Pyramids

from biting his leg off.
    The sun rose again. Herons honked. Mist unspooled between the pools, was burned up as the sky turned from blue to new bronze.
    And time unrolled in glorious uneventfulness for Dios until an alien noise took the silence and did the equivalent of cutting it into small pieces with a rusty breadknife.
    It was a noise, in fact, like a donkey being chainsawed. As sounds went, it was to melody what a boxful of dates is to high-performance motocross. Nevertheless, as other voices joined it, similar but different, in a variety of fractured keys and broken tones, the overall effect was curiously attractive. It had lure. It had pull. It had a strange suction.
    The noise reached a plateau, one pure note made of a succession of discordances, and then, for just the fraction of a second, the voices split away, each along a vector…
    There was a stirring of the air, a flickering of the sun.
    And a dozen camels appeared over the distant hills, skinny and dusty, running toward the water. Birds erupted from the reeds. Leftover saurians slid smoothly off the sandbanks. Within a minute the shore was a mass of churned mud as the knobbly-kneed creatures jostled, nose deep in the water.
    Dios sat up, and saw his staff lying in the mud. It was a little scorched, but still intact, and he noticed what somehow had never been apparent before. Before? Had there been a before? There had certainly been a dream, something like a dream…
    Each snake had its tail in its mouth.
    Down the slope after the camels, his ragged family trailing behind him, was a small brown figure waving a camel prod. He looked hot and very bewildered.
    He looked, in fact, like someone in need of good advice and careful guidance.
    Dios’s eyes turned back to the staff. It meant something very important, he knew. He couldn’t remember what, though. All he could remember was that it was very heavy, yet at the same time hard to put down. Very hard to put down. Better not to pick it up, he thought.
    Perhaps just pick it up for a while, and go and explain about gods and why pyramids were so important. And then he could put it down afterward, certainly.
    Sighing, pulling the remnants of his robes around him to give himself dignity, using the staff to steady himself, Dios went forth.

About the Author
    Terry Pratchett is one of the most popular living authors in the world. His first story was published when he was thirteen, and his first full-length book when he was twenty. He worked as a journalist to support the writing habit, but gave up the day job when the success of his books meant that it was costing him money to go to work.
    Pratchett’s acclaimed novels are bestsellers in the U.S. and the United Kingdom and have sold more than twenty-one million copies worldwide. He lives in England, where he writes all the time. (It’s his hobby as well.)
    Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

UNANIMOUS PRAISE FOR TERRY PRATCHETT
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    Fantasy and Science Fiction
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