Discworld 16 - Soul Music

by Terry Pratchett

  The Lecturer in Recent Runes swore that the sixty-four-foot Gravissima organ pipe went skyward on a pillar of flame.

  The Chair of Indefinite Studies and the Senior Wrangler said that when they found the Librarian upside down in one of the fountains in Sator Square, outside the University, he was going “ook ook” to himself and grinning.

  The Bursar said that he’d seen a dozen naked young women bouncing up and down on his bed, but the Bursar occasionally said things like this anyway, especially when he’d been indoors a lot.

  The Dean said nothing at all.

  His eyes were glazed.

  Sparks crackled in his hair.

  He was wondering if he’d be allowed to paint his bedroom black.

  …the beat went on…

  The lifetimer of Imp stood in the middle of the huge desk. The Death of Rats walked around it, squeaking under his breath.

  Susan looked at it, too. There was no doubt that all the sand was in the bottom bulb. But something else had filled the top and was pouring through the pinch. It was pale blue and coiling in frantically on itself, like excited smoke.

  “Have you ever seen anything like it?” she said.

  SQUEAK.

  “Nor me.”

  Susan stood up. The shadows around the walls, now that she’d got used to them, seemed to be of things—not exactly machinery, but not exactly furniture either. There had been an orrery on the lawn at the College. The distant shapes put her in mind of it, although what stars it measured in what dark courses she really couldn’t say. They seemed to be projections of things too strange even for this strange dimension.

  She’d wanted to save his life, and that was right. She knew it. As soon as she’d seen his name she…, well, it was important. She’d inherited some of Death’s memory. She couldn’t have met the boy, but perhaps he had. She felt that the name and the face had established themselves so deeply in her mind now that the rest of her thoughts were forced to orbit them.

  Something else had saved his life first.

  She held the lifetimer up to her ear again.

  She found herself tapping her foot.

  And realized that distant shadows were moving.

  She ran across the floor, the real floor, the one outside the boundaries of the carpet.

  The shadows looked more like mathematics would be if it was solid. There were vast curves of…something. Pointers like clock hands, but longer than a tree, moved slowly through the air.

  The Death of Rats climbed onto her shoulder.

  “I suppose you don’t know what’s happening?”

  SQUEAK.

  Susan nodded. Rats, she supposed, died when they should. They didn’t try to cheat, or return from the dead. There were no such things as zombie rats. Rats knew when to give up.

  She looked at the glass again. The boy—and she used the term as girls will of young males several years older than them—the boy had played a chord on the guitar or whatever it was, and history had been bent. Or had skipped, or something.

  Something besides her didn’t want him dead.

  It was two o’clock in the morning, and raining.

  Constable Detritus, Ankh-Morpork City Watch, was guarding the Opera House. It was an approach to policing that he’d picked up from Sergeant Colon. When you were all by yourself in the middle of a rainy night, go and guard something big with handy overhanging eaves. Colon had pursued this policy for years, as a result of which no major landmark had ever been stolen.*

  It had been an uneventful night. About an hour earlier a sixty-four-foot organ pipe had dropped out of the sky. Detritus had wandered over to inspect the crater, but he wasn’t quite certain if this was criminal activity. Besides, for all he knew this was how you got organ pipes.

  For the last five minutes he’d also been hearing muffled thumps and the occasional tinkling noise from inside the Opera House. He’d made a note of it. He did not wish to appear stupid. Detritus had never been inside the Opera House. He didn’t know what sound it normally made at 2:00 A.M.

  The front doors opened, and a large, oddly shaped flat box came out, hesitantly. It advanced in a curious way—a few steps forward, a couple of steps back. And it was also talking to itself.

  Detritus looked down. He could see…he paused…at least seven legs of various sizes, only four of which had feet.

  He shambled across to the box and banged on the side.

  “Hello, hello, hello, what is all this…then?” he said, concentrating to get the sentence right.

  The box stopped.

