Soul Music

wretched rats,” said Cassandra, struggling back to reality. “I heard Miss Butts tell the gardener to put poison down.”
    “Shame,” said Gloria.
    Lady Sarah seemed to have something boiling in her mind.
    “Look, that horse didn’t really stand in midair, did it?” she demanded. “Horses can’t do that!”
    “Then it couldn’t have done it,” said Susan.
    “Hang time,” said Gloria. “That’s all it was. Hang time. Like in basketball. * Bound to be something like that.”
    “Yes.”
    “That’s all it was.”
    “Yes.”
    The human mind has a remarkable ability to heal. So have the trollish and dwarfish minds. Susan looked at them in frank amazement. They’d all seen a horse stand on the air. And now they had carefully pushed it somewhere in their memories and broken off the key in the lock.
    “Just out of interest,” she said, still eyeing the hayrack, “I don’t suppose any of you know where there’s a wizard in this town, do you?”

    “I’ve found us somewhere to play!” said Glod.
    “Where?” said Lias.
    Glod told them.
    “ The Mended Drum? ” said Lias. “Dey throw axes !”
    “We’d be safe there. The Guild won’t play in there,” said Glod.
    “Well, yah, Dey lose members in dere. Dere members lose members,” said Lias.
    “We’ll get five dollars,” said Glod. The troll hesitated.
    “I could use five dollars,” he conceded.
    “One-third of five dollars,” said Glod.
    Lias’s brow creased.
    “Is that more or less than five dollars?” he said.
    “Look, it’ll get us exposure,” said Glod.
    “I don’t want exposure in der Drum,” said Lias. “Exposure’s the last thing I want in der Drum. In der Drum, I want something to hide behind.”
    “All we have to do is play something,” said Glod. “Anything. The new landlord is dead keen on pub entertainment.”
    “I thought they had a one-arm bandit.”
    “Yes, but he got arrested.”

    There’s a floral clock in Quirm. It’s quite a tourist attraction.
    It turns out to be not what they expect.
    Unimaginative municipal authorities throughout the multiverse had made floral clocks, which turn out to be a large clock mechanism buried in a civic flower bed with the face and numbers picked out in bedding plants. *
    But the Quirm clock is simply a round flower bed, filled with twenty-four different types of flower, carefully chosen for the regularity of the opening and closing of their petals…
    As Susan ran past, the Purple Bindweed was opening and Love-in-a-Spin was closing. This meant that it was about half past ten.
    The streets were deserted. Quirm wasn’t a night town. People who came to Quirm looking for a good time went somewhere else. Quirm was so respectable that even dogs asked permission before going to the lavatory.
    At least, the streets were almost deserted. Susan fancied she could hear something following her, fast and pattering, moving and dodging across the cobbles so quickly that it was never more than a suspicion of a shape.
    Susan slowed down as she reached Three Roses Alley.
    Somewhere in Three Roses near the fish shop, Gloria had said. The gels were not encouraged to know about wizards. They did not figure in Miss Butts’s universe.
    The alley looked alien in the darkness. A torch burned in a bracket at one end. It merely made the shadows darker.
    And, halfway along in the gloom, there was a ladder leaning against the wall and a young woman just preparing to climb it. There was something familiar about her.
    She looked around as Susan approached, and seemed quite pleased to see her.
    “Hi,” she said. “Got change of a dollar, miss?”
    “Pardon?”
    “Couple of half-dollars’d do. Half a dollar is the rate. Or I’ll take copper. Anything, really.”
    “Um. Sorry. No. I only get fifty pence a week allowance anyway.”
    “Blast. Oh, well, nothing for it.”
    Insofar as Susan could see, the girl did not appear to be the usual sort of young woman who made her living in alleys. She had a kind of well-scrubbed beefiness about her; she looked like a nurse of the sort who assist doctors whose patients occasionally get a bit confused and declare they’re a bedspread.
    She looked familiar, though.
    The girl took a pair of pliers from a pocket in her dress, shinned up the ladder, and climbed in through an upper window.
    Susan hesitated. The girl had seemed quite businesslike about it all, but in her limited experience people who climbed ladders to get into houses at night were