There was no real day or night here. That had given Albert trouble at first. There was just the bright landscape and, above, a black sky with stars. Death had never got the hang of day and night. When the house had human inhabitants it tended to keep a twenty-six-hour day. Humans, left to themselves, adopt a longer diurnal rhythm than the twenty-four-hour day, so they can be reset like a lot of little clocks at sunset. Humans have to put up with Time, but days are a sort of personal option.

Albert went to bed whenever he remembered.

Now he sat up, with one candle alight, staring into space.

“She remembered about the bathroom,” he muttered. “And she knows about things she couldn’t have seen. She couldn’t have been tole. She’s got his memory. She inherited.”

SQUEAK, said the Death of Rats. He liked to sit by the fire at night.

“Last time he went off people stopped dyin’,” said Albert. “But they ain’t stopped dyin’ this time. And the horse went to her. She’s fillin’ the hole.”

Albert glared at the darkness. When he was agitated it showed by a sort of relentless chewing and sucking activity, as if he was trying to extract some forgotten morsel of teatime from the recesses of a tooth. Now he was making a noise like a hairdresser’s U-bend.

He couldn’t remember ever having been young. It must have happened thousands of years ago. He was seventy-nine, but Time in Death’s house was a reusable resource.

He was vaguely aware that childhood was a tricky business, especially toward the end. There was all the business with pimples and bits of your body having a mind of their own.

Running the executive arm of mortality was certainly an extra problem.

But the point was, the horrible, inescapable point was, that someone had to do it.

For, as has been said before, Death operated in general rather than particular terms, just like a monarchy.

If you are a subject in a monarchy, you are ruled by the monarch. All the time. Waking or sleeping. Whatever you—or they—happen to be doing.

It’s part of the general conditions of the situation. The queen doesn’t actually have to come around to your actual house, hog the chair and the TV remote control, and issue actual commands about how one is parched and would enjoy a cup of tea. It all takes place automatically, like gravity. Except that, unlike gravity, it needs someone at the top. They don’t necessarily have to do a great deal. They just have to be there. They just have to be.

“Her?” said Albert.

SQUEAK.

“She’ll crack soon enough,” said Albert. “Oh, yes. You can’t be an immortal and a mortal at the same time, it’ll tear you in half. I almost feels sorry for her.”

SQUEAK, agreed the Death of Rats.

“And that ain’t the worst bit,” said Albert. “You wait till her memory really starts working…”

SQUEAK.

You listen to me,” said Albert. “You’d better start looking for him right away.”

Susan awoke, and had no idea what time it was.

There was a clock by the bedside, because Death knew there should be things like bedside clocks. It had skulls and bones and the omega sign on it, and it didn’t work. There were no working clocks in the house, except the special one in the hall. Any others got depressed and stopped, or unwound themselves all in one go.

Her room looked as though someone had moved out yesterday. There were hairbrushes on the dressing table, and a few odds and ends of makeup. There was even a dressing gown on the back of the door. It had a rabbit on the pocket. The cozy effect would have been improved if it hadn’t been a skeletal one.

She had a rummage through the drawers. This must have been her mother’s room. There was a lot of pink. Susan had nothing against pink in moderation, but this wasn’t it; she put on her old school dress.

The important thing, she decided, was to stay calm. There was always a logical explanation for everything, even if you had to make it up.

SQEAUFF.

The Death of Rats landed on the dressing table, claws scrabbling for a purchase. He removed the tiny scythe from his jaws.

“I think,” said Susan carefully, “that I would like to go home now, thank you.”

The little rat nodded, and leapt.

It landed on the edge of the pink carpet and scurried away across the dark floor beyond.

When Susan stepped off the carpet the rat stopped and looked around in approval. Once again, she felt she’d passed some sort of test.

She followed it out into the hall and then into the smoky cavern of the kitchen. Albert was bent over the stove.

“’Morning,” he said, out of habit rather than any acknowledgment of the time of day. “You want fried bread with your sausages? There’s porridge to follow.”

Susan looked at the mess sizzling in the huge frying pan. It wasn’t a sight to be seen on an empty stomach, although it could probably cause one. Albert could make an egg wish it had never been laid.

“Haven’t you got any muesli?” she said.

“Is that some kind of sausage?” said Albert suspiciously.

“It’s nuts and grains.”

“Any fat in it?”

“I don’t think so.”

“How’re you suppose to fry it, then?”

“You don’t fry it.”

“You call that breakfast?”

“It doesn’t have to be fried to be breakfast,” said Susan. “I mean, you mentioned porridge, and you don’t fry porridge—”

“Who says?”

“A boiled egg, then?”

“Hah, boiling’s no good, it don’t kill off all the germs.”

“BOIL ME AN EGG, ALBERT.”

As the echoes bounced and died away, Susan wondered where the voice had came from.

Albert’s ladle tinkled on the tiles.

“Please?” said Susan.

“You did the voice,” said Albert.

“Don’t bother about the egg,” said Susan. The voice had made her jaw ache. It worried her even more than it worried Albert. After all, it was her mouth. “I want to go home!”

“You are home,” said Albert.

“This place? This isn’t my home!”

“Yeah? What’s the inscription on the big clock?”

“‘Too Late,’” said Susan promptly.

“Where are the beehives?”

“In the orchard.”

“How many plates’ve we got?”

“Seven—” Susan shut her mouth firmly.

“See? It’s home to part of you,” said Albert.

“Look…Albert,” said Susan, trying sweet reason in case it worked any better this time round, “maybe there is…someone…sort of…in charge of things but I’m really no one special…I mean…”

“Yeah? How come the horse knows you?”

“Yes, but I really am just a normal girl—”

“Normal girls didn’t get a My Little Binky set on their third birthday!” snapped Albert. “Your dad took it away. The Master was very upset about that. He was trying.”

“I mean I’m an ordinary kid!”

“Listen, ordinary kids get a xylophone. They don’t just ask their granddad to take his shirt off!”

“I mean I can’t help it! That’s not my fault! It’s not fair!”

“Really? Oh, why didn’t you say?” said Albert sourly. “That cuts a lot of thin ice, that does. I should just go out now, if I was you, and tell the universe that it’s not fair. I bet it’ll say, oh, all right then, sorry you’ve been troubled, you’re let off.”

“That’s sarcasm! You can’t talk to me like that! You’re just a servant!”

“That’s right. And so are you. So I should get started, if I was you. The Rat’ll help. He mainly does rats, but the principle’s the same.”

Susan sat with her mouth open.

“I’m going outside,” she snapped.

“I ain’t stopping you.”

Susan stormed out through the back door, across the enormous expanses of the outer room, past the grindstone in the yard, and into the garden.

“Huh,” she said.

If someone had told Susan that Death had a house, she would have called them mad or, even worse, stupid. But if she’d had to imagine one, she’d have drawn, in sensible black crayon, some towering, battlemented, Gothic mansion. It would loom, and involve other words ending in “oom,” like gloom and doom. There would have been thousands of windows. She’d fill odd corners of the sky with bats. It would be impressive.

It wouldn’t be a cottage. It wouldn’t have a rather tasteless garden. It wouldn’t have a mat in front of the door with “Welcome” on it.

Susan had invincible walls of common sense. They were beginning to melt like salt in a wet wind, and that made her angry.

There was grandfather Lezek, of course, on his little farm so poor that even the sparrows had to kneel down to eat. He’d been a nice old chap, so far as she could recall; a bit sheepish, now she came to think about it, especially when her father was around.

Her mother had told Susan that her own father had been…

Now she came to think about that, she wasn’t sure what her mother had told her. Parents were quite clever at not telling people things, even when they used a lot of words. She’d just been left with the impression that he wasn’t around.

Now it was being suggested that he was renowned for being around all the time.

It was like having a relative in trade.

A god, now…a god would be something. Lady Odile Flume, in the fifth form, was always boasting that her great-great-grandmother had once been seduced by the god Blind Io in the form of a vase of daisies, which apparently made her a demi-hemi-semi-goddess. She said her mother found it useful to get a table in restaurants. Saying you were a close relative of Death probably would not have the same effect. You probably wouldn’t even manage a seat near the kitchen.

If it was all some kind of dream, she didn’t seem at any risk of waking up. Anyway, she didn’t believe in that kind of thing. Dreams weren’t like this.

A path led from the stable yard past a vegetable garden and, descending slightly, into an orchard of black-leaved trees. Glossy black apples hung from them. Off to one side were some white beehives.

And she knew she’d seen it all before.

There was an apple tree that was quite, quite different from the others.

She stood and stared at it as memory flooded back.

She remembered being just old enough to see how logically stupid the whole idea was, and he’d been standing there, anxiously waiting to see what she’d do…

Old certainties drained away, to be replaced by new certainties.

Now she understood whose granddaughter she was.

The Mended Drum had traditionally gone in for, well, traditional pub games, such as dominoes, darts, and Stabbing People In The Back and Taking All Their Money. The new owner had decided to go up-market. This was the only available direction.

There had been The Quizzing Device, a three-ton water-driven monstrosity based on a recently discovered design by Leonard of Quirm. It had been a bad idea. Captain Carrot of the Watch, who had a mind like a needle under his open, smiling face, had surreptitiously substituted a new roll of questions like: Were you nere Vortin’s Diamond Warehourse on the Nite of the 15th? and: Who was the Third Man Who did the Blagging At Bearhugger’s Distillery Larst week? and had arrested three customers before they caught on.

The owner had promised another machine any day now. The Librarian, one of the tavern’s regulars, had been collecting pennies in readiness.

There was a small stage at one end of the bar. The owner had tried a lunchtime stripper, but only once. At the sight of a large orang-utan in the front row with a big innocent grin, a big bag of penny pieces, and a big banana the poor girl had fled. Yet another entertainment Guild had blacklisted the Drum.

The new owner’s name was Hibiscus Dunelm. It wasn’t his fault. He really wanted to make the Drum, he said, a fun place. For two pins he’d have put stripy umbrellas outside.

He looked down at Glod.

“Just three of you?” he said.

“Yes.”

“When I agreed to five dollars you said you had a big band.”

“Say hello, Lias.”

“My word, that is a big band.” Dunelm backed away. “I thought,” he said, “just a few numbers that everyone knows? Just to provide some ambience.”

“Ambience,” said Imp, looking around the Drum. He was familiar with the word. But, in a place like this, it was all lost and alone. There were only three or four customers in at this early hour of the evening. They weren’t paying any attention to the stage.

The wall behind the stage had clearly seen action. He stared at it as Lias patiently stacked up his stones.

“Oh, just a bit of fruit and old eggs,” said Glod. “People probably get a bit boisterous. I shouldn’t worry about that.”

“I’m not worried about it,” said Imp.

“I should think not.”

“It’s the ax marks and arrow holles I’m worried about. Gllod, we haven’t even practiced! Not properly!”

“You can play your guitar, can’t you?”

“Well, yes, I suppose…”

He’d tried it out. It was easy to play. In fact, it was almost impossible to play badly. It didn’t seem to matter how he touched the strings—they still rang out the tune he had in mind. It was, in solid form, the kind of instrument you dream about when you first start to play—the one you can play without learning. He remembered when he’d first picked up a harp and struck the strings, confidently expecting the kind of lambent tones the old men coaxed from them. He’d got a discord instead. But this was the instrument he’d dreamed of…

“We’ll stick to numbers everyone knows,” said the dwarf. “‘A Wizard’s Staff’ and ‘Gathering Rhubarb.’ Stuff like that. People like songs they can snigger along to.”

Imp looked down at the bar. It was filling up a bit now. But his attention was drawn to a large orang-utan, which had pulled up its chair right in front of the stage and was holding a bag of fruit.

