Soul Music by Terry Pratchett Page A

dipped below the field, as if the surface were no more substantial than mist. Then Binky appeared to determine where the ground level should be, and decided to stand on it.
    Lady Sarah was the first one to find her voice.
    “We’ll tell Miss Butts on youewa ,” she managed.
    Susan was almost bewildered with unfamiliar fright, but the petty-mindedness in the tones slapped her back to something approaching sanity.
    “Oh yes?” she said. “And what will you tell her?”
    “You made the horse jump up and…” The girl stopped, aware of what she was about to say.
    “Quite so,” said Susan. “I expect that seeing horses float in the air is silly, don’t you?”
    She slipped off the horse’s back, and gave the watchers a bright smile.
    “It’s against school rules, anyway,” muttered Lady Sarah.
    Susan led the white horse back into the stables, rubbed him down, and put him in a spare loose box.
    There was a rustling in the hayrack for a moment. Susan thought she caught a glimpse of ivory white bone.
    “Those wretched rats,” said Cassandra, struggling back to reality. “I heard Miss Butts tell the gardener to put poison down.”
    “Shame,” said Gloria.
    Lady Sarah seemed to have something boiling in her mind.
    “Look, that horse didn’t really stand in midair, did it?” she demanded. “Horses can’t do that!”
    “Then it couldn’t have done it,” said Susan.
    “Hang time,” said Gloria. “That’s all it was. Hang time. Like in basketball. * Bound to be something like that.”
    “Yes.”
    “That’s all it was.”
    “Yes.”
    The human mind has a remarkable ability to heal. So have the trollish and dwarfish minds. Susan looked at them in frank amazement. They’d all seen a horse stand on the air. And now they had carefully pushed it somewhere in their memories and broken off the key in the lock.
    “Just out of interest,” she said, still eyeing the hayrack, “I don’t suppose any of you know where there’s a wizard in this town, do you?”

    “I’ve found us somewhere to play!” said Glod.
    “Where?” said Lias.
    Glod told them.
    “ The Mended Drum? ” said Lias. “Dey throw axes !”
    “We’d be safe there. The Guild won’t play in there,” said Glod.
    “Well, yah, Dey lose members in dere. Dere members lose members,” said Lias.
    “We’ll get five dollars,” said Glod. The troll hesitated.
    “I could use five dollars,” he conceded.
    “One-third of five dollars,” said Glod.
    Lias’s brow creased.
    “Is that more or less than five dollars?” he said.
    “Look, it’ll get us exposure,” said Glod.
    “I don’t want exposure in der Drum,” said Lias. “Exposure’s the last thing I want in der Drum. In der Drum, I want something to hide behind.”
    “All we have to do is play something,” said Glod. “Anything. The new landlord is dead keen on pub entertainment.”
    “I thought they had a one-arm bandit.”
    “Yes, but he got arrested.”

    There’s a floral clock in Quirm. It’s quite a tourist attraction.
    It turns out to be not what they expect.
    Unimaginative municipal authorities throughout the multiverse had made floral clocks, which turn out to be a large clock mechanism buried in a civic flower bed with the face and numbers picked out in bedding plants. *
    But the Quirm clock is simply a round flower bed, filled with twenty-four different types of flower, carefully chosen for the regularity of the opening and closing of their petals…
    As Susan ran past, the Purple Bindweed was opening and Love-in-a-Spin was closing. This meant that it was about half past ten.
    The streets were deserted. Quirm wasn’t a night town. People who came to Quirm looking for a good time went somewhere else. Quirm was so respectable that even dogs asked permission before going to the lavatory.
    At least, the streets were almost deserted. Susan fancied she could hear something following her, fast and pattering, moving and dodging across the cobbles so quickly that it was