Soul Music (34 page)

‘Hello, Pseudopolis!'

They had to call out the city Watch. They had to organize a bucket chain from the river. Asphalt had to stand outside Buddy's dressing room with a club. With a nail in it.

Albert, in front of a scrap of mirror in his bedroom, brushed his hair furiously. It was white. At least, long ago it was white. Now it was the colour of a tobacco addict's index finger.

‘It's my duty, that's what it is,' he muttered. ‘Don't know where he'd be without me. Maybe he
does
remember the future, but he always gets it wrong! Oh, he can go on worrying about the eternal verities, but who has to sort it out when all's said and done . . . Muggins, that's who.'

He glared at himself in the mirror.

‘Right!' he said.

There was a battered shoe-box under the bed. Albert pulled it out very, very carefully and took the top off. It was half full of cotton wool; nestling in the wool, like a rare egg, was a lifetimer.

Engraved on it was the name: Alberto Malich.

The sand inside was frozen, immobile, in mid-pour. There wasn't much left in the top bulb.

No time passed, here.

It was part of the Arrangement. He worked for Death, and time didn't pass, except when he went into the World.

There was a scrap of paper by the glass. The figures ‘91' had been written at the top, but lower numbers trailed down the page after it. 73 . . . 68 . . . 37 . . . 19.

Nineteen!

He must have been daft. He'd let his life leak away by hours and minutes, and there had been a lot more of them lately. There'd been all that business with the plumber, of course. And shopping. The Master didn't like to go shopping. It was hard to get served. And Albert had taken a few holidays, because it was nice to see the sun, any sun, and feel wind and rain; the Master did his best, but he could never get them right. And decent vegetables, he couldn't do them properly either. They never tasted
grown
.

Nineteen days left in the world. But more than enough.

Albert slipped the lifetimer into his pocket, put on an overcoat, and stamped back down the stairs.

‘You,' he said, pointing to the Death of Rats, ‘you can't sense a trace of him? There must be
something
. Concentrate.'

‘What did he say?'

‘He said all he can remember is something about sand.'

‘Sand,' said Albert. ‘All right. Good start. We search all the sand.'

‘Wherever the Master is, he'll make an impression.'

Cliff awoke to a swish-swish sound. The shape of Glod was outlined in the light of dawn, wielding a brush.

‘What're you doing, dwarf?'

‘I got Asphalt to get some paint,' said Glod. ‘These rooms are a disgrace.'

Cliff raised himself on his elbows and looked around.

‘What do you call the colour on the door?'

‘Eau-de-Nil.'

‘Nice.'

‘Thank you,' said Glod.

‘The curtains are good, too.'

The door creaked open. Asphalt came in, with a tray, and kicked the door shut behind him.

‘Oh, sorry,' he said.

‘I'll paint over the mark,' said Glod.

Asphalt put the tray down, trembling with excitement.

‘Everyone's talking about you guys!' he said. ‘And they're saying it was about time they built a new theatre anyway. I've got you eggs and bacon, eggs and rat, eggs and coke, and . . . and . . . what was it . . . oh, yes. The Captain of the Watch says if you're still in the city at sunrise he will personally have you buried alive. I've got the cart all ready by the back door. Young women have been writing things on it in lipstick. Nice curtains, by the way.'

All three of them looked at Buddy.

‘He hasn't moved,' said Glod. ‘Flopped down right after the show and out like a light.'

‘He was certainly leaping around last night,' said Cliff.

Buddy continued to snore gently.

‘When we get back,' said Glod, ‘we ought to have a nice holiday somewhere.'

‘Dat's right,' said Cliff. ‘If we get out of dis alive, I'm going to put my rock kit on my back and take a long walk, and the first time someone says to me, “What are dem things on your back?” dat's where I'm gonna settle down.'

Asphalt peered down into the street.

‘Can you all eat fast?' he said. ‘Only there's some men in uniform out there. With shovels.'

Back in Ankh-Morpork, Mr Clete was astonished.

‘But we hired you!' he said.

‘The term is “retained”, not “hired”,' said Lord Downey, head of the Assassins' Guild. He looked at Clete with an expression of unconcealed distaste. ‘Unfortunately, however, we can no longer entertain your contract.'

‘They're
musicians
,' said Mr Clete. ‘How hard can they be to kill?'

‘My associates are somewhat reluctant to talk about it,' said Lord Downey. ‘They seem to feel that the clients are protected in some way. Obviously, we will return the balance of your fee.'

‘Protected,' muttered Clete, as they stepped thankfully through the archway of the Assassins' Guild.

‘Well, I told you what it was like in the Drum when—' Satchelmouth began.

‘That's just superstition,' snapped Clete. He glanced up at a wall, where three Festival posters flaunted their primary colours.

‘It was stupid of you to think Assassins would be any good outside the city,' muttered Clete.

‘Me? I never—'

‘Get them more than five miles from a decent tailor and a mirror, and they go all to pieces,' Clete added.

He stared at the poster.

‘
Free
,' he muttered. ‘Did you put it about that anyone who plays at this Festival is right out of the Guild?'

‘Yes, sir. I don't think they're worrying, sir. I mean, some of 'em have been getting together, sir. See, they say since there's a lot more people want to be musicians than we'll allow in the Guild then we should—'

‘It's mob rule!' said Clete. ‘Banding together to force unacceptable rules on a defenceless city!'

‘Trouble is, sir,' said Satchelmouth, ‘if there's a lot of them . . . if they think of talking to the palace . . . well, you know the Patrician, sir . . .'

Clete nodded glumly. Any Guild was powerful just so long as it self-evidently spoke for its constituency. He thought of hundreds of musicians flocking to the palace. Hundreds of
non-Guild
musicians . . .