  Then it said, “We’re a piano.”

  Detritus gave this due consideration. He wasn’t sure what a piano was.

  “A piano move about, does it?” he said.

  “It’s…we’ve got legs,” said the piano.

  Detritus conceded the point.

  “But it are the middle of the night,” he said.

  “Even pianos have to have time off,” said the piano.

  Detritus scratched his head. This seemed to cover it.

  “Well…all right,” he said.

  He watched the piano jerk and wobble down the marble steps and around the corner.

  It carried on talking to itself:

  “How long have we got, d’you think?”

  “We ought to make it to the bridge. He not clever enough to be a drummer.”

  “But he’s a policeman.”

  “So?”

  “Cliff?”

  “Yup?”

  “We might get caught.”

  “He can’t stop us. We’re on a mission from Glod.”

  “Right.”

  The piano tottered onward through the puddles for a little while, and then asked itself:

  “Buddy?”

  “Yup?”

  “Why did I just say dat?”

  “Say what?”

  “About us being on a mission…you know…from Glod?”

  “Weeell…the dwarf said to us, go and get the piano, and his name is Glod, so—”

  “Yeah. Yeah. Right…but…he could’ve stopped us, I mean, dere’s nothing special about some mission from some dwarf—”

  “Maybe you were just a bit tired.”

  “Maybe dat’s it,” said the piano, gratefully.

  “Anyway, we are on a mission from Glod.”

  “Yup.”

  Glod sat in his lodgings, watching the guitar.

  It had stopped playing when Buddy had gone out, although if he put his ear very close to the strings, he was sure that they were still humming very gently.

  Now he very carefully reached out and touched the—

  To call the sudden snapping sound discordant would be too mild. The sound had a snarl, it had talons.

  Glod sat back. Right. Right. It was Buddy’s instrument. An instrument played by the same person over the years could become very adapted to them, although not in Glod’s experience to the point of biting someone else. Buddy hadn’t had it a day, yet, but the principle maybe was the same.

  There was an old dwarf legend about the famous Horn of Furgle, which sounded itself when danger was near and also in the presence, for some reason, of horseradish.

  And there was even an Ankh-Morpork legend, wasn’t there, about some old drum in the Palace or somewhere that was supposed to bang itself if an enemy fleet was seen sailing up the Ankh? The legend had died out in recent centuries, partly because this was the Age of Reason and also because no enemy fleet could sail up the Ankh without a gang of men with shovels going in front.

  And there was a troll story about some stones that, on frosty nights…

  The point was that magical instruments turned up every so often.

  Glod reached out again.

  JUD-Adud-adud-duh.

  “All right, all right…”

  The old music shop was right up against the University, after all, and magic did leak out despite what the wizards always said about the talking rats and walking trees just being statistical flukes. But this didn’t fee
l like magic. It felt a lot older than that. It felt like music.

  Glod wondered whether he should persuade Im—Buddy to take it back to the shop, get a proper guitar…

  On the other hand, six dollars was six dollars. At least.

  Something hammered on the door.

  “Who’s that?” said Glod, looking up.

  The pause outside was long enough to let him guess. He decided to help out.

  “Cliff?” he said.

  “Yup. Got a piano here.”

  “Bring it on in.”

  “Had to break off der legs and der lid and a few other bits but it’s basically okay.”

  “Bring it on in, then.”

  “Door’s too narrow.”

  Buddy, coming up the stairs behind the troll, heard the crunch of woodwork.

  “Try it again.”

  “Fit’s perfectly.”

  There was a piano-shaped hole around the doorway. Glod was standing next to it, holding his ax. Buddy looked at the wreckage all over the landing.

  “What the hell are you doing?” he said. “That’s someone else’s wall!”

  “Well? It’s someone else’s piano.”

  “Yes, but…you can’t just hack holes in the wall—”

  “What’s more important? Some wall or getting the sound right?” said Glod.

