‘I got a job anyway, Mr Silverfish,’ said Detritus calmly, carrying Silverfish towards the gate. ‘I’m VicePresident of Throwing Out People Mr Dibbler Doesn’t like the Face Of.’
‘Then you’ll have to take on an assistant!’ snarled Silverfish.
‘I got a nephew looking for a career,’ said the troll. ‘Have a nice day.’
‘Right,’ said Dibbler, rubbing his hands briskly. ‘Soll!’
Soll appeared from behind a trestle table loaded with rolled-up plans, and took a pencil out of his mouth.
‘Yes, Uncle?’
‘How long will it take?’
‘About four days, Uncle.’ ‘That’s too long. Hire more people. I want it done by tomorrow, right?’
‘But, Uncle-‘
‘Or you’re sacked,’ said Dibbler. Soll looked frightened.
‘I’m your nephew, Uncle,’ he protested. ‘You can’t sack nephews.’
Dibbler looked around and appeared to notice Victor for the first time.
‘Ah, Victor. You’re good at words,’ he said. ‘Can I sack a nephew?’
‘Er. I don’t think so. I think you have to disown them, or something,’ said Victor lamely. ‘But-‘
‘Right! Right!’ said Dibbler. ‘Good man. I knew it was some kind of a word like that. Disown. Hear that, Soll?’
‘Yes, Uncle,’ said Soll dispiritedly. ‘I’ll go and see if I can find some more carpenters, then, shall I?’
‘Right.’ Soll flashed Victor a look of terrified astonishment as he scurried away. Dibbler started haranguing a group of handlemen. Instructions spouted out of the man like water from a fountain.
‘I reckon no-one’s goin’ to Ankh-Morpork this morning, then,’ said a voice by Victor’s knee.
‘He’s certainly very, er, ambitious today;’ said Victor. ‘Not like himself at all.’
Gaspode scratched an ear. ‘There was sunnink I got to tell you. What was it, now? Oh, yeah. I remember. Your girlfriend is an agent of demonic powers. That night we saw her on the hill she was prob’ly on her way to commune with evil. What d’you fink of that, eh?’
He grinned. He was rather proud of the way he’d introduced the subject.
‘That’s nice,’ said Victor abstractedly. Dibbler was certainly acting even stranger than usual. Even stranger than usual for Holy Wood, even . . .
‘Yeah,’ said Gaspode, slightly annoyed at this reception. ‘A-cavortin’ at night with eldritchly occult Intelligences from the Other Side, I shouldn’t wonder.’
‘Good,’ said Victor. You didn’t normally burn things in Holy Wood. You saved them and painted on the other side. Despite himself, he began to get interested.
‘-a cast of thousands,’ Dibbler was saying. ‘I don’t care where you get them from, we’ll hire everyone in Holy Wood if we have to, right? And I want-‘
‘A-helpin’ them in their evil attempts to take over the whole world, if I’m any judge,’ said Gaspode.
‘Does she?’ said Victor. Dibbler was talking to a couple of apprentice alchemists now. What was that. A twentyreeler? But no-one had ever dreamed of going above five!
‘Yeah, a-diggin’ away to rouse them from their ancient slumber to reek havoc, style offing,’ said Gaspode. ‘Prob’ly aided by cats, you mark my-‘
‘Look, just shut up a minute, will you?’ said Victor, irritably. ‘I’m trying to hear what they’re saying.’
‘Well, ‘scuse me. I was jus’ tryin’ to save the world,’ muttered Gaspode. ‘If gharstely creatures from Before the Dawna Time starts wavin’ at you from under your bed, jus’ you don’t come complainin’ to me.’
‘What are you going on about?’ said Victor.
‘Oh, nothin’. Nothin’.’
Dibbler looked up, caught sight of Victor’s craning face, and waved at it.
‘You, lad! Come here! Have I got a part for you!’
‘Have you?’ said Victor, pushing his way through the crowd.
‘That’s what I said!’
‘No, you asked if-‘ Victor began, and gave up.
‘And where’s Miss Ginger, may I ask?’ said Dibbler. ‘Late again?’
‘ . . . prob’ly sleepin’ in . . . ‘ grumbled a sullen and totally ignored voice from down below in the sea of legs, ‘. . . prob’ly takes it out of you, messin’ with the occult . . . ‘
‘Soll, send someone to fetch her here-‘
‘Yes, Uncle.’
