The Band With Rocks In blinked in the torchlight.
No-one clapped. On the other hand, no-one threw anything, either. By Drum standards, this was a hearty welcome.
Ridcully saw a tall, curly-headed young man clutching what looked like an undernourished guitar or possibly a banjo that had been used in a fight. Beside him was a dwarf, holding a battle horn. At the rear was a troll, hammer in each paw, seated behind a pile of rocks. And to one side was the Librarian, standing in front of . . . Ridcully leaned forward . . . what appeared to be the skeleton of a piano, balanced on some beer-kegs.
The boy looked paralysed by the attention.
He said: ‘Hello … er … Ankh-Morpork.
And, this amount of conversation apparently having exhausted him, he started to play.
It was a simple little rhythm, one that you might easily have ignored if you’d met it in the street. It was followed by a sequence of crashing chords and then, Ridcully realized, it hadn’t been followed by the chords, because the rhythm was there all the time. Which was impossible. No guitar could be played like that.
The dwarf blew a sequence of notes on the horn. The troll picked up the beat. The Librarian brought both hands down upon the piano keyboard, apparently at random.
Ridcully had never heard such a din.
And then . . . and then . . . it wasn’t a din any more.
It was like that nonsense about white light that the young wizards in the High Energy Magic Building went on about. They said that all the colours together made up white, which was bloody nonsense as far as Ridcully was concerned, because everyone knew that if you mixed up all the colours you could get your hands on, you got a sort of greeny-brown mess which certainly wasn’t any kind of white. But now he had a vague idea what they meant.
All this noise, this mess of music, suddenly came together and there was a new music inside it.
The Dean’s quiff was quivering.
The whole crowd was moving.
Ridcully realized his foot was tapping. He stamped on it with his other foot.
Then he watched the troll carry the beat and hammer the rocks until the walls shook. The Librarian’s fingers swooped along the keyboard. Then his toes did the same. And all the time the guitar hooted and screamed and sang out the melody.
The wizards were bouncing in their seats and twirling their fingers in the air.
Ridcully leaned over to the Bursar and screamed at him.
‘What?’ shouted the Bursar.
‘I said, they’ve all gone mad except me and you!’
‘What?’
‘It’s the music!’
‘Yes! It’s great!’ said the Bursar, waving his skinny hands in the air.
‘And I’m not too certain about you!’
Ridcully sat down again and pulled out the thaumometer. It was vibrating crazily, which was no help at all. It didn’t seem to be able to decide if this was magic or not.
He nudged the Bursar sharply.
‘This ain’t magic! This is something else!’
‘You’re exactly right!’
Ridcully had the feeling that he suddenly wasn’t speaking the right language.
‘I mean it’s too much!’
‘Yes!’
Ridcully sighed.
‘Is it time for your dried frog pill?’
Smoke was coming out of the stricken piano. The Librarian’s hands were walking through the keys like Casanunda in a nunnery.
Ridcully looked around. He felt all alone.
Someone else hadn’t been overcome by the music. Satchelmouth had stood up. So had his two associates.
They had drawn some knobbly clubs. Ridcully knew the Guild laws. Of course, they had to be enforced. You couldn’t run a city without them. This certainly wasn’t licensed music – if ever there was unlicensed music, this was it. Nevertheless . . . he rolled up his sleeve and prepared a quick fireball, just in case.
One of the men dropped his club and clutched his foot. The other one spun around as if something had slapped his ear. Satchelmouth’s hat dented, as if someone had just hit him on the head.
Ridcully, one eye watering terribly, thought he made out the Tooth Fairy girl bringing the handle of a scythe down on Satchelmouth’s head.
The Archchancellor was quite a bright man but often had trouble in forcing his train of thought to change tracks. He was having difficulty with the idea of a scythe, after all, grass didn’t have teeth – and then the fireball burned his fingers, and then, as he sucked frantically at them, he realized that there was something in the sound. Something extra.
‘Oh, no,’ he said, as the fireball floated to the floor and set fire to the Bursar’s boot, ‘it’s alive.’