“Gllod, there’s an ape watching us.”

“Well?” said Glod, unfolding a string bag.

“It’s an ape.”

“This is Ankh-Morpork. That’s how things are here.” Glod removed his helmet and unfolded something from inside.

“Why’ve you got a string bag?” said Imp.

“Fruit’s fruit. Waste not, want not. If they throw eggs, try to catch them.”

Imp slung the guitar’s strap over his shoulder. He’d tried to tell the dwarf, but what could he say: This is too easy to play?

He hoped there was a god of musicians.

And there is. There are many, one for almost every type of music. Almost every type. But the only one due to watch over Imp that night was Reg, god of club musicians, who couldn’t pay much attention because he’d also got three other gigs to do.

“We ready?” said Lias, picking his hammers.

The others nodded.

“Let’s give ’em ‘The Wizard’s Staff,’ then,” said Glod. “That always breaks the ice.”

“Okay,” said the troll. He counted on his fingers. “One, two…one, two, many, lots.”

The first apple was thrown seven seconds later. It was caught by Glod, who didn’t miss a note. But the first banana curved viciously and grounded in his ear.

“Keep playing!” he hissed.

Imp obeyed, ducking a fusillade of oranges.

In the front row, the ape opened his bag and produced a very large melon.

“Can you see any pears?” said Glod, taking a breath. “I like pears.”

“I can see a man with a throwing ax!”

“Does it look valuable?”

An arrow vibrated in the wall by Lias’s head.

It was three in the morning. Sergeant Colon and Corporal Nobbs were reaching the conclusion that anyone who intended to invade Ankh-Morpork probably wasn’t going to do so now. And there was a good fire back in the watch house.

“We could leave a note,” said Nobby, blowing on his fingers. “You know? Come back tomorrow, sort of thing?”

He looked up. A solitary horse was walking under the gate arch. A white horse, with a somber, black-clad rider.

There was no question of “Halt, who goes there?” The night watch walked the streets at strange hours and had become accustomed to seeing things not generally seen by mortal men.

Sergeant Colon touched his helmet respectfully.

“‘Evenin’, your lordship,” he said.

“Er…GOOD EVENING.”

The guards watched the horse walk out of sight.

“Some poor bugger’s in for it, then,” said Sergeant Colon.

“He’s dedicated, you got to admit it,” said Nobby. “Out at all hours. Always got time for people.”

“Yeah.”

The guards stared into the velvety dark. Something not quite right, thought Sergeant Colon.

“What’s his first name?” said Nobby.

They stared some more. Then Sergeant Colon, who still hadn’t quite been able to put his finger on it, said, “What do you mean, what’s his first name?”

“What’s his first name?”

“He’s Death,” said the sergeant. “Death. That’s his whole name. I mean…what do you mean?…you mean like…Keith Death?”

“Well, why not?”

“He’s just Death, isn’t he?”

“No, that’s just his job. What do his friends call him?”

“What do you mean, friends?”

“All right. Please yourself.”

“Let’s go and get a hot rum.”

“I think he looks like a Leonard.”

Sergeant Colon remembered the voice. That was it. Just for a moment there…

“I must be getting old,” he said. “For a moment there I thought he sounded like a Susan.”

“I think they saw me,” whispered Susan, as the horse rounded a corner.

The Death of Rats poked its head out of her pocket.

SQUEAK.

“I think we’re going to need that raven,” said Susan. “I mean, I…think I understand you, I just don’t know what you’re saying…”

Binky stopped outside a large house, set back a little from the road. It was a slightly pretentious residence with more gables and mullions than it should rightly have, and this was a clue to its origins: it was the kind of house built for himself by a rich merchant when he goes respectable and needs to do something with the loot.

“I’m not happy about this,” said Susan. “It can’t possibly work. I’m human. I have to go to the toilet and things like that. I can’t just walk into people’s houses and kill them!”

SQUEAK.

“All right, not kill. But it’s not good manners, however you look at it.”

A sign on the door said: Tradesmen to rear entrance.

“Do I count as—”

SQUEAK!

Susan normally would never have dreamed of asking. She’d always seen herself as a person who went through the front doors of life.

The Death of Rats scuttled up the path and through the door.

“Hang on! I can’t—”

Susan looked at the wood. She could. Of course she could. More memories crystallized in front of her eyes. After all, it was only wood. It’d rot in a few hundred years. By the measure of infinity, it hardly existed at all. On average, considered over the lifetime of the multiverse, most things didn’t.

She stepped forward. The heavy oak door offered as much resistance as a shadow.

Grieving relatives were clustered around the bed where, almost lost in the pillows, was a wrinkled old man. At the foot of the bed, paying no attention whatsoever to the keening around it, was a large, very fat, ginger cat.

SQUEAK.

Susan looked at the hourglass. The last few grains tumbled through the pinch.

The Death of Rats, with exaggerated caution, sneaked up behind the sleeping cat and kicked it hard. The animal awoke, turned, flattened its ears in terror, and leapt off the quilt.

The Death of Rats sniggered.

SNH, SNH, SNH.

One of the mourners, a pinch-faced man, looked up. He peered at the sleeper.

“That’s it,” he said, “He’s gone.”

“I thought we were going to be here all day,” said the woman next to him, standing up. “Did you see that wretched old cat move? Animals can tell, you know. They’ve got this sixth sense.”

SNH, SNH, SNH.

“Well, come on there, I know you’re here somewhere,” said the corpse. It sat up.

Susan was familiar with the idea of ghosts. But she hadn’t expected it to be like this. She hadn’t expected the ghosts to be the living, but they were merely pale sketches in the air compared to the old man sitting up in bed. He looked solid enough, but a blue glow outlined him.

“One hundred and seven years, eh?” he cackled. “I expect I had you worried for a while there. Where are you?”

“Er, HERE,” said Susan.

“Female, eh?” said the old man. “Well, well, well.”

He slid off the bed, spectral nightshirt flapping, and was suddenly pulled up short as though he’d reached the end of a chain. This was more or less the case; a thin line of blue light still tethered him to his late habitation.

The Death of Rats jumped up and down on the pillow, making urgent slashing movements with its scythe.

“Oh, sorry,” said Susan, and sliced. The blue line snapped with a high-pitched, crystalline twang.

Around them, sometimes walking through them, were the mourners. Mourning seemed to have stopped now the old man had died. The pinch-faced man was feeling under the mattress.

“Look at ’em,” said the old man nastily, “Poor ole granddad, sob sob, sorely missed, we won’t see his like again, where did the ole bugger leave his will? That’s my youngest son, that is. Well, if you can call a card every Hogswatchnight a son. See his wife? Got a smile like a wave on a slop bucket. And she ain’t the worst of ’em. Relatives? You can keep ’em. I only stayed alive out of mischief.”

A couple of people were exploring under the bed. There was a humorous porcelain clang. The old man capered behind them, making gestures.

“Not a chance!” he chortled. “Heh heh! It’s in the cat basket! I left all me money to the cat!”

Susan looked around. The cat was watching them anxiously from behind the washstand.

Susan felt some response was called for.

“That was very…kind of you…” she said.

“Hah! Mangy thing! Thirteen years of sleepin’ and crappin’ and waiting for the next meal to turn up? Never took half an hour’s exercise in his big fat life. Up until they find the will, anyway. Then he’s going to be the richest, fastest cat in the world—”

The voice faded. So did its owner.

“What a dreadful old man,” said Susan.

She looked down at the Death of Rats, who was trying to make faces at the cat.

“What’ll happen to him?”

SQUEAK.

“Oh.” Behind them, a former mourner tipped a drawer out onto the floor. The cat was beginning to tremble.

Susan stepped out through the wall.

Clouds curled behind Binky like a wake.

“Well, that wasn’t too bad. I mean, no blood or anything. And he was very old and not very nice.”

“That’s all right, then, is it?”

The raven landed on her shoulder.

“What’re you doing here?”

“Rat Death here said I could have a lift. I’ve got an appointment.”

SQUEAK.

The Death of Rats poked its nose out of the saddlebag.

“Are we a cab service?” said Susan coldly.

The rat shrugged and pushed a lifetimer into her hand.

Susan read the name etched on the glass.

“Volf Volfssonssonssonsson? Sounds a bit Hublandish to me.”

SQUEAK.

The Death of Rats clambered up Binky’s mane and took up station between the horse’s ears, tiny robe flapping in the wind.

Binky cantered low over a battlefield. It wasn’t a major war, just an intertribal scuffle. Nor were there any obvious armies—the fighters seemed to be two groups of individuals, some on horseback, who happened coincidentally to be on the same side. Everyone was dressed in the same sort of furs and exciting leatherwear, and Susan was at a loss to know how they told friend from foe. People just seemed to shout a lot and swing huge swords and battle axes at random. On the other hand, anyone you managed to hit instantly became your foe, so it probably all came out right in the long run. The point was that people were dying and acts of incredibly stupid heroism were being performed.

SQUEAK.

The Death of Rats pointed urgently downward.

“Gee…down.”

Binky settled on a small hillock.

“Er…right,” said Susan. She pulled the scythe out of its holster. The blade sprang into life.

It wasn’t hard to spot the souls of the dead. They were coming off the battlefield arm in arm, friend and hitherto foe alike, laughing and stumbling, straight toward her.

Susan dismounted. And concentrated.

“ER,” she said, “ANYONE HERE BEEN KILLED AND CALLED VOLF?”

Behind her, the Death of Rats put its head in its paws.

“ER. HELLO?”

No one took any notice. The warriors trooped past. They were forming a line on the edge of the battlefield, and appeared to be waiting for something.

She didn’t have to…do…all of them. Albert had tried to explain, but a memory had unfolded anyway. She just had to do some, determined by timing or historical importance, and that meant all the others happened; all she had to do was keep the momentum going.

“You got to be more assertive,” said the raven, who had alighted on a rock. “That’s the trouble with women in the professions. Not assertive enough.”

“Why’d you want to come here?” she said.

“This is a battlefield, isn’t it,” said the raven patiently. “You’ve got to have ravens afterward.” Its freewheeling eyes swiveled in its head. “Carrion regardless, as you might say.”

“You mean everyone gets eaten?”

“Part of the miracle of nature,” said the raven.

“That’s horrible,” said Susan. Black birds were already circling in the sky.

“Not really,” said the raven. “Horses for courses, you might say.”

One side, if that’s what you could call it, was fleeing the field of battle with the others in pursuit.

The birds started to settle on what was, Susan realized with horror, an early breakfast. Soft bits, sunny-side up.

“You’d better go and look for your lad,” said the raven. “Otherwise he’ll miss his ride.”

“What ride?”

The eyes orbited again.

“You ever learn mythology?” it said.

“No. Miss Butts says it’s just made-up stories with little literary content.”

“Ah. Deary me. Can’t have that, can we. Oh, well. You’ll soon see. Must rush.” The raven leapt into the air. “I generally try to get a seat near the head.”

“What will I—?”

And then someone started to sing. The voice swooped out of the sky like a sudden wind. It was a rather good mezzo-soprano—

“Hohotojo! Hotojoho!”

And after it, mounted on a horse almost as fine as Binky, was a woman. Very definitely. A lot of woman. She was as much woman as you could get in one place without getting two women. She was dressed in chain mail, a shiny 46 D-cup breastplate, and a helmet with horns on it.

The assembled dead cheered as the horse cantered in for a landing. There were six other singing horsewomen plunging out of the sky behind it.

“Isn’t it always the same,” said the raven, flapping away. “You can wait hours without seeing one and then you get seven all at once.”

