Soul Music (28 page)

Ridcully was the kind of man who'd push any lever, just to see what it did.

He put the card in the obvious slot . . .

There was an immediate change in the rustling. Ants trailed in their busy way through the tubing. Some of them appeared to be carrying seeds . . .

There was a small dull sound and a card dropped out of the other end of the glass maze.

It had four holes in it.

Ridcully was still staring at it when Ponder came up behind him, rubbing his eyes.

‘'S our ant counter,' he said.

‘Two plus two equals four,' said Ridcully. ‘Well, well, I never knew that.'

‘It can do other sums as well.'

‘You tellin' me ants can count?'

‘Oh, no. Not individual ants . . . it's a bit hard to explain . . . the holes in the cards, you see, block up some tubes and let them through others and . . .' Ponder sighed, ‘we think it might be able to do other things.'

‘Like what?' Ridcully demanded.

‘Er, that's what we're trying to find out . . .'

‘You're trying to find out? Who built it?'

‘Skazz.'

‘And
now
you're trying to find out what it does?'

‘Well, we think it might be able to do quite complicated maths. If we can get enough bugs in it.'

Ants were still bustling around the enormous crystalline structure.

‘Had a rat thingy, a gerbil or something, when I was a lad,' said Ridcully, giving up in the face of the incomprehensible. ‘Spent all the time on a treadmill. Round and round, all night long. This is a bit like that, yes?'

‘In very broad terms,' said Ponder carefully.

‘Had an ant farm, too,' said Ridcully, thinking faraway thoughts. ‘The little devils never could plough straight.' He pulled himself together. ‘Anyway, get the rest of your chums here right now.'

‘What for?'

‘A bit of a tutorial,' said Ridcully.

‘Aren't we going to examine the music?'

‘In good time,' said Ridcully. ‘But first, we're going to talk to someone.'

‘Who?'

‘I'm not sure,' said Ridcully. ‘We'll know when he turns up. Or her.'

Glod looked at their suite. The hotel owners had just left, after going through the ‘dis is der window, it really opens, dis is der pump, you get water out of it wit der handle here, dis is me waiting for some money' routine.

‘Well, that just about does it. That just about puts the iron helmet on it, that does,' he said. ‘We play Music With Rocks In all evening, and we've got a room that looks like
this
?'

‘It's homely,' said Cliff. ‘Look, trolls don't have much to do with de frills of life—'

Glod looked towards his feet.

‘It's on the floor and it's soft,' he said. ‘Silly me for thinking it was a carpet. Someone fetch me a broom. No, someone fetch me a shovel.
Then
someone fetch me a broom.'

‘It'll do,' said Buddy.

He put down his guitar and stretched out on the wooden slab that was apparently one of the beds.

‘Cliff,' said Glod, ‘can I have a word?'

He jerked a stubby thumb at the door.

They conferred on the landing.

‘It's getting bad,' said Glod.

‘Yep.'

‘He hardly says a word now when he's not on stage.'

‘Yep.'

‘Ever met a zombie?'

‘I know a golem. Mr Dorfl down in Long Hogmeat.'

‘Him? He's a genuine zombie?'

‘Yep. Got a holy word on his head, I seen it.'

‘Yuk. Really? I buy sausages from him.'

‘Anyway . . . what
about
zombies?'

‘. . . you couldn't tell from the taste, I thought he was a really good sausage-maker . . .'

‘What were you saying about zombies?'

‘. . . funny how you can know someone for years and then find out they've got feet of clay . . .'

‘Zombies . . .' said Cliff patiently.

‘What? Oh. Yes. I mean he acts like one.' Glod recalled some of the zombies in Ankh-Morpork. ‘At least, like zombies are supposed to act.'

‘Yep. I know what you mean.'

‘And we both know why.'

‘Yep. Er. Why?'

‘The guitar.'

‘Oh, that. Yeah.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Maybe we could get him to—'

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

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

They ended up out in the road.

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

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

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

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

Two of them were Glod and Cliff.

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

He looked up at a blank wall.

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

‘Glod—'

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

‘Glod—?'

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

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

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

‘It was a mistake anyone could have made.'

‘Yep.'

‘It doesn't invalidate anything I said.'

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

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

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

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

‘It's called a Serpent.'

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

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

‘Glod?'

Glod jumped. ‘Yes? What?'

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

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

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

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

‘Not at all, not at all, in fact we—'

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

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

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

‘Are you the Watch?'

Glod bowed.

‘No, ma'am. We're musicians.'

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

‘A kind of guitar.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Who brought it in?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘That?'

‘We've got some money. Why not?'

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

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

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

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

Glod pointed.

‘We'll take this.'

‘Two dollars.'

‘Hey, why should we pay anything? It's not as though it's yours—'

‘Pay up,' said Cliff with a sigh. ‘Don't negotiate.'

Glod handed over the money with bad grace, snatched the bag the old lady gave him, and strutted out of the shop.

‘Fascinating stock you have here,' said Cliff, staring at the gong.

The old lady shrugged.

‘My friend's a bit annoyed because he thought you one of dose mysterious shops you hear about in folk tales,' Cliff went on. ‘You know, here today and gone tomorrow. He was looking for you on der other side of der road, haha!'

‘Sounds daft to me,' said the old lady, in a voice to discourage any further unseemly levity.

Cliff glanced at the gong again, shrugged, and followed Glod.

The woman waited until their footsteps had died away in the fog.

Then she opened the door and peered up and down the street. Apparently satisfied by its abundance of emptiness, she went back to her counter and reached for a curious lever underneath. Her eyes glowed green for a moment.

‘Forget my own head next,' she said, and pulled.

There was a grinding of hidden machinery.

The shop vanished. A moment later, it reappeared on the other side of the road.

Buddy lay looking at the ceiling.

How did food taste? It was hard to remember. He'd eaten meals over the last few days, he must have done, but he couldn't remember the taste. He couldn't remember much of anything, except the playing. Glod and rest of them sounded as if they were talking through a thick gauze.

Asphalt had wandered off somewhere.

He swung himself off the hard bed and padded over to the window.

The Shades of Ankh-Morpork were just visible in the grey, cheap-rate light before dawn. A breeze blew in through the open window.

When he turned around, there was a young woman standing in the middle of the floor.

She put her finger to her lips.

‘Don't go shouting to the little troll,' she said. ‘He's downstairs having some supper. Anyway, he wouldn't be able to see me.'

‘Are you my muse?'

Susan frowned.

‘I think I know what you mean,' she said. ‘I've seen pictures. There were eight of them, led by . . . um . . . Cantaloupe. They're supposed to protect people. The Ephebians believe they inspire musicians and artists, but of course they don't exi—' She paused, and made a conscientious correction. ‘At least, I've never met them. My name's Susan. I'm here because . . .'