Page 38 of Maskerade (Discworld 18)

'Oh.' Salzella passed the paper over.

Bucket read: Dear Bucket, Whoops! Ahahahahahahahaha!!!!! Yrs, The Opera Ghost 'What can we do?' he said. 'One moment he writes polite little notes, the next he goes mad on paper!'

'Herr Trubelmacher has got everyone out hunting for new instruments,' said Salzella. 'Are violins more expensive than ballet shoes?'

'There are few things in the world more expensive than ballet shoes. Violins happen to be among them,' said Salzella. 'Further expense!'

'It seems so, yes.'

'But I thought the Ghost liked music! Herr Trubelmacher tells me the organ is beyond repair!!!' He stopped. He was aware that he had exclaimed a little less rationally than a sane man should. 'Oh, well,' Bucket continued wearily. 'The show must go on, I suppose.'

'Yes, indeed,' said Salzella. Bucket shook his head. 'How's it all going for tonight?'

'I think it will work, if that's what you mean. Perdita seems to have a very good grasp of the part.'

'And Christine?'

'She has an astonishingly good grasp of wearing a dress. Between them, they make one prima donna.' The proud owner of the Opera House got slowly to his feet. 'It all seemed so simple,' he moaned. 'I thought: opera, how hard can it be? Songs. Pretty girls dancing. Nice scenery. Lots of people handing over cash. Got to be better than the cut-throat world of yoghurt, I thought. Now everywhere I go there's-' Something crunched under his shoe. He picked up the remains of a pair of half-moon spectacles. 'These are Dr Undershaft's, aren't they?' he said. 'What're they doing here?' His eyes met Salzella's steady gaze. 'Oh, no,' he groaned. Salzella turned slightly, and stared hard at a big double bass case leaning against the wall. He raised his eyebrows. 'Oh, no,' said Bucket, again. 'Go on. Open it. My hands have gone all sweaty. . .' Salzella padded across to the case and grasped the lid. 'Ready?' Bucket nodded, wearily. The case was flung open. 'Oh, no!' Salzella craned round to see. 'Ah, yes,' he said. 'A broken neck, and the body has been kicked in considerably. That'll cost a dollar or two to repair, and no mistake.'

'And all the strings are busted! Are double basses more expensive to rebuild than violins?'

'I am afraid that all musical instruments are incredibly expensive to repair, with the possible exception of the triangle,' said Salzella. 'However, it could have been worse, hmm?'

'What?'

'Well, it could have been Dr Undershaft in there, yes?'

Bucket gaped at him, and then shut his mouth. 'Oh. Yes. Of course. Oh, yes. That would have been worse. Yes. Bit of luck there, I suppose. Yes. Um.'

'So that's an opera house, is it?' said Granny. 'Looks like someone built a great big box and glued the architecture on afterwards.' She coughed, and appeared to be waiting for something. 'Can we have a look around?' said Nanny dutifully, aware that Granny's curiosity was equalled only by her desire not to show it. 'It can't do any harm, I suppose,' said Granny, as if granting a big favour. 'Seein' as we've nothing else to do right this minute.' The Opera House was, indeed, that most efficiently multifunctional of building designs. It was a cube. But, as Granny had pointed out, the architect had suddenly realized late in the day that there ought to be some sort of decoration, and had shoved it on hurriedly, in a riot of friezes, pillars, corybants and curly bits. Gargoyles had colonized the higher reaches. The effect, seen from the front, was of a huge wall of tortured stone. Round the back, of course, there was the usual drab mess of windows, pipes and damp stone walls. One of the rules of a certain type of public architecture is that it only happens at the front. Granny paused under a window. 'Someone's singing,' she said. 'Listen.'

'La-la-la-la-la-LAH,' trilled someone. 'Do-Re-Mi-Fah-SoLa-Ti-Do. . .'

'That's opera, right enough,' said Granny. 'Sounds foreign to me.' Nanny had an unexpected gift for languages; she could be comprehensibly incompetent in a new one within an hour or two. What she spoke was one step away from gibberish but it was authentically foreign gibberish. And she knew that Granny Weatherwax, whatever her other qualities, had an even bigger tin ear for languages than she did for music. 'Er. Could be,' she said. 'There's always a lot going on, I know that. Our Nev said they sometimes do different operations every night.'

'How did he find that out?' said Granny. 'Well, there was a lot of lead. That takes some shifting. He said he liked the noisy ones. He could hum along and also no one heard the hammering.' The witches strolled onwards. 'Did you notice young Agnes nearly bump into us back there?' said Granny. 'Yes. It was all I could do not to turn around,' said Nanny. 'She wasn't very pleased to see us, was she? I practically heard her gasp.'

'That's very suspicious, if you ask me,' said Nanny. 'I mean, she sees two friendly faces from back home, you'd expect her . to come runnin' up. . .'

'We're old friends, after all. Old friends of her grandma and her mum, anyway, and that's practic'ly the same.'

'Remember those eyes in the teacup?' said Nanny. 'She could be under the gaze of some strange occult force! We got to be careful. People can be very tricky when they're in the grip of a strange occult force. Remember Mr Scruple over in Slice?'

'That wasn't a strange occult force. That was acid stomach.'

'Well, it certainly seemed strangely occult for a while. Especially if the windows were shut.' Their perambulation had taken them to the Opera House's stage-door. Granny looked up at a line of posters. 'La Triviata,' she read aloud. 'The Ring of the Nibelungingung. . . ?'

'Well, basically there are two sorts of opera,' said Nanny, who also had the true witch's ability to be confidently expert on the basis of no experience whatsoever. 'There's your heavy opera, where basically people

sing foreign and it goes like “Oh oh oh, I am dyin', oh, I am dyin', oh, oh, oh, that's what I'm doin”', and there's your light opera, where they sing in foreign and it basically goes “Beer! Beer! Beer! Beer! I like to drink lots of beer!”, although sometimes they drink champagne instead. That's basically all of opera, reely.'

'What? Either dyin' or drinkin' beer?'

'Basically, yes,' said Nanny, contriving to suggest that this was the whole gamut of human experience. 'And that's opera?'

'We-ll. . . there might be some other stuff. But mostly it's stout or stabbin'.' Granny was aware of a presence. She turned. A figure had emerged from the stage-door, carrying a poster, a bucket of glue and a brush. It was a strange figure, a sort of neat scarecrow in clothes slightly too small for it, although, to be truthful, there were probably no clothes that would have fit that body. The ankles and wrists seemed infinitely extensible and independently guided. It encountered the two witches standing at the poster board, and stopped politely. They could see the sentence marshalling itself behind the unfocused eyes. 'Excuse me ladies! The show must go on!' The words were all there and they made sense, but each sentence was fired out into the world as a unit. Granny pulled Nanny to one side. 'Thank you!' They watched in silence as the man, with great and meticulous care, applied paste to a neat rectangle and then affixed the poster, smoothing every crease methodically. 'What's your name, young man?' said Granny. 'Walter!'

'That's a nice beret you have there.'

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