Two men staggered out, arm in arm, and zigzagged happily toward the main street. Susan stepped back. No one bothered her when she didn’t want to be noticed.
The men walked through the ladder.
Either the men weren’t exactly solid, and they certainly sounded solid enough, or there was something wrong with the ladder. But the girl had climbed it…
…and was now climbing down again, slipping something into her pocket.
“Never even woke up, the little cherub,” she said.
“Sorry?” said Susan.
“Didn’t have 50p on me,” said the girl. She swung the ladder easily up onto her shoulder. “Rules are rules. I had to take another tooth.”
“Pardon?”
“It’s all audited, you see. I’d be in real trouble if the dollars and teeth didn’t add up. You know how it is.”
“I do?”
“Still, can’t stay here talking all night. Got sixty more to do.”
“Why should I know? Do what? Whom to?” said Susan.
“Children, of course. Can’t disappoint them, can I? Imagine their little faces when they lift up their little pillows, bless them.”
Ladder. Pliers. Teeth. Money. Pillows…
“You don’t expect me to believe you’re the Tooth Fairy?” said Susan suspiciously.
She touched the ladder. It felt solid enough.
“Not the,” said the girl. “A. I’m surprised you don’t know that.”
She’d sauntered around the corner before Susan asked, “Why me?”
“’Cos she can tell,” said a voice behind her. “Takes one to know one.”
She turned. The raven was sitting in a small open window.
“You’d better come in,” it said. “You can meet all sorts, out in that alley.”
“I already have.”
There was a brass plate screwed on the wall beside the door. It said: “C V Cheesewaller, DM (Unseen), B. Thau, B.F.”
It was the first time Susan had ever heard metal speak.
“Simple trick,” said the raven, dismissively. “It senses you looking at it. Just give—”
“C V Cheesewaller, DM (Unseen), B. Thau, B.F.”
“…shut up…just give the door a push.”
“It’s locked.”
The raven gave her a beady-eyed look with its head on one side. Then it said: “That stops you? Oh, well. I’ll fetch the key.”
It appeared a moment later and dropped a large metal key onto the cobbles.
“Isn’t the wizard in?”
“In, yes. In bed. Snoring his head off.”
“I thought they stayed up all night!”
“Not this one. Cup of cocoa around nine, dead to the world at five past.”
“I can’t just let myself into his house!”
“Why not? You’ve come to see me. Anyway, I’m the brains of the outfit. He just wears the funny hat and does the hand waving.”
Susan turned the key.
It was warm inside. There was the usual wizardly paraphernalia—a forge, a bench with bottles and bundles strewn over it, a bookcase with books rammed in anyhow, a stuffed alligator hanging from the ceiling, some very big candles that were just lava streams of wax, and a raven on a skull.
“They get it all out of a catalog,” said the raven. “Believe me. It all comes in a big box. You think candles get dribbly like that by themselves? That’s three days’ work for a skilled candle dribbler.”
“You’re just making that up,” said Susan. “Anyway, you can’t just buy a skull.”
“You know best I’m sure, being educated,” said the raven.
“What were you trying to tell me last night?”
“Tell you?” said the raven, with a guilty look on its beak.
“All that dah-dah-dah-DAH stuff.”
The raven scratched its head.
“He said I wasn’t to tell you. I was just supposed to warn you about the horse. I got carried away. Turned up, has it?”
“Yes!”
“Ride it.”
“I did. It can’t be real! Real horses know where the ground is.”
“Miss, there’s no horse realer than that one.”
“I know his name! I’ve ridden him before!”
The raven sighed, or at least made a sort of whistling noise, which is as close to a sigh as a beak can get.
“Ride the horse. He’s decided you’re the one.”
“Where to?”
“That’s for me not to know and you to find out.”
“Just supposing I was stupid enough to do it…can you kind of hint about what will happen?”
“Well…you’ve read books, I can see. Have you ever read any about children who go to magical faraway kingdoms and have adventures with goblins and so on?”
“Yes, of course,” said Susan, grimly.
“It’d probably be best if you thought along those lines,” said the raven.
Susan picked up a bundle of herbs and played with them.
“I saw someone outside who said she was the Tooth Fairy,” she said.
“Nah, couldn’t’ve been the Tooth Fairy,” said the raven. “There’s at least three of them.”
“There’s no such person. I mean…I didn’t know, I thought that’s just a…a story. Like the Sandman or the Hogfather.”*
“Ah,” said the raven. “Changing our tone, yes? Not so much of the emphatic declarative, yes? A bit less of the ‘There’s no such thing’ and a bit more of the ‘I didn’t know,’ yes?”
“Everyone knows—I mean, it’s not logical that there’s an old man in a beard who gives everyone sausages and chitterlings on Hogswatchnight, is it?”
“I don’t know about logic. Never learned about logic,” said the raven. “Living on a skull ain’t exactly logical, but that’s what I do.”
“And there can’t be a Sandman who goes around throwing sand in children’s eyes,” said Susan, but in tones of uncertainty. “You’d…never get enough sand in one bag.”
