Soul Music

'Yep. I know what you mean.'

'And we both know why.'

'Yep. Er. Why?'

'The guitar.'

'Oh, that. Yeah.'

'When we're on stage, that thing is in charge—'

In the silence of the room, the guitar lay in the dark by Buddy's bed and its strings vibrated gently to the sound of the dwarf's voice…

'OK, so what do we do about it?' said Cliff.

'It's made of wood. Ten seconds with an axe, no more problem.'

'I'm not sure. That ain't no ordinary instrument.'

'He was a nice kid when we met him. For a human,' said Glod.

'So what do we do? I don't think we could get it off him.'

'Maybe we could get him to—'

The dwarf paused. He was aware of a fuzzy echo to his voice.

'That damn thing is listening to us!' he hissed. 'Let's go outside.'

They ended up out in the road.

'Can't see how it can listen,' said Cliff. 'An instrument's for listening to.'

'The strings listen,' said Glod, flatly. 'That is not an ordinary instrument.'

Cliff shrugged. 'Dere's one way we could find out,' he said.

Early morning fog filled the streets. Around the University it was sculpted into curious forms by the slight magical background radiation. Strange-shaped things moved across the damp cobbles.

Two of them were Glod and Cliff.

'Right,' said the dwarf. 'Here we are.'

He looked up at a blank wall.

'I knew it!' he said. 'Didn't I say? Magic! How many times have we heard this story? There's a mysterious shop no-one's ever seen before, and someone goes in and buys some rusty old curio, and it turns out to—'

'Glod—'

'-some kind of talisman or a bottle full of genie, and then when there's trouble they go back and the shop —'

'Glod-?'

'-has mysteriously disappeared and gone back to whatever dimension it came from- yes, what is it?'

'You're on the wrong side of the road. It's over here.'

Glod glared at the blank wall, and then turned and stomped across the road.

'It was a mistake anyone could have made.'

'Yep.'

'It doesn't invalidate anything I said.'

Glod rattled the door and, to his surprise, found it was unlocked.

'It's gone two in the morning! What kind of music shop is open at two in the morning?' Glod struck a match.

The dusty graveyard of old instruments loomed around them. It looked as though a number of prehistoric animals had been caught in a flash flood and then fossilized.

'What's that one that looks like a serpent?' whispered Cliff.

'It's called a Serpent.'

Glod was uneasy. He'd spent most of his life as a musician. He hated the sight of dead instruments, and these were dead. They didn't belong to anyone. No-one played them. They were like bodies without life, people without souls. Something they had contained had gone. Every one of them represented a musician down on his luck.

There was a pool of light in a grove of bassoons. The old lady was deeply asleep in a rocking chair, with a tangle of knitting on her lap and a shawl around her shoulders.

'Glod?'

Glod jumped. 'Yes? What?'

'Why are we here? We know the place exists now—'

'Grab some ceiling, hooligans!'

Glod blinked at the crossbow bolt pricking the end of his nose, and raised his hands. The old lady had gone from asleep to firing stance without apparently passing through any intermediate stage.

'This is the best I can do,' he said. 'Er… the door wasn't locked, you see, and…'

'So you thought you could rob a poor defenceless old lady?'

'Not at all, not at all, in fact we—'

'I belongs to the Neighbourhood Witch scheme, I do! One word from me and you'll be hopping around looking for some princess with an amphibian fixation—'

'I think dis has gone far enough,' said Cliff. He reached down and his huge hand closed over the bow. He squeezed. Bits of wood oozed between his fingers.

'We're quite harmless,' he said. 'We've come about the instrument you sold our friend last week.'

'Are you the Watch?'

Glod bowed.

'No, ma'am. We're musicians.'

'That's supposed to make me feel better, is it? What instrument are you talking about?'

'A kind of guitar.'

The old woman put her head on one side. Her eyes narrowed.

'I won't take it back, you know,' she said. 'It was sold fair 'n' square. Good working condition, too.'

'We just want to know where you got it from.'

'Never got it from nowhere,' said the old lady. 'It's always been here. Don't blow that!'

Glod nearly dropped the flute he'd nervously picked up from the debris.

'… or we'll be knee deep in rats,' said the old lady. She turned back to Cliff. 'It's always been here,' she repeated.

'It's got a one chalked on it,' said Glod.

'It's always been here,' said the woman. 'Ever since I've had the shop.'

'Who brought it in?'

'How should I know? I never asks them their name. People don't like that. They just gets the number.'

Glod looked at the flute. There was a yellowing tag attached to it, on which the number 431 had been scrawled.

He stared along the shelves behind the makeshift counter. There was a pink conch shell. That had a number on it, too. He moistened his lips and reached out…

'If you blow that, you'd just better have a sacrificial virgin and a big cauldron of breadfruit and turtle meat standing by,' said the old lady.

There was a trumpet next to it. It looked amazingly untarnished.

'And this one?' he said. 'It'll make the world end and the sky fall on me if I give it a tootle, will it?'

'Interesting you should say that,' said the old lady.

Glod lowered his hand, and then something else caught his eye.

'Good grief,' he said, 'is that still here? I'd forgotten about that…'

'What is it?' said Cliff, and then looked where Glod was pointing.

'That?'

'We've got some money. Why not?'

'Yeah. It might help. But you know what Buddy said. We'd never be able to find—'

'It's a big city. If you can't find it in Ankh-Morpork, you can't find it anywhere.'

Glod picked up half a drumstick and looked thoughtfully at a gong half buried in a pile of musicstands.

'I shouldn't,' said the old lady. 'Not if you don't want seven hundred and seventy-seven skeletal warriors