*And didn’t appear to do anything to the enemy at all.
**He was a wizard. Tricks shots for a wizard aren’t the old three-times-round-the-table jobs. His best one was once off the cushion, once off a sea gull, once off the back of the head of the Bursar, who’d been walking along the corridor outside last Tuesday (a bit a temporal spin there), and a tricky rebound off the ceiling. He’d missed sinking the actual shot by a whisker, but it had been pretty tricky, even so.
***And this was true. Nature can adapt to practically anything. There were fish evolved to live in the river. They looked like a cross between a soft-shelled crab and an industrial vacuum cleaner, and tended to explode in fresh water, and what you had to use for bait was nobody’s business, but they were fish and a sportsman like Ridcully never cared about what the quarry tasted like.
*The Senior Wrangler had a theory that long food—beans, celery, and rhubarb—made you taller, because of the famous Doctrine of Signatures. It certainly made him lighter.
*And, of course, one that misfires. Deafness doesn’t prevent composers hearing the music. It prevents them hearing the distractions.
*It wasn’t the taste. Plenty of hot dogs taste bad. But Dibbler had now actually managed to produce sausages that didn’t taste of anything. It was weird. No matter how much mustard, ketchup, and pickle people put on them, they still didn’t taste of anything. Not even the midnight dogs they sell to drunks in Helsinki can quite manage that.
*Troll beer is ammonium sulfide dissolved in alcohol and tastes like drinking fermented batteries.
*Not with very good results, however. Stibbons spent weeks grinding lenses and blowing glassware and had finally produced a device which showed the tremendous number of tiny animals there were in one drop of water from the river Ankh.
The Archchancellor had taken a look and then remarked that anything in which that much life could exist had to be healthy.
*All right—all dwarf songs. Except the one about Hiho.
*Troll gambling is even simpler than Australian gambling. One of the most popular games is One Up, which consists of throwing a coin in the air and betting on whether it will come down again.
*Rats had featured largely in the history of Ankh-Morpork. Shortly before the Patrician came to power there was a terrible plague of rats. The city council countered it by offering twenty pence for every rat tail. This did, for a week or two, reduce the number of rats—and then people were suddenly queing up with tails, the city treasury was being drained, and no one seemed to be doing much work. And there still seemed to be a lot of rats around. Lord Vetinari had listened carefully while the problem was explained, and had solved the thing with one memorable phrase which said a lot about him, about the folly of bounty offers, and about the natural instinct of Ankh-Morporkians in any situation involving money: “Tax the rat farms.”
*From the Old wys-ars, lit: one who, at bottom, is very smart.
*Or, at least, onto the river.
*A very grammatical half an hour, however.
*Old shoes always turn up in the bottom of every wardrobe. If a mermaid had a wardrobe, old shoes would turn up in the bottom of it.
*Although, strictly speaking, humans feel it all the time.
*’PLUGGERS
They’ve Got Soles
FEEL THE NALES!
*He’d still got the nugget somewhere.
About the Author
Terry Pratchett is one of the most popular living authors in the world. His first story was published when he was thirteen, and his first full-length book when he was twenty. He worked as a journalist to support the writing habit, but gave up the day job when the success of his books meant that it was costing him money to go to work.
Pratchett’s acclaimed novels are bestsellers in the U.S. and the United Kingdom and have sold more than thirty million copies worldwide. He lives in England, where he writes all the time. (It’s his hobby, as well.)
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
Praise
THE ACCOLADES!
THE ADORATION!
Acclaim for Bestselling Author
Terry Pratchett
“Superb popular entertainment.”
Washington Post Book World
“Unadulterated fun…witty, frequently hilarious…Pratchett parodies everything in sight.”
San Fransisco Chronicle
“Pratchett continues to distinguish himself from his colleagues with clever plotlines and genuinely likable characters.”
Publishers Weekly (*Starred Review*)
“If I were making my list of Best Books of the Twentieth Century, Terry Pratchett’s would be most of them.”
Elizabeth Peters
“Truly original…Discworld is more complicated and satisfactory than Oz…Brilliant.”
A.S. Byatt
“The funniest parodist working in the field today, period.”
New York Review of Science Fiction
“As always he is head and shoulders above the best of the rest. He is screamingly funny. He is wise. He has style.”
Daily Telegraph (London)
“Pratchett is as funny as Wodehouse and witty as Waugh.”
Independent (London)
“Terry Pratchett does for fantasy what Douglas Adams did for science fiction.”
Today (Great Britain)
“Terry Pratchett is more than a magician. He is the kindest, most fascinating teacher you ever had.”
Harlan Ellison
“It is his unexpected insights into human morality that make the Discworld series stand out.”
Times Literary Supplement (London)
“If Terry Pratchett is not yet an institution, he should be.”
Fantasy and Science Fiction
“Simply the best humorous writer of the twentieth century.”
Oxford Times
“Consistently, inventively mad…wild and wonderful!”
Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine
“Pratchett demonstrates just how great the distance is between one-or two-joke writers and the comic masters whose work will be read into the next century.”
Locus
“Pratchett is a comic genius.”
Express (London)
BOOKS BY TERRY PRATCHETT
The Carpet People
The Dark Side of the Sun
Strata • Truckers
Diggers • Wings
Only You Can Save Mankind
Johnny and the Dead • Johnny and the Bomb
The Unadulterated Cat (with Gray Jollife)
Good Omens (with Neil Gaiman)
THE DISCWORLD® SERIES:
Going Postal • Monstrous Regiment • Night Watch
The Last Hero • The Truth • Thief of Time
The Fifth Elephant • Carpe Jugulum
The Last Continent • Jingo
Hogfather • Feet of Clay • Maskerade
Interesting Times • Soul Music • Men at Arms
Lords and Ladies • Small Gods
Witches Abroad • Reaper Man
Moving Pictures • Eric (with Josh Kirby)
Guards! Guards! • Pyramids
Wyrd Sisters • Sourcery • Mort • Equal Rites
The Light Fantastic • The Color of Magic
Mort: A Discworld Big Comic (with Graham Higgins)
The Streets of Ankh-Morpork (with Stephen Briggs)
The Discworld Companion (with Stephen Briggs)
The Discworld Mapp (with Stephen Briggs)
The Pratchett Portfolio (with Paul Kidby)
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the authors imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
SOUL MUSIC. Copyright © 2007 by Terrt and Lyn Pratchett. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Con
ventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © JUNE 2007 ISBN: 9780061805752
06 07 08 09 10
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