Reaper Man (9 page)

“Oh,” said the Dean.

“If it comes past again, try to trip it up so’s I can have a look at the label.”

A bedsheet squeezed through an upper window and flapped away across the rooftops.

“Y’know,” said the Lecturer in Recent Runes, trying to keep his voice calm and relaxed, “I don’t think this is magic. It doesn’t
feel
like magic.”

The Senior Wrangler fished in one of the deep pockets of his robe. There was a muffled clanking and rustling and the occasional croak. Eventually he produced a dark blue glass cube. It had a dial on the front.

“You carry one of
them
around in your pocket?” said the Dean. “A valuable instrument like that?”

“What the hell is it?” said Ridcully.

“Amazingly sensitive magical measuring device,” said the Dean. “Measures the density of a magical field. A thaumometer.”

The Senior Wrangler proudly held the cube aloft and pressed a button on the side.

A needle on the dial wobbled around a little bit and stopped.

“See?” said the Senior Wrangler. “Just natural background, representing no hazard to the public.”

“Speak up,” said the Archchancellor. “I can’t hear you above the noise.”

Crashes and screams rose from the houses on either side of the street.

Mrs. Evadne Cake was a medium, verging on small.

It wasn’t a demanding job. Not many people who died in Ankh-Morpork showed much inclination to chat to their surviving relatives. Put as many mystic dimensions between you and them as possible, that was their motto. She filled in between engagements with dressmaking and church work—any church. Mrs. Cake was very keen on religion, at least on Mrs. Cake’s terms.

Evadne Cake was not one of those bead-curtain-and-incense mediums, partly because she didn’t hold with incense but mainly because she was actually very good at her profession. A good conjuror can astound you with a simple box of matches and a perfectly ordinary deck of cards, if you would care to examine them, sir, you will see they are a perfectly ordinary deck of cards—he doesn’t need the finger-nipping folding tables and complicated collapsible top hats of lesser prestidigitators. And, in the same way, Mrs. Cake didn’t need much in the way of props. Even the industrial-grade crystal ball was only there as a sop to her customers. Mrs. Cake could actually read the future in a bowl of porridge.
*
She could have a revelation in a panful of frying bacon. She had spent a lifetime dabbling in the spirit world, except that in Evadne’s case dabbling wasn’t really apposite. She wasn’t the dabbling kind. It was more a case of stamping into the spirit world and demanding to see the manager.

And, while making her breakfast and cutting up dogfood for Ludmilla, she started to hear voices.

They were very faint. It wasn’t that they were on the verge of hearing, because they were the kind of voices that ordinary ears can’t hear. They were inside her head.

…
watch what you’re doing…where am I…quit shoving, there
…

And then they faded again.

They were replaced by a squeaking noise from the next room. She pushed aside her boiled egg and waddled through the bead curtain.

The sound was coming from under the severe, no-nonsense hessian cover of her crystal ball.

Evadne went back into the kitchen and selected a heavy frying pan. She waved it through the air once or twice, getting the heft of it, and then crept toward the crystal under its hood.

Raising the pan ready to swat anything unpleasant, she twitched aside the cover.

The ball was turning slowly around and around on its stand.

Evadne watched it for a while. Then she drew the curtains, eased her weight down on the chair, took a deep breath and said, “Is there anybody there?”

Most of the ceiling fell in.

After several minutes and a certain amount of struggle Mrs. Cake managed to get her head free.

“Ludmilla!”

There were soft footsteps in the passageway and then something came in from the backyard. It was clearly, even attractively female, in general shape, and wore a perfectly ordinary dress. It was also apparently suffering from a case of superfluous hair that not all the delicate pink razors in the world could erase. Also, teeth and fingernails were being worn long this season. You expected the whole thing to growl, but it spoke in a pleasant and definitely human voice.

“Mother?”

“Oi’m under ’ere.”

The fearsome Ludmilla lifted up a huge joist and tossed it lightly aside. “What happened? Didn’t you have your premonition switched on?”

“Oi turned it off to speak to the baker. Cor, that gave me a turn.”

“I’ll make you a cup of tea, shall I?”

“Now then, you know you always crushes teacups when it’s your Time.”

“I’m getting better at it,” said Ludmilla.

