Dr. Hannibal Lecter (harpsichord) plays Bach

[cook_the_rude]

Dr. Lecter is seated at the harpsichord this evening, in shirtsleeves, playing a variety of pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach, not all of them written for the instrument. But transposing other work for a two manual harpsichord isn't very hard.

He has a glass of the viognier Sunshine chose for him the other day, sipping lightly in between the pieces.

He does not seem to mind the audience and does pay people some passing attention as he carries on playing.



[[meta: hannibal is always the worst at helping. even when he is helping. for all others, terms and conditions still apply!]]

Comments

[scots_wolf]

There is music in the bar tonight. Somebody is playing Yrael's harpsichord, but not Yrael, or Urquhart would go and say hello. So, Urquhart lets the stranger play in peace while he enjoys the evening, sipping his whisky, long legs stretched out, Franz the dog lying half beneath them, dozing.

[cook_the_rude]

The stranger notices Urquhart and Franz when idly looking around, still playing; he nods politely at them.

After that, he looks over at them occasionally, with a fond look for the dog.

[scots_wolf]

After the stranger finishes that piece, Urquhart gets up and walks over, glass and bottle in his hand.

"You play very well," he greets the stranger. "Can I offer you a drink of my whisky in thanks?"

He casually shows the label; it's one of the best he knows.

[cook_the_rude]

The stranger gives a short little laugh. "MacAbre?" he says. "What an original name! I haven't even heard of that distillery, Bearhugger."

He tilts his head almost comically, looking at the label.

"It must be a good one, I take it, or a Scotsman wouldn't drink it of an evening, relaxing with his dog. Tell me about it."

He indicates a chair quite close to the piano.

[scots_wolf]

Urquhart sits, gets a glass from Thady the mottled waitrat, and pours the requisite inch of whisky, handing it to the musician.

"It's not from Scotland," he says, "not even from Earth, actually. It's from the world of a former friend of mine, just as the dog is. It's destilled in a City called Ankh-Morkpork, and it's the best, on par with any of the great single malts of my home."

He takes a sip from his own glass. Despite all the awkwardness with Moist lately, and the fact that he seems to have moved on with the sort of ease that used to be Urquhart's trademark, the whisky is still worth drinking, and offering to musicians for their pains.

"The names of his world are all like that," he continues. "It's a very odd world which sometimes sounds like one gigantic planet-sized pun with some moral message attached. But that doesn't make the whisky any less good, or the people from that world less real. You've been told about how the different worlds connect and add up here, I hope?"

[cook_the_rude]

"Yes, I have," the harpsichord player says. "It's not that hard to accept if we're willing to believe the evidence of our own eyes. Your former friend's does sound a bit odd, but then, some of the world I heard of seem a bit difficult to believe in. In one of them, comic strip superheroes are apparently real. So why not a world full of puns?"

[scots_wolf]

Urquhart snorts. "Wait until you meet a purple pony before saying 'difficult to believe'!" he laughs. "Oh, and the punning world of my former friend is also, apparently, quite flat and carried through space on the back of four elephants carried in turn by a huge turtle named Great A'tuin. No idea how they know its name. It's known as the Disc; a number of people from there come here, not just my former friend who introduced me to that whisky."

[cook_the_rude]

Amusement visibly flickers over the man's face at the mention of 'purple ponies', but he doesn't remark upon them.

"What makes your friend a former one?" he asks. "I can't help noticing that turn of phrase."

[scots_wolf]

Urquhart shrugs. Franz wakes up, stretches, and comes over.

"We fell out," Urquhart says. "We went to the Disc a few times, for fun and profit, and then after a while, he suddenly started taking umbrage at the ease with which I use violence."

Among other things, but that's none of the newcomer's business.

"I'm a professional killer, and my services are always for hire. He knew that, but suddenly, he grew worried that I'd do something that would implicate me."

Something about the stranger seems trustworthy and overly friendly; and to flush that out, Urquhart thrusts the bare-faced admittance of his profession right in the man's face. That usually works with the squeamish over-civilised folk from the future.

[cook_the_rude]

"Interesting profession," the man says, perfectly polite in his tone. "You're allowed to advertise that here?"

[scots_wolf]

"I don't break any of their silly rules," Urquhart shrugs. "I don't get much business, though. I consider myself largely retired. I'm dead, anyway; this is a very pleasant afterlife, full of books and good food and drink; I have a dog, can hunt and fish to my heart's content, water the garden outside, and meet some of the best women in the multiverse, and visit alien worlds."

The pianist from the future, with his starched shirt and meticulous hands, has probably not met dead people before.

[cook_the_rude]

"Seems as if you were well rewarded for helping God kill some surplus people," the stranger shrugs, turning back to the harpsichord and starting on the next piece of music.