Susan watched in astonishment as each rider picked up a dead warrior and galloped up into the sky again. They disappeared abruptly a few hundred meters up and reappeared again almost instantly for a fresh passenger. Soon there was a busy shuttle service operating.

After a minute or two one of the women trotted her horse over to Susan, and pulled a scroll of parchment out of her breastplate.

“What ho! Says here Volf,” she said, in the brisk voice used by people on horseback when addressing mere pedestrians. “Volf the Lucky…?”

“Er. I don’t know—I MEAN, I DON’T KNOW WHICH ONE HE IS,” said Susan helplessly.

The helmeted woman leaned forward. There was something rather familiar about her.

“Are you new?”

“Yes. I mean, YES.”

“Well, don’t stand there like a big girl’s blouse. Jolly well go and fetch him, there’s a good sport.”

Susan looked around wildly, and saw him at last. He wasn’t very far away. A youngish man, outlined in flickering pale blue, was visible among the fallen.

Susan hurried over, scythe at the ready. There was a blue line connecting the warrior to his former body.

SQUEAK! shouted the Death of Rats, jumping up and down and making suggestive motions.

“Left hand thumb up, right hand bent at the wrist, give it some wellie!” shouted the horned woman.

Susan swung the scythe. The line snapped.

“What happened?” said Volf. He looked down. “That’s me down there, isn’t it?” he said. He turned slowly. “And down there. And over there. And…”

He looked at the horned female warrior and brightened up.

“By Io!” he said. “It’s true? Valkyries will carry me off to the hall of Blind Io where there is perpetual feasting and drinking?”

“Don’t, I mean DON’T ASK ME,” said Susan.

The Valkyrie reached down and hauled the warrior across her saddle.

“Just keep quiet, there’s a good chap,” she said. She stared thoughtfully at Susan.

“Are you a soprano?” she said.

“Pardon?”

“Can you sing at all, gel? Only we could do with another soprano. Far too many mezzo-sopranos around these days.”

“I’m not very musical, I’m sorry.”

“Oh, well. Just a thought. Must be going.” She threw back her head. The mighty breastplate heaved. “Hohotojo!”

The horse reared, and galloped into the sky. Before it reached the clouds it shrank to a gleaming pinpoint, which winked.

“What,” said Susan, “was all that about?”

There was a flurry of wings. The raven alighted on the head of the recently departed Volf.

“Well, these guys believe that if you die in battle, some big fat singing horned women carry you off to a sort of giant feast hall where you gobble yourself silly for the rest of eternity,” said the raven. It belched genteeley. “Damn stupid idea, really.”

“But it just happened!”

“Still a daft idea.” The raven looked around at the stricken battlefield, empty now except for the fallen and the flocks of his fellow ravens. “What a waste,” he added. “I mean, just look at it all. Such a terrible waste.”

“Yes!”

“I mean, I’m near bursting and there’s hundreds of ’em untouched. I think I’ll see if I can have a doggie bag.”

“They’re dead bodies!”

“Right!”

“What are you eating?”

“It’s all right,” said the raven, backing away. “There’s enough for everyone.”

“That’s disgusting!”

“I didn’t kill ’em,” it said.

Susan gave up.

“She looked a lot like Iron Lily,” she said, as they walked back to the patient horse. “Our gym mistress. Sounded like her, too.” She imagined the warbling Valkyries pounding across the sky. Get some warrior, you bunch of fainting blossoms…

“Convergent evolution,” said the raven. “Often happens. I read once where apparently the common octopus has an eye almost exactly the same as the human eyeb—caw!”

“You were going to say something like: except for the taste, weren’t you,” said Susan.

“Negger grossed by bind,” said the raven indistinctly.

“Sure?”

“Leg go ogg by beak glease?”

Susan released her grip.

“This is dreadful,” she said. “This is what he used to do? There’s no element of choice?”

SQUEAK.

“But what if they don’t deserve to die?”

SQUEAK.

The Death of Rats contrived to indicate, quite effectively, that in that case they could apply to the universe and point out that they didn’t deserve to die. In which case it was up to the universe to say, oh, didn’t you? oh, well, that’s all right then, you can go on living. It was a remarkably succinct gesture.

“So…my grandfather was Death, and he just let nature take its course? When he could have done some good? That’s stupid.”

The Death of Rats shook its skull.

“I mean, was Volf on the right side?” said Susan.

“Hard to say,” said the raven. “He was a Vasung. The other side were Bergunds. Apparently it all started with a Bergund carrying off a Vasung woman a few hundred years ago. Or it may have been the other way round. Well, the other side invaded their village. There was a bit of a massacre. And then the other ones went to the other village and there was another massacre. After that, you might say, there was some residual bad feeling.”

“Very well, then,” said Susan. “Who’s next?”

SQUEAK.

The Death of Rats landed on the saddle. It leaned down and, with some effort, hauled another hourglass out of the pack. Susan read the label.

It said: Imp y Celyn.

Susan had a sensation of falling backward.

“I know this name,” she said.

SQUEAK.

“I…remember it from somewhere,” said Susan. “It’s important. He’s…important…”

The moon hung over the desert of Klatch like a huge ball of rock.

It wasn’t much of a desert to be graced by so impressive a moon.

It was just part of the belt of deserts, growing progressively hotter and dryer, that surrounded the Great Nef and the Dehydrated Ocean. And no one would have thought much about it if people very like Mr. Clete of the Musicians’ Guild hadn’t come along and made maps and put across this part of the desert an innocent little dotted line that marked a border between Klatch and Hersheba.

Up until that time the D’regs, a collection of cheerfully warlike nomadic tribes, had roamed the desert quite freely. Now there was a line, they were sometimes Klatchian D’regs and sometimes Hershebian D’regs, with all the rights due to citizens of both states, particularly the right to pay just as much tax as could be squeezed out of them and be drafted in to fight wars against people they’d never heard of. So as a result of the dotted line Klatch was now incipiently at war with Hersheba and the D’regs, Hersheba was at war with the D’regs and Klatch, and the D’regs were at war with everyone, including one another, and having considerable fun because the D’reg word for “stranger” was the same as for “target.”

The fort was one of the legacies of the dotted line.

Now it was a dark rectangle on the hot silver sands. From it came what could very accurately be called the strains of an accordion, since someone seemed to want to play a tune but kept on running into difficulties after a few bars, and starting again.

Someone knocked on the door.

After a while there was a scraping on the other side and a small hatch opened.

“Yes, offendi?”

IS THIS THE KLATCHIAN FOREIGN LEGION?

The face of the little man on the other side of the door went blank.

“Ah,” he said, “you’ve got me there. Hang on a moment.” The hatch shut. There was a whispered discussion on the other side of the door. The hatch opened.

“Yes, it appears we are the…the…what was that again? Right, got it…the Klatchian Foreign Legion. Yes. What was it you were wanting?”

I WISH TO JOIN.

“Join? Join what?”

THE KLATCHIAN FOREIGN LEGION.

“Where’s that?”

There was some more whispering.

“Oh. Right. Sorry. Yes. That’s us.”

The doors swung open. The visitor strode in. A legionary with corporal’s stripes on his arm walked up to him.

“You’ll have to report to…” his eyes glazed a little, “…you know…big man, three stripes…on the tip of my tongue a moment ago…”

SERGEANT?

“Right,” said the corporal, with relief. “What’s your name, soldier?”

ER…

“You don’t have to say, actually. That’s what the…the…”

KLATCHIAN FOREIGN LEGION?

“…what it’s all about. People join to…to…with your mind, you know, when you can’t…things that happened…”

FORGET?

“Right. I’m…” The man’s face went blank. “Wait a minute, would you?”

He looked down at his sleeve. “Corporal…” he said. He hesitated, looking worried. Then an idea struck him and he pulled at the collar of his vest and twisted his neck until he could squint, with considerable difficulty, at the label thus revealed.

“Corporal…Medium? Does that sound right?”

I DON’T THINK SO.

“Corporal…Hand Wash Only?”

PROBABLY NOT.

“Corporal…Cotton?”

IT’S A POSSIBILITY.

“Right. Well, welcome to the…er…

KLATCHIAN FOREIGN LEGION…

“Right. The pay is three dollars a week and all the sand you can eat. I hope you like sand.”

I SEE YOU CAN REMEMBER ABOUT SAND.

“Believe me, you won’t ever forget sand,” said the corporal bitterly.

I NEVER DO.

“What did you say your name was?”

The stranger remained silent.

“Not that it matters,” said Corporal Cotton. “In the…”

KLATCHIAN FOREIGN LEGION?

“…right…we give you a new name. You start out afresh.”

He beckoned to another man.

“Legionary…?”

“Legionary…er…ugh…er…Size 15, sir.”

“Right. Take this…man away and get him a…” he snapped his fingers irritably, “…you know…thing…clothes, everyone wears them…sand-colored—”

UNIFORM?

The corporal blinked. For some inexplicable reason the word “bone” kept elbowing its way into the melting, flowing mess that was his consciousness.

“Right,” he said. “Er. It’s a twenty-year tour, Legionary. I hope you’re man enough for it.”

I LIKE IT ALREADY, said Death.

“I suppose it’s legal for me to go in licensed premises?” said Susan, as Ankh-Morpork appeared on the horizon.

SQUEAK.

The city slid under them again. Where there were wider streets and squares she could make out individual figures. Huh, she thought…if only they knew I was up here! And, despite everything, she couldn’t help feeling superior. All the people down there had to think about were, well, ground-level things. Mundane things. It was like looking down at ants.

She’d always known she was different. Much more aware of the world, when it was obvious that most people went through it with their eyes shut and their brains set to “simmer.” It was comforting in a way to know that she was different. The feeling wrapped around her like an overcoat.

Binky landed on a greasy jetty. On one side the river sucked at the wooden pilings.

Susan slid off the horse, unshipped the scythe, and stepped inside the Mended Drum.

There was a riot going on. The patrons of the Drum tended to be democratic in their approach to aggressiveness. They liked to see that everyone got some. So, although it was the consensus of the audience that the trio were lousy musicians, and, therefore, a suitable target, various fights had broken out because people had been hit by badly aimed missiles, or hadn’t had a fight all day, or were just trying to reach the door.

Susan had no difficulty in spotting Imp y Celyn. He was at the front of the stage, his face a mask of terror. Behind him was a troll, with a dwarf trying to hide behind it.

She glanced at the hourglass. Just a few more seconds…

He was really rather attractive, in a dark, curly-headed sort of way. He looked a little elvish.

And familiar.

She’d felt sorry for Volf, but at least he was on a battlefield. Imp was on a stage. You didn’t expect to die on stage.

I’m standing here with a scythe and an hourglass waiting for someone to die. He’s not much older than me and I’m not supposed to do anything about it. That’s silly. And I’m sure I’ve seen him…before…

No one actually tried to kill musicians in the Drum. Axes were thrown and crossbows fired in a good-humored, easygoing way. No one really aimed, even if they were capable of doing so. It was more fun watching people dodge.

A big, red-bearded man grinned at Lias and selected a small throwing ax from his bandolier. It was okay to throw axes at trolls. They tended to bounce off.

Susan could see it all. It’d bounce off and hit Imp. No one’s fault, really. Worse things happened at sea. Worse things happened in Ankh-Morpork all the time, continuously.

The man doesn’t even mean to kill him. It’s so sloppy. That’s not how things should go. Someone ought to do something about it.

She reached over to grab the ax handle.

SQUEAK!

“Shut up!”

Whaaauum.

Imp stood like a discus thrower as the chord filled across the noisy room.

It rang like an iron bar dropped on a library floor at midnight.

Echoes bounced back from the corners of the room. Each one bore its own load of harmonies.

