Soul Music

across the stones until it came up against another, slightly larger, bone.
    A third bone tumbled off a rock and joined them.
    In the semidarkness there was a rattling among the stones, and a handful of little white shapes bounced and tumbled between the rocks until a hand, index finger reaching for the sky, rose into the night.
    Then there was a series of deeper, more hollow noises as longer, larger things skipped end over end through the gloom.

    “I was going to make it better!” shouted Susan. “What’s the good of being Death if you have to obey idiot rules all the time?”
    BRING THEM BACK.
    As Susan turned, a toe bone hopped across the mud and scuttled into place somewhere under Death’s robe.
    He strode forward, snatched the scythe from Susan and, in one movement, whirled it over his head and smashed it on a rock. The blade shattered.
    He reached down and picked up a fragment. It glittered in his fingers like a tiny star of blue ice.
    IT WAS NOT A REQUEST.
    When the music spoke, the falling snow danced.
    You can’t kill me .
    Death reached into his robe, and brought out the guitar. Bits of it had broken off, but this didn’t matter; the shape flickered in the air. The strings glowed.
    Death took a stance that Crash would have died to achieve, and raised one hand. In his fingers the sliver glinted. If light could have made a noise, it would have flashed ting .
    He wanted to be the greatest musician in the world. There has to be a law. Destiny runs its course .
    For once, Death appeared not to smile.
    He brought his hand down on the strings.
    There was no sound.
    There was, instead, a cessation of sound, the end of a noise which Susan realized she’d been hearing all along. All the time. All her life. A kind of sound you never notice until it stops…
    The strings were still.
    There are millions of chords. There are millions of numbers. And everyone forgets the one that is a zero. But without the zero, numbers are just arithmetic. Without the empty chord, music is just noise.
    Death played the empty chord.
    The beat slowed. And began to weaken. The universe spun on, every atom of it. But soon the whirling would end and the dancers would look around and wonder what do next.
    It’s not time for THAT! Play something else!
    I CANNOT.
    Death nodded toward Buddy.
    BUT HE CAN.
    He threw the guitar toward Buddy. It passed right through him.
    Susan ran and snatched it up, held it out.
    “You’ve got to take it! You’ve got to play! You’ve got to start the music again!”
    She strummed frantically at the strings. Buddy winced.
    “Please!” she shouted. “Don’t fade away!”
    The music screamed in her head.
    Buddy managed to grasp the guitar, but stood looking at it as if he’d never seen it before.
    “What’ll happen if he doesn’t play it?” said Glod.
    “You’ll all die in the wreckage!”
    AND THEN, said Death, THE MUSIC WILL DIE. AND THE DANCE WILL END. THE WHOLE DANCE.
    The ghostly dwarf gave a cough.
    “We’re getting paid for this number, right?” he said.
    YOU’LL GET THE UNIVERSE.
    “And free beer?”
    Buddy held the guitar to him. His eyes met Susan’s.
    He raised his hand, and played.
    The single chord rang out across the gorge, and echoed back with strange harmonics.
    THANK YOU, said Death. He stepped forward and took the guitar.
    He moved suddenly, and smashed the thing against a rock. The strings parted, and something accelerated away, toward the snow and the stars.
    Death looked at the wreckage with some satisfaction.
    NOW THAT’S MUSIC WITH ROCKS IN.
    He snapped his fingers.

    The moon rose over Ankh-Morpork.
    The park was deserted. The silver light flowed over the wreckage of the stage, and the mud and half-consumed sausages that marked the spot where the audience had been. Here and there it glinted off broken sound traps.
    After a while some of the mud sat up and spat out some more mud.
    “Crash? Jimbo? Scum?” it said.
    “Is that you, Noddy?” said a sad shape hanging from one of the stage’s few remaining beams.
    The mud pulled some more mud out of its ears. “Right! Where’s Scum?”
    “I think they threw him into the lake.”
    “Is Crash alive?”
    There was a groan from under a heap of wreckage.
    “Pity,” said Noddy, with feeling.
    A figure emerged out of the shadows, squelching.
    Crash half crawled, half fell out of the rubble.
    “You’fe got to admit,” he mumbled, because at some stage in the performance a guitar had hit him in the teeth, “that