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Российское респираторное общество 13 страница






“Anyway... what about zombies?”

“... you couldn’t tell from the taste, I thought he was a really good sausage-maker...”

“What were you saying about zombies?”

“... funny how you can know someone for years and then find out they’ve got feet of clay...”

“Zombies...” said Cliff patiently.

“What? Oh. Yes. I mean he acts like one.” Glod recalled some of the zombies in AnkhMorpork. “At least, like zombies are supposed to act.”

“Yep. I know what you mean.”

“And we both know why.”

“Yep. Er. Why?”

“The guitar.”

“Oh, that. Yeah.”

“When we’re on stage, that thing is in charge—”

In the silence of the room, the guitar lay in the dark by Buddy’s bed and its strings vibrated gently to the sound of the dwarf’s voice...

“OK, so what do we do about it?” said Cliff.

“It’s made of wood. Ten seconds with an axe, no more problem.”

“I’m not sure. That ain’t no ordinary instrument.”

“He was a nice kid when we met him. For a human,” said Glod.

“So what do we do? I don’t think we could get it off him.”

“Maybe we could get him to—”

The dwarf paused. He was aware of a fuzzy echo to his voice.

“That damn thing is listening to us!” he hissed. “Let’s go outside.”

They ended up out in the road.

“Can’t see how it can listen,” said Cliff. “An instrument’s for listening to.”

“The strings listen,” said Glod, flatly. “That is not an ordinary instrument.”

Cliff shrugged. “Dere’s one way we could find out,” he said.

Early morning fog filled the streets. Around the University it was sculpted into curious forms by the slight magical background radiation. Strange-shaped things moved across the damp cobbles.

Two of them were Glod and Cliff.

“Right,” said the dwarf. “Here we are.”

He looked up at a blank wall.

“I knew it!” he said. “Didn’t I say? Magic! How many times have we heard this story? There’s a mysterious shop no-one’s ever seen before, and someone goes in and buys some rusty old curio, and it turns out to—”

“Glod—”

“—some kind of talisman or a bottle full of genie, and then when there’s trouble they go back and the shop—”

“Glod-?”

“—has mysteriously disappeared and gone back to whatever dimension it came from- yes, what is it?”

“You’re on the wrong side of the road. It’s over here.”

Glod glared at the blank wall, and then turned and stomped across the road.

“It was a mistake anyone could have made.”

“Yep.”

“It doesn’t invalidate anything I said.”

Glod rattled the door and, to his surprise, found it was unlocked.

“It’s gone two in the morning! What kind of music shop is open at two in the morning?” Glod struck a match.

The dusty graveyard of old instruments loomed around them. It looked as though a number of prehistoric animals had been caught in a flash flood and then fossilized.

“What’s that one that looks like a serpent?” whispered Cliff.

“It’s called a Serpent.”

Glod was uneasy. He’d spent most of his life as a musician. He hated the sight of dead instruments, and these were dead. They didn’t belong to anyone. No-one played them. They were like bodies without life, people without souls. Something they had contained had gone. Every one of them represented a musician down on his luck.

There was a pool of light in a grove of bassoons. The old lady was deeply asleep in a rocking chair, with a tangle of knitting on her lap and a shawl around her shoulders.

“Glod?”

Glod jumped. “Yes? What?”

“Why are we here? We know the place exists now—”

Grab some ceiling, hooligans!”

Glod blinked at the crossbow bolt pricking the end of his nose, and raised his hands. The old lady had gone from asleep to firing stance without apparently passing through any intermediate stage.

“This is the best I can do,” he said. “Er... the door wasn’t locked, you see, and...”

“So you thought you could rob a poor defenceless old lady?”

“Not at all, not at all, in fact we—”

“I belongs to the Neighbourhood Witch scheme, I do! One word from me and you’ll be hopping around looking for some princess with an amphibian fixation—”

“I think dis has gone far enough,” said Cliff. He reached down and his huge hand closed over the bow. He squeezed. Bits of wood oozed between his fingers.

“We’re quite harmless,” he said. “We’ve come about the instrument you sold our friend last week.”

“Are you the Watch?”

Glod bowed.

“No, ma'am. We’re musicians.”

“That’s supposed to make me feel better, is it? What instrument are you talking about?”

“A kind of guitar.”

The old woman put her head on one side. Her eyes narrowed.