“There’s a good girl, but I’ll do it myself, thanks all the same.”

Mrs. Cake stood up, brushed the plaster dust off her apron, and said: “They shouted! They shouted! All at once!”

Modo the University gardener was weeding a rose bed when the ancient, velvet lawn beside him heaved and sprouted a hardy perennial Windle Poons, who blinked in the light.

“Is that you, Modo?”

“That’s right, Mr. Poons,” said the dwarf. “Shall I give you a hand up?”

“I think I can manage, thank you.”

“I’ve got a shovel in the shed, if you like.”

“No, it’s perfectly all right.” Windle pulled himself out of the grass and brushed the soil off the remains of his robe. “Sorry about your lawn,” he added, looking down at the hole.

“Don’t mention it, Mr. Poons.”

“Did it take long to get it looking like that?”

“About five hundred years, I think.”

“Gosh, I am sorry. I was aiming for the cellars, but I seem to have lost my bearings.”

“Don’t you worry about that, Mr. Poons,” said the dwarf cheerfully. “Everything’s growing like crazy anyway. I’ll fill it in this afternoon and put some more seed down and five hundred years will just zoom past, you wait and see.”

“The way things are going, I probably will,” said Windle moodily. He looked around. “Is the Archchancellor here?” he said.

“I saw them all going up to the palace,” said the gardener.

“Then I think I’ll just go and have a quick bath and a change of clothes. I wouldn’t want to disturb anyone.”

“I heard you wasn’t just dead but buried too,” said the gardener, as Windle lurched off.

“That’s right.”

“Can’t keep a good man down, eh?”

Windle turned back.

“By the way…where’s Elm Street?”

Modo scratched an ear. “Isn’t it that one off Treacle Mine Road?”

“Oh, yes. I remember.”

Modo went back to his weeding.

The circular nature of Windle Poons’ death didn’t bother him much. After all, trees looked dead in the winter, burst forth again every spring. Dried up old seeds went in the ground, fresh young plants sprang up. Practically nothing ever died for long. Take compost, for example.

Modo believed in compost with the same passion that other people believed in gods. His compost heaps heaved and fermented and glowed faintly in the dark, perhaps because of the mysterious and possibly illegal ingredients Modo fed them, although nothing had ever been proved and, anyway, no one was about to dig into one to see what was in it.

All dead stuff, but somehow alive. And it certainly grew roses. The Senior Wrangler had explained to Modo that his roses grew so big because it was a miracle of existence, but Modo privately thought that they just wanted to get as far away from the compost as possible.

The heaps were in for a treat tonight. The weeds were really doing well. He’d never known plants to grow so fast and luxuriantly. It must be all the compost, Modo thought.

By the time the wizards reached the palace it was in uproar. Pieces of furniture were gliding across the ceiling. A shoal of cutlery, like silvery minnows in mid-air, flashed past the Archchancellor and dived away down a corridor. The place seemed to be in the grip of a selective and tidy-minded hurricane.

Other people had already arrived. They included a group dressed very like the wizards in many ways, although there were important differences to the trained eye.

“Priests?” said the Dean. “Here? Before
us
?”

The two groups began very surreptitiously to adopt positions that left their hands free.

“What good are they?” said the Senior Wrangler.

There was a noticeable drop in metaphorical temperature.

A carpet undulated past.

The Archchancellor met the gaze of the enormous Chief Priest of Blind Io who, as senior priest of the senior god in the Discworld’s rambling pantheon, was the nearest thing Ankh-Morpork had to a spokesman on religious affairs.

“Credulous fools,” muttered the Senior Wrangler.

“Godless tinkerers,” said a small acolyte, peering out from behind the Chief Priest’s bulk.

“Gullible idiots!”

“Atheistic scum!”

“Servile morons!”

“Childish conjurors!”

“Bloodthirsty priests!”

“Interfering wizards!”

Ridcully raised an eyebrow. The Chief Priest nodded very slightly.

They left the two groups hurling imprecations at each other from a safe distance and strolled nonchalantly toward a comparatively quiet part of the room where, beside a statue of one of the Patrician’s predecessors, they turned and faced one another again.

“So…how are things in the godbothering business?” said Ridcully.

“We do our humble best. How is the dangerous meddling with things man was not meant to understand?”

