Soul Music

moonlight silver. A checkerboard pattern of fields strobed by in the moonlight, with the occasional light of an isolated farm. Ragged clouds whipped past and away.
    Away on her left the Ramtop Mountains were a cold white wall. On her right, the Rim Ocean carried a pathway to the moon. There was no wind, or even a great sensation of speed—just the land flashing by, and the long slow strides of Binky.
    And then someone spilled gold on the night. Clouds parted in front of her and there, spread below, was Ankh-Morpork—a city containing more Peril than even Miss Butts could imagine.
    Torchlight outlined a pattern of streets into which Quirm would have not only been lost, but mugged and pushed into the river as well.
    Binky cantered easily over the rooftops. Susan could hear the sounds of the streets, even individual voices, but there was also the great roar of the city, like some kind of insect hive. Upper windows drifted by, each one a glow of candlelight.
    The horse dropped through the smoky air and landed neatly and at the trot in an alley, which was otherwise empty except for a closed door and a sign with a torch over it.
    Susan read:

    CURRY GARDENS
    K ITCHREN E NTLANCE —K EEP O UT . R IS M EANS Y OU .

    Binky seemed to be waiting for something.
    Susan had expected a more exotic destination.
    She knew about curry. They had curry at school, under the name of Bogey and Rice. It was yellow. There were soggy raisins and peas in it.
    Binky whinnied, and stamped a hoof.
    A hatch in the door flew open. Susan got a brief impression of a face against the fiery atmosphere of the kitchen.
    “Ooorrrh, nooorrrh! Binkorrr! ”
    The hatch slammed shut again.
    Obviously something was meant to happen.
    She stared at a menu nailed to the wall. It was misspelled, of course, because the menu of the folkier kind of restaurant always has to have misspellings in it, so that customers can be lured into a false sense of superiority. She couldn’t recognize the names of most of the dishes, which included:

    Curry with Vegetable 8p
    Curry with Sweat, and Sore Balls of Pig 10p
    Curry with Sweer and Sour, Ball of Fish 10p
    Curry with Meat 10p
    Curry with Named Meat 15p
    Extra Curry 5p
    Porn cracker 4p

    E AT I T H ERE O R ,
    T AKE I T A WAY

    The hatch snapped open again and a large brown bag of allegedly but not really waterproof paper was dumped on the little ledge in front of it. Then the hatch slammed shut again.
    Susan reached out carefully. The smell rising from the bag had a sort of thermic lance quality that warned against metal cutlery. But tea had been a long time ago.
    She realized she didn’t have any money on her. On the other hand, no one had asked her for any. But the world would go to wrack and ruin if people didn’t recognize their responsibilities.
    She leaned forward and knocked on the door
    “Excuse me…don’t you want anything—?”
    There was shouting and a crash from inside, as if half a dozen people were fighting to get under the same table.
    “Oh. How nice. Thank you. Thank you very much,” said Susan, politely.
    Binky walked away, slowly. This time there was no bunched leap of muscle power—he trotted into the air carefully, as if sometime in the past he’d been scolded for spilling something.
    Susan tried the curry several hundred feet above the speeding landscape, and then threw it away as politely as possible.
    “It was very…unusual,” she said. “And that’s it? You carried me all the way up here for take-away food?”
    The ground skimmed past faster, and it crept over her that the horse was going a lot faster now, a full gallop instead of the easy canter. A bunching of muscle…
    …and then the sky ahead of her erupted blue for a moment.
    Behind her, unseen because light was standing around red with embarrassment, asking itself what had happened, a pair of hoofprints burned in the air for a moment and then faded.

    It was a landscape, hanging in space.
    There was a squat little house, with a garden around it. There were fields, and distant mountains. Susan stared at it as Binky slowed.
    There was no depth. As the horse swung around for a landing, the landscape was revealed as a mere surface, a thin shaped film of…existence…imposed on nothingness.
    She expected it to tear when the horse landed, but there was only a faint crunch and a scatter of gravel.
    Binky trotted around the house and into the stable yard, where he stood and waited.
    Susan got off, gingerly. The ground felt solid