It was an explosion of sound in the same way that a Hogswatchnight rocket explodes, each falling spark exploding again…

Imp’s finger caressed the strings, picking out three more chords. The ax thrower lowered his ax.

This was music that had not only escaped but had robbed a bank on the way out. It was music with its sleeves rolled up and its top button undone, raising its hat and grinning and stealing the silver.

It was music that went down to the feet by way of the pelvis without paying a call on Mr. Brain.

The troll picked up his hammers, looked blankly at his stones, and then began to beat out a rhythm.

The dwarf took a deep breath, and extracted from the horn a deep, throbbing sound.

People drummed their fingers on the edges of the tables. The orang was sitting with a huge rapt grin on his face, as though he’d swallowed a banana sideways.

Susan looked down at the hourglass marked Imp y Celyn.

The top bulb was now quite empty of sand, but something blue flickered in there.

She felt tiny pinlike claws scrabble up her back and find purchase on her shoulder.

The Death of Rats looked down at the glass.

SQUEAK, it said, quietly.

Susan still wasn’t good on Rat but she thought she knew “uh-oh” when she heard it.

Imp’s fingers danced over the strings, but the sound that came from them was no relative to the tones of harp or lute. The guitar screamed like an angel who had just discovered why it was on the wrong side. Sparks glittered on the strings.

Imp himself had his eyes shut and was holding the instrument close to his chest, like a soldier holding a spear at the port. It was hard to know who was playing what.

And still the music flooded out.

The Librarian’s hair was standing on end, all over his body. The ends crackled.

It made you want to kick down walls and ascend the sky on steps of fire. It made you want to pull all the switches and throw all the levers and stick your fingers in the electric socket of the Universe to see what happened next. It made you want to paint your bedroom wall black and cover it with posters.

Now various muscles on the Librarian’s body were twitching with the beat as the music earthed itself through him.

There was a small party of wizards in the corner. They were watching the performances with their mouths open.

And the beat strode on, and crackled from mind to mind, snapping its fingers and curling its lip.

Live music. Music with rocks in it, running wild…

Free at last! It leapt from head to head, crackling in through the ears and heading for the hindbrain. Some were more susceptible than others…closer to the beat…

It was an hour later.

The Librarian knuckled and swung through the midnight drizzle, head exploding with music.

He landed on the lawns of Unseen University and ran into the Great Hall, hands waving wildly overhead to maintain balance.

He stopped.

Moonlight filtered in through the big windows, illuminated what the Archchancellor always referred to as “our mighty organ,” to the general embarrassment of the rest of the faculty.

Rack upon rack of pipes entirely occupied one wall, looking like pillars in the gloom or possibly resembling the stalagtites of some monstrously ancient cave. Almost lost among them was the player’s pulpit, with its three giant keyboards and the hundred knobs for special sound effects.

It wasn’t often used, except for the occasional civic affair or Wizards’ Excuse Me.^*

But the Librarian, energetically pumping the bellows and making occasional little “ooks” of excitement, felt there was a lot more that it could do.

A fully grown male orang-utan may look like an amiable pile of old carpets but has a strength on him that would make a human of equivalent weight eat lots of rug. The Librarian only stopped pumping when the lever was too hot to hold and the air reservoirs were farting and whistling around the rivets.

The he swung himself up into the organist’s seat.

The whole edifice was humming softly under the enormous pent-up pressure.

The Librarian locked his hands together and cracked his knuckles, which is impressive when you have as many knuckles as an orang-utan.

He raised his hands.

He hesitated.

He lowered his hands again and pulled out the Vox Humana, the Vox Dei, and the Vox Diabolica.

The moan of the organ took on a more urgent tone.

He raised his hands.

He hesitated.

He lowered his hands and pulled out all the rest of the stops, including the twelve knobs with “?” on them and the two with faded labels warning in several languages that they were on no account to be touched, ever, in any circumstances.

He raised his hands.

He raised his feet also, positioning them over some of the more perilous pedals.

He shut his eyes.

He sat for a moment in contemplative silence, a test pilot ready to slit the edge of the envelope in the starship Melody.

He let the plangent memory of the music fill his head and flow down his arms and fill his fingers.

His hands dropped.

“What did we do? What did we do?” said Imp. Excitement ran its barefoot races up and down his spine.

They were sitting in the tiny cramped room behind the bar.

Glod took off his helmet and wiped the inside.

“Would you believe four beats to the bar, two-four time, melody led, with the bass beat forward in the melody?”

“What’s all dat?” said Lias. “What’s all dem words mean?”

“You’re a musician, ain’t you?” said Glod. “What do you think you do?”

“I hits ’em with the hammers,” said Lias, one of Nature’s drummers.

“But that bit you did…” said Imp, “You know…in the middle…you know, bam-bah bam-bah bam-bamBAH… how did you know how to do that bit?”

“It was just the bit dat had to go there,” said Lias.

Imp looked at the guitar. He’d put it on the table. It was still playing quietly to itself, like a cat purring.

“That’s not a normall instrument,” he said, shaking a finger at it. “I was just standing there and it started playing alll by itself!

“Probably belonged to a wizard, like I said,” said Glod.

“Nah,” said Lias. “Never knew any wizard who was musical. Music and magic don’t mix.”

They looked at it.

Imp never heard of an instrument that played itself before, except the legendary harp of Owen Mwnyy, which sang when danger threatened. And that had been back in the days when there were dragons around. Singing harps went well with dragons. They seemed out of place in a city with Guilds and everything.

The door swung open.

“That was…astonishing, boys,” said Hibiscus Dunelm. “Never heard anything like it! Can you come back tomorrow night? Here’s your five dollars.”

Glod counted the coins.

“We did four encores,” he said darkly.

“I’d complain to the Guild, if I was you,” said Hibiscus.

The trio looked at the money. It looked very impressive to people whose last meal had been twenty-four hours ago. It wasn’t Guild rate. On the other hand, it had been a long twenty-four hours.

“If you come back tomorrow,” said Hibiscus, “I’ll make it…six dollars, how about that?”

“Oh, wow,” said Glod.

Mustrum Ridcully was jolted upright in bed, because the bed itself was being gently vibrated across the floor.

So it had happened at last!

They were out to get him.

The tradition of promotion in the University by filling dead men’s shoes, sometimes by firstly ensuring the death of the man in those shoes, had lately ceased. This was largely because of Ridcully himself, who was big and kept himself in trim and, as three late-night aspirants to the Archchancellorship had found, also had very good hearing. They had been variously hung out of the window by their ankles, knocked unconscious with a shovel, and had their arm broken in two places. Besides, Ridcully was known to sleep with two loaded crossbows by his bed. He was a kind man and probably wouldn’t shoot you in both ears.

That sort of consideration encouraged a more patient type of wizard. Everyone dies sooner or later. They could wait.

Ridcully took stock and found his first impression was mistaken. There appeared to be no murderous magic going on. There was just sound, cramming the room to every corner.

Ridcully shuffled into his slippers and went out into the corridor, where other members of the faculty were milling around and blearily asking one another what the hell was happening. Plaster rained down on them from the ceiling in a steady fog.

“Who’s causing that din?” shouted Ridcully. There was a mute chorus of unheard replies, and much shrug of shoulder.

“Well, I will find out,” growled the Archchancellor, and set off for the stairs with the others trailing after him. He walked without his knees or elbows bending very much, a sure sign of a forthright man in a bad temper.

The trio said nothing all the way out of the Drum. They said nothing all the way to Gimlet’s delicatessen. They said nothing while they waited in the queue, and then all they said was: “So…right…that’s one Quatre-rodenti with extra newts, hold the chilis, one Klatchian Hots with double salami and a Four Strata, no pitchblende.”

They sat down to wait. The guitar hummed to itself, a little four-note riff. They tried not to think about it. They tried to think about other things.

“I think I change my name,” said Lias, eventually. “I mean…Lias? Not a good name for the music business.”

“What’ll you change it to?” said Glod.

“I thought…don’t laugh…I thought…Cliff?” said Lias.

“Cliff?”

“Good troll name. Very stony. Very rocky. Nothing wrong with it,” said Cliff né Lias, defensively.

“Well…yes…but, I dunno, I mean…well…Cliff? Can’t see anyone lasting long in this business with a name like Cliff.”

“Better than Glod, anyway.”

“I’m sticking with Glod,” said Glod. “And Imp is sticking with Imp, right?”

Imp looked at the guitar. It’s not right, he thought. I hardly touched it. I just…And I feel so tired…I…

“Not sure,” he said, wretchedly. “Not sure if Imp is the right name for…this music.” His voice trailed off. He yawned.

“Imp?” said Glod, after a while.

“Hmm?” said Imp. And he’d felt someone was watching him out there. That was daft, of course. He couldn’t say to someone “I was on stage and I thought someone was watching me.” They’d say “Really? That’s really occult, that is…”

“Imp?” said Glod, “Why’re you snapping your fingers like that?”

Imp looked down.

“Was I?”

“Yes.”

“Just thinking. My name…it’s not right for this music, either.”

“What does it mean in real language?” said Glod.

“Well, all my family are y Celyns,” said Imp, ignoring the insult to an ancient tongue. “It means ‘of the hollly.’ That’s all that grows in Llamedos, you see. Everything else just rots.”

“I wasn’t goin’ to say,” said Cliff, “but Imp sounds a bit like elf to me.”

“It just means ‘smalll shoot,’” said Imp. “You know. Like a bud.”

“Bud y Celyn?” said Glod. “Buddy? Worse than Cliff, in my opinion.”

“I…think it sounds right,” said Imp.

Glod shrugged, and pulled a handful of coins out of his pocket.

“We’ve still got more’n four dollars,” he said. “I know what we should do with it, too.”

“We should put it toward Guild membership,” said the new Cliff.

Glod stared into the middle distance.

“No,” he said. “We haven’t got the sound right. I mean, it was very good, very…new,” he stared hard at Imp-cum-Buddy, “but there’s still something missing…”

The dwarf gave Buddy né Imp another penetrating stare.

“Do you know you’re shaking all over?” he said. “Moving around on your seat like you got a pant full of ant.”

“I can’t help it,” said Buddy. He wanted to sleep, but a rhythm was bouncing around inside his head.

“I saw it too,” said Cliff. “When we was walking here, you were bouncing along.” He looked under the table. “And you is tapping your feet.”

“And you keep snapping your fingers,” said Glod.

“I can’t stop thinking about the music,” said Buddy. “You’re right. We need…” he drummed his fingers along the table, “…a sound like…pang pang pang PANG Pang…”

“You mean a keyboard?” said Glod.

“Do I?”

“They’ve got one of those new pianofortes just over the river in the Opera House,” said Glod.

“Yah, but dat sort of thing ain’t for our kind of music,” said Cliff. “Dat sort of thing is for big fat guys in powdered wigs.”

“I reckon,” said Glod, giving Buddy another lopsided stare, “if we put it anywhere near Im—near Buddy, it’ll be for our kind of music soon enough. So go and get it.”

“I heard where it cost four hundred dollars,” said Cliff. “No one’s got dat many teeth.”

“I didn’t mean buy it,” said Glod. “Just…borrow it for a while.”

“Dat’s stealing,” said Cliff.

“No it’s not,” said the dwarf. “We’ll let them have it back when we’ve finished with it.”

“Oh. Dat’s all right den.”

Buddy wasn’t a drummer or a troll and could see the technical flaw in Glod’s argument. And, a few weeks ago, he’d have said so. But then he’d been a good circle-going boy from the valleys, who didn’t drink, didn’t swear, and played the harp at every druidic sacrifice.

Now he needed that piano. The sound had been nearly right.

