Soul Music (4 page)

Many people assumed that this was the river Ankh, whose waters can be drunk or even cut up and chewed. A drink from the Ankh would quite probably rob a man of his memory, or at least cause things to happen to him that he would on no account wish to recall.

In fact there was another river that would do the trick. There was, of course, a snag. No one knows where it is, because they're always pretty thirsty when they find it.

Death turned his attention elsewhere.

‘Seventy-five dollllars?' said Imp. ‘Just to pllay music?'

‘That's twenty-five dollars registration fee, twenty per cent of fees, and fifteen dollars voluntary compulsory annual subscription to the Pension Fund,' said Mr Clete, secretary of the Guild.

‘But we haven't got that much money!'

The man gave a shrug which indicated that, although the world did indeed have many problems, this was one of them that was not his.

‘But maybe we shallll be ablle to pay when we've earned some,' said Imp weakly. ‘If you could just, you know, Ilet us have a week or two—'

‘Can't let you play anywhere without you being members of the Guild,' said Mr Clete.

‘But we can't be members of the Guild until we've played,' said Glod.

‘That's right,' said Mr Clete cheerfully. ‘Hat. Hat. Hat.'

It was a strange laugh, totally mirthless and vaguely birdlike. It was very much like its owner, who was what you would get if you extracted fossilized genetic material from something in amber and then gave it a suit.

Lord Vetinari had encouraged the growth of the Guilds. They were the big wheels on which the clockwork of a well-regulated city ran. A drop of oil here . . . a spoke inserted there, of course . . . and by and large it all
worked
.

And gave rise, in the same way that compost gives rise to worms, to Mr Clete. He was not, by the standard definitions, a bad man; in the same way a plague-bearing rat is not, from a dispassionate point of view, a bad animal.

Mr Clete worked hard for the benefit of his fellow men. He devoted his life to it. For there are many things in the world that need doing that people don't want to do and were grateful to Mr Clete for doing for them. Keeping minutes, for example. Making sure the membership roll was quite up to date. Filing.
Organizing
.

He'd worked hard on behalf of the Thieves' Guild, although he hadn't been a thief, at least in the sense normally meant. Then there'd been a rather more senior vacancy in the Fools' Guild, and Mr Clete was no fool. And finally there had been the secretaryship of the Musicians.

Technically, he should have been a musician. So he bought a comb and paper. Since up until that time the Guild had been run by real musicians, and therefore the membership roll was unrolled and hardly anyone had paid any dues lately and the organization owed several thousand dollars to Chrysoprase the troll at punitive interest, he didn't even have to audition.

When Mr Clete had opened the first of the unkempt ledgers and looked at the unorganized mess, he had felt a deep and wonderful feeling. Since then, he'd never looked back. He had spent a long time looking down. And although the Guild had a president and council, it also had Mr Clete, who took the minutes and made sure things ran smoothly and smiled very quietly to himself. It is a strange but reliable fact that whenever men throw off the yoke of tyrants and set out to rule themselves there emerges, like a mushroom after rain, Mr Clete.

Hat. Hat. Hat. Mr Clete laughed at things in inverse proportion to the actual humour of the situation.

‘But that's nonsense!'

‘Welcome to the wonderful world of the Guild economy,' said Mr Clete. ‘Hat. Hat. Hat.'

‘What happens if we pllay without belonging to the Guilld, then?' said Imp. ‘Do you confiscate our instruments?'

‘To start with,' said the president. ‘And then we sort of give them back to you. Hat. Hat. Hat. Incidentally . . . you're not elvish, are you?'

‘Seventy-five dollars is
criminall
,' said Imp, as they plodded along the evening streets.

‘Worse than criminal,' said Glod. ‘I hear the Thieves' Guild just charges a percentage.'

‘And dey give you a proper Guild membership and everything,' Lias rumbled. ‘Even a pension. And dey have a day trip to Quirm and a picnic every year.'

‘Music
should
be free,' said Imp.

