Free Soul Music by Terry Pratchett Page A

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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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 some time 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.
    â€˜It was very . . . unusual,’ she said. ‘And that’s it? You carried me all the way up here for takeaway 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.
    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. Definitely. Whoever lived here had no taste at all.
    She found the front door. It was black, with a knocker in the shape of an omega.
    Susan reached for it, but the door opened by itself.
    And the hall stretched away in front of her, far bigger than the outside of the house could possibly contain. She could distantly make out a stairway wide enough for the tap-dancing finale in a musical.
    There was something else wrong with the perspective. There clearly was a wall a long way off but, at the same time, it looked as though it was painted in the air a mere fifteen feet or so away. It was as if distance was optional.
    There was a large clock against one wall. Its slow tick filled the immense space.
    There’s a room , she thought. I remember the room of whispers .
    Doors lined the hall at wide intervals. Or short intervals, if you looked at it another way.
    She tried to walk towards the nearest one, and