He snapped his fingers in time with his thoughts.

“But we ain’t got anyone to play it,” said Cliff.

“You get the piano,” said Glod. “I’ll get the piano player.”

And all the time they kept glancing at the guitar.

The wizards advanced in a body toward the organ. The air around it vibrated as if superheated.

“What an unholy noise!” shouted the Lecturer in Recent Runes.

“Oh, I don’t know!” screamed the Dean. “It’s rather catchy!”

Blue sparks crackled between the organ pipes. The Librarian could just be seen high in the trembling structure.

“Who’s pumping it?” screamed the Senior Wrangler.

Ridcully looked around at the side. The handle seemed to be going up and down by itself.

“I’m not having this,” he muttered. “Not in my damn university. It’s worse than students.”

And he raised his crossbow and fired, right at the main bellows.

There was a long drawn out wail in the key of A, and then the organ exploded.

The history of the subsequent seconds was put together during a discussion in the Uncommon Room where the wizards went for a stiff drink, or in the Bursar’s case a warm milk, shortly afterward.

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 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.

“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, anything 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…”

It was the Bursar, standing in the doorway. A large red-faced man was behind him, craning over his shoulder.

“What is it, Bursar?”

“Erm, this gentleman has got a—”

“It’s about your monkey,” said the man.

Ridcully brightened up.

“Oh, yes?”

“Apparently, erm, he sto—removed some wheels from this gentleman’s carriage,” said the Bursar, who was on the depressive side of his mental cycle.

“You sure it was the Librarian?” said the Archchancellor.

“Fat, red hair, says ‘ook’ a lot?”

“That’s him. Oh, dear. I wonder why he did that?” said Ridcully. “Still, you know what they say…a five-hundred-pound gorilla can sleep where he likes.”

“But a three-hundred-pound monkey can give me my bloody wheels back,” said the man, unmoved. “If I don’t get my wheels back, there’s going to be trouble.”

“Trouble?” said Ridcully.

“Yeah. And don’t think you can scare me. Wizards don’t scare me. Everyone knows there’s a rule that you mustn’t use magic against civilians.” The man thrust his face close to Ridcully and raised a fist.

Ridcully snapped his fingers. There was an inrush of air, and a croak.

“I’ve always thought of it more as a guideline,” he said, mildly. “Bursar, go and put this frog in the flower bed and when he becomes his old self give him ten dollars. Ten dollars would be all right, wouldn’t it?”

“Croak,” said the frog hastily.

“Good. And now will someone tell me what’s going on?”

There was a series of crashes from downstairs.

“Why do I think,” said Ridcully, to the world in general, “that this isn’t going to be the answer?”

The servants had been laying the tables for lunch. This generally took some time. Since wizards took their meals seriously, and left a lot of mess, the tables were in a permanent state of being laid, cleaned, or occupied. Place settings alone took a lot of time. Each wizard required nine knives, thirteen forks, twelve spoons, and one rammer, quite apart from all the wineglasses.

Wizards often turned up in ample time for the next meal. In fact they were often there in good time to have second helpings of the previous one.

A wizard was sitting there now.

“That’s Recent Runes, ain’t it?” said Ridcully.

He had a knife in each hand. He also had the salt, pepper, and mustard pots in front of him. And the cake stand. And a couple of tureen covers. All of which he was hitting vigorously with the knives.

“What’s he doing that for?” said Ridcully. “And, Dean, will you stop tapping your feet?”

“Well, it’s catchy,” said the Dean.

“It’s catching,” said Ridcully.

The Lecturer in Recent Runes was frowning in concentration. Forks jangled across the woodwork. A spoon caught a glancing blow, pinwheeled through the air, and hit the Bursar on the ear.

“What the hells does he think he’s doing?”

“That really hurt!”

The wizards clustered around the Lecturer in Recent Runes. He paid them no attention whatsoever. Sweat poured down his beard.

“He just broke the cruet,” said Ridcully.

“It’s going to smart for hours.”

“Ah, yes, he’s as hot as mustard,” said the Dean.

“I’d take that with a pinch of salt,” said the Senior Wrangler.

Ridcully straightened up. He raised a hand.

“Now, someone’s about to say something like ‘I hope the Watch don’t ketchup with him,’ aren’t you?” he said. “Or ‘That’s a bit of a sauce’ or I bet you’re all trying to think of somethin’ silly to say about pepper. I’d just like to know what’s the difference between this faculty and a bunch of pea-brained idiots.”

“Hahaha,” said the Bursar nervously, still rubbing his ear.

“It wasn’t a rhetorical question.” Ridcully snatched the knives out of the Lecturer’s hands. The man went on beating the air for a moment and then appeared to wake up.

“Oh, hello, Archchancellor. Is there a problem?”

“What were you doing?”

The Lecturer looked down at the table.

“He was syncopating,” said the Dean.

“I never was!”

Ridcully frowned. He was a thick-skinned, single-minded man with the tact of a sledgehammer and about the same sense of humor, but he was not stupid. And he knew that wizards were like weather vanes, or the canaries that miners used to detect pockets of gas. They were by their nature tuned to an occult frequency. If there was anything strange happening, it tended to happen to wizards first. They turned, as it were, to face it. Or dropped off their perch.

“Why’s everyone suddenly so musical?” he said. “Using the term in its loosest sense, of course.” He looked at the assembled wizardry. And then down toward the floor.

“You’ve all got crépe on your shoes!”

The wizards looked at their feet with some surprise.

“My word, I thought I was a bit taller,” said the Senior Wrangler. “I put it down to the celery diet.” ^*

“Proper footwear for a wizard is pointy shoes or good stout boots,” said Ridcully. “When one’s footwear turns creepy, something’s amiss.”

“It’s crepe,” said the Dean. “It’s got a little pointy thingy over the—”

Ridcully breathed heavily.

“When your boots change by themselves—” he growled.

“There’s magic afoot?”

“Haha, good one, Senior Wrangler,” said the Dean.

“I want to know what’s going on,” said Ridcully, in a low and level voice. “And if you don’t all shut up, there will be trouble.”

He reached into the pockets of his robe and, after a few false starts, produced a pocket thaumometer. He held it up. There was always a high level of background magic in the University, but the little needle was on the “Normal” mark. On average, anyway. It was ticking backward and forward across it like a metronome.

Ridcully held it up so they could all see.

“What’s this?” he said.

“Four-four time?” said the Dean.

“Music ain’t magic,” said Ridcully. “Don’t be daft. Music’s just twanging and banging and—”

He stopped.

“Has anyone got anything they should be telling me?”

The wizards shuffled their blue-suede feet nervously.

“Well,” said the Senior Wrangler, “it is a fact that last night, er, I, that is to say, some of us, happened to be passing by the Mended Drum—”

“Bona-Fide Travelers,” said the Lecturer in Recent Runes. “It’s allowable for Bona-Fide Travelers to get a Drink at Licensed Premises at any Hour of Day or Night. City statute, you know.”

“Where were you traveling from, then?” Ridcully demanded.

“The Bunch of Grapes.”

“That’s just around the corner.”

“Yes, but we were…tired.”

“All right, all right,” said Ridcully, in the voice of a man who knows that pulling at a thread any more will cause the whole vest to unravel. “The Librarian was with you?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Go on.”

“Well, there was this music—”

“Sort of twangy,” said the Senior Wrangler.

“Melody led,” said the Dean.

“It was…”

“…sort of…”

“…in a way it…”

“…kind of gets under your skin and makes you feel fizzy,” said the Dean. “Incidentally, has anyone got any black paint? I’ve looked everywhere.”

“Under your skin,” murmured Ridcully. He scratched his chin. “Oh, dear. One of those. Stuff leakin’ into the universe again, eh? Influences coming from Outside, yes? Remember what happened when Mr. Hong opened his take-away fish bar on the site of the old temple in Dagon Street? And then there was those moving pictures. I was against them from the start. And those wire things on wheels. This universe has more damn holes in it than a Quirm cheese. Well, at—”

“Lancre cheese,” said the Senior Wrangler helpfully. “That’s the one with the holes. Quirm is the one with the blue veins.”

Ridcully gave him a look.

“Actually, it didn’t feel magical,” said the Dean. He sighed. He was seventy-two. It had made him feel that he was seventeen again. He couldn’t remember having been seventeen; it was something that must have happened to him while he was busy. But it made him feel like he imagined it felt like when you were seventeen, which was like having a permanent red-hot vest on under your skin.

He wanted to hear it again.

“I think they’re going to have it again tonight,” he ventured. “We could, er, go along and listen. In order to learn more about it, in case it’s a threat to society,” he added virtuously.

“That’s right, Dean,” said the Lecturer in Recent Runes. “It’s our civic duty. We’re the city’s first line of supernatural defense. Supposing ghastly creatures started coming out of the air?”

“What about it?” said the Chair of Indefinite Studies.

“Well, we’d be there.”

“Yes? That’s good, is it?”

Ridcully glared at his wizards. Two of them were surreptitiously tapping their feet. And several of them appeared to be twitching, very gently. The Bursar twitched gently all the time, of course, but that was only his way.

Like canaries, he thought. Or lightning conductors.

“All right,” he said reluctantly. “We’ll go. But we won’t draw attention to ourselves.”

“Certainly, Archchancellor.”

“And everyone’s to buy their own drink.”

“Oh.”

Corporal (possibly) Cotton saluted in front of the fort’s sergeant, who was trying to shave.

“It’s the new recruit, sir,” he said. “He won’t obey orders.”

The sergeant nodded, and then looked blankly at something in his own hand.

“Razor, sir,” said the corporal, helpfully. “He just keeps on saying things like IT’S NOT HAPPENING YET.”

“Have you tried burying him up to the neck in the sand? That usually works.”

“It’s a bit…um…thing…nasty to people…had it a moment ago…” The corporal snapped his fingers. “Thing. Cruel. That’s it. We don’t give people…the Pit…these days.”

“This is the…” the sergeant glanced at the palm of his left hand, where there were several lines of writing, “the Foreign Legion.”

“Yessir. All right, sir. He’s weird. He just sits there all the time. We call him Beau Nidle, sir.”

The sergeant peered bemusedly at the mirror.

“It’s your face, sir,” said the corporal.

Susan stared at herself critically.

Susan…it wasn’t a good name, was it? It wasn’t a truly bad name, it wasn’t like poor Iodine in the fourth form, or Nigella, a name which meant “oops, we wanted a boy.” But it was dull. Susan. Sue. Good old Sue. It was a name that made sandwiches, kept its head in difficult circumstances, and could reliably look after other people’s children.

It was a name used by no queens or goddesses anywhere.

And you couldn’t do much even with the spelling. You could turn it into Suzi, and it sounded as though you danced on tables for a living. You could put in a Z and a couple of Ns and an E, but it still looked like a name with extensions built on. It was as bad as Sara, a name that cried out for a prosthetic H.

Well, at least she could do something about the way she looked.

It was the robe. It might be traditional but…she wasn’t. The alternative was her school uniform or one of her mother’s pink creations. The baggy dress of the Quirm College for Young Ladies was a proud one and, in the mind of Miss Butts at least, proof against all the temptations of the flesh…but it lacked a certain panache as costume for the Ultimate Reality. And pink was not even to be thought of.

For the first time in the history of the universe, a Death wondered about what to wear.

“Hold on,” she said, to her reflection. “Here… I can create things, can’t I?”

She held out her hand and thought: cup. A cup appeared. It had a skull-and-bones pattern around the rim.

“Ah,” said Susan. “I suppose a pattern of roses is out of the question? Probably not right for the ambience, I expect.”

