Soul Music - Terry Pratchett [3]
The humans he’d known—and there had been a few—had responded to the impossible size of the rooms in a strange way, by simply ignoring it.
Take Albert, now. The big door had opened, Albert had stepped through, carefully balancing a cup and saucer…
…and a moment later had been well inside the room, on the edge of the relatively small square of carpet that surrounded Death’s desk. Death gave up wondering how Albert covered the intervening space when it dawned on him that, to his servant, there was no intervening space…
“I’ve brought you some camomile tea, sir,” said Albert.
HMM?
“Sir?”
SORRY. I WAS THINKING. WHAT WAS IT YOU SAID?
“Camomile tea?”
I THOUGHT THAT WAS A KIND OF SOAP?
“You can put it in soap or tea, sir,” said Albert. He was worried. He was always worried when Death started to think about things. It was the wrong job for thinking about things. And he thought about them in the wrong way.
HOW VERY USEFUL. CLEAN INSIDE AND OUT.
Death put his chin on his hands again.
“Sir?” said Albert, after a while.
HMM?
“It’ll get cold if you leave it.”
ALBERT…
“Yessir?”
I HAVE BEEN WONDERING…
“Sir?”
WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT? SERIOUSLY? WHEN YOU GET RIGHT DOWN TO IT?
“Oh. Er. Couldn’t really say, sir.”
I DIDN’T WANT TO DO IT, ALBERT. YOU KNOW THAT. NOW I KNOW WHAT SHE MEANT. NOT JUST ABOUT THE KNEES.
“Who, sir?”
There was no reply.
Albert looked back when he’d reached the door. Death was staring into space again. No one could stare quite like him.
Not being seen wasn’t a big problem. It was the things that she kept seeing that were more of a worry.
There were the dreams. They were only dreams, of course. Susan knew that modern theory said that dreams were only images thrown up while the brain was filing the day’s events. She would have been more reassured if the day’s events had ever included flying white horses, huge dark rooms, and lots of skulls.
At least they were only dreams. She’d seen other things. For example, she’d never mentioned the strange woman in the dormitory the night Rebecca Snell put a tooth under the pillow. Susan had watched her come through the open window and stand by the bed. She looked a bit like a milkmaid and not at all frightening, even though she had walked through the furniture. There had been the jingle of coins. Next morning the tooth had gone and Rebecca was richer by one fifty-pence coin.
Susan hated that sort of thing. She knew that mentally unstable people told children about the Tooth Fairy, but that was no reason for one to exist. It suggested woolly thinking. She disliked woolly thinking, which in any case was a major misdemeanor under the regime of Miss Butts.
It was not, otherwise, a particularly bad one. Miss Eulalie Butts and her colleague Miss Delcross had founded the College on the astonishing idea that, since gels had nothing much to do until someone married them, they may as well occupy themselves by learning things.
There were plenty of schools in the world, but they were all run either by the various churches or by the Guilds. Miss Butts objected to churches on logical grounds and deplored the fact that the only Guilds that considered girls worth educating were the Thieves and the Seamstresses. But it was a big and dangerous world out there, and a gel could do worse than face it with a sound knowledge of geometry and astronomy under her bodice. For Miss Butts sincerely believed that there were no basic differences between boys and gels.
At least, none worth talking about.
None that Miss Butts would talk about, anyway.
And, therefore, she believed in encouraging logical thought and a healthy inquiring mind among the nascent young women in her care, a course of action which is, as far as wisdom is concerned,