“Could be. Could be.”
“I’d better be going,” said Susan. “Miss Butts always checks the dorms on the stroke of midnight.”
“How many dormitories are there?” said the raven.
“About thirty, I think.”
“You believe she checks them all at midnight and you don’t believe in the Hogfather?”
“I’d better be going anyway,” said Susan. “Um. Thank you.”
“Lock up behind you and chuck the key through the window,” said the raven.
The room was silent after she’d gone, except for the crackle as coals settled in the furnace.
Then the skull said: “Kids today, eh?”
“I blame education,” said the raven.
“A lot of knowledge is a dangerous thing,” said the skull. “A lot more dangerous than just a little. I always used to say that, when I was alive.”
“When was that, exactly?”
“Can’t remember. I think I was pretty knowledgeable. Probably a teacher or philosopher, something of that kidney. And now I’m on a bench with a bird crapping on my head.”
“Very allegorical,” said the raven.
No one had taught Susan about the power of belief, or at least about the power of belief in a combination of high magical potential and low reality stability such as existed on the Discworld.
Belief makes a hollow place. Something has to roll in to fill it.
Which is not to say that belief denies logic. For example, it’s fairly obvious that the Sandman needs only a small sack.
On the Discworld, he doesn’t bother to take the sand out first.
It was almost midnight.
Susan crept into the stables. She was one of those people who will not leave a loose thread unpulled or a mystery unsolved.
The ponies were silent in the presence of Binky. The horse glowed in the darkness.
Susan heaved a saddle down from the rack, and then thought better of it. If she was going to fall off, a saddle wo
uldn’t be any help. And reins would be about as much use as a rudder on a rock.
She opened the door to the loose box. Most horses won’t walk backward voluntarily, because what they can’t see doesn’t exist.
But Binky shuffled out by himself and walked over to the mounting block, where he turned and watched her expectantly.
Susan climbed onto his back. It was like sitting on a table.
“All right,” she whispered. “I don’t have to believe any of this, mind you.”
Binky lowered his head and whinnied. Then he trotted out into the yard and headed for the field. At the gate he broke into a canter, and turned toward the fence.
Susan shut her eyes.
She felt muscles bunch under the velvet skin and then the horse was rising, over the fence, over the field.
Behind it, in the turf, two fiery hoofprints burned for a second or two.
As she passed above the school she saw a light flicker in a window. Miss Butts was on her rounds.
There’s going to be trouble over this, Susan told herself.
And then she thought: I’m on the back of a horse a hundred feet up in the air, being taken somewhere mysterious that’s a bit like a magic land with goblins and talking animals. There’s only so much more trouble I could get into…
Besides, is riding a flying horse against school rules? I bet it’s not written down anywhere.
Quirm vanished behind her, and the world opened up in a pattern of darkness and moonlight silver. A checkerboard pattern of fields strobed by in the moonlight, with the occasional light of an isolated farm. Ragged clouds whipped past and away.
Away on her left the Ramtop Mountains were a cold white wall. On her right, the Rim Ocean carried a pathway to the moon. There was no wind, or even a great sensation of speed—just the land flashing by, and the long slow strides of Binky.
And then someone spilled gold on the night. Clouds parted in front of her and there, spread below, was Ankh-Morpork—a city containing more Peril than even Miss Butts could imagine.
Torchlight outlined a pattern of streets into which Quirm would have not only been lost, but mugged and pushed into the river as well.
Binky cantered easily over the rooftops. Susan could hear the sounds of the streets, even individual voices, but there was also the great roar of the city, like some kind of insect hive. Upper windows drifted by, each one a glow of candlelight.
The horse dropped through the smoky air and landed neatly and at the trot in an alley, which was otherwise empty except for a closed door and a sign with a torch over it.
Susan read:
CURRY GARDENS
KITCHREN ENTLANCE—KEEP OUT. RIS MEANS YOU.
Binky seemed to be waiting for something.
Susan had expected a more exotic destination.
She knew about curry. They had curry at school, under the name of Bogey and Rice. It was yellow. There were soggy raisins and peas in it.
Binky whinnied, and stamped a hoof.
A hatch in the door flew open. Susan got a brief impression of a face against the fiery atmosphere of the kitchen.
“Ooorrrh, nooorrrh! Binkorrr!”
The hatch slammed shut again.
Obviously something was meant to happen.
She stared at a menu nailed to the wall. It was misspelled, of course, because the menu of the folkier kind of restaurant always has to have misspellings in it, so that customers can be lured into a false sense of superiority. She couldn’t recognize the names of most of the dishes, which included:
Curry with Vegetable 8p
Curry with Sweat, and Sore Balls of Pig 10p
Curry with Sweer and Sour, Ball of Fish 10p
Curry with Meat 10p
Curry with Named Meat 15p
Extra Curry 5p
Porn cracker 4p
EAT IT HERE OR,
TAKE IT AWAY
The hatch snapped open again and a large brown bag of allegedly but not really waterproof paper was dumped on the little ledge in front of it. Then the hatch slammed shut again.