When he finishes that, he turns back towards Urquhart. "How did you chose your jobs?"

[scots_wolf]

"I came recommended, as a rule," Urquhart says. "My employer of the moment told me what the problem was, who he wanted out of the way, and then I'd do some research and remove that problem as efficiently as possible. I don't like to give freebies. And I was never caught by the authorities."

[cook_the_rude]

"How and when did you die, then?" the newcomers asks, politely interested.

[scots_wolf]

"Thanks to a young thief and a drunken old priest who just wouldn't leave well alone, my last job went dramatically pear-shaped, and I was pushed off the scaffold of the cathedral in Cologne as it was being built," Urquhart says. "That was in the year 1260 AD, if your world counts years in the same way."

[cook_the_rude]

"It does," the harpsichord player says. "A medieval man! Interesting. You lived in a very pivotal time, with the scholastic philosophers at full swing, rowdy goliard poetry in Latin, and refined culture influenced by the Arab style brought back from the crusades. Pity you're dead; I would have liked to go there. Cologne was a great city at the time, second only to Paris in Western Europe, really."

The man takes a sip of his MacAbre, and then give Urquhart a funnily rueful little smile.

"Sorry, I was getting carried away. I shouldn't bombard you with educated babble about your own time, how thoughtless of me. You had better things to do than worry about poetry and philosophy at your profession, I take it."

[scots_wolf]

Urquhart finds the man a bit too calm and controlled to believe the bit about the 'babble' and suspects he's being deliberately provoked, in return to proudly declaring himself a hired assassin. Still, he can't resist rising to the bait.

"I never worried about it," he says. "I knew the poetry by heart and discoursed about the philosophy deep into the night over sour wine, when I was young and studied in Paris, at what would soon become known as the Sorbonne. I ended up with an odd profession, not the medicine I had thought about when I finished my studies as magister artium, but I always meant to retire to a place with many books and intelligent company to have long discussions with. Unfortunately, I kept being sidetracked; there was always just one more job, more lucrative and challenging than the last... And then there was the botched job with the bishop, and I ended up here."

[cook_the_rude]

"We share an alma mater, then," the newcomer says. "I studied medicine in Paris in the 1980s. How very interesting! Life is full of side tracks and unexpected turns."

He sips his whisky.

"Bishop. That wasn't Engelbert, as he was well before that time, and was actually murdered. It was" - he closes his eyes and tilts his head, concentrating visibly - "Konrad von Hochstaden? Quite controversial man, but he wasn't murdered."

[scots_wolf]

Urquhart doesn't quite enjoy the way the man pulls his vast knowledge from thin air to throw at him, as if he were consulting books on the inside of his eyelids.

"That's because I failed to kill him," he says, aloud. "I got his master builder, though. That legend about the devil taking him because he'd sold his soul for his designs? That devil was me, originally. I may have grown in the telling."

[cook_the_rude]

"Quite some side track," the newcomer says. "Didn't you miss Paris, and the life of an educated man?"

He seems seriously interested.

[scots_wolf]

"Remember Heraclitus," Urquhart says, not liking the turn the conversation is taking, but trying not to be too abrupt. "You can't step into the same river twice. Things had changed deeply, and places were out of reach for me forever. I wouldn't say they were haunted. It was me, rather, who would have become a ghost there, after..."

[cook_the_rude]

"It's not the battlefield that's haunted. It's the people who come there. The battlefield doesn't care," the stranger says, quietly, as if quoting something.

[scots_wolf]

Battlefield. Urquhart doesn't like to think about battlefields.

About the blood in the sand, the stench of the ripped-out entrails in the glaring midday sun of Egypt, about the cries, the terrible pitiful thin wails of the children, slaughtered after the city was taken, the pitiful wails that wouldn't and wouldn't stop...

Urquhart must have whimpered because Franz is there, at once, pressing against him, ready to have his fur gripped and his strong, muscular frame leant into.

The bar room is all but gone; instead, there is the midday sun of Damietta, and the glistening entrails spilled into the sand, the singing and shimmer of the swords and long knives, the rough laughter of the common soldiers who carried out their orders without thinking twice about them...

[cook_the_rude]

"You don't look well," the stranger says, suddenly very close, his face leaning into Urquhart's. "What is wrong...?"

Beat.

"Tell me your name! What are you called? Your first name? Who are you?"

[scots_wolf]

Urquhart doesn't want to answer, and can't think of an answer as the voice of the stranger mingles with the voices of the soldiers in his vision, a bit raw and deeply uncaring, no matter what the words say.

He has no answer, he doesn't think he can say anything, as everything turns to sun and blood and heat and cries, and Urquhart dissolves, groaning, into the fur of his dog, the only solid reality that remains to him.