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starfish. It wasn’t that he was unhelpful, but he had the kind of vague, cheerful helpfulness that serious men soon learn to dread.
Then there was the puzzle of why the sun came out during the day, instead of at night when the light would come in useful. He knew the standard explanation, which somehow didn’t seem satisfying.
Poets have tried to describe Ankh-Morpork. They have failed. Perhaps it’s the sheer zestful vitality of the place, or maybe it’s just that a city with a million inhabitants and no sewers is rather robust for poets, who prefer daffodils and no wonder.
So let’s just say that Ankh-Morpork is as full of life as an old cheese on a hot day, as loud as a curse in a cathedral, as bright as an oil slick, as colourful as a bruise and as full of activity, industry, bustle and sheer exuberant busyness as a dead dog on a termite mound.
It was crowded in the Curry Gardens on the corner of God Street and Blood Alley, but only with the cream of society – at least, with those people who are found floating on the top and who, therefore, it’s wisest to call the cream. Fragrant bushes planted among the tables nearly concealed the basic smell of the city itself, which has been likened to the nasal equivalent of a foghorn.
The other diners didn’t take much notice, even when Death leaned back and lit a rather fine pipe. Someone with smoke curling out of their eye sockets takes some ignoring, but everyone managed it.
The answer flowed into his mind with all the inevitability of a tax demand.
Mort stared down at his fried eggs. They stared back from their lake of fat. Albert had heard of nutritional values, and didn’t hold with them.
Death gave Mort the look he was coming to be familiar with. It started off as blank surprise, flickered briefly towards annoyance, called in for a drink at recognition and settled finally on vague forbearance.
The appearance of Death didn’t cause much of a stir. A footman by the door turned to him, opened his mouth and then frowned in a distracted way and thought of something else. A few courtiers glanced in their direction, their eyes instantly unfocusing as common sense overruled the other five.
LOOK AT IT THIS WAY. THE WALL CAN’T BE THERE. OTHERWISE YOU WOULDN’T BE WALKING THROUGH IT. WOULD YOU, BOY?
Mort sniffed. There was a certain something about the air in the city. You got the feeling that it was air that had seen life. You couldn’t help noting with every breath that thousands of other people were very close to you and nearly all of them had armpits.
And so Mort came at last to the river Ankh, greatest of rivers. Even before it entered the city it was slow and heavy with the silt of the plains, and by the time it got to The Shades even an agnostic could have walked across it. It was hard to drown in the Ankh, but easy to suffocate.
‘There’s some things I shall miss,’ she said. ‘But it gets thin, you know. Life, I’m referring to. You can’t trust your own body any more, and it’s time to move on. I reckon it’s about time I tried something else.
They were one of the oldest of the Disc’s religious sects, although even the gods themselves were divided as to whether Listening was really a proper religion, and all that prevented their temple being wiped out by a few well-aimed avalanches was the fact that even the gods were curious as to what it was that the Listeners might Hear. If there’s one thing that really annoys a god, it’s not knowing something.
from the temple. On the absolute scale of small talk this comment must rate minus quite a lot, but Mort couldn’t think of anything better.
His mouth opened and shut. Mort wanted to say: thirdly, you’re so beautiful, or at least very attractive, or anyway far more attractive than any other girl I’ve ever met, although admittedly I haven’t met very many. From this it will be seen that Mort’s innate honesty will never make him a poet; if Mort ever compared a girl to a summer’s day, it would be followed by a thoughtful explanation of what day he had in mind and whether it was raining at the time. In the circumstances, it was just as well that he couldn’t find his voice.
There were few ocean-going ships on the Disc. No captain liked to venture out of sight of a coastline. It was a sorry fact that ships which looked from a distance as though they were going over the edge of the world weren’t in fact disappearing over the horizon, they were in fact dropping over the edge of the world.