“I won’t take it back, you know,” she said. “It was sold fair “n' square. Good working condition, too.”

“We just want to know where you got it from.”

“Never got it from nowhere,” said the old lady. “It’s always been here. Don’t blow that!”

Glod nearly dropped the flute he’d nervously picked up from the debris.

“... or we’ll be knee deep in rats,” said the old lady. She turned back to Cliff. “It’s always been here,” she repeated.

“It’s got a one chalked on it,” said Glod.

“It’s always been here,” said the woman. “Ever since I’ve had the shop.”

“Who brought it in?”

“How should I know? I never asks them their name. People don’t like that. They just gets the number.”

Glod looked at the flute. There was a yellowing tag attached to it, on which the number 431 had been scrawled.

He stared along the shelves behind the makeshift counter. There was a pink conch shell. That had a number on it, too. He moistened his lips and reached out...

“If you blow that, you’d just better have a sacrificial virgin and a big cauldron of breadfruit and turtle meat standing by,” said the old lady.

There was a trumpet next to it. It looked amazingly untarnished.

“And this one?” he said. “It’ll make the world end and the sky fall on me if I give it a tootle, will it?”

“Interesting you should say that,” said the old lady.

Glod lowered his hand, and then something else caught his eye.

“Good grief,” he said, “is that still here? I’d forgotten about that...”

“What is it?” said Cliff, and then looked where Glod was pointing.

“That?”

“We’ve got some money. Why not?”

“Yeah. It might help. But you know what Buddy said. We’d never be able to find—”

“It’s a big city. If you can’t find it in Ankh-Morpork, you can’t find it anywhere.”

Glod picked up half a drumstick and looked thoughtfully at a gong half buried in a pile of musicstands.

“I shouldn’t,” said the old lady. “Not if you don’t want seven hundred and seventy-seven skeletal warriors springing out of the earth.”

Glod pointed.

“We’ll take this.”

“Two dollars.”

“Hey, why should, we pay anything? It’s not as though it’s yours—”

“Pay up,” said Cliff with a sigh. “Don’t negotiate.”

Glod handed over the money with bad grace, snatched the bag the old lady gave him, and strutted out of the shop.

“Fascinating stock you have here,” said Cliff, staring at the gong.

The old lady shrugged.

“My friend’s a bit annoyed because he thought you one of dose mysterious shops you hear about in folk tales,” Cliff went on. “You know, here today and gone tomorrow. He was looking for you on der other side of der road, haha!”

“Sounds daft to me,” said the old lady, in a voice to discourage any further unseemly levity.

Cliff glanced at the gong again, shrugged, and followed Glod.

The woman waited until their footsteps had died away in the fog.

Then she opened the door and peered up and down the street. Apparently satisfied by its abundance of emptiness, she went back to her counter and reached for a curious lever underneath. Her eyes glowed green for a moment.

“Forget my own head next,” she said, and pulled.

There was a grinding of hidden machinery.

The shop vanished. A moment later, it reappeared on the other side of the road.

Buddy lay looking at the ceiling.

How did food taste? It was hard to remember. He’d eaten meals over the last few days, he must have done, but he couldn’t remember the taste. He couldn’t remember much of anything, except the playing. Glod and rest of them sounded as if they were talking through a thick gauze.

Asphalt had wandered off somewhere.

He swung himself off the hard bed and padded over to the window.

The Shades of Ankh-Morpork were just visible in the grey, cheap-rate light before dawn. A breeze blew in through the open window.

When he turned around, there was a young woman standing in the middle of the floor.

She put her finger to her lips.

“Don’t go shouting to the little troll,” she said. “He’s downstairs having some supper. Anyway, he wouldn’t be able to see me.”

“Are you my muse?”

Susan frowned.

“I think I know what you mean,” she said. “I’ve seen pictures. There were eight of them, led by... um... Cantaloupe. They’re supposed to protect people. The Ephebians believe they inspire musicians and artists, but of course they don’t exi—” She paused, and made a conscientious correction. “At least, I’ve never met them. My name’s Susan. I’m here because...”

Her voice trailed away.

“Cantaloupe?” said Buddy. “I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Cantaloupe.”

“Whatever.”

“How did you get in here?”

“I’m... Look, sit down. Right. Well... you know how some things... like the Muses, as you said... people think that some things are represented by people?”

A look of temporary understanding informed Buddy’s perplexed features.

