Maskerade

big double-bass case leaning against the wall. He raised his eyebrows.
    “Oh, no ,” said Bucket, again. “Go on. Open it. My hands have gone all sweaty…”
    Salzella padded across to the case and grasped the lid. “Ready?”
    Bucket nodded, wearily.
    The case was flung open.
    “Oh, no!”
    Salzella craned round to see.
    “Ah, yes,” he said. “A broken neck, and the body has been kicked in considerably. That’ll cost a dollar or two to repair, and no mistake.”
    “And all the strings are busted! Are double basses more expensive to rebuild than violins?”
    “I am afraid that all musical instruments are incredibly expensive to repair, with the possible exception of the triangle,” said Salzella. “However, it could have been worse, hmm?”
    “What?”
    “Well, it could have been Dr. Undershaft in there, yes?”
    Bucket gaped at him, and then shut his mouth. “Oh, Yes. Of course. Oh, yes. That would have been worse. Yes. Bit of luck there, I suppose. Yes. Um.”

    “So that’s an opera house, is it?” said Granny. “Looks like someone built a great big box and glued the architecture on afterward.”
    She coughed, and appeared to be waiting for something.
    “Can we have a look around?” said Nanny dutifully, aware that Granny’s curiosity was equaled only by her desire not to show it.
    “It can’t do any harm, I suppose,” said Granny, as if granting a big favor. “Seein’ as we’ve nothing else to do right this minute.”
    The Opera House was, indeed, that most efficiently multifunctional of building designs. It was a cube. But, as Granny had pointed out, the architect had suddenly realized late in the day that there ought to be some sort of decoration, and had shoved it on hurriedly, in a riot of friezes, pillars, corybants, and curly bits. Gargoyles had colonized the higher reaches. The effect, seen from the front, was of a huge wall of tortured stone.
    Round the back, of course, there was the usual drab mess of windows, pipes and damp stone walls. One of the rules of a certain type of public architecture is that it only happens at the front.
    Granny paused under a window. “Someone’s singing,” she said. “Listen.”
    “La-la-la-la-la-LAH,” trilled someone. “Do-Re-Mi-Fah-So-La-Ti-Do…”
    “That’s opera, right enough,” said Granny. “Sounds foreign to me.”
    Nanny had an unexpected gift for languages; she could be comprehensibly incompetent in a new one within an hour or two. What she spoke was one step away from gibberish but it was authentically foreign gibberish. And she knew that Granny Weatherwax, whatever her other qualities, had an even bigger tin ear for languages than she did for music.
    “Er. Could be,” she said. “There’s always a lot going on, I know that. Our Nev said they sometimes do different operations every night.”
    “How did he find that out?” said Granny.
    “Well, there was a lot of lead. That takes some shifting. He said he liked the noisy ones. He could hum along and also no one heard the hammering.”
    The witches strolled onward.
    “Did you notice young Agnes nearly bump into us back there?” said Granny.
    “Yes. It was all I could do not to turn around,” said Nanny.
    “She wasn’t very pleased to see us, was she? I practically heard her gasp.”
    “That’s very suspicious, if you ask me,” said Nanny. “I mean, she sees two friendly faces from back home, you’d expect her to come runnin’ up…”
    “We’re old friends, after all. Old friends of her grandma and her mum, anyway, and that’s practic’ly the same.”
    “Remember those eyes in the teacup?” said Nanny. “She could be under the gaze of some strange occult force! We got to be careful. People can be very tricky when they’re in the grip of a strange occult force. Remember Mr. Scruple over in Slice?”
    “That wasn’t a strange occult force. That was acid stomach.”
    “Well, it certainly seemed strangely occult for a while. Especially if the windows were shut.”
    Their perambulation had taken them to the Opera House’s stage door.
    Granny looked up at a line of posters.
    “La Triviata,” she read aloud. “ The Ring of the Nibelungingung… ?”
    “Well, basically there are two sorts of opera,” said Nanny, who also had the true witch’s ability to be confidently expert on the basis of no experience whatsoever. “There’s your heavy opera, where basically people sing foreign and it goes like ‘Oh, oh, oh, I am dyin’, oh, I am dyin’,