‘. . . wot can you expect, huh, people who like cats’re capable of anythin’, you can’t trust ’em. . . ‘
‘And find someone to transcribe the bed.’
‘Yes, Uncle.’
‘ . . . but do they listen! Not them. Bet if I had a glossy coat an’ ran aroun’ yappin’ they’d listen all right . . . ‘
Dibbler opened his mouth to speak, and then frowned and raised a hand.
‘Where’s that muttering coming from?’ he said.
‘ . . . prob’ly saved the whole world for ’em, by rights I’d get a statchoo put up to me nose but no, oh no, not for you Mr Gaspode, on account of you not bein’ the right kinda person, so . . . ‘
The whine stopped. The crowd shuffled aside, revealing a small bowlegged grey dog, which looked up impassively at Dibbler.
‘Bark?’ it said, innocently.
Events always moved fast in Holy Wood, but the work on Blown Away sped forward like a comet. The other Fruitbat clicks were halted. So were most of the others in the town, because Dibbler was hiring actors and handlemen at twice what anyone else would pay.
And a sort of Ankh-Morpork rose among the dunes. It would have been cheaper, Soll complained, to have risked the wrath of the wizards, sneaked some filming in Ankh-Morpork itself, and then slipped someone a fistful of dollars to put a match to the place.
Dibbler disagreed.
‘Apart from anything else,’ he declared, ‘it wouldn’t look right.’
‘But it’s the real Ankh-Morpork, Uncle,’ said Soll. ‘It’s got to look exactly right. How can it not look right?’
‘Ankh-Morpork doesn’t look all that genuine, you know,’ said Dibbler thoughtfully.
‘Of course it’s bloody genuine!’ snapped Soll, the bonds of .kinship stretching to snapping point. ‘It’s really there! It’s really itself! You can’t make it any more genuine! It’s as genuine as it can get!’
Dibbler took his cigar out of his mouth.
‘No, it isn’t,’ he said. ‘You’ll see.’
Ginger turned up around lunchtime, looking so pale that even Dibbler didn’t shout at her. She kept glaring at Gaspode, who tried to stay out of her way.
Dibbler was preoccupied, anyway. He was in his office, explaining The Plot.
It was basically quite simple, running on the familiar lines of Boy Meets Girl, Girl Meets Another Boy, Boy Loses Girl, except that on this occasion there was a civil war in the middle of it . . .
The origins of the Ankh-Morpork Civil War (8.32 p.m., Grune 3, 432 -10.45 a. m., Grune 4, 432) have always been a subject of heated debate among historians. There are two main theories: 1. The common people, having been heavily taxed by a particularly stupid and unpleasant king, decided that enough was enough and that it was time to do away with the outmoded concept of monarchy and replace it with, as it turned out, a series of despotic overlords who still taxed heavily but at least had the decency not to pretend the gods had given them the right to do it, which made everyone feel a bit better OR 2. One of the players in a game of Cripple Mr Onion in a tavern had accused another of palming more than the usual number of aces, and knives had been drawn, and then someone had hit someone with a “bench, and then someone else had stabbed someone, and arrows started to fly, and someone had swung on the chandelier, and a carelesslyhurled axe had hit someone in the street, and then the Watch had been called in, and someone had set fire to the place, and someone had hit a lot of people with a table, and then everyone lost their tempers and commenced to start fighting.
Anyway, it all caused a civil war, which is something every mature civilization needs to have had . . . [20]
‘The way I see it,’ said Dibbler, ‘there’s this high-born girl living all by herself in this big house, right, and her young man goes off to fight for the rebels, you see, and she meets this other guy, and there’s the chemistry between them-‘
‘They blow up?’ said Victor.
‘He means they fall in love,’ said Ginger coldly.
‘That sort of thing,’ nodded Dibbler. ‘Eyes meeting across a crowded room. And she’s all alone in the world except for the servants and, let’s see, yeah, perhaps her pet dog-‘
‘This’ll be Laddie?’ said Ginger.
‘Right. And of course she’s going to do everything she can to preserve the family mine, so she’s kind of flirting with ’em both, the men, not the dog, and then one of them gets killed in the war and the other one throws her over but it’s all OK because she’s tough at heart.’ He sat back. ‘What d’you think?’ he said.
The people sitting around the room looked uneasily at one another.
There was a fidgety silence.