“Like the Hogfather representing the spirit of the midwinter festival?” he said.

“Right. Well... I’m sort of in that business,” said Susan. “It doesn’t exactly matter what I do.”

“You mean you’re not human?”

“Oh, yes. But I’m... doing a job. I suppose thinking of me as a Muse is probably as good as anything. And I’m here to warn you.”

“A Muse for Music With Rocks In?”

“Not really, but listen... hey, are you all right?”

“Don’t know.”

“You looked all washed-out. Listen. The music is dangerous—”

Buddy shrugged. “Oh, you mean the Guild of Musicians. Mr Dibbler says not to worry about that. We’re leaving the city for—”

Susan stamped forward and picked up the guitar.

“I mean this!”

The strings moved and whined under her hand.

“Don’t touch that!”

“It’s taken you over,” said Susan, throwing it on to the bed. Buddy grabbed it and played a chord.

“I know what you’re going to say,” he said. “Everyone says it. The other two think it’s evil. But it’s not!”

“It might not be evil, but it’s not right! Not here, not now.”

“Yes, but I can handle it.”

“You can’t handle it. It handles you.”

“Anyway, who are you to tell me all this? I don’t have to take lessons from a tooth fairy!”

“Listen, it’ll kill you! I’m sure of it!”

“So I’m supposed to stop playing, then?”

Susan hesitated.

“Well, not exactly... because then—”

“Well, I don’t have to listen to mysterious occult women! You probably don’t even exist! So you can just fly back to your magic castle, OK?”

Susan was temporarily speechless. She was reconciled to the irredeemable dumbness of most of mankind, particularly the section of it that stood upright and shaved in the mornings, but she was also affronted. No-one had ever talked to Death like this. At least, not for long.

“All right,” she said, reaching out and touching his arm. “But you’ll see me again, and... and you won’t like it much! Because, let me tell you, I happen to be—”

Her expression changed. She felt the sensation of falling backwards while standing still; the room drifted past her and away into darkness, pinwheeling around Buddy’s horrified face.

The darkness exploded, and there was light.

Dribbly candle light.

Buddy waved his hand through the empty space where Susan had been.

“Are you still here? Where did you go? Who are you?

Cliff looked around.

“Thought I heard something,” he muttered. “Here, you do know, don’t you, dat some of dose instruments weren’t just ordin—”

“I know,” said Glod. “I wish I’d had a go on the rat pipe. I’m hungry again.”

“I mean they were mythi—”

“Yes.”

“So how come dey end up in a second-hand music shop?”

“Ain’t you ever hocked your stones?”

“Oh, sure,” said Cliff. “Everyone does, some time or other, you know that. Sometimes it’s all you’ve got if you want to see another meal.”

“There you are, then. You said it. It’s something every working musician’s going to do, sooner or later.”

“Yeah, but the thing that Buddy... I mean, it’s got the number one on it...”

“Yes.”

Glod peered up at a street-sign.

“"Cunning Artificers",” he said. “Here we are. Look, half the workshops are still open even at this time of night.” He shifted the sack. Something cracked inside it. “You knock that side, I’ll knock this.”

“Yeah, all right... but, I mean, number one. Even the conch shell was number fifty-two. Who used to own the guitar?”

“Don’t know,” said Glod, knocking on the first door, “but I hope they never come back for it.”

“And that,” said Ridcully, “is the Rite of AshkEnte. Quite easily done. You have to use a fresh egg, though.”

Susan blinked.

There was a circle drawn on the floor. Strange unearthly shapes surrounded it, although when she adjusted her mind set she realized that these were perfectly ordinary students.

“Who are you?” she said. “What’s this place? Let me go this instant!”

She strode across the circle and rebounded from an invisible wall.

The students were staring at her in the manner of those who have heard of the species “female' but have never expected to get this close to one.

“I demand that you let me go!” She glared at Ridcully. “Aren’t you the wizard I saw last night?”

“That’s right,” said Ridcully, “and this is the Rite of AshkEnte. It calls Death into the circle and he—or as it may be, in this case, she —can’t leave until we say so. There’s a lot of stuff in this book here spelled with funny long esses and it goes on about abjuring and conjuration, but it’s all show, really. Once you’re in, you’re in. I must say your predecessor—hah, bit of a pun there—was a lot more gracious about it.”

Susan glared. The circle played tricks with her ideas of space. It seemed most unfair.

