‘You’ve got to help me,’ said Albert, ‘otherwise something dreadful will happen.’
‘Push off!’
Albert kicked the door shut behind him.
‘Just don’t say I didn’t warn you,’ he said. On his shoulder the Death of Rats sniffed the air suspiciously.
A moment later Hibiscus was having his chin pressed firmly into the boards of one of his tables.
‘Now, I know he’d come in here,’ said Albert, who wasn’t even breathing heavily, ‘because everyone does, sooner or later. Have another look.’
‘That’s a Caroc card,’ said Hibiscus indistinctly. ‘That’s Death!’
‘That’s right. He’s the one on the white horse. You can’t miss him. Only he wouldn’t look like that in here, I expect.’
‘Let me get this straight,’ said the landlord, trying desperately to wriggle out of the iron grip. ‘You want me to tell you if I’ve seen someone who doesn’t look like that?’
‘He’d have been odd. Odder than most.’ Albert thought for a moment. ‘And he’d have drunk a lot, if I know him. He always does.’
‘This is Ankh-Morpork, you know.’
‘Don’t be cheeky, or I’ll get angry.’
‘You mean you’re not angry now?’
‘I’m just impatient. You can try for angry if you like.’
‘There was . . . someone . . . few days ago. Can’t remember exactly what he looked like-‘
‘Ah. That’d be him.’
‘Drank me dry, complained about the Barbarian Invaders game, got legless and then . . .’
‘What?’
‘Can’t recall. We just threw him out.’
‘Out the back door?’
‘Yes.’
‘But that’s just river out there.’
‘Well, most people come round before they sink.’
SQUEAK, said the Death of Rats.
‘Did he say anything?’ said Albert, too busy to pay attention.
‘Something about remembering everything, I think. He said . . . he said being drunk didn’t make him forget. Kept going on about doorknobs and . . . hairy sunlight.’
‘Hairy sunlight?’
‘Something like that.’
And the pressure on Hibiscus’s arm was suddenly released. He waited a second or two and then, very cautiously, turned his head.
There was no-one behind him.
Very carefully, Hibiscus bent down to look under the tables.
Albert stepped out into the dawn and, after some fumbling, produced his box. He opened it and glanced at his lifetimer, then snapped the lid shut.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘What next?’
SQUEAK!
‘What?’
And someone hit him across the head.
It wasn’t a killing stroke. Timo Laziman of the
Thieves’ Guild knew what happened to thieves who killed people. The Assassins’ Guild came and talked briefly to them – in fact, all they said was, ‘Goodbye.’
All he’d wanted to do was knock the old man out so that he could rifle his pockets.
He’d not expected the sound as the body hit the ground. It was like the tinkle of broken glass, but with unpleasant overtones that carried on echoing in Timo’s ears long after they should have stopped.
Something leapt from the body and whirred into his face. Two skeletal claws grabbed his ears and a bony muzzle jerked forward and hit him hard on the forehead. He screamed and ran for it.
The Death of Rats dropped to the ground again and scurried back to Albert. It patted his face, kicked him frantically a few times and then, in desperation, bit him on the nose.
Then it grabbed Albert’s collar and tried to pull him out of the gutter, but there was a warning tinkle of glass.
The eye sockets turned madly towards the Drum’s closed front door. Ossified whiskers bristled.
A moment later Hibiscus opened the door, if only to stop the thunderous knocking.
‘I said we’re-‘
Something shot between his legs, paused momentarily to bite him on the ankle, and scuttled towards the back door, nose pressed firmly to the floor.
It was called Hide Park not because people could, but because a hide was once a measure of land capable of being ploughed by one man with three-and-one-half oxen on a wet Thursday, and the park was exactly this amount of land, and people in Ankh-Morpork stick to tradition and often to other things as well.
And it had trees, and grass, and a lake with actual fish in it. And, by one of those twists of civic history, it was a fairly safe place. People seldom got mugged in Hide Park. Muggers like ‘somewhere safe to sunbathe, just like everyone else. It was, as it were, neutral territory.
