‘I am frankly amazed,’ said Mr Cartwright. ‘It beats me how they find this stuff out.’
‘It certainly makes you wonder what’s going on that we aren’t told,’ said Mr Windling.
William listened for a while, until he couldn’t wait any longer.
‘Something interesting in the paper?’ he asked innocently.
‘A woman in Kicklebury Street says her husband has been kidnapped by elves,’ said Mr Mackleduff, holding up the Inquirer. The heading was very clear on the subject:
ELVES STOLE MY HUSBAND!
‘That’s made up!’ said William.
‘Can’t be,’ said Mackleduff. ‘There’s the lady’s name and address, right there. They wouldn’t put that in the paper if they were telling lies, would they?’
William looked at the name and address. ‘I know this lady,’ he said.
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‘There you are, then!’
‘She was the one last month who said her husband had been carried off by a big silver dish that came out of the sky,’ said William, who had a good memory for this sort of thing. He’d nearly put it in his news letter as an ‘On a lighter note’ but had thought better of it. ‘And you, Mr Prone, said everyone knew her husband had carried himself off with a lady called Flo who used to work as a waitress in Harga’s House of Ribs.’
Mrs Arcanum gave William a sharp look which said that the whole subject of nocturnal kitchenware theft could be re-opened at any time, extra egg or no.
‘I am not partial to that kind of talk at the table,’ she said coldly.
‘Well, then, it’s obvious,’ said Mr Cartwright. ‘He must’ve come back.’
‘From the silver dish or from Flo?’ said William.
‘Mr de Worde!’
‘I was only asking,’ said William. ‘Ah, I see they’re revealing the name of the man who broke into the jeweller’s the other day. Shame it’s Done It Duncan, poor old chap.’
‘A notorious criminal, by the sound of it,’ said Mr Windling. ‘It’s shocking that the Watch won’t arrest him.’
‘Especially since he calls on them every day,’ said William.
‘Whatever for?’
‘A hot meal and a bed for the night,’ said William. ‘Done It Duncan confesses to everything, you see. Original sin, murders, minor thefts . . . everything. When he’s desperate he tries to turn himself in for the reward.’
‘Then they ought to do something about him,’ said Mrs Arcanum.
‘I believe they generally give him a mug of tea,’ said William. He paused and then ventured: ‘Is there anything in the other paper?’
‘Oh, they’re still trying to say that Vetinari didn’t do it,’ said Mr Mackleduff. ‘And the King of Lancre says women in Lancre don’t give birth to snakes.’
‘Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?’ said Mrs Arcanum.
‘Vetinari must’ve done something,’ said Mr Windling. ‘Otherwise why would he be helping the Watch with their inquiries? That’s
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not the action of an innocent man, in my humble opinion.’*
‘I believe there’s plenty of evidence that throws doubt on his guilt,’ said William.
‘Really,’ said Mr Windling, making the word suggest that William’s opinion was considerably more humble than his. ‘Anyway, I understand the Guild leaders are meeting today.’ He sniffed. ‘It’s time for a change. Frankly, we could do with a ruler who is a little more responsive to the views of ordinary people.’
William glanced at Mr Longshaft, the dwarf, who was peacefully cutting some toast into soldiers. Perhaps he hadn’t noticed. Perhaps there was nothing to notice and William was being over sensitive. But years of listening to Lord de Worde’s opinions had given him a certain ear. It told him when phrases like ‘the views of ordinary people’, innocent and worthy in themselves, were being used to mean that someone should be whipped.
‘How do you mean?’ he said.
The . . . city is getting too big,’ said Mr Windling. ‘In the old days the gates were kept shut, not left open to all and sundry. And people could leave their doors unlocked.’
‘We didn’t have anything worth stealing,’ said Mr Cartwright.
That’s true. There’s more money around,’ said Mr Prone.
‘It doesn’t all stay here, though,’ said Mr Windling. That was true, at least. ‘Sending money home’ was the major export activity of the city, and dwarfs were right at the front of it. William also knew that most of it came back again, because dwarfs bought from the best dwarf craftsmen and, mostly, the best dwarf craftsmen worked in Ankh-Morpork these days. And they sent money back
* The best way to describe Mr Windling would be like this: you are at a meeting. You’d like to be away early. So would everyone else. There really isn’t very much to discuss, anyway. And just as everyone can see Any Other Business coming over the horizon and is already putting their papers neatly together, a voice says ‘If I can raise a minor matter, Mr Chairman . . .’ and with a horrible wooden feeling in your stomach you know, now, that the evening will go on for twice as long with much referring back to the minutes of earlier meetings. The man who has just said that, and is now sitting there with a smug smile of dedication to the committee process, is as near Mr Windling as makes no difference. And something that distinguishes the Mr Windlings of the universe is the term ‘in my humble opinion’, which they think adds weight to their statements rather than indicating, in reality, ‘these are the mean little views of someone with the social grace of duckweed’.
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home. A tide of gold coins rolled back and forth and seldom had a chance to go cold. But it upset the Windlings of the city.
Mr Longshaft quietly picked up his boiled egg and inserted it into an eggcup.
‘There’s just too many people in the city,’ Mr Windling repeated. ‘I’ve nothing against . . . outsiders, heavens know, but Vetinari let it go far too far. Everyone knows we need someone who is prepared to be a little more firm.’
There was a metallic noise. Mr Longshaft, still staring fixedly at his egg, had reached down and drawn a smallish but still impressively axe-like axe from his bag. Watching the egg carefully, as if it was about to run away, he leaned slowly back, paused for a moment, then brought the blade round in an arc of silver.
The top of the egg flew up with hardly a noise, turned over in mid-air several feet above the plate, and landed beside the eggcup.
Mr Longshaft nodded to himself and then looked up at the frozen expressions.
‘I’m sorry?’ he said. ‘I wasn’t listening.’
At which point, as Sacharissa would have put it, the meeting broke up.
William purchased his own copy of the Inquirer on the way to Gleam Street and wondered, not for the first time, who was writing this stuff. They were better at it than he would be, that was certain. He’d wondered once about making up a few innocent paragraphs, when not much was happening in the city, and found that it was a lot harder than it looked. Try as he might, he kept letting common sense and intelligence get the better of him. Besides, telling lies was Wrong.
He noted glumly that they’d used the talking dog story. Oh, and one he hadn’t heard before: a strange figure had been seen swooping around the rooftops of Unseen University at night, HALF MAN HALF MOTH? Half invented and half made up, more likely.
The curious thing was, if the breakfast table jury was anything to go by, that denying stories like this only proved that they were true. After all, no one would bother to deny something if it didn’t exist, would they?
He took a short cut through the stables in Creek Alley. Like
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Gleam Street, Creek Alley was there to mark the back of places. This part of the city had no real existence other than as a place you passed through to somewhere more interesting. The dull street was made up of high-windowed warehouses and broken-down sheds and, significantly, Hobson’s Livery Stable.
It was huge, especially since Hobson had realized that you could go multi-storey.
Willie Hobson was another businessman in the mould of the King of the Golden River; he’d found a niche, occupied it and forced it open so wide that lots of money dropped in. Many people in the city occasionally needed a horse, and hardly anyone had a place to park one. You needed a stable, you needed a groom, you needed a hayloft. . . but to hire a horse from Willie you just needed a few dollars.
Lots of people kept their own horses there, too. People came and went all the time. The bandy-legged, goblin-like little men who ran the place never bothered to stop anyone unless they appeared to have hidden a horse about their person.
William looked around when a voice out of the gloom of the loose-boxes said, “scuse me, friend.’