‘Yes, sir.’ The man was looking harassed and Vimes felt there was room for a pinch of sympathy.
‘Fred and Nobby don’t like complications either, sir.’
‘We need simple answers, Vimes.’
‘Sir. Fred and Nobby are good at simple.’
The Patrician turned away and looked out over the city.
‘Ah,’ he said, in a quieter voice. ‘Simple men to see the simple truth.’
‘This is a fact, sir.’
‘You are learning fast, Vimes.’
‘Couldn’t say about that, sir.’
‘And when they have found the simple truth, Vimes?’
‘Can’t argue with the truth, sir.’
‘In my experience, Vimes, you can argue with anything.’
When Vimes had gone Lord Vetinari sat at his desk for a while, staring at nothing. Then he took a key from a drawer and walked across to a wall, where he pressed a particular area.
There was a rattle of a counterweight. The wall swung back.
The Patrician walked softly through the narrow passageway beyond. Here and there it was illuminated by a very faint glow from around the edges of the little panels which, if gently slid back, would allow someone to look out through the eyesockets of a handy portrait.
They were a relic of a previous ruler. Vetinari never bothered with them. Looking out of someone else’s eyes wasn’t the trick.
There was a certain amount of travel up dark stairways and along musty corridors. Occasionally he’d make movements the meaning of which might not be readily apparent. He’d touch a wall here and here, apparently without thinking, as he passed. Along one stone–flagged passage, lit only by the grey fight from a window forgotten by everyone except the most optimistic flies, he appeared to play a game of hopscotch, robes flying around him and calves twinkling as he skipped from stone to stone.
These various activities did not seem to cause anything to happen. Eventually he reached a door, which he unlocked. He did this with some caution.
The air beyond was full of acrid smoke, and the steady pop–pop sound which he had begun to hear further back along the passage was now quite loud. It faltered for a moment, was followed by a much louder bang, and then a piece of hot metal whirled past the Patrician’s car and buried itself in the wall.
In the smoke a voice said, ‘Oh dear.’
It didn’t seem unhappy, but sounded rather like the voice one might use to a sweet and ingratiating little puppy which, despite one’s best efforts, is sitting next to a spreading damp patch on the carpet.
As the billows cleared the indistinct shape of the speaker turned to Vetinari with a wan little smile and said, ‘Fully fifteen seconds this time, my lord! There is no doubt that the principle is sound.’
That was one of Leonard of Quirm’s traits: he picked up conversations out of the air, he assumed everyone was an interested friend, and he took it for granted that you were as intelligent as he was.
Vetinari peered at a small heap of bent and twisted metal.
‘What was it, Leonard?’ he said.
‘An experimental device for turning chemical energy into rotary motion,’ said Leonard. ‘The problem, you see, is getting the little pellets of black powder into the combustion chamber at exactly the right speed and one at a time. If two ignite together, well, what we have is the external combustion engine.’
‘And, er, what would be the purpose of it?’ said the Patrician.
‘I believe it could replace the horse,’ said Leonard proudly.
They looked at the stricken thing.
‘One of the advantages of horses that people often point out,’ said Vetinari, after some thought, ‘is that they very seldom explode. Almost never, in my experience, apart from that unfortunate occurrence in the hot summer a few years ago.’ With fastidious fingers he pulled something out of the mess. It was a pair of cubes, made out of some soft white fur and linked together by a piece of string. There were dots on them.
‘Dice?’ he said.
Leonard smiled in an embarrassed fashion. ‘Yes. I can’t think why I thought they’d help it go better. It was just, well, an idea. You know how it is.’
Lord Vetinari nodded. He knew how it was. Be knew how it was far more than Leonard of Quirm did, which was why there was one key to the door and he had it. Not that the man was a prisoner, except by dull, humdrum standards. He appeared rather grateful to be confined in this light, airy attic with as much wood, paper, sticks of charcoal and paint as he desired and no rent or food bills to pay.
In any case, you couldn’t really imprison someone like Leonard of Quirm. The most you could do was lock up his body. The gods alone knew where his mind went. And, although he had so much cleverness it leaked continually, he couldn’t tell you which way the political wind was blowing even if you fitted him with sails.
Leonard’s incredible brain sizzled away alarmingly, an overloaded chip pan on the Stove of Life. It was impossible to know what he would think of next, because he was constantly reprogrammed by the whole universe. The sight of a waterfall or a soaring bird would send him spinning down some new path of practical speculation that invariably ended in a heap of wire and springs and a cry of ‘I think I know what I did wrong.’ He’d been a member of most of the craft guilds in the city but had been thrown out for getting impossibly high marks in the exams or, in some cases, correcting the questions. It was said that he’d accidentally blown up the Alchemists’ Guild using nothing more than a glass of water, a spoonful of acid, two lengths of wire and a pingpong ball.
Any sensible ruler would have killed off Leonard, and Lord Vetinari was extremely sensible and often wondered why he had not done so. He’d decided that it was because, imprisoned in the priceless, enquiring amber of Leonard’s massive mind, underneath A that bright investigative genius was a kind of wilful innocence that might in lesser men be called stupidity. It was the seat and soul of that force which, down the millennia, had caused mankind to stick its fingers in the electric fight socket of the Universe and play with the switch to see what happened – and then be very surprised when it did.
It was, in short, something useful. And if the Patrician was anything, he was the political equivalent of the old lady who saves bits of string because you never know when they might come in handy.
After all, you couldn’t plan for every eventuality, because that would involve knowing what was going to happen, and if you knew what was going to happen, you could probably see to it that it didn’t, or at least happened to someone else. So the Patrician never planned. Plans often got in the way.
And, finally, he kept Leonard around because the man was easy to talk to. He never understood what Lord Vetinari was talking about, he had a world view about as complex as that of a concussed duckling and, above all, never really paid attention. This made him an excellent confidant. After all, when you seek advice from someone it’s certainly not because you want them to give it. You just want them to be there while you talk to yourself.
‘I’ve just made some tea.’ said Leonard. ‘Will you join me?’
He followed the Patrician’s gaze to a brown stain all up one wall, which ended in a star of molten metal in the plaster.
‘I’m afraid the automatical tea engine went wrong,’ he said. ‘I shall have to make it by hand.’
‘So kind,’ said Lord Vetinari.
He sat down amidst the easels and, while Leonard busied himself at the fireplace, leafed through the latest sketches. Leonard sketched as automatically as other people scratched; genius – a certain kind of genius – fell off him like dandruff.
There was a picture of a man drawing, the lines catching the figure so accurately it appeared to stand out of the paper. And around it, because Leonard never wasted white space, were other sketches, scattered aimlessly. A thumb. A bowl of flowers. A device, apparently, for sharpening pencils by water power…
Vetinari found what he was looking for in the bottom lefthand corner, sandwiched between a sketch for a new type of screw and a tool for opening oysters. It, or something very much like it, was always there somewhere.
One of the things that made Leonard such a rare prize, and kept him under such secure lock and key, was that he really didn’t see any difference between the thumb and the roses and the pencil–sharpener and this.
‘Ah, the self–portrait,’ said Leonard, returning with two cups.
‘Yes, indeed,’ said Vetinari. ‘But my eye was drawn to this little sketch here. The war machine…’