Terry Pratchett - Reaper Man

"What do you mean, Geoffrey?" said Ridcully, as kindly as he could.

The Fool gulped. ‘Well, you see," he mumbled, "we have sharp as in splinters, and retort as in large glass alchemical vessel, and thus we get a pun on "sharp retort" which also means, well, a scathing answer. Sharp retort. You see? It's a play on words. Um. It's not very good, is it."

The Archchancellor looked into eyes like two runny eggs.

"Oh, a pun," he said. "Of course. Hohoho. " He waved a hand encouragingly at the others.

"Hohoho, " said the Chief Priest.

"Hohoho," said the leader of the Assassins' Guild.

"Hohoho," said the head Alchemist. "And, you know, what makes it even funnier is that it was actually an alembic."

"So what you're telling me," said the Patrician, as considerate hands led the Fool away, "is that none of you are responsible for these events?"

He gave Ridcully a meaningful look as he spoke.

The Archchancellor was about to answer when his eye was caught by a movement on the Patrician's desk.

There was a little model of the Palace in a glass globe. And next to it was a paperknife.

The paperknife was slowly bending.

"Well?" said the Patrician.

"Not us," said Ridcully, his voice hollow. The Patrician followed his gaze.

The knife was already curved like a bow.

The Patrician scanned the sheepish crowd until he found Captain Doxie of the City Guard Day Watch.

"Can't you do something?" he said.

"Er. Like what, sir? The knife? Er. I suppose I could arrest it for being bent."

Lord Vetinari threw his hands up in the air.

"So! It's not magic! It's not gods! It's not people! What is it? And who's going to stop it? Who am I going to call?"

Half an hour later the little globe had vanished.

No-one noticed. They never do.

Mrs. Cake knew who she was going to call.

"You there, One-Man-Bucket?" she said.

Then she ducked, just in case.

A reedy and petulant voice oozed out of the air.

where have you been I can't move in here!

Mrs. Cake bit her lip. Such a direct reply meant her spirit guide was worried. When he didn't have anything on his mind he spent five minutes talking about buffaloes and great white spirits, although if One-Man-Bucket had ever been near white spirit he'd drunk it and it was anyone's guess what he'd do to a buffalo. And he kept putting ‘ums' and ‘hows ‘ into the conversation.

"What d'you mean?"

- there been a catastrophe or something, some kind of ten-second plague?

"No. Don't think so."

- there's real pressure here, you know. what's hokeing everything up?

"What do you mean?"

- shutupshutupshutup I'm trying to talk to the lady!

- you lot over there, keep the noise down! oh yeaha sez you -

Mrs. Cake was aware of other voices trying to drown him out.

"One-Man-Bucket!"

- heathen savage, am I? so you know what this heathen savage says to youa yeah? listen, I've been over here for a hundred years, me! I don't have to take talk like that from someone who's still warm! Tight - that does it, you...

His voice faded.

Mrs. Cake set her jaw.

His voice came back.

- oh yeah? oh yeaha well, maybe you was big when you was alive, friend, but here and now you're just a bedsheet with holes in it! Oh, so you don't like that, eh -

"He's going to start fighting again, mum," said Ludmilla, who was curled up by the kitchen stove. "He always calls people "friend" just before he hits them."

Mrs. Cake sighed.

"And it sounds as if he's going to fight a lot of people," said Ludmilla.

"Oh, all right. Go and fetch me a vase. A cheap one, mind."

It is widely suspected, but not generally known, that everything has an associated spirit form which, upon its demise, exists briefly in the draughty gap between the worlds of the living and the dead. This is important.

"No, not that one. That belonged to your granny."

This ghostly survival does not last for long without a consciousness to hold it together, but depending on what you have in mind it can last for just long enough.

"That one'll do. I never liked the pattern."

Mrs. Cake took an orange vase with pink peonies on it from her daughter's paws.

"Are you still there, One-Man-Bucket?" she said.

- I'll make you regret the day you ever died, you whining -

"Catch."

She dropped the vase on to the stove. It smashed.

A moment later, there was a sound from the Other Side. If a discorporate spirit had hit another discorporate spirit with the ghost of a vase, it would have sounded just like that.

- right, said the voice of One-Man-Bucket, and there's more where that came from, OK?

The Cakes, mother and hairy daughter, nodded at each other.

When One-Man-Bucket spoke again, his voice dripped with smug satisfaction.

- just a bit of an altercation about seniority here, he said. just sorting out a bit of personal space. got a lot of problems here, Mrs. Cake. it's like a waiting room -

There was a shrill clamour of other disembodied voices.

- could you get a message, please, to Mr. -

- tell her there's a bag of coins on the ledge up the chimney -

- Agnes is not to have the silverware after what she said about our Molly -

- I didn't have time to feed the cat, could someone go - shutupshutup! That was One-Man-Bucket again. you've got no idea have you? this is ghost talk, is it? feed the cat? whatever happened to ‘I am very happy here, and waiting for you to join me'?

- listen, if anyone else joins us, we'll be standing on one another's heads -

- that's not the point. that's not the point, that's all I'm saying. when you're a spirit, there's things you gotta say. Mrs. Cake?

"Yes?"

- you got to tell someone about this.

Mrs. Cake nodded.

"Now you all go away," she said. ‘I'm getting one of my headaches."

The crystal ball faded.

"Well!" said Ludmilla.

"I ain't going to tell no priests," said Mrs. Cake firmly.

It wasn't that Mrs. Cake wasn't a religious woman.

She was, as has already been hinted, a very religious woman indeed. There wasn't a temple, church, mosque or small group of standing stones anywhere in the city that she hadn't attended at one time or another, as a result of which she was more feared than an Age of Enlightenment; the mere sight of Mrs. Cake's small fat body on the threshold was enough to stop most priests dead in the middle of their invocation.

Dead. That was the point. All the religions had very strong views about talking to the dead. And so did Mrs. Cake. They held that it was sinful. Mrs. Cake held that it was only common courtesy.

This usually led to a fierce ecclesiastical debate which resulted in Mrs. Cake giving the chief priest what she called ‘a piece of her mind'. There were so many pieces of Mrs. Cake's mind left around the city now that it was quite surprising that there was enough left to power Mrs. Cake but, strangely enough, the more pieces of her mind she gave away the more there seemed to be left.

There was also the question of Ludmilla. Ludmilla was a problem. The late Mr. Cake, gods rest his soul, had never so much as even whistled at the full moon his whole life, and Mrs. Cake had dark suspicions that Ludmilla was a throwback to the family's distant past in the mountains, or maybe had contracted genetics as a child. She was pretty certain her mother had once alluded circumspectly to the fact that Great-uncle Erasmus sometimes had to eat his meals under the table. Either way, Ludmilla was a decent upright young woman for three weeks in every four and a perfectly well-behaved hairy wolf thing for the rest of the time.

Priests often failed to see it that way. Since by the time Mrs. Cake fell out with whatever priests were currently moderating between her and the gods, she had usually already taken over the flower arrangements, altar dusting, temple cleaning, sacrificial stone scrubbing, honorary vestigial virgining, hassock repairing and every other vital religious support role by sheer force of personality, her departure resulted in total chaos.