Once upon a time Mort would have found it eerie. Now it was – reassuring. It demonstrated that the universe was running smoothly. His conscience, which had been looking for the opening, gleefully reminded him that, all right, it might be running smoothly but it certainly wasn’t heading in the right direction.
Keli marched towards the palace with her shoulders set determinedly, dragging the wizard behind her like a reluctant puppy. It was with such a walk that mothers used to bear down on the local school when their little boy came home with a black eye; it was unstoppable; it was like the March of Time.
He looked back like a nocturnal rabbit trying to outstare the headlights of a sixteen-wheeled artic whose driver is a twelve-hour caffeine freak outrunning the tachometers of hell.
Mort didn’t return it. Instead he turned and plodded towards the door, at a general speed and gait that made Great A’Tuin look like a spring lamb.
‘At least I don’t look like I’ve been eating doughnuts in a wardrobe for years,’ he said, as they stepped out on to Death’s black lawn.
Mort shuffled anxiously through his limited repertoire of small talk, and gave up.
Ysabell was crying, not in little ladylike sobs, but in great yawning gulps, like bubbles from an underwater volcano, fighting one another to be the first to the surface. They were sobs escaping under pressure, matured in humdrum misery.
Mort had imagined that Death’s handwriting would either be gothic or else tombstone angular, but Death had in fact studied a classic work on graphology before selecting a style and had adopted a hand that indicated a balanced, well-adjusted personality.
It was an inn, and inside there were people having a good time, or what passed for a good time if you were a peasant who spent most of your time closely concerned with cabbages.
Now it really was dawn, that cusp of the day that belonged to no one except the seagulls in Morpork docks, the tide that rolled in up the river, and a warm turnwise wind that added a smell of spring to the complex odour of the city.
He’d tried fishing, dancing, gambling and drink, allegedly four of life’s greatest pleasures, and wasn’t sure that he saw the point. Food he was happy with – Death liked a good meal as much as anyone else. He couldn’t think of any other pleasures of the flesh or, rather, he could, but they were, well, fleshy, and he couldn’t see how it would be possible to go about them without some major bodily restructuring, which he wasn’t going to contemplate. Besides, humans seemed to leave off doing them as they grew older, so presumably they couldn’t be that attractive.
‘It would seem that you have no useful skill or talent whatsoever,’ he said. ‘Have you thought of going into teaching?’
Death’s face was a mask of terror. Well, it was always a mask of terror, but this time he meant it to be.
It struck Mort with sudden, terrible poignancy that Death must be the loneliest creature in the universe. In the great party of Creation, he was always in the kitchen.
Harga’s House of Ribs down by the docks is probably not numbered among the city’s leading eateries, catering as it does for the type of beefy clientele that prefers quantity and breaks up the tables if it doesn’t get it.
Red around the eyes, and smelling slightly of smoke, Cutwell ambled towards the royal apartments past bevies of maids engaged in whatever it was maids did, which always seemed to take at least three of them.
‘You don’t know about that what you talk about,’ he added, with more feeling than grammar, ‘else you wouldn’t say that. What do you want from me?’
There were a few ships at anchor, mostly single-sailed coastal traders. The Empire didn’t encourage its subjects to go far away, in case they saw things that might disturb them. For the same reason it had built a wall around the entire country, patrolled by the Heavenly Guard whose main function was to tread heavily on the fingers of any inhabitants who felt they might like to step outside for five minutes for a breath of fresh air. This didn’t happen often, because most of the subjects of the Sun Emperor were quite happy to live inside the Wall. It’s a fact of life that everyone is on one
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The duke was backed by half a dozen large serious men, the type of men whose only function in life is to loom behind people like the duke. They had a dozen large serious crossbows, whose main purpose was to appear to be on the point of going off.
Light on the Discworld isn’t like light elsewhere. It’s grown up a bit, it’s been around, it doesn’t feel the need to rush everywhere. It knows that however fast it goes darkness always gets there first, so it takes it easy.
The blades met in mid-air with a noise like a cat sliding down a pane of glass.