  Buddy hesitated. Part of him thought: that’s ridiculous, it’s only music. Another part of him thought, rather more sharply: that’s ridiculous, it’s only a wall. All of him said: “Oh. Since you put it like that…but what about the piano player?”

  “I told you, I know just where to find one,” said Glod.

  A tiny part of him was amazed: I’ve hacked a hole in my own wall! It took me days to nail that wallpaper on properly.

  Albert was in the stable, with a shovel and a wheelbarrow.

  “Go well?” he said, when Susan’s shadow appeared over the half door.

  “Er…yes…I suppose…”

  “Pleased to hear it,” said Albert, without looking up. The shovel thumped on the barrow.

  “Only…something happened which probably wasn’t usual…”

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  Albert picked up the wheelbarrow and trundled it in the direction of the garden.

  Susan knew what she was supposed to do. She was supposed to apologize, and then it’d turn out that crusty old Albert had a heart of gold, and they’d be friends after all, and he’d help her and tell her things, and—

  And she’d be some stupid girl who couldn’t cope.

  No.

  She went back to the stable, where Binky was investigating the contents of a bucket.

  The Quirm College for Young Ladies encouraged self-reliance and logical thought. Her parents had sent her there for that very reason.

  They’d assumed that insulating her from the fluffy edges of the world was the safest thing to do. In the circumstances, this was like not telling people about self-defense so that no one would ever attack them.

  Unseen University was used to eccentricity among the faculty. After all, humans derive their notions of what it means to be a normal human being by constant reference to the humans around them, and when those humans are other wizards, the spiral can only wiggle downward. The Librarian was an orang-utan, and no one thought that was at all odd. The Reader in Esoteric Studies spent so much time reading in what the Bursar referred to as “the smallest room” * that he was generally referred to as the Reader in The Lavatory, even on official documents. The Bursar himself in any normal society would have been considered more unglued than a used stamp in a downpour. The Dean had spent seventeen years writing a treatise on The Use of the syllable ‘ENK’ in Levitation Spells of the Early Confused Period. The Archchancellor, who regularly used the long gallery above the great hall for archery practice and had accidentally shot the Bursar twice, thought the whole faculty was as crazy as loons, whatever a loon was. “Not enough fresh air,” he’d say. “Too much sittin’ around indoors. Rots the brain.” More often, he’d say “Duck!”

  None of them, apart from Ridcully and the Librarian, were early risers. Breakfast, if it happened at all, happened around midmorning. Wizards lined the buffet, lifting the big silver lids of the tureens and wincing at every clang. Ridcully liked big, greasy breakfasts, especially if it included those slightly translucent sausages with the green flecks that you can only hope is a herb of some sort. Since it was the Archchancellor’s prerogative to choose the menu, many of the more squeamish wizards had stopped eating breakfast altogether and got through the day just on lunch, tea, dinner, and supper and the occasional snack.

  So there weren’t too many in the Great Hall this morning. Besides, it was a bit drafty. Workmen were busy somewhere up in the roof.

  Ridcully put down his fork.

  “All right, who’s doing it?” he said. “Own up, that man.”

  “Doing what, Archchancellor?” said the Senior Wrangler.

  “Someone’s tappin’ his foot.”

  The wizard looked along the table. The Dean was staring happily into space.

  “Dean?” said the Senior Wrangler.

  The Dean’s left hand was held not far from his mouth. The other was making rhythmic stroking motions somewhere in the region of his kidneys.

  “I don’t know what he thinks he’s doin’,” said Ridcully. “But it looks unhygienic to me.”

  “I think he’s playing an invisible banjo, Archchancellor,” said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.

  “Well, it’s quiet, at least,” said Ridcully. He looked at the hole in the roof, which was letting unaccustomed daylight into the hall. “Anyone seen the Librarian?”

  The orang-utan was busy.