“Why have you summoned me, then?” she said.

“That’s better. That’s more according to the script,” said Ridcully. “We are allowed to ask you questions, you see. And you have to answer them. Truthfully.”

“Well?”

“Would you like to sit down? A glass of something?”

“No.”

“Just as you like. This new music... tell us about it.” “You summoned Death to ask that?”

“I’m not sure who we’ve summoned,” said Ridcully. “It is really alive?”

“I... think so.”

“Does it live anywhere?”

“It seems to have lived in one instrument but I think it’s moving around now. Can I go?”

“No. Can it be killed?”

“I don’t know.”

“Should it be here?”

“What?”

“Should it be here?” Ridcully repeated patiently. “Is it something that’s supposed to be happening?”

Susan suddenly felt important. Wizards were rumoured to be wise—in fact, that’s where the word came from.[23] But they were asking her things. They were listening to her. Pride sparkled in her eyes.

“I... don’t think so. It’s turned up here by some kind of accident. This isn’t the right world for it.”

Ridcully looked smug. “That’s what I thought. This isn’t right, I said. It’s making people try and be things they aren’t. How can we stop it?”

“I don’t think you can. It’s not susceptible to magic.”

“Right. Music’s not. Any music. But something must be able to make it stop. Show her your box, Ponder.”

“Er... yes. Here.”

He lifted the lid. Music, slightly tinny but still recognizable, drifted out into the room.

“Sounds like a spider trapped in a matchbox, don’t it?” said Ridcully.

“You can’t reproduce music like that on a piece of wire in a box,” said Susan. “It’s against nature.”

Ponder looked relieved.

“That’s what I said,” he said. “But it does it anyway. It wants to.”

Susan stared at the box.

She began to smile. There was no humour in it.

“It’s unsettling people,” said Ridcully. “And... look at this.” He pulled a roll of paper out of his robe and unfolded it. “Caught some lad trying to paste this on to our gates. Blooming cheek! So I took it off him and told him to hop it, which was,” Ridcully looked smugly at his fingertips, “quite appropriate as it turned out. It’s going on about some festival of Music With Rocks In. It’ll all end with monsters from another dimension breaking through, you can rely on that. That’s the sort of thing that happens a lot in these parts.”

“Excuse me,” said Big Mad Adrian, his voice cargoed with suspicion, “I don’t want to cause any trouble, right, but is this Death or not? I’ve seen pictures, and they didn’t look like her.”

“We did the Rite stuff,” said Ridcully. “And this is what we got.”

“Yes, but my father’s a herring fisherman and he doesn’t just find herring in his herring nets,” said Skazz.

“Yeah. She could be anyone,” said Tez the Terrible. “I thought Death was taller and bonier.”

“She’s just some girl messing about,” said Skazz.

Susan stared at them.

“She hasn’t even got a scythe,” said Tez.

Susan concentrated. The scythe appeared in her hands, its blue-edged blade making a noise like a finger dragged around the rim of a glass.

The students straightened up.

“But I’ve always thought it was time for a change,” said Tez.

“Right. It’s about time girls got a chance in the professions,” said Skazz.

“Don’t you dare patronize me!”

“That’s right; said Ponder. “There’s no reason why Death has to be male. A woman could be almost as good as a man in the job.”

“You’re doing it very well,” said Ridcully.

He gave Susan an encouraging smile.

She rounded on him. I’m Death, she thought technically, anyway—and this is a fat old man who has no right to give me any kind of orders. I’ll glare at him, and he’ll soon realize the gravity of his situation. She glared.

“Young lady,” said Ridcully, “would you care for breakfast?”

The Mended Drum seldom closed. There tended to be a lull around six in the morning, but Hibiscus stayed open so long as someone wanted a drink.

Someone wanted a lot of drinks. Someone indistinct was standing at the bar. Sand seemed to be running out of him and, in so far as Hibiscus could tell, he had a number of arrows of Klatchian manufacture sticking in him.

The barman leaned forward.

“Have I seen you before?”

I’M IN HERE QUITE OFTEN, YES. A WEEK LAST WEDNESDAY, FOR EXAMPLE.

“Ha! That was a bit of a do. That’s when poor old Vince got stabbed.”

YES.

“Asking for it, calling yourself Vincent the Invulnerable.”

YES. INACCURATE, TOO.

“The Watch are saying it was suicide.”

