Chapter 12

Nick covered more distance than Octavia expected. They walked all day and every time they checked his location with the walking stick, the stick gave them a new direction, and said, “He’s moving, sorry.”

It was evening before they heard a dog barking in the distance, a few left-over pools of sludgy discworld light shown here and there, reflecting on a creature that Octavia had never seen before. It was a dingaroo. Dingaroos stand six feet tall and they’re enthusiastically carnivorous. If you ignore the fangs, they are a kind of cute until they show you how hungry they are. It was snow white, one end had a big fluffy round tail the size of a beach ball, the other end had a cute pink nose, long floppy ears and teeth, lots and lots of long, pointy teeth. It was one of the most dangerous of its kind, CBD - Cute, But Deadly. Its massive rear legs were powerful enough to collapse any door with a single kick, and whatever obstacle it couldn’t kick down, those huge white teeth could slash their way through it. (The dingaroo is the equivalent of a round world dingo or outback wolf crossed with a kangaroo and a bunny. Like the drop bear, it has no natural predators, and currently no unnatural predators are signing up for training.)

The dingaroo appeared to be nipping at something laying on the ground, but the little dog was doing a good job fending it off. “Bark! Yap! Bark! Bark! Yap!” The little dog wasn’t barking or yapping, it was shouting the word “Bark” punctuated with the occasional word “Yap.” Unfortunately, this dog has a Morporkian accent, so the word “Bark” came out “Bahk.”

Gula could see what was happening better than Octavia could in this gloom (gargoyles have advanced visual abilities because hanging off the edge of roofs they have nothing more to do than watch, ) and she growled “IIIIIIIK!” (Nick!) and she leapt off of the backpack that was tied to the walking stick.

Gargoyles have two methods of locomotion; one is an odd stop-motion method that only gargoyles that had been saturated in the intense magical field of a magical university have attained. Very few people have actually seen gargoyles move like that, and of those people who have seen it, only a very few have the patience to see it again. Only the Four Ecksan drop bear is slower. The other form of locomotion is falling, which all gargoyles can do, but gargoyles from the Unseen University can fall in any direction.

An accelerating dust cloud marked her passage as she raced across the desert floor. Gula fell horizontally, moving faster and faster until she collided with the dingaroo. Hit with a 25 pound stone statue traveling at 92 MPH, the vicious six foot tall rabbit went down like a paper sack full of chunky style raspberry jelly dropped from a ten-story tower.