Hi there. This is a really short chapter so I'm gonna tryand post two at one for ya. Unfortunately I've been having trouble uploading my documents lately so it's pretty much hope and pray on that right now. Anyway... oh I lied last time bythe way, there is no action in this chapter; not unless you count an angry Susan and some stuff blowing up. Thanks for all your lovelyreviews and please keep them coming. Ta.
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Albert was hiding in the kitchen. Susan had long since stopped yelling but that didn't mean it was safe to go into the study. She and her grandfather had been locked in there for close to an hour now and Albert was nervous. He knew it was theoretically impossible to kill Death but he wondered if Susan knew that.
Eventually the door opened and Susan strode out, eyes blazing. She was holding something in her arms. As she marched purposefully out of the house Albert crept into the study. Death was seated behind his desk, his skull in his hands.
"Um… everything alright master?" hazarded the little man.
I FEEL A LITTLE SHAKEN ALBERT.
"Yes sir, Miss Susan has that effect."
SHE'S MY GRANDDAUGHTER ALBERT.
"Yes sir. Like I said, she has that effect."
Death looked up at Albert and sagged back in his chair
SHE DOESN'T LIKE IT WHEN I ASK HER TO HELP.
"It's good for her, builds character sir."
HMM.
Neither of them bothered to say that Susan had quite enough character to begin with. That was part of the problem.
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"Perhaps a small over for heating food on long journeys…"
"No."
"A device for playing music?"
"No.
"A toilet?"
"No!"
Leonard frowned at his daughter. "You know Henriette you can be very restrictive sometimes."
She sighed and rubbed a hand over her oil-stained face. "I know."
"Don't you want to help me anymore?"
He sounded plaintive and she knew that if she turned around he would be regarding her with the same huge sad eyes that you got on the pathetically cute puppies in the pet shop window. It wouldn't occur to him to be angry with her, just hurt that he thought she wasn't interested.
"Of course I want to help you father. But this design is very ambitious, even for you. I think maybe we should finish the basic machine before we go adding things okay?"
She touched his shoulder and he looked up at her, nodding slowly.
"But do you think that the oven might be a good idea when we're done?"
Henriette closed her eyes.
"Yes father, no doubt an oven for heating food on long journeys would be a very good idea. But when we're finished."
He wasn't listening, he had gone back to his wires and cogs. She had really hoped that he would get tired of this sooner or later, it wasn't worth his disappointment when it didn't work. Still, she was willing to humour him for the moment..
Leonard worked fast and already the basic shell of the machine stood near the wall. Henriette glared at it. Her father had always had eccentric ideas but this was beyond the limit. It was Vetinari's fault, it had to be. Before he left for Ank-Morpok he never would have come up with this.
The sane part of her brain pointed out that he seemed to have exhausted every other possible exercise in invention since he had been here. Their various parts littered the room. But Henriette wasn't listening; she wanted somebody to be angry at and since her father was a lost cause where that was concerned Vetinari was the best candidate for the job.
She wiped her sweat-damp hair from her eyes and went back to the control panel she had been working on. As she worked, her anger ebbed slightly. There was something about the assembling of a piece of machinery that soothed her. So enwrapped was she that she almost didn't hear her father's quietly muttered, "Oops."
Henriette managed to throw herself flat on the floor in time to escape most of the explosion. As she helped clear up afterwards it struck her that things blew up more often these days as well.
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Susan was at school. Much to his general annoyance she tried not to let the fact that she was Death's granddaughter interfere with her day job. Right now she was trying to un-stick a child's fingers and not think about the thing in her desk drawer.
"There we are Tony. Just try and keep your fingers out of the glue pot from now on."
"Yeth Mith Thuthan."
"Tony, you are not an Igor."
"Sorry Miss."
"Run along now, it's lunch time."
"Yes Miss."
The rest of the class were already filing out. Susan remained behind her desk; she never went to the staff room with the other teachers. This was mostly because she found the other members of staff to be incredibly drippy women who believed that children were little angels to be wrapped in cotton wool rather than the evil little buggers Susan knew them to be5.
She sat and savoured the quiet for a while and then… time stopped. It was the safest way to ensure that she was not disturbed. She pushed the chair back from the desk and leaned down, sliding the bottom drawer open carefully. She lifted the heavy black book which lay there and set it down on her desk. There was the faint blue haze around the edges which signalled it out as one of the books from Death's library. On the black leather cover two words were picked out in golden gothic script: Havelock Vetinari.
Susan flipped the book open and back-tracked until she found the last page. It was less than a quarter of the way through.
…his young body crashed to the ground and lay, lifeless in the dark street. His spine was shattered, his brain dead even before his heart had beat its last. And so died the last of the ill-fated Vetinari family, his body cooling under the dark and relatively clear night sky of Ankh-Morpok.
Susan took a deep breath and closed the book. It was a horrible way to die, especially for a young man. She didn't know the Patrician but she knew what everyone said about him. Even so, she wasn't looking forward to what she was going to have to do.
She put the book away in the drawer again and let time speed up around her once more. Susan fished in another drawer and pulled out her sandwiches. She ate her lunch and marked schoolwork; life went on after all.
5 There was another reason why she never went to the staff room: namely because she had received a request from the headmistress that she never go there again after she left three teachers in tears on her very first morning.