Death nodded. Going into the Mended Drum and calling yourself Vincent the Invulnerable was clearly suicide by AnkhMorpork standards.

THIS DRINK'S GOT MAGGOTS IN IT.

The barman squinted at it.

“That’s not a maggot, sir,” he said. “That’s a worm.”

OH THAT'S BETTER, IS IT?

“It’s supposed to be there, sir. That’s mexical, that is. They put the worm in to show how strong it is.”

STRONG ENOUGH TO DROWN WORMS?

The barman scratched his head. He’d never thought of it in those terms.

“It’s just something people drink,” he said vaguely.

Death picked up the bottle and held it up to what normally would have been eye level. The worm rotated forlornly.

WHAT'S IT LIKE? he said.

“Well, it’s a sort of—”

I WASN’T TALKING TO YOU.

“Breakfast? said Susan, I mean- BREAKFAST?

“It must be coming up to that time,” said the Archchancellor. “It’s a long time since I last had breakfast with a charming young woman.”

“Good grief, you’re all just as bad as each other,” said Susan.

“Very well, scratch charming,” said Ridcully evenly. “But the sparrows are coughin' in the trees and the sun is peepin' over the wall and I smell cookin”, and having a meal with Death is a chance that doesn’t happen to everyone. You don’t play chess, do you?”

“Extremely well,” said Susan, still bewildered.

“Thought as much. All right, you fellows. You can go back to prodding the universe. Will you step this way, madam?”

“I can’t leave the circle!”

“Oh, you can if I invite you. It’s all a matter of courtesy. I don’t know if you’ve ever had the concept explained?”

He reached out and took her hand. She hesitated, then stepped across the chalk line. There was a slight tingling feeling.

The students backed away hurriedly.

“Go on, get on with it,” said Ridcully. “This way, madam.”

Susan had never experienced charm before. Ridcully possessed quite a lot of it, in a twinkly-eyed kind of way.

She followed him across the lawns to the Great Hall.

The breakfast tables had been laid out, but they were unoccupied. The big sideboard had sprouted copper tureens like autumn fungi. Three rather young maids were waiting patiently behind the array.

“We tend to help ourselves,” said Ridcully conversationally, lifting a cover. “Waiters and so on make too much nois- this is some sort of a joke, is it?”

He prodded what was under the cover and beckoned the nearest maid.

“Which one are you?” he said. “Molly, Polly or Dolly?”

“Molly, your lordship,” said the maid, dropping a curtsy and trembling slightly. “Is there something wrong?”

“A-wrong-wrong-wrong-wrong, a-do-wrong-wrong,” said the other two maids.

“What happened to the kippers? What’s this? Looks like a beef patty in a bun,” said Ridcully, staring at the girls.

“Mrs Whitlow gave instructions to the cook,” said Molly nervously. “It’s a—”

“—yay-yay-yay—”

“—it’s a burger.”

“You’re telling me' said Ridcully. “And why’ve you got a beehive made of hair on your head, pray? Makes you look like a matchstick.”

“Please sir, we—”

“You went to see the Music With Rocks In concert, did you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Yay, yay.”

“You, er, you didn’t throw anything on the stage, did you?”

“No, sir!”

“Where’s Mrs Whitlow?”

“In bed with a cold, sir.”

“Not at all surprised.” Ridcully turned to Susan. “People are playing silly burgers, I’m afraid.”

“I eat only muesli at breakfast,” said Susan.

“There’s porridge,” said Ridcully. “We do it for the Bursar because it’s not exciting.” He lifted the lid of a tureen. “Yes, still here,” he said. “There’s some things Music With Rocks In can’t change, and one of them’s porridge. Let me help you to a ladleful.”

They sat on either side of the long table...

“Well, isn’t this nice?” Ridcully said.

“Are you laughing at me?” said Susan suspiciously.

“Not at all. In my experience, what you mostly get in herring nets is herring. But, speaking as a mortal a customer, as you might say—I’m interested to know why Death is suddenly a teenage girl instead of the animate natomy we’ve come to know and... know.”

“Natomy?”

“Another word for skeleton. Probably derived from “anatomy".”

“He’s my grandfather.”

“Ah. Yes, you said. And that’s true, is it?”

“It sounds a bit silly, now I come to tell someone else.”

Ridcully shook his head.

“You should do my job for five minutes. Then tell me about silly,” he said. He took a pencil out of his pocket and cautiously lifted the top half of the bun on his plate.