“Pretty fair. Pretty fair.” Ridcully removed his hat and fished inside the pointy bit. “Can I offer you a drop of something?”

“Alcohol is a snare for the spirit. Would you care for a cigarette? I believe you people indulge.”

“Not me. If I was to tell you what that stuff does to your lungs—”

Ridcully unscrewed the very tip of his hat and poured a generous measure of brandy into it.

“So,” he said, “what’s happening?”

“We had an altar float up into the air and drop on us.”

“A chandelier unscrewed itself.
Everything’s
unscrewing itself. You know, I saw a suit of clothes run past on the way here? Two pairs of pants for seven dollars!”

“Hmm. Did you see the label?”

“Everything’s throbbing, too. Notice the way everything’s throbbing?”

“We thought it was you people.”

“It’s not magic. I suppose the gods aren’t more than usually unhappy?”

“Apparently not.”

Behind them, the priests and the wizards were screaming chin to chin.

The Chief Priest moved a little closer.

“I think I could be strong enough to master and defeat just a little snare,” he said. “I haven’t felt like this since Mrs. Cake was one of my flock.”

“Mrs. Cake? What’s a Mrs. Cake?”

“You have…ghastly Things from the Dungeon Dimensions and things, yes? Terrible hazards of your ungodly profession?” said the Chief Priest.

“Yes.”

“We have someone called Mrs. Cake.”

Ridcully gave him an enquiring look.

“Don’t ask,” said the priest, shuddering. “Just be grateful you’ll never have to find out.”

Ridcully silently passed him the brandy.

“Just between the two of us,” said the priest, “have you got any ideas about all this? The guards are trying to dig his lordship out. You know he’ll want answers. I’m not even certain I know the questions.”

“Not magic and not gods,” said Ridcully. “Can I have the snare back? Thank you. Not magic and not gods. That doesn’t leave us much, does it?”

“I suppose there’s not some kind of magic you don’t know about?”

“If there is, we don’t know about it.”

“Fair enough,” the priest conceded.

“I suppose it’s not the gods up to a bit of ungodliness on the side?” said Ridcully, clutching at one last straw. “A couple of ’em had a bit of a tiff or something? Messing around with golden apples or something?”

“It’s very quiet on the god front right now,” said the Chief Priest. His eyes glazed as he spoke, apparently reading from a script inside his head. “Hyperopia, goddess of shoes, thinks that Sandelfon, god of corridors, is the long-lost twin brother of Grune, god of unseasonal fruit. Who put the goat in the bed of Offler, the Crocodile God? Is Offler forging an alliance with Seven-handed Sek? Meanwhile, Hoki the Jokester is up to his old tricks—”

“Yes, yes, all right,” said Ridcully. “I’ve never been able to get interested in all that stuff, myself.”

Behind them, the Dean was trying to prevent the Lecturer in Recent Runes from attempting to turn the priest of Offler the Crocodile God into a set of matching suitcases, and the Bursar had a bad nose-bleed from a lucky blow with a thurible.

“What we’ve got to present here,” said Ridcully, “is a united front. Right?”

“Agreed,” said the Chief Priest.

“Right. For now.”

A small rug sinewaved past at eye level. The Chief Priest handed back the brandy bottle.

“Incidentally, mother says you haven’t written lately,” he said.

“Yeah…” The other wizards would have been surprised at their Archchancellor’s look of contrite embarrassment. “I’ve been busy. You know how it is.”

“She said to be sure to remind you she’s expecting both of us over for lunch on Hogswatchday.”

“I haven’t forgotten,” said Ridcully, glumly. “I’m looking forward to it.” He turned to the mêlée behind them.

“Cut it out, you fellows,” he said.

“Brethren! Desist!” bellowed the Chief Priest.

The Senior Wrangler released his grip on the head of the high priest of the Cult of Hinki. A couple of cu-rates stopped kicking the Bursar. There was a general adjustment of clothing, a finding of hats and a bout of embarrassed coughing.

“That’s better,” said Ridcully. “Now then, his Eminence the Chief Priest and myself have decided—”

The Dean glowered at a very small bishop.

“He kicked me! You kicked me!”

“Ooo! I never did, my son.”

“You bloody well did,” the Dean hissed. “Sideways, so they wouldn’t see!”