Soul Music

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 him 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 on to 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[10].

It had been an uneventful night. About an hour earlier a 64-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 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 round 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 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 feel 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.