‘So what we going to do now?' said Lias.

‘Anyone got any money?' said Glod.

‘Got a dollar,' said Lias.

‘Got some pennies,' said Imp.

‘Then we're going to have a decent meal,' said Glod. ‘Right here.'

He pointed up at a sign.

‘Gimlet's Hole Food?' said Lias. ‘Gimlet? Sounds dwarfish. Vermincelli and stuff?'

‘Now he's doing troll food too,' said Glod. ‘Decided to put aside ethnic differences in the cause of making more money. Five types of coal, seven types of coke and ash, sediments to make you dribble. You'll like it.'

‘Dwarf bread too?' said Imp.

‘
You
like dwarf bread?' said Glod.

‘Llove it,' said Imp.

‘What,
proper
dwarf bread?' said Glod. ‘You
sure
?'

‘Yes. It's nice and crunchy, see.'

Glod shrugged.

‘That proves it,' he said. ‘No one who likes dwarf bread can be elvish.'

The place was almost empty. A dwarf in an apron that came up to its armpits watched them over the top of the counter.

‘You do fried rat?' said Glod.

‘Best damn fried rat in the city,' said Gimlet.

‘OK. Give me four fried rats.'

‘And some dwarf bread,' said Imp.

‘And some coke,' said Lias patiently.

‘You mean rat heads or rat legs?'

‘No. Four fried rats.'

‘And some coke.'

‘You want ketchup on those rats?'

‘No.'

‘You
sure
?'

‘No ketchup.'

‘And some coke.'

‘And two hard-boilled eggs,' said Imp.

The others gave him an odd look.

‘Wellll? I just like hard-boilled eggs,' he said.

‘And some coke.'

‘And two hard-boiled eggs.'

‘And some coke.'

‘Seventy-five dollars,' said Glod, as they sat down. ‘What's three times seventy-five dollars?'

‘Many dollars,' said Lias.

‘More than two hundred dollllars,' said Imp.

‘I don't think I've even
seen
two hundred dollars,' said Glod. ‘Not while I've been awake.'

‘We raise money?' said Lias.

‘We can't raise money by being musicians,' said Imp. ‘It's the Guild llaw. If they catch you, they take your instrument and shove—' He stopped. ‘Llet's just say it's not much fun for the piccollo pllayer,' he added from memory.

‘I shouldn't think the trombonist is very happy either,' said Glod, putting some pepper on his rat.

‘I can't go back home now,' said Imp. ‘I said I'd . . . I can't go back home yet. Even if I
could
, I'd have to raise monolliths llike my brothers. Allll they care about is stone circlles.'

‘If
I
go back home now,' said Lias, ‘I'll be clubbing druids.'

They both, very carefully, sidled a little further away from each other.

‘Then we play somewhere where the Guild won't find us,' said Glod cheerfully. ‘We find a club somewhere—'

‘Got a club,' said Lias, proudly. ‘Got a
nail
in it.'

‘I mean a night club,' said Glod.

‘Still got a nail in it at night.'

‘I happen to know,' said Glod, abandoning that line of conversation, ‘that there's a lot of places in the city that don't like paying Guild rates. We could do a few gigs and raise the money with
no
trouble.'

‘Allll three of us together?' said Imp.

‘Sure.'

‘But we pllay dwarf music and human music and trollll music,' said Imp. ‘I'm not sure they'llll go together. I mean, dwarfs llisten to dwarf music, humans llisten to human music, trolllls llisten to trollll music. What do we get if we mix it allll together? It'd be dreadfull.'

‘We're getting along okay,' said Lias, getting up and fetching the salt from the counter.

‘We're musicians,' said Glod. ‘It's not the same with real people.'

‘Yeah, right,' said the troll.

Lias sat down.

There was a cracking noise.

Lias stood up.

‘Oh,' he said.

Imp reached over. Slowly and with great care he picked the remains of his harp off the bench.

‘Oh,' said Lias.

A string curled back with a sad little sound.

