Soul Music

Mrs. Whitlow?”
    “In bed with a cold, sir.”
    “Not at all surprised.” Ridcully turned to Susan. “People are playing silly burgers, I’m afraid.”
    “I eat only muesli at breakfast,” said Susan.
    “There’s porridge,” said Ridcully. “We do it for the Bursar because it’s not exciting.” He lifted the lid of a tureen. “Yes, still here,” he said. “There’s some things Music With Rocks In can’t change, and one of them’s porridge. Let me help you to a ladleful.”
    They sat on either side of the long table.
    “Well, isn’t this nice,” Ridcully said.
    “Are you laughing at me?” said Susan suspiciously.
    “Not at all. In my experience, what you mostly get in herring nets is herring. But, speaking as a mortal—a customer, as you might say—I’m interested to know why Death is suddenly a teenage girl instead of the animate natomy we’ve come to know and…know.”
    “Natomy?”
    “Another word for skeleton. Probably derived from ‘anatomy.’”
    “He’s my grandfather.”
    “Ah. Yes, you said. And that’s true, is it?”
    “It sounds a bit silly now I come to tell someone else.”
    Ridcully shook his head.
    “You should do my job for five minutes. Then tell me about silly,” he said. He took a pencil out of his pocket and cautiously lifted the top half of the bun on his plate.
    “There’s cheese in this,” he said, accusingly.
    “But he’s gone off somewhere and next thing I know I’ve inherited the whole thing. I mean, I didn’t ask for it! Why me? Having to go around with this silly scythe thing…that’s not what I wanted out of life—”
    “It’s certainly not something you get careers leaflets about,” said Ridcully.
    “Exactly.”
    “And I suppose you’re stuck with it?” said Ridcully.
    “We don’t know where he’s gone. Albert says he’s very depressed about something but he won’t say what.”
    “Dear me. What could depress Death?”
    “Albert seems to think he might do something…silly.”
    “Oh, dear. Not too silly. I hope. Could that be possible? It’d be…morticide, I suppose. Or cidicide.”
    To Susan’s amazement Ridcully patted her hand.
    “But I’m sure we’ll all sleep safer in our beds knowing that you’re in charge,” he said.
    “It’s all so untidy ! Good people dying stupidly, bad people living to a ripe old age…it’s so disorganized . There’s no sense to it. There’s no justice at all. I mean, there’s this boy—”
    “What boy?”
    To Susan’s horror and amazement she found that she was blushing. “Just some boy,” she said. “He was supposed to have died quite ridiculously, and I was going to save him, and then the music saved him, and now it’s getting him into all sorts of trouble and I’ve got to save him anyway and I don’t know why .”
    “Music?” said Ridcully. “Does he play a sort of guitar?”
    “Yes! How did you know?”
    Ridcully sighed. “When you’re a wizard you get an instinct for these things.” He prodded his burger some more. “And lettuce, for some reason. And one very, very thin slice of pickled cucumber.” He let the bread drop.
    “The music is alive,” he said.
    Something that had been knocking on Susan’s attention for the past ten minutes finally used its boots.
    “Oh, my god,” she said.
    “Which one would that be?” said Ridcully politely.
    “It’s so simple ! It strolls into traps! It changes people! They want to play m—I’ve got to go,” said Susan hurriedly. “Er. Thank you for the porridge…”
    “You haven’t eaten any of it,” Ridcully pointed out mildly.
    “No, but…but I had a really good look at it.”
    She vanished. After a little while Ridcully leaned forward and waved his hand vaguely in the space where she had been sitting, just in case.
    Then he reached into his robe and pulled out the poster about the Free Festival. Great big things with tentacles, that was the problem. Get enough magic in one place and the fabric of the universe gave at the heel just like one of the Dean’s socks which, Ridcully noticed, had been in some extremely bright colors the last few days.
    He waved a hand at the maids.
    “Thank you, Molly, Dolly, or Polly,” he said. “You can clear this stuff away.”
    “Yay-yay.”
    “Yes, yes, thank you.”
    Ridcully felt rather alone. He’d quite enjoyed talking to the girl. She seemed to be the only person in the place who wasn’t mildly insane or totally preoccupied with something that he, Ridcully,