Besides, is riding a flying horse against school rules? I bet it’s not written down anywhere.
Quirm vanished behind her, and the world opened up in a pattern of darkness and moonlight silver. A chequer-board pattern of fields strobed by in the moonlight, with the occasional light of an isolated farm. Ragged clouds whipped past and away.
Away on her left the Ramtop Mountains were a cold white wall. On her right, the Rim Ocean carried a pathway to the moon. There was no wind, or even a great sensation of speed – just the land flashing by, and the long slow strides of Binky.
And then someone spilled gold on the night. Clouds parted in front of her and there, spread below, was Ankh-Morpork – a city containing more Peril than even Miss Butts could imagine.
Torchlight outlined a pattern of streets in which Quirm would have not only been lost, but mugged and pushed into the river as well.
Binky cantered easily over the rooftops. Susan could hear the sounds of the streets, even individual voices, but there was also the great roar of the city, like some kind of insect hive. Upper windows drifted by, each one a glow of candlelight.
The horse dropped through the smoky air and landed neatly and at the trot in an alley which was otherwise empty except for a closed door and a sign with a torch over it.
Susan read:
CURRY GARDENS
Kitchren Entlance – Keep Out. Ris Means You.
Binky seemed to be waiting for something. Susan had expected a more exotic destination.
She knew about curry. They had curry at school, under the name of Bogey and Rice. It was yellow. There were soggy raisins and peas in it.
Binky whinnied, and stamped a hoof.
A hatch in the door flew open. Susan got a brief impression of a face against the fiery atmosphere of the kitchen.
‘Ooorrh, nooorrrh! Binkorrr!’
The hatch slammed shut again.
Obviously something was meant to happen.
She stared at a menu nailed to the wall. It was misspelled, of course, because the menu of the folkier kind of restaurant always has to have misspellings in it, so that customers can be lured into a false sense of superiority. She couldn’t recognize the names of most of the dishes, which included:
Curry with Vegetable 8p
Curry with Sweat, and Sore Balls of Pig 10p
Curry with Sweer and Sour, Ball of Fish 10p
Curry with Meat 10p
Curry with Named Meat 15p
Extra Curry 5p
Porn cracker 4p
Eat It Here Or,
Take It Away
The hatch snapped open again and a large brown bag of allegedly but not really waterproof paper was dumped on the little ledge in front of it. Then the hatch slammed shut again.
Susan reached out carefully. The smell rising from the bag had a sort of thermic lance quality that warned against metal cutlery. But tea had been a long time ago.
She realized she didn’t have any money on her. On the other hand, no-one had asked her for any. But the world would go to wrack and ruin if people didn’t recognize their responsibilities.
She leaned forward and knocked on the door.
‘Excuse me . . . don’t you want anything-?’
There was shouting and a crash from inside, as if half a dozen people were fighting to get under the same table.
‘Oh. How nice. Thank you. Thank you very much,’ said Susan, politely.
Binky walked away, slowly. This time there was no bunched leap of muscle power – he trotted into the air carefully, as if some time in the past he’d been scolded for spilling something.
Susan tried the curry several hundred feet above the speeding landscape, and then threw it away as politely as possible.
‘It was very . . . unusual,’ she said. ‘And that’s it? You carried me all the way up here for takeaway food?’
The ground skimmed past faster, and it crept over her that the horse was going a lot faster now, a full gallop instead of the easy canter. A bunching of muscle . . .
. . . and then the sky ahead of her erupted blue for a moment.
Behind her, unseen because light was standing around red with embarrassment asking itself what had happened, a pair of hoofprints burned in the air for a moment.
It was a landscape, hanging in space.
There was a squat little house, with a garden around it. There were fields, and distant mountains. Susan stared at it as Binky slowed.
There was no depth. As the horse swung around for a landing, the landscape was revealed as a mere surface, a thin-shaped film of . . . existence . . . imposed on nothingness.
She expected it to tear when the horse landed, but there was only a faint crunch and a scatter of gravel.
Binky trotted around the house and into the stableyard, where he stood and waited.
Susan got off, gingerly. The ground felt solid enough under her feet. She reached down and scratched at the gravel; there was more gravel underneath.
She’d heard that the Tooth Fairy collected teeth. Think about it logically . . . the only other people who collected any bits of bodies did so for very suspicious purposes, and usually to harm or control other people. The Tooth Fairies must have half the children in the world under their control. And this didn’t look like the house of that sort of person.
The Hogfather apparently lived in some kind of horrible slaughterhouse in the mountains, festooned with sausages and black puddings and painted a terrible blood-red.
Which suggested style. A nasty style, but at least style of a sort. This place didn’t have style of any sort.
The Soul Cake Tuesday Duck didn’t apparently have any kind of a home. Nor did Old Man Trouble or the Sandman, as far as she knew.
She walked around the house, which wasn’t much larger than a cottage. Definitely. Whoever lived here had no taste at all.
She found the front door. It was black, with a knocker in the shape of an omega.
Susan reached for it, but the door opened by itself.
And the hall stretched away in front of her, far bigger than the outside of the house could possibly contain. She could distantly make out a stairway wide enough for the tap-dancing finale in a musical.
There was something else wrong with the perspective. There clearly was a wall a long way off but, at the same time, it looked as though it was painted in the air a mere fifteen feet or so away. It was as if distance was optional.
There was a large clock against one wall. Its slow tick filled the immense space.
There’s a room, she thought. I remember the room of whispers.
Doors lined the hall at wide intervals. Or short intervals, if you looked at it another way.
She tried to walk towards the nearest one, and gave up after a few wildly teetering steps. Finally she managed to reach it by taking aim and then shutting her eyes.
The door was at one and the same time about normal human size and immensely big. There was a highly ornate frame around it, with a skulls-and-bones motif.
She pushed the door open.
This room could have housed a small town.
A small area of carpet occupied the middle distance, no more than a hectare in size. It took Susan several minutes to reach the edge.
It was a room within a room. There was a large, heavy-looking desk on a raised dais, with a leather swivel chair behind it. There was a large model of the Discworld, on a sort of ornament made of four elephants standing on the shell of a turtle. There were several bookshelves, the large volumes piled in the haphazard fashion of people who’re far too busy using the books ever to arrange them properly. There was even a window, hanging in the air a few feet above the ground.
But there were no walls. There was nothing between the edge of the carpet and the walls of the greater room except floor, and even that was far too precise a word for it. It didn’t look like rock and it certainly wasn’t wood. It made no sound when Susan walked on it. It was simply surface, in the purely geometrical sense.
The carpet had a skull-and-bones pattern.
It was also black. Everything was black, or a shade of grey. Here and there a tint suggested a very deep purple or ocean-depth blue.
In the distance, towards the walls of the greater room, the metaroom or whatever it was, there was the suggestion of . . . something. Something was casting complicated shadows, too far away to be clearly seen.
Susan got up on to the dais.
There was something odd about the things around her. Of course, there was everything odd about the things around her, but it was a huge major oddness that was simply in their nature. She could ignore it. But there was an oddness on a human level. Everything was just slightly wrong, as if it had been made by someone who hadn’t fully comprehended its purpose.