Reaper Man - Terry Pratchett [26]
“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