The problem, Archchancellor,’ he tried, ‘is that we have always been very much against using movable type printing for magic purposes because–‘
‘Yes, yes, I know all about that,’ said the Archchancellor. ‘But there’s all the other stuff, more of it every day . . . forms and charts and gods know what. You know I’ve always wanted a paperless office–‘
‘Yes, Archchancellor, that’s why you hide it all in cupboards and throw it out of the window at night.’
‘Clean desk, clean mind,’ said the Archchancellor. He thrust the leaflet into the Bursar’s hand.
‘Just you trot down there, why don’t you, and see if it’s just a lot of hot air. But walk, please.’
William felt drawn back to the sheds behind the Bucket next day. Apart from anything else, he had nothing to do and he didn’t like being useless.
There are, it has been said, two types of people in the world. There are those who, when presented with a glass that is exactly half full, say: this glass is half full. And then there are those who say: this glass is half empty.
The world belongs, however, to those who can look at the glass and say: ‘What’s up with this glass? Excuse me? Excuse me? This is my glass? I don’t think so. My glass was full! And it was a bigger glass!
And at the other end of the bar the world is full of the other type of person, who has a broken glass, or a glass that has been carelessly knocked over (usually by one of the people calling for a larger glass), or who had no glass at all, because they were at the back of the crowd and had failed to catch the barman’s eye.
William was one of the glassless. And this was odd, because he’d been born into a family that not only had a very large glass indeed but could afford to have people discreetly standing around with bottles to keep it filled up.
It was self-imposed glasslessness, and it had started at a fairly early age when he’d been sent away to school.
William’s brother Rupert, being the elder, had gone to the Assassins’ School in Ankh-Morpork, widely regarded as being the best school in the world for the full-glass class. William, as a less-important son, had been sent to Hugglestones, a boarding school so bleak and spartan that only the upper glasses would dream of sending their sons there.
Hugglestones was a granite building on a rain-soaked moor, and its stated purpose was to make men from boys. The policy employed involved a certain amount of wastage, and consisted in William’s recollection at least of very simple and violent games in the healthy outdoor sleet. The small, slow, fat or merely unpopular were mown down, as nature intended, but natural selection operates in many ways and William found that he had a certain capacity for survival. A good way to survive on the playing fields of Hugglestones was to run very fast and shout a lot while inexplicably always being a long way from the ball. This had earned him, oddly enough, a reputation for being keen, and keenness was highly prized at Hugglestones, if only because actual achievement was so rare. The staff at Hugglestones believed that in sufficient quantities ‘being keen’ could take the place of lesser attributes like intelligence, foresight and training.
He had been truly keen on anything involving words. At Hugglestones this had not counted for a great deal, since most of its graduates never expected to have to do much more with a pen than sign their names (a feat which most of them could manage after three or four years), but it had meant long mornings peacefully reading anything that took his fancy while around him the hulking front-row forwards who would one day be at least the deputy-leaders of the land learned how to hold a pen without crushing it.
William left with a good report, which tended to be the case with pupils that most of the teachers could only vaguely remember. Afterwards, his father had faced the problem of what to do with him.
He was the younger son, and family tradition sent youngest sons into some church or other, where they couldn’t do much harm on a physical level. But too much reading had taken its toll. William found that he now thought of prayer as a sophisticated way of pleading with thunderstorms.
Going into land management was just about acceptable, but it seemed to William that land managed itself pretty well, on the whole. He was all in favour of the countryside, provided that it was on the other side of a window.
A military career somewhere was unlikely. William had a rooted objection to killing people he didn’t know.
He enjoyed reading and writing. He liked words. Words didn’t shout or make loud noises, which pretty much defined the rest of his family. They didn’t involve getting muddy in the freezing cold. They didn’t hunt inoffensive animals, either. They did what he told them to. So, he’d said, he wanted to write.
His father had erupted. In his personal world a scribe was only one step higher than a teacher. Good gods, man, they didn’t even ride a horse! So there had been Words.
As a result, William had gone off to Ankh-Morpork, the usual destination for the lost and the aimless. There he’d made words his living, in a quiet sort of way, and considered that he’d got off easily compared to brother Rupert, who was big and good natured and a Hugglestones natural apart from the accident of birth.
And then there had been the war against Klatch . . .
It was an insignificant war, which was over before it started, the kind of war that both sides pretended hadn’t really happened, but one of the things that did happen in the few confused days of wretched turmoil was the death of Rupert de Worde. He had died for his beliefs; chief among them was the very Hugglestonian one that bravery could replace armour, and that Klatchians would turn and run if you shouted loud enough.
William’s father, during their last meeting, had gone on at some length about the proud and noble traditions of the de Wordes. These had mostly involved unpleasant deaths, preferably of foreigners, but somehow, William gathered, the de Wordes had always considered that it was a decent second prize to die themselves. A de Worde was always to the fore when the city called. That was why they existed. Wasn’t the family motto Le Mot Juste? The Right Word In The Right Place, said Lord de Worde. He simply could not understand why William did not want to embrace this fine tradition and he dealt with it, in the manner of his kind, by not dealing with it.
And now a great frigid silence had descended between the de Wordes that made the winter chill seem like a sauna.
In this gloomy frame of mind it was positively cheering to wander into the print room to find the Bursar arguing the theory of words with Goodmountain.
‘Hold on, hold on,’ said the Bursar. ‘Yes, indeed, figuratively a word is made up of individual letters but they have only a,’ he waved his long fingers gracefully, ‘theoretical existence, if I may put it that way. They are, as it were, words partis in potentia, and it is, I am afraid, unsophisticated in the extreme to imagine that they have any real existence unis et separata. Indeed, the very concept of letters having their own physical existence is, philosophically, extremely worrying. Indeed, it would be like noses and fingers running around the world all by themselves–‘
That’s three ‘indeeds’, thought William, who noticed things like that. Three indeeds used by a person in one brief speech generally meant an internal spring was about to break.
‘We got whole boxes of letters,’ said Goodmountain flatly. ‘We can make any words you want.’
That’s the trouble, you see,’ said the Bursar. ‘Supposing the metal remembers the words it has printed? At least engravers melt down their plates, and the cleansing effect of fire will–‘
‘ ‘scuse me, your reverence,’ said Goodmountain. One of the dwarfs had tapped him gently on the shoulder and handed him a square of paper. He passed it up to the Bursar.
‘Young Caslong here thought you might like this as a souvenir,’ he said. ‘He took it down directly from the case and pulled it off on the stone. He’s very quick like that.’
The Bursar tried to look the young dwarf sternly up and down, although this was a pretty pointless intimidatory tactic to use on dwarfs since they had very little up to look down from.
‘Really?’ he said. ‘How very . . .’ His eyes scanned the paper.
And then bulged.
‘But these are . . . when I said . . . I only just said . . . How did you know I was going to say . . . I mean, my actual words . . .’ he stuttered.