‘. . . sort of . . .’
‘. . . in a way it . . .’
‘. . . kind of gets under your skin and makes you feel fizzy,’ said the Dean. ‘Incidentally, has anyone got any black paint? I’ve looked everywhere.’
‘Under your skin,’ murmured Ridcully. He scratched his chin. ‘Oh, dear. One of those. Stuff leakin’ into the universe again, eh? Influences coming from Outside, yes? Remember what happened when Mr Hong opened his takeaway fish bar on the site of the old temple in Dagon Street? And then there were those moving pictures. I was against them from the start. And those wire things on wheels. This universe has more damn holes in it than a Quirm cheese. Well, at-‘
‘Lancre cheese,’ said the Senior Wrangler helpfully. ‘That’s the one with the holes. Quirm is the one with the blue veins.’
Ridcully gave him a look.
‘Actually, it didn’t feel magical,’ said the Dean. He sighed. He was seventy-two. It had made him feel that he was seventeen again. He couldn’t remember having been seventeen; it was something that must have happened to him while he was busy. But it made him feel like he imagined it felt like when you were seventeen, which was like having a permanent red-hot vest on under your skin.
He wanted to hear it again.
‘I think they’re going to have it again tonight,’ he ventured. ‘We could, er, go along and listen. In order to learn more about it, in case it’s a threat to society,’ he added virtuously.
‘That’s right, Dean,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes. ‘It’s our civic duty. We’re the city’s first line of supernatural defence. Supposing ghastly creatures started coming out of the air?’
‘What about it?’ said the Chair of Indefinite Studies.
‘Well, we’d be there.’
‘Yes? That’s good, is it?’
Ridcully glared at his wizards. Two of them were surreptitiously tapping their feet. And several of them appeared to be twitching, very gently. The Bursar twitched gently all the time, of course, but that was only his way.
Like canaries, he thought. Or lightning conductors.
‘All right,’ he said reluctantly. ‘We’ll go. But we won’t draw attention to ourselves.’
‘Certainly, Archchancellor.’
‘And everyone’s to buy their own drink.’
‘Oh.’
Corporal (possibly) Cotton saluted in front of the fort’s sergeant, who was trying to shave.
‘It’s the new recruit, sir,’ he said. ‘ He won’t obey orders.’
The sergeant nodded, and then looked blankly at something in his own hand.
‘Razor, sir,’ said the corporal helpfully. ‘He just keeps on saying things like IT’S NOT HAPPENING YET.’ ‘Have you tried burying him up to the neck in the sand? That usually works.’
‘It’s a bit . . . um . . . thing . . . nasty to people . . . had it a moment ago . . .’ The corporal snapped his fingers. ‘Thing. Cruel. That’s it. We don’t give people . . . the Pit . . . these days.’
‘This is the . . .’ the sergeant glanced at the palm of his left hand, where there were several lines of writing, ‘the Foreign Legion.’
‘Yessir. All right, sir. He’s weird. He just sits there all the time. We call him Beau Nidle, sir.’
The sergeant peered bemusedly at the mirror.
‘It’s your face, sir,’ said the corporal.
Susan stared at herself critically.
Susan . . . it wasn’t a good name, was it? It wasn’t a truly bad name, it wasn’t like poor Iodine in the fourth form, or Nigella, a name which means ‘oops, we wanted a boy’. But it was dull. Susan. Sue. Good old Sue. It was a name that made sandwiches, kept its head in difficult circumstances and could reliably look after other people’s children.
It was a name used by no queens or goddesses anywhere.
And you couldn’t do much even with the spelling. You could turn it into Suzi, and it sounded as though you danced on tables for a living. You could put in a Z and a couple of Ns and an E, but it still looked like a name with extensions built on. It was as bad as Sara, a name that cried out for a prosthetic H.
Well, at least she could do something about the way she looked.