He grabbed the beer mug, finished the contents hurriedly, and rammed it upside down on the tabletop.
The moon shone over the Klatchian desert, in the vicinity of the dotted line. Both sides of it got exactly the same amount of moonlight, although minds like Mr Clete’s deplored this state of affairs.
The sergeant strolled across the packed sand of the parade ground. He stopped, sat down, and produced a cheroot. Then he pulled out a match, reached down and struck it on something sticking out of the sand, which said:
GOOD EVENING.
‘I expect you’ve had enough, eh, soldier?’ said the sergeant.
ENOUGH WHAT, SERGEANT?
‘Two days in the sun, no food, no water . . . I expect you’re delirious with thirst and are just begging to be dug out, eh?’
YES. IT IS CERTAINLY VERY DULL.
‘Dull?’
I AM AFRAID SO.
‘Dull? It’s not meant to be dull! It’s the Pit! It’s meant to be a horrible physical and mental torture! After one day of it you’re supposed to by a . . .’ The sergeant glanced surreptitiously at some writing on his wrist, ‘. . . a raving madman! I’ve been watching you all day! You haven’t even groaned! I can’t sit in my . . . thing, you sit in it, there’s papers and things . . .’
OFFICE.
‘. . . working, with you outside like this! I can’t bear it!’
Beau Nidle glanced upwards. He felt it was time for a kindly gesture.
HELP, HELP. HELP, HELP, he said.
The sergeant sagged with relief.
THIS ASSISTS PEOPLE TO FORGET, DOES IT?
‘Forget? People forget everything when they’re given …er…’
THE PIT.
‘Yes! That’s it!’
AH. DO YOU MIND IF I ASK A QUESTION?
‘What?.
DO YOU MIND IF PERHAPS I HAVE ANOTHER DAY?
The sergeant opened his mouth to reply, and the D’regs attacked over the nearest sand-dune.
‘Music?’ said the Patrician. ‘Ah. Tell me more.’
He leaned back in an attitude that suggested attentive listening. He was extremely good at listening. He created a kind of mental suction. People told him things just to avoid the silence.
Besides, Lord Vetinari, the supreme ruler of Ankh-Morpork, rather liked music.
People wondered what sort of music would appeal to such a man.
Highly formalized chamber music, possibly, or thunder-andlightning opera scores.
In fact the kind of music he really liked was the kind that never got played. It ruined music, in his opinion, to torment it by involving it on dried skins, bits of dead cat and lumps of metal hammered into wires and tubes. It ought to stay written down, on the page, in rows of little dots and crotchets, all neatly caught between lines. Only there was it pure. It was when people started doing things with it that the rot set in. Much better to sit quietly in a room and read the sheets, with nothing between yourself and the mind of the composer but a scribble of ink. Having it played by sweaty fat men and people with hair in their ears and spit dribbling out of the end of their oboe . . . well, the idea made him shudder. Although not much, because he never did anything to extremes.
So…
‘And then what happened?’ he said.
‘An’ then he started singin’, yerronner,’ said Cumbling Michael, licensed beggar and informal informant. ‘A song about Great Fiery Balls.’
The Patrician raised an eyebrow.
‘Pardon?’
‘Somethin’ like that. Couldn’t really make out the words, the reason bein’, the piano exploded.’
‘Ah? I imagine this interrupted the proceedings somewhat.’
‘Nah, the monkey went on playin’ what was left,’ said Cumbling Michael. ‘And people got up and started cheerin’ and dancin and stampin’ their feet like there was a plague of cockroaches.’
‘And you say the men from the Musicians’ Guild were hurt?’
‘It was dead strange. They were white as a sheet afterwards. At least,’ Cumbling Michael thought about the state of his own bedding, ‘white as some sheets-‘
The Patrician glanced at his reports while the beggar talked. It had certainly been a strange evening. A riot at the Drum . . . well, that was normal, although it didn’t sound exactly like a typical riot and he’d never heard of wizards dancing. He rather felt he recognized the signs . . . There was only one thing that could make it worse.