“There’s cheese in this,” he said, accusingly.

“But he’s gone off somewhere and next thing I know I’ve inherited the whole thing. I mean, I didn’t ask for it! Why me? Having to go around with this silly scythe thing... that’s not what I wanted out of life—”

“It’s certainly not something you get careers leaflets about,” said Ridcully.

“Exactly.”

“And I suppose you’re stuck with it?” said Ridcully.

“We don’t know where he’s gone. Albert says he’s very depressed about something but he won’t say what.”

“Dear me. What could depress Death?”

“Albert seems to think he might do something... silly.”

“Oh, dear. Not too silly, I hope. Could that be possible? It’d be... morticide, I suppose. Or cidicide.”

To Susan’s amazement Ridcully patted her hand.

“But I’m sure we’ll all sleep safer in our beds knowing that you’re in charge,” he said.

“It’s all so untidy! Good people dying stupidly, bad people living to a ripe old age... it’s so disorganized. There’s no sense to it. There’s no justice at all. I mean, there’s this boy—”

“What boy?”

To Susan’s horror and amazement she found that she was blushing. “Just some boy,” she said. “He was supposed to have died quite ridiculously, and I was going to save him, and then the music saved him, and now it’s getting him into all sorts of trouble and I’ve got to save him anyway and I don’t know why. ”

“Music?” said Ridcully. “Does he play a sort of guitar?”

“Yes! How did you know?”

Ridcully sighed. “When you’re a wizard you get an instinct for these things.” He prodded his burger some more. “And lettuce, for some reason. And one very, very thin slice of pickled cucumber.”

He let the bread drop.

“The music is alive,” he said.

Something that had been knocking on Susan’s attention for the past ten minutes finally used its boots.

“Oh, my god,” she said.

“Which one would that be?” said Ridcully politely.

“It’s so simple! It strolls into traps! It changes people! They want to play m- I’ve got to go,” said Susan hurriedly. “Er. Thank you for the porridge...”

“You haven’t eaten any of it,” Ridcully pointed out mildly.

“No, but... but I had a really good look at it.”

She vanished. After a little while Ridcully leaned forward and waved his hand vaguely in the space where she had been sitting, just in case.

Then he reached into his robe and pulled out the poster about the Free Festival. Great big things with tentacles, that was the problem. Get enough magic in one place and the fabric of the universe gave at the heel just like one of the Dean’s socks which, Ridcully noticed, had been in some extremely bright colours the last few days.

He waved a hand at the maids.

“Thank you, Molly, Dolly or Polly,” he said. “You can clear this stuff away.”

“Yay-yay.”

“Yes, yes, thank you.”

Ridcully felt rather alone. He’d quite enjoyed talking to the girl. She seemed to be the only person in the place who wasn’t mildly insane or totally preoccupied with something that he, Ridcully, didn’t understand.

He wandered back to his study, but was distracted by the sounds of hammering coming from the Dean’s chambers. The door was ajar.

The senior wizards had quite large suites that included study, workshop and bedroom. The Dean was hunched over the furnace in the workshop area, with a smoked-glass mask over his face and a hammer in his hand. He was hard at work. There were sparks.

This was much more cheering, Ridcully thought. Maybe this was an end to all this Music With Rocks In nonsense and a return to some real magic.

“Everythin' all right, Dean?” he said.

The Dean pushed up the glass and nodded.

“Nearly finished, Archchancellor,” he said.

“Heard you bangin' away right down the passage,” said Ridcully, conversationally.

“Ah. I’m working on the pockets,” said the Dean.

Ridcully looked blank. Quite a number of the more difficult spells involved heat and hammering, but pockets was a new one.

The Dean held up a pair of trousers.

They were not, strictly speaking, as trousery as normal trousers; senior wizards developed a distinctive 50” waist, 25” leg shape that suggested someone who sat on a wall and required royal assistance to be put together again. They were dark blue.

“You were hammerin' them?” said Ridcully. “Mrs Whitlow been heavy on the starch again?”

He looked closer.

“You’re rivetin' them together?”

The Dean beamed.

“These trousers,” he said, “are where it’s at.”

“Are you talkin' Music With Rocks In again?” said Ridcully suspiciously.

“I mean they’re cool.”

“Well, better than a thick robe in this weather,” Ridcully conceded, “but- you’re not going to put them on now, are you?”







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