Susan reached out carefully. The smell rising from the bag had a sort of thermic lance quality that warned against metal cutlery. But tea had been a long time ago.
She realized she didn’t have any money on her. On the other hand, no one had asked her for any. But the world would go to wrack and ruin if people didn’t recognize their responsibilities.
She leaned forward and knocked on the door
“Excuse me…don’t you want anything—?”
There was shouting and a crash from inside, as if half a dozen people were fighting to get under the same table.
“Oh. How nice. Thank you. Thank you very much,” said Susan, politely.
Binky walked away, slowly. This time there was no bunched leap of muscle power—he trotted into the air carefully, as if sometime in the past he’d been scolded for spilling something.
Susan tried the curry several hundred feet above the speeding landscape, and then threw it away as politely as possible.
“It was very…unusual,” she said. “And that’s it? You carried me all the way up here for take-away food?”
The ground skimmed past faster, and it crept over her that the horse was going a lot faster now, a full gallop instead of the easy canter. A bunching of muscle…
…and then the sky ahead of her erupted blue for a moment.
Behind her, unseen because light was standing around red with embarrassment, asking itself what had happened, a pair of hoofprints burned in the air for a moment and then faded.
It was a landscape, hanging in space.
There was a squat little house, with a garden around it. There were fields, and distant mountains. Susan stared at it as Binky slowed.
There was no depth. As the horse swung around for a landing, the landscape was revealed as a mere surface, a thin shaped film of…existence…imposed on nothingness.
She expected it to tear when the horse landed, but there was only a faint crunch and a scatter of gravel.
Binky trotted around the house and into the stable yard, where he stood and waited.
Susan got off, gingerly. The ground felt solid enough under her feet. She reached down and scratched at the gravel; there was more gravel underneath.
She’d heard that the Tooth Fairy collected teeth. Think about it logically…the only other people who collected any bits of bodies did so for very suspicious purposes, and usually to harm or control other people. The Tooth Fairies must have half the children in the world under their control. And this didn’t look like the house of that sort of person.
The Hogfather apparently lived in some kind of horrible slaughterhouse in the mountains, festooned with sausages and black puddings and painted a terrible blood red.
Which suggested style. A nasty style, but at least style of a sort. This place didn’t have style of any sort.
The Soul Cake Tuesday Duck didn’t apparently have any kind of a home. Nor did Old Man Trouble or the Sandman, as far as she knew.
She walked around the house, which wasn’t much larger than a cottage. Definitely. Whoever lived here had no taste at all.
She found the front door. It was black, with a knocker in the shape of an omega.
Susan reached for it, but the door opened by itself.
And the hall stretched away in front of her, far bigger than the outside of the house could possibly contain. She could distantly make out a stairway wide enough for the tap dancing finale in a musical.
There was something else wrong with the perspective. There clearly was a wall a long way off but, at the same time, it looked as though it was painted in the air a mere fifteen feet or so away. It was as if distance was optional.
There was a large clock against one wall. Its slow tick filled the immense space.
There’s a room, she thought. I remember the room of whispers.
Doors lined the hall at wide intervals. Or short intervals, if you looked at it another way.
She trie
d to walk toward the nearest one, and gave up after a few wildly teetering steps. Finally she managed to reach it by taking aim and then shutting her eyes.
The door was at one and the same time about normal human size and immensely big. There was a highly ornate frame around it, with a skull-and-bones motif.
She pushed the door open.
This room could have housed a small town.
A small area of carpet occupied the middle distance, no more than a hectare in size. It took Susan several minutes to reach the edge.
It was a room within a room. There was a large, heavy-looking desk on a raised dais, with a leather swivel chair behind it. There was a large model of the Discworld, on a sort of ornament made of four elephants standing on the shell of a turtle. There were several bookshelves, the large volumes piled in the haphazard fashion of people who’re far too busy using the books ever to arrange them properly. There was even a window, hanging in the air a few feet above the ground.
But there were no walls. There was nothing between the edge of the carpet and the walls of the greater room except floor, and even that was far too precise a word for it. It didn’t look like rock and it certainly wasn’t wood. It made no sound when Susan walked on it. It was simply surface, in the purely geometrical sense.
The carpet had a skull-and-bones pattern.
It was also black. Everything was black, or a shade of grey. Here and there a tint suggested a very deep purple or ocean-depth blue.
In the distance, toward the walls of the greater room, the metaroom or whatever it was, there was the suggestion of…something. Something was casting complicated shadows, too far away to be clearly seen.
Susan got up onto the dais.
There was something odd about the things around her. Of course, there was everything odd about the things around her, but it was a huge major oddness that was simply in their nature. She could ignore it. But there was an oddness on a human level. Everything was just slightly wrong, as if it had been made by someone who hadn’t fully comprehended its purpose.
Discworld 16 - Soul Music Page 6