The Patrician was a pragmatist. He never tried to fix things that worked. Things that didn't work, however, got broken.

The only glimmer of hope was that they'd all be too busy messing around with music to think about the bigger picture. It had certainly worked for Clete.

Then he remembered that the blasted Dibbler man was involved.

Expecting Dibbler not to think about anything concerning money was like expecting rocks not to think about gravity.

‘Hello? Albert?'

Susan pushed open the kitchen door. The huge room was empty.

‘Albert?'

She tried upstairs. There was her own room, and there was a corridor of doors that didn't open and possibly never could – the doors and frames had an all-in-one, moulded-together look. Presumably Death had a bedroom, although proverbially Death never slept. Perhaps he just lay in bed reading.

She tried the handles until she found one that turned.

Death
did
have a bedroom.

He'd got many of the details right. Of course. After all, he saw quite a lot of bedrooms. In the middle of the acres of floor was a large four-poster bed, although when Susan gave it an experimental prod it turned out that the sheets were as solid as rock.

There was a full-length mirror, and a wardrobe. She had a look inside, just in case there was a selection of robes, but there was nothing in there except a few old shoes in the bottom.
²⁶

A dressing table held a jug-and-basin set with a motif of skulls and omegas, and a variety of bottles and other items.

She picked them up, one by one. After-shave lotion. Pomade. Breath freshener. A pair of silver-backed hairbrushes.

It was all rather sad. Death clearly had picked up an idea of what a gentleman should have on his dressing table, without confronting one or two fundamental questions.

Eventually she found a smaller, narrower staircase.

‘Albert?'

There was a door at the top.

‘Albert? Anyone?'

It's not actually barging in if I call out first, she told herself. She pushed open the door.

It was a very small room.
Really
small. It contained a few sticks of bedroom furniture and a small narrow bed. A small bookcase contained a handful of small uninteresting-looking books. There was a piece of ancient paper on the floor which, when Susan picked it up, turned out to be covered with numbers, all crossed out except the last one, which was: 19.

One of the books was
Gardening In Difficult Conditions
.

She went back down to the study. She'd known that there was no one in the house. There was a dead feeling in the air.

There was the same feeling in the gardens. Death could create most things, except for plumbing. But he couldn't create life itself. That had to be added, like yeast in bread. Without it, everything was beautifully neat and tidy and boring, boring, boring.

This is what it must have been like
, she thought.
And then, one day, he adopted my mother. He was curious
.

She took the path through to the orchard again.

And when I was born Mum and Dad were so afraid that I felt at home here they brought me up to be . . . well . . . a Susan. What kind of name is that for Death's granddaughter? A girl like that should have better cheekbones, straight hair and a name with Vs and Xs in it
.

And there, once again, was the thing he'd made for her. All by himself. Working it all out from first principles . . .

A swing. A simple swing.

It was already burning hot in the desert between Klatch and Hersheba.

The air shimmied, and then there was a pop. Albert appeared on a sand-dune. There was a clay-brick fort on the horizon.

‘The Klatchian Foreign Legion,' he muttered, as sand began its inexorable progress into his boots.

Albert trudged towards it with the Death of Rats sitting on his shoulder.

He knocked on the door, which had a number of arrows in it. After a while a small hatch slid back.

‘What do you want, offendi?' said a voice from somewhere behind it.

Albert held up a card.

‘Have you seen someone who didn't look like this?' he demanded.

There was silence.

‘Then let's say: have you seen some mysterious stranger who didn't talk about his past?' said Albert.

‘This is the Klatchian Foreign Legion, offendi. People don't talk about their past. They join up to . . . to . . .'

It dawned on Albert as the pause lengthened that it was up to him to get the conversation going again.

‘Forget?'

‘Right. Forget. Yes.'

‘So have you had any recent recruits who were a little, shall we say, odd?'

‘Might have done,' said the voice slowly. ‘Can't remember.'

The hatchway slammed shut.

Albert hammered on it again. The hatchway opened.

‘Yes, what is it?'

‘Are you sure you can't remember?'

‘Remember what?'

Albert took a deep breath.

‘I demand to see your commanding officer!'

The hatch shut. The hatch opened.

‘Sorry. It appears that I
am
the commanding officer. You're not a D'reg or a Hershebian, are you?'

‘Don't you know?'

‘I'm . . . pretty sure I must have done. Once. You know how it is . . . head like . . . thing, you know . . . With holes in . . . You drain lettuce in it . . . er . . .'

There was the sound of bolts being pulled back, and a wicket door opened in the gateway.

The possible officer was a sergeant, in so far as Albert was at all familiar with Klatchian ranks. He had the look about him of someone who, among the things he couldn't remember, would include a good night's sleep. If he could remember to.

There were a few other Klatchian soldiers inside the fort, sitting or, just barely, standing. Many were bandaged. And there was a rather greater number of soldiers slumped or lying on the packed sand who'd never need a night's sleep ever again.

‘What's been happening here?' said Albert. His tone was so authoritative that the sergeant found himself saluting.

‘We were attacked by D'regs, sir,' he said, swaying slightly. ‘Hundreds of them! They outnumbered us . . . er . . . what's the number after nine? Got a one in it.'

‘Ten.'

‘Ten to one, sir.'

‘I see you survived, though,' said Albert.

‘Ah,' said the sergeant. ‘Yes. Er. Yes. That's where it all gets a bit complicated, in fact. Er. Corporal? That's you. No, you just next to him. The one with the two stripes?'

‘Me?' said a small fat soldier.

‘Yes. Tell him what happened.'

‘Oh. Right. Er. Well, the bastards had shot us full of arrows, right? An' it looked like it was all up with us. Then someone suggested sticking bodies up on the battlements with their spears and crossbows and everything so's the bastards'd think we was still up to strength—'