  He had holed up in one of the library cellars, which he currently used as a general workshop and book hospital. There were various presses and guillotines, a bench full of tins of nasty substances where he made his own binding glue and all the other tedious cosmetics of the Muse of literature.

  He’d brought a book down with him. It had taken even him several hours to find it.

  The Library didn’t only contain magical books, the ones which are chained to their shelves and are very dangerous. It also contained perfectly ordinary books, printed on commonplace paper in mundane ink. It would be a mistake to think that they weren’t also dangerous, just because reading them didn’t make fireworks go off in the sky. Reading them sometimes did the more dangerous trick of making fireworks go off in the privacy of the reader’s brain.

  For example, the big volume open in front of him contained some of the collected drawings of Leonard of Quirm, skilled artist and certified genius, with a mind that wandered so much it came back with souvenirs.

  Leonard’s books were full of sketches—of kittens, of the way water flows, of the wives of influential Ankh-Morporkian merchants whose portraits had provided his means of making a living. But Leonard had been a genius and was deeply sensitive to the wonders of the world, so the margins were full of detailed doodles of whatever was on his mind at that moment—vast waterpowered engines for bringing down city walls on the heads of the enemy, new types of siege guns for pumping flaming oil over the enemy, gunpowder rockets that showered the enemy with burning phosphorus, and other manufactures of the Age of Reason.

  And there had been something else. The Librarian had noticed it in passing once before, and had been slightly puzzled by it. It seemed out of place. *

  His hairy hand thumbed through the pages. Ah…here it was…

  Yes. Oh, YES.

  …It spoke to him in the language of the Beat…

  The Archchancellor made himself comfortable at his snooker table.

  He’d long ago got rid of the official desk. A snooker table was much to be preferred. Things didn’t fall off the edge, there were a number of handy pockets to keep sweets and things in, and when he was bored he could shovel the paperwork off and set up trick shots.** He never bothered to shovel the paperwork back on afterward. In his experience, any
thing really important never got written down, because by then people were too busy shouting.

  He picked up his pen and started to write.

  He was composing his memoirs. He’d got as far as the title: Along the Ankh with Bow, Rod, and Staff with a Knob on the End.

  “Not many people realize,” he wrote, “that the river Ankh has a large and varied pifcine population—” ***

  He flung down the pen and stormed along the corridor into the Dean’s office.

  “What the hell’s that?” he shouted.

  The Dean jumped.

  “It’s, it’s, it’s a guitar, Archchancellor,” said the Dean, walking hurriedly backward as Ridcully approached. “I just bought it.”

  “I can see that, I can hear that, what was it you were tryin’ to do?”

  “I was practicing, er, riffs,” said the Dean. He waved a badly printed woodcut defensively in Ridcully’s face. The Archchancellor grabbed it.

  “‘Blert Wheedown’s Guitar Primer,’” he read. “‘Play your Way to Succefs in Three Easy Lefsons and Eighteen Hard Lefsons.’ Well? I’ve nothin’ against guitars, pleasant airs, a-spying young maidens one morning in May and so on, but that wasn’t playin’. That was just noise. I mean, what was it supposed to be?”

  “A lick based on an E pentatonic scale using the major seventh as a passing tone?” said the Dean.

  The Archchancellor peered at the open page.

  “But this says Lesson One: Fairy Footsteps,” he said.

  “Um, um, um, I was getting a bit impatient,” said the Dean.

  “You’ve never been musical, Dean,” said Ridcully. “It’s one of your good points. Why the sudden interest—what have you got on your feet?”

  The Dean looked down.

  “I thought you were a bit taller,” said Ridcully. “You standing on a couple of planks?”

  “They’re just thick soles,” said the Dean. “Just…just something the dwarfs invented, I suppose…dunno…found them in my closet…Modo the gardener says he thinks they’re crépe.”

  “That’s strong language for Modo, but I’d say he’s right enough.”

  “No…it’s a kind of rubbery stuff…” said the Dean, dismally.

  “Erm…excuse me, Archchancellor…”