Soul Music by Terry Pratchett Page B

never more than a suspicion of a shape.
    Susan slowed down as she reached Three Roses Alley.
    Somewhere in Three Roses near the fish shop, Gloria had said. The gels were not encouraged to know about wizards. They did not figure in Miss Butts’s universe.
    The alley looked alien in the darkness. A torch burned in a bracket at one end. It merely made the shadows darker.
    And, halfway along in the gloom, there was a ladder leaning against the wall and a young woman just preparing to climb it. There was something familiar about her.
    She looked around as Susan approached, and seemed quite pleased to see her.
    “Hi,” she said. “Got change of a dollar, miss?”
    “Pardon?”
    “Couple of half-dollars’d do. Half a dollar is the rate. Or I’ll take copper. Anything, really.”
    “Um. Sorry. No. I only get fifty pence a week allowance anyway.”
    “Blast. Oh, well, nothing for it.”
    Insofar as Susan could see, the girl did not appear to be the usual sort of young woman who made her living in alleys. She had a kind of well-scrubbed beefiness about her; she looked like a nurse of the sort who assist doctors whose patients occasionally get a bit confused and declare they’re a bedspread.
    She looked familiar, though.
    The girl took a pair of pliers from a pocket in her dress, shinned up the ladder, and climbed in through an upper window.
    Susan hesitated. The girl had seemed quite businesslike about it all, but in her limited experience people who climbed ladders to get into houses at night were Miscreants whom Plucky Gels should Apprehend. And she might at least have gone to look for a watchman, had it not been for the opening of a door farther up the alley.
    Two men staggered out, arm in arm, and zigzagged happily toward the main street. Susan stepped back. No one bothered her when she didn’t want to be noticed.
    The men walked through the ladder.
    Either the men weren’t exactly solid, and they certainly sounded solid enough, or there was something wrong with the ladder. But the girl had climbed it…
    …and was now climbing down again, slipping something into her pocket.
    “Never even woke up, the little cherub,” she said.
    “Sorry?” said Susan.
    “Didn’t have 50p on me,” said the girl. She swung the ladder easily up onto her shoulder. “Rules are rules. I had to take another tooth.”
    “Pardon?”
    “It’s all audited, you see. I’d be in real trouble if the dollars and teeth didn’t add up. You know how it is.”
    “I do?”
    “Still, can’t stay here talking all night. Got sixty more to do.”
    “ Why should I know? Do what? Whom to?” said Susan.
    “Children, of course. Can’t disappoint them, can I? Imagine their little faces when they lift up their little pillows, bless them.”
    Ladder. Pliers. Teeth. Money. Pillows…
    “You don’t expect me to believe you’re the Tooth Fairy?” said Susan suspiciously.
    She touched the ladder. It felt solid enough.
    “Not the ,” said the girl. “ A . I’m surprised you don’t know that.”
    She’d sauntered around the corner before Susan asked, “Why me?”
    “’Cos she can tell,” said a voice behind her. “Takes one to know one.”
    She turned. The raven was sitting in a small open window.
    “You’d better come in,” it said. “You can meet all sorts, out in that alley.”
    “I already have.”
    There was a brass plate screwed on the wall beside the door. It said: “C V Cheesewaller, DM (Unseen), B. Thau, B.F.”
    It was the first time Susan had ever heard metal speak.
    “Simple trick,” said the raven, dismissively. “It senses you looking at it. Just give—”
    “C V Cheesewaller, DM (Unseen), B. Thau, B.F.”
    “…shut up…just give the door a push.”
    “It’s locked.”
    The raven gave her a beady-eyed look with its head on one side. Then it said: “That stops you? Oh, well. I’ll fetch the key.”
    It appeared a moment later and dropped a large metal key onto the cobbles.
    “Isn’t the wizard