Free Soul Music by Terry Pratchett Page B

gave up after a few wildly teetering steps. Finally she managed to reach it by taking aim and then shutting her eyes.
    The door was at one and the same time about normal human size and immensely big. There was a highly ornate frame around it, with a skull-and-bones motif.
    She pushed the door open.
    This room could have housed a small town.
    A small area of carpet occupied the middle distance, no more than a hectare in size. It took Susan several minutes to reach the edge.
    It was a room within a room. There was a large, heavy-looking desk on a raised dais, with a leather swivel chair behind it. There was a large model of the Discworld, on a sort of ornament made of four elephants standing on the shell of a turtle. There were several bookshelves, the large volumes piled in the haphazard fashion of people who’re far too busy using the books ever to arrange them properly. There was even a window, hanging in the air a few feet above the ground.
    But there were no walls. There was nothing between the edge of the carpet and the walls of the greater room except floor, and even that was far too precise a word for it. It didn’t look like rock and it certainly wasn’t wood. It made no sound when Susan walked on it. It was simply surface, in the purely geometrical sense.
    The carpet had a skull-and-bones pattern.
    It was also black. Everything was black, or a shade of grey. Here and there a tint suggested a very deep purple or ocean-depth blue.
    In the distance, towards the walls of the greater room, the metaroom or whatever it was, there was the suggestion of . . . something. Something was casting complicated shadows, too far away to be clearly seen.
    Susan got up on to the dais.
    There was something odd about the things around her. Of course, there was everything odd about the things around her, but it was a huge major oddness that was simply in their nature. She could ignore it. But there was an oddness on a human level. Everything was just slightly wrong, as if it had been made by someone who hadn’t fully comprehended its purpose.
    There was a blotter on the oversize desk but it was part of it, fused to the surface. The drawers were just raised areas of wood, impossible to open. Whoever had made the desk had seen desks, but hadn’t understood deskishness.
    There was even some sort of desk ornament. It was just a slab of lead, with a thread hanging down one side and a shiny round metal ball on the end of the thread. If you raised the ball it swung down and thumped into the lead, just once.
    She didn’t try to sit in the chair. There was a deep pit in the leather. Someone had spent a lot of time sitting there.
    She glanced at the spines of the books. They were in a language she couldn’t understand.
    She trekked back to the distant door, went out into the hall, and tried the next door. A suspicion was beginning to form in her mind.
    The door led to another huge room, but this one was full of shelves, floor to distant, cloud-hung ceiling. Every shelf was lined with hourglasses.
    The sand pouring from the past to the future filled the room with a sound like surf, a noise made up of a billion small sounds.
    Susan walked between the shelves. It was like being in a crowd.
    Her eye was caught by a movement on a nearby shelf. In most of the hourglasses the falling sand was a solid silver line but in this one, just as she watched, the line vanished. The last grain of sand tumbled into the bottom bulb.
    The hourglass vanished with a small ‘pop’.
    A moment later another one appeared in its place, with the faintest of ‘pings’. In front of her eyes, sand began to fall . . .
    And she was aware that this process was going on all over the room. Old hourglasses vanished, new ones took their place.
    She knew about this, too.
    She reached out and picked up a glass, bit her lip thoughtfully, and started to turn the thing upside down . . .
    SQUEAK !
    She spun around. The Death