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reached down and opened her hand. The thing climbed onto it—its feet felt like pins—and looked at her expectantly.
    Susan lifted it up to eye level. All right, perhaps it was a figment of her imagination. She ought to take it seriously.
    “You’re not going to say something like ‘oh, my paws and whiskers,’ are you?” she said quietly. “If you do, I shall go and drop you in the privy.”
    The rat shook its skull.
    “And you’re real?”
    SQUEAK. SQUEAKSQUEAKSQEAK—
    “Look, I don’t understand,” said Susan patiently. “I don’t speak rodent. We only do Klatchian in Modern Languages and I only know how to say ‘my aunt’s camel has fallen in the mirage.’ And if you are imaginary, you might try to be a bit more…lovable.”
    A skeleton, even a small one, is not a naturally lovable object, even if it has got an open countenance and a grin. But the feeling…no, she realized…the memory was creeping over her from somewhere that this one was not only real but on her side. It was an unfamilar concept. Her side had normally consisted of her.
    The late rat regarded Susan for a moment and then, in one movement, gripped the tiny scythe between its teeth and sprang off Susan’s hand, landed on the classroom floor, and scuttled away between the desks.
    “It’s not even as if you’ve got paws and whiskers,” said Susan. “Not proper ones, anyway.”
    The skeletal rat stepped through the wall.
    Susan turned back to her book and ferociously read Noxeuse’s Divisibility Paradox, which demonstrated the impossibility of falling off a log.

    They practiced that very night, in Glod’s obsessively neat lodgings. These were behind a tannery in Phedre Road, and probably safe from the wandering ears of the Musicians’ Guild. They were also freshly painted and well scrubbed. The tiny room sparkled. You never got cockroaches or rats or any kind of vermin in a dwarf home. At least not while the owner could still hold a frying pan.
    Glod and Imp sat and watched Lias the troll hit his rocks.
    “What d’you fink?” he said, when he’d finished.
    “Is that all you do?” said Imp, after a while.
    “Dey’re rocks,” said the troll, patiently. “Dat’s all you can do. Bop, bop, bop.”
    “Hmm. Can I have a go?” said Glod.
    He sat behind the array of stones and looked at them for a while. Then he rearranged a few of them, took a couple of hammers out of his toolbox, and tapped a stone experimentally.
    “Now let’s see…” he said.
    Bambam-bam BAM .
    Beside Imp, the guitar strings hummed.
    “Without A Shirt,” said Glod.
    “What?” said Imp.
    “It’s just a bit of musical nonsense,” said Glod. “Like ‘Shave and a haircut, two pence’?”
    “Sorry?”
    Bam-bam-a-bambam, bam BAM .
    “Shave and haircut good value for two pence,” said Lias.
    Imp looked hard at the stones. Percussion wasn’t approved of in Llamedos either. The bards said that anyone could hit a rock or a hollow log with a stick. That wasn’t music . Besides, it was…and here they’d drop their voices…too animal .
    The guitar hummed. It seemed to pick up sounds.
    Imp suddenly had a nagging feeling that there was a lot you could do with percussion.
    “Can I try?” he said.
    He picked up the hammers. There was the faintest of tones from the guitar.
    Forty-five seconds later, he put down the hammers. The echoes died away.
    “Why did you hit me on the helmet at the end there?” said Glod, carefully.
    “Sorry,” said Imp. “I think I got carried away. I thought you were a cymbal.”
    “It was very…unusual,” said the troll.
    “The music’s…in the stones,” said Imp. “You just have to llet it out. There’s music in everything, if you know how to find it.”
    “Can I try dat riff?” said Lias. He took the hammers and shuffled around behind the stones again.
    A-bam-bop-a-re-bop-a-bim-bam-boom .
    “ What did you do to them?” he said. “They sound…wild.”
    “Sounded good to me,” said Glod. “Sounded a