Soul Music

gonna settle down.”
    Asphalt peered down into the street.
    “Can you all eat fast?” he said. “Only there’s some men in uniform out here. With shovels.”

    Back in Ankh-Morpork, Mr. Clete was astonished.
    “But we hired you!” he said.
    “The term is ‘retained,’ not ‘hired,’” said Lord Downey, head of the Assassins’ Guild. He looked at Clete with an expression of unconcealed distaste. “Unfortunately, however, we can no longer entertain your contract.”
    “They’re musicians ,” said Clete. “How hard can they be to kill?”
    “My associates are somewhat reluctant to talk about it,” said Lord Downey. “They seem to feel that the clients are protected in some way. Obviously, we will return the balance of your fee.”
    “Protected,” muttered Clete, as they stepped thankfully through the archway of the Assassins’ Guild.
    “Well, I told you what it was like in the Drum when—” Satchelmouth began.
    “That’s just superstition,” snapped Clete. He glanced up at a wall, where three Festival posters flaunted their primary colors.
    “It was stupid of you to think Assassins would be any good outside the city,” muttered Clete.
    “Me? I never—”
    “Get them more than five miles from a decent tailor and a mirror and they go all to pieces,” Clete added.
    He stared at the poster.
    “ Free ,” he muttered. “Did you put it about that anyone who plays at this Festival is right out of the Guild?”
    “Yes, sir. I don’t think they’re worrying, sir. I mean, some of ’em have been getting together, sir. See, they say since there’s a lot more people want to be musicians than we’ll allow in the Guild, then we should—”
    “That’s mob rule!” said Clete. “Banding together to force unacceptable rules on a defenseless city!”
    “Trouble is, sir,” said Satchelmouth, “if there’s a lot of them…if they think of talking to the palace…well, you know the Patrician, sir…”
    Clete nodded glumly. Any Guild was powerful just so long as it self-evidently spoke for its constituency. He thought of hundreds of musicians flocking to the palace. Hundreds of non-Guild musicians…
    The Patrician was a pragmatist. He never tried to fix things that worked. Things that didn’t work, however, got broken.
    The only glimmer of hope was that they’d all be too busy messing around with music to think about the bigger picture. It had certainly worked for Clete.
    Then he remembered that the blasted Dibbler man was involved. Expecting Dibbler not to think about anything concerning money was like expecting rocks not to think about gravity.

    “Hello? Albert?”
    Susan pushed open the kitchen door. The huge room was empty.
    “Albert?”
    She tried upstairs. There was her own room, and there was a corridor of doors that didn’t open and possibly never could—the doors and frames had an all-in-one, molded-together look. Presumably Death had a bedroom, although proverbially Death never slept. Perhaps he just lay in bed reading.
    She tried the handles until she found one that turned.
    Death did have a bedroom.
    He’d got many of the details right. Of course. After all, he saw quite a lot of bedrooms. In the middle of the acres of floor was a large four-poster bed, although when Susan gave it an experimental prod it turned out that the sheets were as solid as rock.
    There was a full-length mirror, and a wardrobe. She had a look inside, just in case there was a selection of robes, but there was nothing in there except a few old shoes in the bottom. *
    A dressing table held a jug-and-basin set with a motif of skulls and omegas, and a variety of bottles and other items.
    She picked them up, one by one. After-shave lotion. Pomade. Breath freshener. A pair of silverbacked hairbrushes.
    It was all rather sad. Death clearly had picked up an idea of what a gentleman should have on his dressing table, without confronting one or two fundamental questions.
    Eventually she found a smaller, narrower staircase.
    “Albert?”
    There was a door at the top.
    “Albert? Anyone?”
    It’s not actually barging in if I call out first , she told herself. She pushed open the door.
    It was a very small room. Really small. It contained a few small sticks of bedroom furniture and a small narrow bed. A small bookcase contained a handful of small, uninteresting-looking books. There was a piece of ancient paper on the floor which, when Susan picked it up, turned out to be covered with numbers, all crossed