It was like watching the death of a kitten.

‘I won that at the Eisteddfod,' said Imp.

‘Could you glue it back together?' said Glod, eventually.

Imp shook his head.

‘There's no one left in Llamedos who knows how, see.'

‘Yes, but in the Street of Cunning Artificers—'

‘I'm real sorry. I mean real sorry, I don't know how it got dere.'

‘It wasn't your faullt.'

Imp tried, ineffectually, to fit a couple of pieces together. But you couldn't repair a musical instrument. He remembered the old bards saying that. They had a soul. All instruments had a soul. If they were broken, the soul of them escaped, flew away like a bird. What was put together again was just a thing, a mere assemblage of wood and wire. It would play, it might even deceive the casual listener, but . . . You might as well push someone over a cliff and then stitch them together and expect them to come alive.

‘Um . . . maybe we could get you another one, then?' said Glod. ‘There's . . . a nice little music shop in The Backs—'

He stopped. Of
course
there was a nice little music shop in The Backs. It had
always
been there.

‘In The Backs,' he repeated, just to make sure. ‘Bound to get one there. In The Backs. Yes. Been there
years
.'

‘Not one of these,' said Imp. ‘Before a craftsman even touches the wood he has to spend two weeks sitting wrapped in a bullllock hide in a cave behind a waterfallll.'

‘Why?'

‘I don't know. It's traditionall. He has to get his mind pure of allll distractions.'

‘There's bound to be something else, though,' said Glod. ‘We'll buy something. You can't be a musician without an instrument.'

‘I haven't got any money,' said Imp.

Glod slapped him on the back. ‘That doesn't matter,' he said. ‘You've got friends! We'll help you! Least we can do.'

‘But we allll spent everything we had on this meall. There's no more money,' said Imp.

‘That's a negative way of looking at it,' said Glod.

‘Wellll, yes. We haven't got any, see?'

‘I'll sort out something,' said Glod. ‘I'm a dwarf. We know about money. Knowing about money is practically my middle name.'

‘That's a
long
middle name.'

It was almost dark when they reached the shop, which was right opposite the high walls of Unseen University. It looked the kind of musical instrument emporium which doubles as a pawnshop, since every musician has at some time in his life to hand over his instrument if he wants to eat and sleep indoors.

‘You ever bought anything in here?' said Lias.

‘No . . . not that I remember,' said Glod.

‘It shut,' said Lias.

Glod hammered on the door. After a while it opened a crack, just enough to reveal a thin slice of face belonging to an old woman.

‘We want to buy an instrument, ma'am,' said Imp.

One eye and a slice of mouth looked him up and down.

‘You human?'

‘Yes, ma'am.'

‘All right, then.'

The shop was lit by a couple of candles. The old woman retired to the safety of the counter, where she watched them very carefully for any signs of murdering her in her bed.

The trio moved carefully amongst the merchandise. It seemed that the shop had accumulated its stock from unclaimed pledges over the centuries. Musicians were often short of money; it was one definition of a musician. There were battle horns. There were lutes. There were drums.

‘This is junk,' said Imp under his breath.

Glod blew the dust off a crumhorn and put it to his lips, achieving a sound like the ghost of a refried bean.

‘I reckon there's a dead mouse in here,' he said, peering into the depths.

‘It was all right before you blew it,' snapped the old woman.

There was an avalanche of cymbals from the other end of the shop.

‘Sorry,' Lias called out.

Glod opened the lid of an instrument that was entirely unfamiliar to Imp. It revealed a row of keys; Glod ran his stumpy fingers over them, producing a sequence of sad, tinny notes.

‘What is it?' whispered Imp.

‘A virginal,' said the dwarf.

‘Any good to us?'

‘Shouldn't think so.'

Imp straightened up. He felt that he was being watched. The old lady
was
watching, but there was something else . . .

‘It's no use. There's nothing here,' he said loudly.

‘Hey, what was that?' said Glod.

‘I said there's—'