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 OK.’
‘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.’
‘Fits perfectly.’
There was a piano-shaped hole around the doorway. Glod was standing next to it, holding his axe. 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 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-defence 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 downwards. 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'[11] 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 they 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 draughty. 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.
‘Somone’s tappin’ his foot.’
The wizards 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 water-powered 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.[12]
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.[13] He never bothered to shovel the paperwork back on afterwards. In his experience, anything really important never got written down, because by then people were too busy shouting.