A Blink of the Screen (35 page)

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

All illustrations are by Josh Kirby unless otherwise stated.

1
. hand-painted Christmas card,
c
. 1971. Written on the back: ‘No. 1 in a limited edition of 2. T. Pratchett.’ Courtesy Colin Smythe.

2
.
Turntables of the Night
. Jacket illustration for
The Flying Sorcerers
, ed. Peter Haining, Souvenir Press, London, 1997.

3
. #ifdefDEBUG +
‘world/enough’ + ‘time’
. Jacket illustration for
Retter der Ewigkeit
, eds. Erik Simon and Friedal Wahren, Heyne, Munich, 2001.

4
.
Hollywood Chickens
. Jacket illustration for
Knights of Madness
, ed. Peter Haining, Souvenir Press, London, 1998.

5
. detail of
Theatre of Cruelty
. Cover illustration for W. H. Smith’s July/August 1993 issue of
Bookcase
magazine.

6
. Discworld.

7
. the first and second versions of the illustration for ‘The Sea and Little Fishes’. The first scene Josh Kirby illustrated was removed from the story when published in
Legends
, ed. Robert
Silverberg
, Tor Fantasy/Tom Doherty Associates, New York, 1998. See
Appendix
for the exiled text.

8
.
The Witches
from the CD inlay of Dave Greenslade’s music
From the Discworld
, Virgin Records, 1994.

9
.
The Unseen University
from the CD inlay of Dave Greenslade’s music
From the Discworld
, Virgin Records, 1994.

10
. Paul Kidby’s illustrations for a set of cigarette cards issued by the Discworld Emporium for the launch of
Unseen Academicals
, 2009.

11
. detail of
Rincewind, the Luggage and Death
. Poster, ISIS Publishing, Oxford, 1996.

12
.
Mort
. Jacket illustration for the book of the same name, Victor Gollancz, London, 1987.

13
.
Ankh-Morpork
. Commissioned for but not used in the CD inlay of Dave Greenslade’s music
From the Discworld
. Published in
Josh Kirby: A Cosmic Cornucopia
, text by David Langford, Paper Tiger, London, 1999.

14
. jacket illustration for
The First Discworld Novels
, Colin Smythe, Gerrards Cross, 1999.

15
.
Terry Pratchett with Some Discworld Characters
. Painted for the
Weekend Guardian
, 23 October 1993.

Appendix

DELETED EXTRACT FROM ‘THE SEA AND LITTLE FISHES’

Granny Weatherwax rose well before dawn next morning, when the frost rimed the trees and she had to take a hammer to the water barrel before she could wash.

The air held the sharp taste of snow to come and the acid smell of foxes.

She went back indoors and prepared one cheese sandwich and made a bottle of cold tea. Then she set out.

It didn’t take much more than an hour, going at a sharp pace over the snapping leaves, to get beyond the buzz of human thoughts. Half an hour later she skirted the smouldering stacks of a charcoal burner, and picked up a hint of his dreams and the sharp, deceitful little mind of the cat he kept for company, hunting among the woodpiles.

Then there was no track any more, only a trail among many.
Minds
out here were sharper and simpler, and generally thinking of only one thing at a time. Almost always it was food – how to get more, and not be some. Sometimes it was sex, and Granny Weatherwax took care to keep her mind firmly closed at those times. Even squirrels deserved their privacy, the dirty little devils.

For a while she followed the banks of a river, her boots clattering from rock to rock, forever going upward.

Her mind worked better here. When she was down there among people there was the constant whispering of their minds. She couldn’t hear what they were thinking, except by dint of enormous concentration. Even the owners of the minds concerned seldom knew what, in the welter of concerns, emotions, worries and hope, they were actually thinking at any time. Humans had the mushiest minds in the world. It was a relief to be free of all that mental tinnitus.

But there was still a faint buzz, as distracting as the whining of a mosquito in a bedroom. Hunters did venture this far, she knew. And the dwarfs were down below somewhere, although they knew better than to come –

– she turned and stepped between two boulders, into a gap you wouldn’t have known was there –

– into this little valley, long and deep, with early snow lurking in every patch of shade. A few trees had been optimistic enough to attempt to grow here.

Granny didn’t stop. Her boots splashed through the stream that had carved out this slot in the rocks until she reached the cave. Large though the mouth was, a casual observer might have thought it just another shadow in the wreck of fallen rocks. Then she was in it, facing that sucking silence of all caves everywhere.

And there, in the shadows, was the Witch.

Granny bowed to her – witches never curtsy – and edged past, and on into the caves.

She hadn’t been up here for … what? Ten years?

The caves wound everywhere under the mountains, and because of the high magical potential in the Ramtops they did not necessarily confine their ramblings to the normal four dimensions. If you entered some of them, it was rumoured, you would never be seen again. At least, not here. And not now.

But Granny headed directly for one quite near this entrance. It had a particular quality that she felt she needed. Perhaps it was something to do with its shape, or the little crystalline specks that glinted in its walls, but this cave was impervious to thought.

Thought couldn’t get in, or out.

She sat down on the sandy floor, alone with her own thoughts.

After a while, they turned up.

There’d been that man down in Sparkle, the one that’d killed those little kids. The people’d sent for her and she’d looked at him and seen the guilt writhing in his head like a red worm, and then she’d taken them to his farm and showed them where to dig, and he’d thrown himself down and asked her for mercy, because he said he’d been drunk and it’d all been done in alcohol.