Read Online Soul Music by Terry Pratchett - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Terry Pratchett
Tags: Fiction, General, Fantasy fiction, Fiction - Fantasy, Fantasy, Discworld (Imaginary place), Fantasy:Humour, Fantasy - General, Fantasy - Series, Wizards, Discworld (Imaginary place) - Fiction, Death (Fictitious character : Pratchett), Rock Music
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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 enough under her feet. She reached down and scratched at the gravel; there was more gravel underneath.
She’d heard that the Tooth Fairy collected teeth. Think about it logically…the only other people who collected any bits of bodies did so for very suspicious purposes, and usually to harm or control other people. The Tooth Fairies must have half the children in the world under their control. And this didn’t look like the house of that sort of person.
The Hogfather apparently lived in some kind of horrible slaughterhouse in the mountains, festooned with sausages and black puddings and painted a terrible blood red.
Which suggested style . A nasty style, but at least style of a sort. This place didn’t have style of any sort.
The Soul Cake Tuesday Duck didn’t apparently have any kind of a home. Nor did Old Man Trouble or the Sandman, as far as she knew.
She walked around the house, which wasn’t much larger than a cottage.
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 enough under her feet. She reached down and scratched at the gravel; there was more gravel underneath.
She’d heard that the Tooth Fairy collected teeth. Think about it logically…the only other people who collected any bits of bodies did so for very suspicious purposes, and usually to harm or control other people. The Tooth Fairies must have half the children in the world under their control. And this didn’t look like the house of that sort of person.
The Hogfather apparently lived in some kind of horrible slaughterhouse in the mountains, festooned with sausages and black puddings and painted a terrible blood red.
Which suggested style . A nasty style, but at least style of a sort. This place didn’t have style of any sort.
The Soul Cake Tuesday Duck didn’t apparently have any kind of a home. Nor did Old Man Trouble or the Sandman, as far as she knew.
She walked around the house, which wasn’t much larger than a cottage.
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