‘Me? No. I was expecting her to be here.’ Then Vimes noticed just the very edge of concern in Carrot’s voice. ‘Something wrong?’
‘She didn’t turn up for duty last night. It wasn’t full moon, so it’s a bit … odd. Nobby said she was rather concerned about something when they were on duty the other day.’
Vimes nodded. Of course, most people were concerned about something if they were on duty with Nobby. They tended to look at clocks a lot.
‘Have you been to her lodgings?’
‘Her bed hadn’t been slept in,’ said Carrot. ‘Or her basket, either,’ he added.
‘Well, I can’t help you there, Carrot. She’s your girlfriend.’
‘She’s been a bit worried about the future, I think,’ said Carrot.
‘Um, you … she … the, er, werewolf thing?’ Vimes stopped, acutely embarrassed.
‘It preys on her mind,’ said Carrot.
‘Perhaps she’s just gone somewhere to think about things.’ Like how on earth could she go out with a young man who, magnificent though he was, blushed at the idea of a packet of Sonkies.
‘That’s what I hope, sir,’ Carrot said. ‘She does that sometimes. It’s really quite stressful, being a werewolf in a big city. I know we’d
have heardif she’d run into any trouble-‘
There was the sound of a harness outside, and the rattle of a coach. Vimes was relieved. Seeing Carrot worried was so unusual that it had the shock of the unfamiliar.
‘Well, we’ll have to go without her,’ he said. ‘I want to be kept in touch about everything, captain. A fake Scone going missing a week or two before a big dwarf coronation-That sounds like another shoe is about to drop and it might just hit me. And while you’re about it, put the word out that I’m to be sent anything about Sonky, will you? I don’t like mysteries. The clacks do a skeleton service as far as Uberwald now, don’t they?’
Carrot brightened up. ‘It’s wonderful, sir, isn’t it? In a few months they say we’ll be able to send messages all the way from AnkhMorpork to Genua in less than a day!’
‘Yes indeed. I wonder if by then we’ll have anything sensible to say to each other.’
Lord Vetinari stood at his window watching the semaphore tower on the other side of the river. All eight of the big shutters facing him were blinking furiously – black, white, white, black, white …
Information was flying into the air. Twenty miles behind him, on another tower in Sto Lat. someone was looking through a telescope and shouting out numbers.
How quickly the future comes upon us, he thought.
He always suspected the poetic description of Time like an ever-rolling stream. Time, in his experience, moved more like rocks … sliding, pressing, building up force underground and then, with one jerk that shakes the crockery, a whole field of turnips mysteriously slips sideways by six feet.
Semaphore had been around for centuries, and everyone knew that knowledge had a value, and everyone knew that exporting goods was a way of making money. And then, suddenly, someone realized how much money you could make by exporting to Genua by tomorrow things known in AnkhMorpork today. And some bright young man in the Street of Cunning Artificers had been unusually cunning.
Knowledge, information, power, words … flying through the air, invisible …
And suddenly the world was tap-dancing on quicksand.
In that case, the prize went to the best dancer.
Lord Vetinari turned away, took some papers from a desk drawer, walked to a wall, touched a certain area, and stepped quickly through the hidden door that noiselessly swung open.
Beyond was a corridor, lit by borrowed light from high windows and paved with small flagstones. He walked forward, hesitated, said ‘No, this is Tuesday,’ and moved his descending foot so that it landed on a stone that in every respect appeared to be exactly the same as its fellows.*
*Except that the ones around it were not good stones to tread on if it was a Tuesday.
Anyone overhearing his progress along the passages and stairs might have caught muttered phrases on the lines of ‘The moon is waxing …’ and ‘Yes, it is before noon.’ A really keen listener would have heard the faint whirring and ticking inside the walls.
A really keen and paranoid listener would have reflected that anything Lord Vetinari said aloud even while he was alone might not be totally worth believing. Not, certainly, if your life depended on it.
Eventually he reached a door, which he unlocked.
There was a large attic room beyond, suddenly airy and bright and cheerful with sunlight from the windows in the roof. It seemed to be a cross between a workshop and a storeroom. Several bird skeletons hung from the ceiling and there were a few other bones on the worktables, along with coils of wire and metal springs and tubes of paint and more tools, many of them probably unique, than you normally saw in any one place. Only a narrow bed, wedged between a thing like a loom with wings and a large bronze statue, suggested that someone actually lived here. They were clearly someone who was obsessively interested in everything.
What interested Lord Vetinari right now was the device. all by itself on a table in the middle of the room. It looked like a collection of copper balls balanced on one another. Steam was hissing gently from a few rivets, and occasionally the device went blup
‘Your lordship!’
Vetinari looked around. A hand was waving desperately at him from behind an upturned bench.
And something made him look up, as well. The ceiling above him was crusted with some brownish substance, which hung from it like stalactites.
Blup
With quite surprising speed the Patrician was behind the bench. Leonard of Quirm smiled at him from underneath his home-made protective helmet.
‘I do apologize,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid I wasn’t expecting anyone to come in. I’m sure it will work this time, however.’
Blup
‘What is it?’ said Vetinari.
Blup
‘I’m not quite sure, but I hope it’s a-‘
And then it was, suddenly, too noisy to talk.
Leonard of Quirm never dreamed that he was a prisoner. If anything, he was grateful to Vetinari for giving him this airy work space, and regular meals, and laundry, and protecting him from those people who for some reason always wanted to take his perfectly innocent inventions, designed for the betterment of mankind, and use them for despicable purposes. It was amazing how many of them there were – both the people and the inventions. It was as if all the genius of a civilization had funnelled into one head which was, therefore, in a constant state of highly inventive spin. Vetinari often speculated upon the fate of mankind should Leonard keep his mind on one thing for more than an hour or so.
The rushing noise died away. Blup.
Leonard peered cautiously over the bench and smiled broadly. ‘Ali! Happily, we appear to have achieved coffee,’ he said.
‘Coffee?’
Leonard walked over to the table and pulled a small lever on the device. A light . brown foam cascaded into a waiting cup with a noise like a clogged drain.
‘Different coffee,’ he said. ‘Very fast coffee. I rather think you will like it. I’m calling this the Very-Fast-Coffee machine.’
‘And that’s today’s invention, is it?’ said Vetinari.
‘Well, yes. It would have been a scale model of a device for reaching the moon and other celestial bodies, but I was thirsty.’
‘How fortunate.’ Lord Vetinari carefully removed an experimental pedal-powered shoepolishing machine from a chair and sat down. ‘And I’ve brought you some more little … messages.’
Leonard almost clapped his hands. ‘Oh, good! And I’ve finished the other ones you gave me last night.’
Lord Vetinari carefully removed a moustache of frothy coffee from his upper lip. ‘I beg your-? All of them? You broke the cyphers on all those messages from Uberwald?’
‘Oh, they were quite easy after I’d finished the new device,’ said Leonard, rummaging through the piles of paper on a bench and handing the Patrician several closely written sheets. ‘But once you realize that there are only a limited number
of birth dates a_ person can have, and that people do tend to think the same way, cyphers are really not very hard.’
‘You mentioned a new device?’ said the Patrician.
‘Oh, yes. The … thingy. It’s all very crude at the moment, but it suffices for these simple codes.’
Leonard pulled a sheet off something vaguely rectangular. It seemed to Vetinari to be all wooden wheels and long thin spars which, he saw when he moved closer, were inscribed thickly with letters and numbers. A number of the wheels were not round but oval or heartshaped or some other curious curve. When Leonard turned a handle, the whole thing moved with a complex oiliness quite disquieting in something merely mechanical.