Moving Pictures

certainly puzzled Detritus.
    “What? You want I should knock my teeth out?” he said.
    “Well, all right, not diamonds,” Ruby conceded. “But there proper modern ways now. You got to court a girl.”
    Detritus brightened. “Ah, but I—” he began.
    “That’s court, not caught,” said Ruby wearily. “You got to, to, to—” She paused.
    She wasn’t all that sure what you had to do. But Ruby had spent some weeks in Holy Wood, and if Holy Wood did anything, it changed things; in Holy Wood she’d plugged into a vast cross-species female freemasonry she hadn’t suspected existed, and she was learning fast. She’d talked at length to sympathetic human girls. And dwarfs. Even dwarfs had better courtship rituals, for gods’ sake. 16 And what humans got up to was amazing .
    Whereas all a female troll had to look forward to was a quick thump on the head and the rest of her life subduing and cooking anything the male dragged back to the cave.
    Well, there were going to be changes. Next time Ruby went home the troll mountains were going to receive their biggest shake-up since the last continental collision. In the meantime, she was going to start with her own life.
    She waved a massive hand in a vague way.
    “You got to, to sing outside a girl’s window,” she said, “and, and you got to give her oograah .”
    “Oograah?”
    “Yeah. Pretty oograah.” 17
    Detritus scratched his head.
    “Why?” he said.
    Ruby looked panicky for a moment. She also couldn’t for the life of her imagine why the handing over of inedible vegetation was so important, but she wasn’t about to admit it.
    “Fancy you not knowing that,” she said scathingly.
    The sarcasm was lost on Detritus. Most things were.
    “Right,” he said. “I not so uncultured as you think,” he added. “I bang up to date. You wait and see.”

    Hammering filled the air. Buildings were spreading backward from the nameless main street into the dunes. No one owned any land in Holy Wood; if it was empty, you built on it.
    Dibbler had two offices now. There was one where he shouted at people, and a bigger one just outside it where people shouted at each other. Soll shouted at handlemen. Handlemen shouted at alchemists. Demons wandered over every flat surface and drowned in the coffee cups and shouted at one another. A couple of experimental green parrots shouted at themselves. People wearing odd bits of costume wandered in and just shouted. Silverfish shouted because he couldn’t quite work out why he now had a desk in the outer office even though he owned the studio.
    Gaspode sat stolidly by the door to the inner office. In the past five minutes he had attracted one half-hearted kick, a soggy biscuit and a pat on the head. He reckoned he was ahead of the game, dogwise.
    He was trying to listen to all the conversation at once. It was extremely instructive. For one thing, some of the people coming in and shouting were carrying bags of money…
    “You what?”
    The shout had come from the inner office. Gaspode cocked the other ear.
    “I, er, want a day off, Mr Dibbler,” said Victor.
    “A day off ? You don’t want to work?”
    “Just for the day, Mr Dibbler.”
    “But you don’t think I’m going to go around paying people to have days off, do you? I’m not made of money, you know. It’s not as if we make a profit, even. Hold a crossbow to my head, why don’t you.”
    Gaspode looked at the bags in front of Soll, who was furiously adding up piles of coins. He raised a cynical eyebrow.
    There was a pause. Oh, no, thought Gaspode. The young idiot’s forgetting his lines.
    “I don’t want paying, Mr Dibbler.”
    Gaspode relaxed.
    “You don’t want paying?”
    “No, Mr. Dibbler.”
    “But you want a job when you get back, I suppose?” said Dibbler sarcastically.
    Gaspode tensed. Victor had taken a lot of coaching.
    “Well, I hope so, Mr. Dibbler. But I was thinking of going to see what Untied Alchemists had to offer.”
    There was a sound exactly like the sound of a chairback striking the wall. Gaspode grinned evilly.
    Another bag of money was dropped in front of Soll.
    “Untied Alchemists!”
    “They really look as if they’re making progress with soundies, Mr. Dibbler,” said Victor meekly.
    “But they’re amateurs! And crooks!”
    Gaspode frowned. He hadn’t been able to coach Victor past this stage.
    “Well, that’s a relief, Mr. Dibbler.”
    “Why’s that?”
    “Well, it’d be dreadful if they were crooks and