She put the cup on the dressing table and tapped it. It went plink in a solid sort of way.

“Well, then,” she said to her reflection, “I don’t want something soppy and posey. No silly black lace or anything worn by idiots who write poetry in their rooms and dress like vampires and are vegetarians really.”

The images of clothes floated across her reflection. It was clear that black was the only option, but she settled on something practical and without frills. She put her head on one side critically.

“Well, maybe a bit of lace,” she said. “And…perhaps a bit more…bodice.”

She nodded at her reflection in the mirror. Certainly it was a dress that no Susan would ever wear, although she suspected that there was a basic Susanness about her which would permeate it after a while.

“It’s a good job you’re here,” she said, “or I’d go totally mad. Haha.”

Then she went to see her grandf…Death.

There was one place he had to be.

Glod wandered quietly into the University Library. Dwarfs respected learning, provided they didn’t have to experience it.

He tugged at the robe of a passing young wizard.

“There’s a monkey runs this place, right?” he said. “Big fat hairy monkey, hands a couple of octaves wide?”

The wizard, a pasty-faced postgraduate student, looked down at Glod with the disdainful air a certain type of person always reserved for dwarfs.

It wasn’t much fun being a student in Unseen University. You had to find your pleasures where you could. He grinned a big, wide innocent grin.

“Why, yes,” he said. “I do believe right at this moment he’s in his workroom in the basement. But you have to be very careful how you address him.”

“Is that so?” said Glod.

“Yes, you have to be sure to say, ‘Do you want a peanut, Mr¨Monkey?’” said the student wizard. He signaled a couple of his colleagues. “That’s so, isn’t it? He has to say Mister Monkey.”

“Oh, yes indeedy,” said a student. “Actually, if you don’t want him to get annoyed, it’s best to be on the safe side and scratch under your arms. That puts him at his ease.”

“And go ugh-ugh-ugh,” said a third student. “He likes that.”

“Well, thank you very much,” said Glod. “Which way do I go?”

“We’ll show you,” said the first student.

“That’s so very kind.”

“Don’t mention it. Only too glad to help.”

The three wizards led Glod down a flight of steps and into a tunnel. Light filtered down through the occasional pane of green glass set in the floor above. Every so often Glod heard a snigger behind him.

The Librarian was squatting down on the floor in a long, high cellar. Miscellaneous items had been scattered on the floor in front of him; there was a cart wheel, odd bits of wood and bone, and various pipes, rods, and lengths of wire that somehow suggested that, around the city, people were puzzling over broken pumps and fences with holes in them. The Librarian was chewing the end of a piece of pipe and looking intently at the heap.

“That’s him,” said one of the wizards, giving Glod a push.

The dwarf shuffled forward. There was another outburst of muffled giggling behind him.

He tapped the Librarian on the shoulder.

“Excuse me—”

“Ook?”

“Those guys just called you a monkey,” said Glod, jerking a thumb in the direction of the door. “I’d make them say ‘sorry,’ if I was you.”

There was a creaking, metallic noise, followed very closely by a scuffling outside as the wizards trampled one another in their effort to get away.

The Librarian had bent the pipe into a U-shape, apparently without effort.

Glod went to the door and looked out. There was a pointy hat on the flagstones, trampled flat.

“That was fun,” he said. “If I’d just asked them where the Librarian was, they’d have said bugger off, you dwarf. You have to know how to deal with people in this game.”

He came back and sat down beside the Librarian. The ape put a smaller bend in the pipe.

“What’re you making?” said Glod.

“Oook-oook-OOK!”

“My cousin Modo is the gardener here,” said Glod. “He says you’re a mean keyboard player.” He stared at the hands, busy in their pipe bending. They were big. And of course there were four of them. “He was certainly partly right,” he added.

The ape picked up a length of driftwood and tasted it.

“We thought you might like to play pianoforte with us at the Drum tonight,” said Glod. “Me and Cliff and Buddy, that is.”

The Librarian rolled a brown eye toward him, then picked up a piece of wood, gripped one end, and began to strum.

“Ook?”

“That’s right,” said Glod. “The boy with the guitar.”

“Eeek.”

The Librarian did a back somersault.

“Oookoook-ooka-ooka-OOOka-OOK!”

“I can see you’re in the swing of it already,” said Glod.

Susan saddled the horse and mounted up.

Beyond Death’s garden were fields of corn, their golden sheen the only color in the landscape. Death might not have been any good at grass (black) and apple trees (gloss black on black), but all the depth of color he hadn’t put elsewhere he’d put in the fields. They rippled as if in the wind, except that there wasn’t any wind.

Susan couldn’t imagine why he’d done it.

There was a path, though. It led across the fields for half a mile or so, then disappeared abruptly. It looked as though somebody walked out here occasionally and just stood, looking around.

Binky followed the path and stopped at the end. Then he turned, managing not to disturb a single ear.

“I don’t know how you do this,” Susan whispered. “But you must be able to do it, and you know where I want to go.”

The horse appeared to nod. Albert had said that Binky was a genuine flesh-and-blood horse, but maybe you could be ridden by Death for hundreds of years without learning something. He looked as though he’d been pretty bright to start with.

Binky began to trot, and then canter, and then gallop. And then the sky flickered, just once.

Susan had expected more than that. Flashing stars, some sort of explosion of rainbow colors…not just a flicker. It seemed a rather dismissive way of traveling nearly seventeen years.

The cornfields had gone, but the garden was pretty much the same. There was the strange topiary and the pond with the skeletal fish. There were, pushing jolly wheelbarrows and carrying tiny scythes, what might have been garden gnomes in a mortal garden but here were cheery little skeletons in black robes. Things tended not to change.

The stables were a little different, though. Binky was in them, for a start.

He whinnied quietly as Susan led him into an empty stall next to himself.

“I’m sure you two know each other,” she said. She’d never expected it to work, but it had to, didn’t it? Time was something that happened to other people, wasn’t it?

She slipped into the house.

NO. I CANNOT BE BIDDEN. I CANNOT BE FORCED. I WILL ONLY DO THAT WHICH I KNOW TO BE RIGHT…

Susan crept along behind the shelves of lifetimers. No one noticed her. When you are watching Death fight, you don’t notice shadows in the background.

They’d never told her about this. Parents never do. Your father could be Death’s apprentice and your mother Death’s adopted daughter, but that’s just fine detail when they become Parents. Parents were never young. They were merely waiting to become Parents.

Susan reached the end of the shelves.

Death was standing over her father…she corrected herself, the boy who would be her father.

Three red marks burn on his cheek where Death has struck him. Susan raised a hand to the pale marks on her own face.

But that’s not how heredity works.

At least…the normal kind…

Her mother…the girl who would become her mother…was pressed against a pillar. She had actually improved with age, Susan thought. Her dress sense certainly had. And she mentally shook herself. Fashion comments? Now?

Death stood over Mort, sword in one hand and Mort’s own lifetimer in the other.

YOU DON’T KNOW HOW SORRY THIS MAKES ME, he said.

“I might,” said Mort.

Death looked up, and looked straight at Susan. His eye sockets flared blue for a moment. Susan tried to press herself into the shadows.

He looked back down at Mort for a moment, and then at Ysabell, and then back at Susan, and then back down at Mort. And laughed.

And turned the hourglass over.

And snapped his fingers.

Mort vanished, with a small “pop” of imploding air. So did Ysabell and the others.

It was, suddenly, very quiet.

Death put the hourglass down, very carefully, on the table and looked at the ceiling for a while. Then he said:

ALBERT?

Albert appeared from behind a pillar.

WOULD YOU BE SO GOOD AS TO MAKE ME A CUP OF TEA, PLEASE.

“Yes, Master. Hehe, you sorted him out right enough—”

THANK YOU.

Albert scurried off in the direction of the kitchen.

Once again there was the closest thing there could ever be to silence in the room of lifetimers…

YOU’D BETTER COME OUT.

Susan did so, and stood before the Ultimate Reality.

Death was seven feet tall. He looked taller. Susan had vague memories of a figure carrying her on its shoulders through the huge dark rooms, but in memory it had been a human figure—bony, but human in a way she was certain of but couldn’t quite define.

This wasn’t human. It was tall, and haughty, and terrible. He might unbend enough to bend the Rules, Susan thought, but that doesn’t make him human. This is the keeper of the gate of the world. Immortal, by definition. The end of everything.

He is my grandfather.

Will be, anyway. Is. Was.

But…there was the thing in the apple tree. Her mind kept swinging back to that. You looked up at the figure, and thought about the tree. It was almost impossible to keep both images in one mind.

WELL, WELL, WELL. YOU HAVE A LOT OF YOUR MOTHER ABOUT YOU, said Death. AND YOUR FATHER.

“How did you know who I am?” said Susan.

I HAVE A UNIQUE MEMORY.

“How can you remember me? I haven’t even been conceived yet!”

I DID SAY UNIQUE. YOUR NAME IS—?

“Susan, but…”

SUSAN? said Death bitterly. THEY REALLY WANTED TO MAKE SURE, DIDN’T THEY?

He sat down in his chair, steepled his fingers, and looked at Susan over the top of them.

She looked back, matching stare for stare.

TELL ME, said Death, after a while, WAS I…WILL I BE…AM I A GOOD GRANDFATHER?

Susan bit her lip thoughtfully.

“If I tell you, won’t that be a paradox?”

NOT FOR US.

“Well…you’ve got bony knees.”

Death stared at her.

BONY KNEES?”

“Sorry.”

YOU CAME HERE TO TELL ME THAT?

“You’ve gone missing back…there. I’m having to do the Duty. Albert is very worried. I came here to…find things out. I didn’t know my father worked for you.”

HE WAS VERY BAD AT IT.

“What have you done with him?”

THEY’RE SAFE FOR NOW. I’M GLAD IT’S OVER. HAVING PEOPLE AROUND WAS BEGINNING TO AFFECT MY JUDGMENT. AH, ALBERT…

Albert had appeared on the edge of the carpet, bearing a tea tray.

ANOTHER CUP, IF YOU WOULD BE SO GOOD.

Albert looked around, and totally failed to see Susan. If you could be invisible to Miss Butts, everyone else was easy.

“If you say so, Master.”

SO, said Death, when Albert had shuffled away, I HAVE GONE MISSING. AND YOU BELIEVE YOU HAVE INHERITED THE FAMILY BUSINESS. YOU?

“I didn’t want to! The horse and the rat just turned up!”

RAT?

“Er…I think that’s something that’s going to happen.”

OH, YES, I REMEMBER. HMM. A HUMAN DOING MY JOB? TECHNICALLY POSSIBLE, OF COURSE, BUT WHY?

“I think Albert knows something, but he changes the subject.”

Albert reappeared, carrying another cup and saucer. He plonked it down pointedly on Death’s desk, with the air of one who is being put upon.

“That’ll be all, will it, Master?” he said.

THANK YOU, ALBERT. YES.

Albert left again, more slowly than normal. He kept looking over his shoulder.

“He doesn’t change, does he?” said Susan. “Of course, that’s the point about this place—”

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT CATS?

“Sorry?”

CATS. DO YOU LIKE ’EM?

“They’re…” Susan hesitated, “all right. But a cat’s just a cat.”

CHOCOLATE, said Death. DO YOU LIKE CHOCOLATE?

“I think it’s possible to have too much,” said Susan.

YOU CERTAINLY DON’T TAKE AFTER YSABELL.

Susan nodded. Her mother’s favorite dish had been Genocide by Chocolate.

AND YOUR MEMORY? YOU HAVE A GOOD MEMORY?

“Oh, yes. I…remember things. About how to be Death. About how it’s all supposed to work. Look, just then you said you remembered about the rat, and it hasn’t even happ—”

Death stood up and strode across to the model of the Discworld.