And it was already filling up, even though there was nothing much to see except the workmen still hammering together a large stage by the lake. An area behind it had been walled off with strips of cheap sacking nailed to stakes. Occasionally excited people would try to get in and would be thrown into the lake by Chrysoprase’s trolls.
Among the practising musicians Crash and his group were immediately noticeable, partly because Crash had his shirt off so that Jimbo could paint iodine on the wounds.
‘I thought you were joking,’ he growled.
‘I did say it was in your bedroom,’ said Scum.
‘How’m I going to play my guitar like this?’ said Crash.
‘You can’t play your guitar anyway,’ said Noddy.
‘I mean, look at my hand. Look at it.’
They looked at his hand. Jimbo’s mum had put a glove on it after treating the wounds; they hadn’t been very deep, because even a stupid leopard won’t hang around anyone who wants to take its trousers off.
‘A glove,’ said Crash, in a terrible voice. ‘Whoever heard of a serious musician with a glove? How can I ever play my guitar with a glove on?’ ‘
‘How can you ever play your guitar anyway?’
‘I don’t know why I put up with you three,’ said Crash. ‘You’re cramping my artistic development. I’m thinking of leaving and forming my own band.’
‘No you won’t,’ said Jimbo, ‘because you won’t find anyone even worse than us. Let’s face it. We’re rubbish.’
He was voicing a hitherto unspoken yet shared thought. The other musicians around them were, it was true, quite bad. But that’s all they were. Some of them had some minor musical talent; as for the rest, they merely couldn’t play. They didn’t have a drummer who missed the drums and a bass guitarist with the same natural rhythm as a traffic accident. And they’d generally settled on their name. They might be unimaginative names, like ‘A Big Troll and Some Other Trolls’, or ‘Dwarfs With Altitude’, but at least they knew who they were.
‘How about “We’re A Rubbish Band”?’ said Noddy, sticking his hands in his pockets.
‘We may be rubbish,’ snarled Crash, ‘but we’re Music With Rocks In rubbish.’
‘Well, well, and how’s it all going, then?’ said Dibbler, pushing his way through the sacking. ‘It won’t be long now – what’re you doing here?’
‘We’re in the programme, Mr Dibbler,’ said Crash meekly.
‘How can you be in the programme when I don’t know what you’re called?’ said Dibbler, waving a hand irritably at one of the posters. ‘Your name up there, is it?’
‘We’re probably where it says Ande Supporting Bandes,’ said Noddy.
‘What happened to your hand?’ said Dibbler.
‘My trousers bit it,’ said Crash, glowering at Scum. ‘Honest, Mr Dibbler, can’t you give us one more chance?’
‘We’ll see,’ said Dibbler, and strode away.
He was feeling too cheerful to argue much. The sausages-in-abun were selling very fast, but they were just covering minor expenses. There were ways of making money out of Music With Rocks In that he’d never thought of . . . and C. M. O. T. Dibbler thought of money all the time.
For example, there were the shirts. They were of cotton so cheap and thin that it was practically invisible in a good light and tended to dissolve in the wash. He’d sold six hundred already! At five dollars each! All he had to do was buy them at ten for a dollar from Klatchian Wholesale Trading and pay Chalky half a dollar each to print them.
And Chalky, with un-troll-like initiative, had even printed off his own shirts. They said:
ChaIKies,
12 The Scours
Thyngs Done.
And people were buying them, paying money to advertise Chalky’s workshop. Dibbler had never dreamed that the world could work like this. It was like watching sheep shear themselves. Whatever was causing this reversal of the laws of commercial practice he wanted in big lumps.
He’d already sold the idea to Plugger the shoemaker in New Cobblers[28] and a hundred shirts had just walked out of the shop, which was more than Plugger’s merchandise usually did. People wanted clothes just because they had writing on!
He was making money. Thousands of dollars in a day! And a hundred music traps were lined up in front of the stage, ready to capture Buddy’s voice. If it went on at this rate, in several billion years he’d be rich beyond his wildest dreams!
Long Live Music With Rocks In!
There was only one small cloud in this silver lining.