It was the robe. It might be traditional but . . . she wasn’t. The alternative was her school uniform or one of her mother’s pink creations. The baggy dress of the Quirm College for Young Ladies was a proud one and, in the mind of Miss Butts at least, proof against all the temptations of the flesh . . . but it lacked a certain panache as costume for the Ultimate Reality. And pink was not even to be thought of.
For the first time in the history of the universe, a Death wondered about what to wear.
‘Hold on,’ she said, to her reflection. ‘Here . . . I can create things, can’t I?’
She held out her hand and thought: cup. A cup appeared. It had a skull-and-bones pattern around the rim.
‘Ah,’ said Susan. ‘I suppose a pattern of roses is out of the question? Probably not right for the ambience, I expect.’
She put the cup on the dressing table and tapped it. It went plink in a solid sort of way.
‘Well, then,’ she said, ‘I don’t want something soppy and posey. No silly black lace or anything worn by idiots who write poetry in their rooms and dress like vampires and are vegetarians really.’
The images of clothes floated across her reflection. It was clear that black was the only option, but she settled on something practical and without frills. She put her head on one side critically.
‘Well, maybe a bit of lace,’ she said. ‘And perhaps a bit more . . . bodice.’
She nodded at her reflection in the mirror. Certainly it was a dress that no Susan would ever wear, although she suspected that there was a basic Susanness about her which would permeate it after a while.
‘It’s a good job you’re here,’ she said, ‘or I’d go totally mad. Haha.’
Then she went to see her grandf . . . Death.
There was one place he had to be.
Glod wandered quietly into the University Library. Dwarfs respected learning, provided they didn’t have to experience it.
He tugged at the robe of a passing young wizard.
‘There’s a monkey runs this place, right?’ he said. ‘Big fat hairy monkey, hands a couple of octaves wide?’
The wizard, a pasty-faced post-graduate student, looked down at Glod with the disdainful air a certain type of person always reserves for dwarfs.
It wasn’t much fun being a student in Unseen University. You had to find your pleasures where you could. He grinned a big, wide, innocent grin.
‘Why, yes,’ he said. ‘I do believe right at this moment he’s in his workroom in the basement. But you have to be very careful how you address him.’
‘Is that so?’ said Glod.
‘Yes, you have to be sure to say, “Do you want a peanut, Mr Monkey?”‘ said the student wizard. He signalled a couple of his colleagues. ‘That’s so, isn’t it? He has to say Mister Monkey.’
‘Oh, yes indeedy,’ said a student. ‘Actually, if you don’t want him to get annoyed it’s best to be on the safe side and scratch under your arms. That puts him at his ease.’
‘And go ugh-ugh-ugh,’ said a third student. ‘He likes that.’
‘Well, thank you very much,’ said Glod. ‘Which way do I go?’
‘We’ll show you,’ said the first student.
‘That’s so very kind.’
‘Don’t mention it. Only too glad to help.’
The three wizards led Glod down a flight of steps and into a tunnel. Light filtered down through the occasional pane of green glass set in the floor above. Every so often Glod heard a snigger behind him.
The Librarian was squatting down on the floor in a long, high cellar. Miscellaneous items had been scattered on the floor in front of him; there was a cartwheel, odd bits of wood and bone, and various pipes, rods and lengths of wire that somehow suggested that, around the city, people were puzzling over broken pumps and fences with holes in. The Librarian was chewing the end of a piece of pipe and looking intently at the heap.
‘That’s him,’ said one of the wizards, giving Glod a push.
The dwarf shuffled forward. There was another outburst of muffled giggling behind him.
He tapped the Librarian on the shoulder.
‘Excuse me-‘
‘Ook?’
‘Those guys just called you a monkey,’ said Glod, jerking a thumb in the direction of the door. ‘I’d make them say sorry, if I was you.’
There was a creaking, metallic noise, followed very closely by a scuffling outside as the wizards trampled one another in their effort to get away.
The Librarian had bent the pipe into a U-shape, apparently without effort.