MORPHIC RESONANCE, he said, not looking at Susan. DAMN. PEOPLE DON’T BEGIN TO UNDERSTAND IT. SOUL HARMONICS. IT’S RESPONSIBLE FOR SO MANY THINGS.

Susan pulled out Imp’s lifetimer. Blue smoke was still pouring through the pinch.

“Can you help me with this?” she said.

Death spun around.

I SHOULD NEVER HAVE ADOPTED YOUR MOTHER.

“Why did you?”

Death shrugged.

WHAT’S THAT YOU’VE GOT THERE?

He took Buddy’s lifetimer from her and held it up.

AH. INTERESTING.

“Do you know what it means, granddad?”

I’VE NOT COME ACROSS IT BEFORE, BUT I SUPPOSE IT’S POSSIBLE. IN CERTAIN CIRCUMSTANCES. IT MEANS…SOMEHOW…THAT HE HAS RHYTHM IN HIS SOUL…GRANDDAD?

“Oh, no. That’s can’t be right. That’s just a figure of speech. And what’s wrong with granddad?”

GRANDFATHER I CAN LIVE WITH. GRANDDAD? ONE STEP AWAY FROM GRAMPS, IN MY OPINION. ANYWAY, I THOUGHT YOU BELIEVED IN LOGIC. CALLING SOMETHING A FIGURE OF SPEECH DOESN’T MEAN IT’S NOT TRUE.

Death waved the hourglass vaguely.

FOR EXAMPLE, he said, MANY THINGS ARE BETTER THAN A POKE IN THE EYE WITH A BLUNT STICK. I’VE NEVER UNDERSTOOD THE PHRASE. SURELY A SHARP STICK WOULD BE EVEN WORSE—

Death stopped.

I’M DOING IT AGAIN! WHY SHOULD I CARE WHAT THE WRETCHED PHRASE MEANS? OR WHAT YOU CALL ME? UNIMPORTANT! GETTING ENTANGLED WITH HUMANS CLOUDS THE THINKING. TAKE IT FROM ME. DON’T GET INVOLVED.

“But I am a human.”

I DIDN’T SAY IT WAS GOING TO BE EASY, DID I? DON’T THINK ABOUT IT. DON’T FEEL.

“You’re an expert, are you?” said Susan hotly.

I MAY HAVE ALLOWED MYSELF SOME FLICKER OF EMOTION IN THE RECENT PAST, said Death, BUT I CAN GIVE IT UP ANY TIME I LIKE.

He held up the hourglass again.

IT’S AN INTERESTING FACT THAT MUSIC, BEING OF ITS NATURE IMMORTAL, CAN SOMETIMES PROLONG THE LIFE OF THOSE INTIMATELY ASSOCIATED WITH IT, he said. I’VE NOTICED THAT FAMOUS COMPOSERS IN PARTICULAR HANG ON FOR A LONG TIME. DEAF AS POSTS, MOST OF THEM, WHEN I COME CALLING. I EXPECT SOME GOD SOMEWHERE FINDS THAT VERY AMUSING. Death contrived to look disdainful. IT’S THEIR KIND OF JOKE.^*

He set the glass down and twanged it with a bony digit.

It went whauuummmmeeee-chida-chida-chida.

HE HAS NO LIFE. HE HAS MUSIC.

“Music’s taken him over?”

YOU COULD PUT IT LIKE THAT.

“Making his life longer?”

LIFE IS EXTENSIBLE. IT HAPPENS ALL THE TIME AMONG HUMANS. NOT OFTEN. USUALLY TRAGICALLY, IN A THEATRICAL KIND OF WAY. BUT THIS ISN’T ANOTHER HUMAN. THIS IS MUSIC.

“He played something, on some sort of stringed instrument like a guitar—”

Death turned.

INDEED? WELL, WELL, WELL…

“Is that important?”

IT IS…INTERESTING.”

“Is it something I should know?”

IT IS NOTHING IMPORTANT. A PIECE OF MYTHOLOGICAL DEBRIS. MATTERS WILL RESOLVE THEMSELVES; YOU MAY DEPEND UPON IT.

“What do you mean, resolve themselves?”

HE WILL PROBABLY BE DEAD IN A MATTER OF DAYS.

Susan stared at the lifetimer.

“But that’s dreadful!”

ARE YOU ROMANTICALLY INVOLVED WITH THE YOUNG MAN?

“What? No! I’ve only ever seen him once!”

YOUR EYES DIDN’T MEET ACROSS A CROWDED ROOM OR ANYTHING OF THAT NATURE?

“No! Of course not.”

WHY SHOULD YOU CARE, THEN?

“Because he matt—because he’s a human being, that’s why,” said Susan, surprised at herself. “I don’t see why people should be messed around like that,” she added lamely. “That’s all. Oh, I don’t know.”

He leaned down again until his skull was on a level with her face.

BUT MOST PEOPLE ARE RATHER STUPID AND WASTE THEIR LIVES. HAVE YOU NOT SEEN THAT? HAVE YOU NOT LOOKED DOWN FROM THE HORSE AT A CITY AND THOUGHT HOW MUCH IT RESEMBLED AN ANT HEAP, FULL OF BLIND CREATURES WHO THINK THEIR MUNDANE LITTLE WORLD IS REAL? YOU SEE THE LIGHTED WINDOWS AND WHAT YOU WANT TO THINK IS THAT THERE MUST BE MANY INTERESTING STORIES BEHIND THEM, BUT WHAT YOU KNOW IS THAT REALLY THERE ARE JUST DULL, DULL SOULS, MERE CONSUMERS OF FOOD, WHO THINK THEIR INSTINCTS ARE EMOTIONS AND THEIR TINY LIVES OF MORE ACCOUNT THAN A WHISPER OF WIND.

The blue glow was bottomless. It seemed to be sucking her own thoughts out of her mind.

“No,” whispered Susan. “No, I’ve never thought like that.”

Death stood up abruptly and turned away. YOU MAY FIND THAT IT HELPS, he said.

“But it’s all just chaos,” said Susan. “There’s no sense to the way people die. There’s no justice!”

HAH.

“You take a hand,” she persisted. “You just saved my father.”

I WAS FOOLISH. TO CHANGE THE FATE OF ONE INDIVIDUAL IS TO CHANGE THE WORLD. I REMEMBER THAT. SO SHOULD YOU.

Death still hadn’t turned to face her.

“I don’t see why we shouldn’t change things if it makes the world better,” said Susan.

HAH.

“Are you too scared to change the world?”

Death turned. The very sight of his expression made Susan back away.

He advanced slowly toward her. His voice, when it came, was a hiss.

YOU SAY THAT TO ME? YOU STAND THERE IN YOUR PRETTY DRESS AND SAY THAT TO ME? YOU? YOU PRATTLE ON ABOUT CHANGING THE WORLD? COULD YOU FIND THE COURAGE TO ACCEPT IT? TO KNOW WHAT MUST BE DONE AND DO IT, WHATEVER THE COST? IS THERE ONE HUMAN ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD WHO KNOWS WHAT DUTY MEANS?

His hands opened and shut convulsively.

I SAID YOU MUST REMEMBER…FOR US, TIME IS ONLY A PLACE. IT’S ALL SPREAD OUT. THERE IS WHAT IS, AND WHAT WILL BE. IF YOU CHANGE THAT, YOU CARRY THE RESPONSIBLITY FOR THE CHANGE. AND THAT IS TOO HEAVY TO BEAR.

“That’s just an excuse!”

Susan glared at the tall figure. Then she turned and marched out of the room.

SUSAN?

She stopped halfway across the floor, but didn’t turn around.

“Yes?”

REALLY…BONY KNEES?

“Yes!”

It was probably the first piano case that’d ever been made, and made out of a carpet at that. Cliff swung it easily onto his shoulder and picked up his sack of rocks in the other hand.

“Is it heavy?” said Buddy.

Cliff held the piano up on one hand and weighed it reflectively.

“A bit,” he said. The floorboards creaked underneath him. “Do you think we should’ve took all dem bits out?”

“It’s bound to work,” said Glod. “It’s like…a coach. The more bits you take off, the faster it goes. Come on.”

They set out. Buddy tried to look as inconspicuous as a human can look if he is accompanying a dwarf with a big horn, an ape, and a troll carrying a piano in a bag.

“I’d like a coach,” said Cliff, as they headed for the Drum. “Big black coach with all dat liver on it.”

“Liver?” said Buddy. He was beginning to get accustomed to the name.

“Shields and dat.”

“Oh. Livery.”

“And dat.”

“What’d you get if you had a pile of gold, Glod?” said Buddy. In its bag the guitar twanged gently to the sound of his voice.

Glod hesitated. He wanted to say that for a dwarf the whole point of having a pile of gold was, well, to have a pile of gold. It didn’t have to do anything other than be just as oraceous as gold could be.

“Dunno,” he said. “Never thought I’d have a pile of gold. What about you?”

“I swore I’d be the most famous musician in the world.”

“Dat’s dangerous, dat kinda swear,” said Cliff.

“Oook.”

“Isn’t it what every artist wants?” said Buddy.

“In my experience,” said Glod, “what every true artist wants, really wants, is to be paid.”

“And famous,” said Buddy.

“Famous I don’t know about,” said Glod. “It’s hard to be famous and alive. I just want to play music every day and hear someone say, ‘Thanks, that was great, here is some money, same time tomorrow, okay?’”

“Is that all?”

“It’s a lot. I’d like people to say ‘we need a good horn man, get Glod Glodsson.’”

“Sounds a bit dull,” said Buddy.

“I like dull. It lasts.”

They reached the side door of the Drum and entered a gloomy room that smelled of rats and second hand beer. There was a distant murmur of voices from the bar.

“Sounds like there’s a lot of people in,” said Glod.

Hibiscus bustled in. “You boys ready, then?” he said.

“Hold on a minute,” said Cliff. “We ain’t discussed our pay.”

“I said six dollars,” said Hibiscus. “What d’you expect? You aren’t Guild, and the Guild rate is eight dollars.”

“We wouldn’t ask you for eight dollars,” said Glod.

“Right!”

“We’ll take sixteen.”

“Sixteen? You can’t do that! That’s twice Guild rate!”

“But there’s a lot of people out there,” said Glod. “I bet you’re renting a lot of beer. We don’t mind going home.”

“Let’s talk about this,” said Hibiscus. He put his arm around Glod’s head and led him to a corner of the room.

Buddy watched the Librarian examine the piano. He’d never seen a musician begin by trying to eat his instrument. Then the ape lifted the lid and regarded the keyboard. He tried a few notes, apparently for taste.

Glod returned, rubbing his hands.

“That’s sorted him out,” he said. “Hah!”

“How much?” said Cliff.

“Six dollars!” said Glod.

There was some silence.

“Sorry,” said Buddy. “We were waiting for the ‘-teen’.”

“I had to be firm,” said Glod. “He got down to two dollars at one point.”

Some religions say that the universe was started with a word, a song, a dance, a piece of music. The Listening Monks of the Ramtops have trained their hearing until they can tell the value of a playing card by listening to it, and have made it their task to listen intently to the subtle sounds of the universe to piece together, from the fossil echoes, the very first noises.

There was certainly, they say, a very strange noise at the beginning of everything.

But the keenest ears (the ones who win most at poker), who listen to the frozen echoes in ammonites and amber, swear they can detect some tiny sounds before that.

It sounded, they say, like someone counting: One, Two, Three, Four.

The very best one, who listened to basalt, said he thought he could make out, very faintly, some numbers that came even earlier.

When they asked him what it was, he said: “It sounds like One, Two.”

No one ever asked what, if there was a sound that called the universe into being, what happened to it afterward. It’s mythology. You’re not supposed to ask that kind of question.

On the other hand, Ridcully believed that everything had come into being by chance or, in the particular case of the Dean, out of spite.

Senior wizards didn’t usually drink in the Mended Drum except when they were off duty. They were aware that they were here tonight in some sort of ill-defined official capacity, and were seated rather primly in front of their drinks.

There was a ring of empty seats around them, but it was not very big because the Drum was unusually crowded.

“Lot of ambience in here,” said Ridcully, looking around. “Ah, I see they do Real Ale again. I’ll have a pint of Turbot’s Really Odd, please.”

The wizards watched him as he drained the mug. Ankh-Morpork beer has a flavor all its own; it’s something to do with the water. Some people say it’s like consommé, but they are wrong. Consommé is cooler.

Ridcully smacked his lips happily.

“Ah, we certainly know what goes into good beer in Ankh-Morpork,” he said.

The wizards nodded. They certainly did. That’s why they were drinking gin and tonic.

Ridcully looked around. Normally at this time of night there was a fight going on somewhere, or at least a mild stabbing. But there was just a buzz of conversation and everyone was watching the small stage at the far end of the room, where nothing was happening in large amounts. There was theoretically a curtain across it; it was only an old sheet, and there was a succession of thuds and thumps from behind it.

The wizards were quite close to the stage. Wizards tend to get good seats. Ridcully thought he could make out some whispering, and see the shadows moving behind the sheet.

“He said what do we call ourselves?”

“Cliff, Buddy, Glod, and the Librarian. I thought he knew that.”

“No, we’ve got to have one name for all of us.”

“Dey rationed, den?”

“Something like The Merry Troubadours, maybe.”

“Oook!”

“Glod and the Glodettes?”

“Oh, yes? How about Cliff and the Cliffettes?”

“Oook ook Oook-ook?”

“No. We need a different type of name. Like the music.”

“How about Gold? Good dwarf name.”

“No. Something different from that.”

“Silver, then.”

“Ook!”

“I don’t think we should name ourselves after any kind of heavy metal, Glod.”

“What’s so special? We’re a band of people who play music.”

“Names are important.”

“The guitar is special. How about The Band With Buddy’s Guitar In It?”

“Oook.”

“Something shorter.”

“Er…”

The universe held its breath.

“The Band with Rocks In?”

“I like it. Short and slightly dirty, just like me.”

“Oook.”

“We ought to think up a name for the music, too.”

“It’s bound to occur to us sooner or later.”

Ridcully looked around the bar.

On the opposite side of the room was Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler, Ankh-Morpork’s most spectacularly unsuccessful businessman. He was trying to sell someone a felonious hot dog, a sign that some recent surefire business venture had collapsed. Dibbler sold his hot sausages only when all else failed. ^*

He gave Ridcully a wave at no charge.

The next table was occupied by Satchelmouth Lemon, one of the Musicians’ Guild’s recruiting officers, with a couple of associates whose apparent knowledge of music extended only to the amount of percussion available on the human skull. His determined expression suggested that he was not there for his health, although the fact that the Guild officers had a mean look about them rather hinted he was there for other people’s health, mostly in order to take it away.

Ridcully brightened up. The evening might just possibly be more interesting than he had expected.

There was another table near the stage. He nearly didn’t notice it, and then his gaze swiveled back to it of its own accord.

There was a young woman sitting there, all by herself. Of course, it wasn’t unusual to see young women in the Drum. Even unaccompanied young women. They were generally there in order to become accompanied.

The odd thing was that, although people were jammed along the benches, she had space all around her. She was quite attractive in a skinny way, Ridcully thought. What was the tomboy word? Gammon, or something. She was wearing a black lace dress of the sort worn by healthy young women who want to look consumptive, and had a raven sitting on her shoulder.

She turned her head, saw Ridcully looking at her, and vanished.

More or less.

He was a wizard, after all. He felt his eyes watering as she flickered in and out of vision.

Ah. Well, he’d heard the Tooth Fairy girls were in the city these days. It’d be one of the night people. They probably had a day off, just like everyone else.

A movement on the table made him look down. The Death of Rats skrittered past, carrying a bowl of peanuts.

He turned back to the wizards. The Dean was still wearing his pointy hat. There was also something slightly shiny about his face.

“You look hot, Dean,” said Ridcully.

“Oh, I’m lovely and cool, Archchancellor, I assure you,” said the Dean. Something runny oozed past his nose.

The Lecturer in Recent Runes sniffed suspiciously.

“Is someone cooking bacon?” he said.

“Take it off, Dean,” said Ridcully. “You’ll feel a lot better.”

“Smells more like Mrs. Palm’s House of Negotiable Affection to me,” said the Senior Wrangler. They looked at him in surprise. “I just happened to walk past once,” he said quickly.

“Runes, please take the Dean’s hat off for him, will you?” said Ridcully.

“I assure you—”

The hat came off. Something long and greasy and very nearly the same pointy shape flopped forward.

“Dean,” said Ridcully eventually, “what have you done to your hair? It looks like a spike at the front and a duck’s arse, excuse my Klatchian, at the back. And it’s all shiny.”

“Lard. That’d be the bacon smell, “said the Lecturer.

“That’s true,” said Ridcully. “But what about the floral smell?”

“mumblemumblemumblelavendermumble,” said the Dean sullenly.

“Pardon, Dean?”

“I said it’s because I added lavender oil,” said the Dean loudly. “And some of us happen to think it’s a rather nifty hairstyle, thank you so very much. Your trouble, Archchancellor, is that you don’t understand people of our age!”

“What…you mean seven months older than me?” said Ridcully.

This time the Dean hesitated.

“What did I just say?” he said.

“Have you been taking dried frog pills, old chap?” said Ridcully.

“Of course not, they’re for the mentally unstable!” said the Dean.

“Ah. There’s the trouble, then.”

The curtain went up or, rather, was jerkily pulled aside.

The Band with Rocks In blinked in the torchlight.

No one clapped. On the other hand, No one threw anything, either. By Drum standards, this was a hearty welcome.

Ridcully saw a tall, curly-headed young man clutching what looked like an undernourished guitar or possibly a banjo that had been used in a fight. Beside him was a dwarf, holding a battle horn. At the rear was a troll, hammer in each paw, seated behind a pile of rocks. And to one side was the Librarian, standing in front of…Ridcully leaned forward…what appeared to be the skeleton of a piano, balanced on some beer kegs.

The boy looked paralyzed by the attention.

He said: “Hello…er…Ankh-Morpork…”

And, this amount of conversation apparently having exhausted him, he started to play.

It was a simple little rhythm, one that you might easily have ignored if you’d met it in the street. It was followed by a sequence of crashing chords and then, Ridcully realized, it hadn’t been followed by the chords, because the rhythm was there all the time. Which was impossible. No guitar could be played like that.

The dwarf blew a sequence of notes on the horn. The troll picked up the beat. The Librarian brought both hands down upon the piano keyboard, apparently at random.

Ridcully had never heard such a din.

And then…and then…it wasn’t a din anymore.

It was like that nonsense about white light that the young wizards in the High Energy Magic Building went on about. They said that all the colors together made up white, which was bloody nonsense as far as Ridcully was concerned, because everyone knew that if you mixed up all the colors you could get your hands on you got a sort of greeny-brown mess which certainly wasn’t any kind of white. But now he had a vague idea what they meant.

All this noise, this mess of music, suddenly came together and there was a new music inside it.

The Dean’s quiff was quivering.

The whole crowd was moving.

Ridcully realized his foot was tapping. He stamped on it with his other foot.

Then he watched the troll pick up the beat and hammer the rocks until the walls shook. The Librarian’s fingers swooped along the keyboard. Then his toes did the same. And all the time the guitar hooted and screamed and sang out the melody.

The wizards were bouncing in their seats and twirling their fingers in the air.

Ridcully leaned over to the Bursar and screamed at him.

“What?” shouted the Bursar.

“I said, they’ve all gone mad except me and you!”

“What?”

“It’s the music!”

“Yes! It’s great!” said the Bursar, waving his skinny hands in the air.

“And I’m not too certain about you!”

Ridcully sat down again and pulled out the thaumometer. It was vibrating crazily, which was no help at all. It didn’t seem to be able to decide if this was magic or not.

He nudged the Bursar sharply.

“This ain’t magic! This is something else!”

“You’re exactly right!”

Ridcully had the feeling that he suddenly wasn’t speaking the right language.

“I mean it’s too much!”

“Yes!”

Ridcully sighed.

“Is it time for your dried frog pill?”

Smoke was coming out of the stricken piano. The Librarian’s hands were walking through the keys like Casanunda in a nunnery.

Ridcully looked around. He felt all alone.

Someone else hadn’t been overcome by the music. Satchelmouth had stood up. So had his two associates.

They had drawn some knobbly clubs. Ridcully knew the Guild laws. Of course, they had to be enforced. You couldn’t run a city without them. This certainly wasn’t licensed music—if ever there was unlicensed music, this was it. Nevertheless…he rolled up his sleeve and prepared a quick fireball, just in case.

One of the men dropped his club and clutched his foot. The other one spun around as if something had slapped his ear. Satchelmouth’s hat dented, as if someone had just hit him on the head.

Ridcully, one eye watering terribly, thought he made out the Tooth Fairy girl bringing the handle of a scythe down on Satchelmouth’s head.

The Archchancellor was quite a bright man but often had trouble in forcing his train of thought to change tracks. He was having difficulty with the idea of a scythe, after all, grass didn’t have teeth—and then the fireball burned his fingers, and then, as he sucked frantically at them, he realized that there was something in the sound. Something extra.

“Oh, no,” he said, as the fireball floated to the floor and set fire to the Bursar’s boot, “it’s alive.”

He grabbed the beer mug, finished the contents hurriedly, and rammed it upside down on the tabletop.

The moon shone over the Klatchian desert, in the vicinity of the dotted line. Both sides of it got exactly the same amount of moonlight, although minds like Mr. Clete’s deplored this state of affairs.

The sergeant strolled across the packed sand of the parade ground. He stopped, sat down, and produced a cheroot. Then he pulled out a match, reached down, and struck it on something sticking out of the sand, which said:

GOOD EVENING.

“I expect you’ve had enough, eh, soldier?” said the sergeant.

ENOUGH WHAT, SERGEANT?

“Two days in the sun, no food, no water…I expect you’re delirious with thirst and are just begging to be dug out, eh?”

YES. IT IS CERTAINLY VERY DULL.

“Dull?”

I AM AFRAID SO.

“Dull? It’s not meant to be dull! It’s the Pit! It’s meant to be a horrible physical and mental torture! After one day of it you’re supposed to be a…” The sergeant glanced surreptitiously at some writing on his wrist, “…a raving madman! I’ve been watching you all day! You haven’t even groaned! I can’t sit in my…thing, you sit in it, there’s papers and things…”

OFFICE.

“…working with you outside like this! I can’t bear it!”

Beau Nidle glanced upward. He felt it was time for a kindly gesture.

HELP, HELP. HELP, HELP, he said.

The sergeant sagged with relief.

THIS ASSISTS PEOPLE TO FORGET, DOES IT?

“Forget? People forget everything when they’re given…er…”

THE PIT.

“Yes! That’s it!”

AH. DO YOU MIND IF I ASK A QUESTION?

“What?”

DO YOU MIND IF PERHAPS I HAVE ANOTHER DAY?

The sergeant opened his mouth to reply, and the D’regs attacked over the nearest sand dune.