‘Well, you are a special man, Charlie,’ said Mr Pin. ‘And afterwards you will have to stay out of sight for a long time.’
37
‘Yeah,’ said Mr Tulip, in a spray of powder. There was a sudden strong smell of mothballs.
‘All right, but why did you have to kidnap me, then? One minute I was locking up for the night, next minute – bang! And you’ve got me chained up.’
Mr Pin decided to change tack. Charlie was arguing too much for a man in the same room as Mr Tulip, especially a Mr Tulip who was halfway through a bag of powdered mothballs. He gave him a big friendly smile.
‘There’s no point in dwelling on the past, my friend,’ he said. ‘This is business. All we want is a few days of your time, and then you end up with a fortune and – and I believe this is important, Charlie – a lifetime in which to spend it.’
Charlie was turning out to be very stupid indeed.
‘But how do you know I won’t tell someone?’ he insisted.
Mr Pin sighed. ‘We trust you, Charlie.’
The man had run a clothes shop in Pseudopolis. Small shopkeepers had to be smart, didn’t they? They were usually sharp as knives when it came to making just the right amount of wrong change. So much for physiognomy, thought Mr Pin. This man could pass for the Patrician even in a good light, but while by all accounts Lord Vetinari would have already worked out all the nasty ways the future could go, Charlie was actually entertaining the idea that he was going to come out of this alive and might even outsmart Mr Pin. He was actually trying to be cunning. He was sitting a few feet away from Mr Tulip, a man trying to snort crushed moth repellant, and he was trying guile. You almost had to admire the man.
‘I’ll need to be back by Friday,’ said Charlie. ‘It’ll all be over by Friday, will it?’
~blk~
The shed that was now leased by the dwarfs had in the course of its rickety life been a forge and a laundry and a dozen other enterprises, and had last been used as a rocking-horse factory by someone who had thought something was the Next Big Thing when it was by then one day away from becoming the Last Big Flop. Stacks of half-finished rocking horses that Mr Cheese had
38
been unable to sell for the back rent still filled one wall all the way to the tin roof. There was a shelf of corroding paint tins. Brushes had fossilized in their jars.
The press occupied the centre of the floor, with several dwarfs at work. William had seen presses. The engravers used them. This one had an organic quality, though. The dwarfs spent as much time changing the press as they did using it. Extra rollers appeared, endless belts were threaded into the works. The press grew by the hour.
Goodmountain was working in front of several of the large sloped boxes, each one of which was divided into several dozen compartments.
William watched the dwarf’s hand fly over the little boxes of leaden letters.
‘Why’s there a bigger box for the Es?’
‘ ‘cos that’s the letter we use most of.’
‘Is that why it’s in the middle of the box?’
‘Right. Es then Ts then As . . .’
‘I mean, people would expect to see A in the middle.’
‘We put E.’
‘But you’ve got more Ns than Us. And U is a vowel.’
‘People use more Ns than you think.’
On the other side of the room Caslong’s stubby dwarf fingers danced across his own boxes of letters.
‘You can almost read what he’s working on–‘ William began.
Goodmountain glanced up. His eyes narrowed for a moment.
‘ “. . . Make . . . more . . . money . . . inn . . . youre . . . Spare . . . Time . . .” ‘ he said. ‘Sounds like Mr Dibbler has been back.’
William stared down at the box of letters again. Of course, a quill pen potentially contained anything you wrote with it. He could understand that. But it did so in a clearly theoretical way, a safe way. Whereas these dull grey blocks looked threatening. He could understand why they worried people. Put us together in the right way, they seemed to say, and we can be anything you want. We could even be something you don’t want. We can spell anything. We can certainly spell trouble.
The ban on movable type wasn’t exactly a law. But he knew the
39
engravers didn’t like it, because they had the world operating just as they wanted it, thank you very much. And Lord Vetinari was said not to like it, because too many words only upset people. And the wizards and the priests didn’t like it because words were important.
An engraved page was an engraved page, complete and unique. But if you took the leaden letters that had previously been used to set the words of a god, and then used them to set a cookery book, what did that do to the holy wisdom? For that matter, what would it do to the pie? As for printing a book of spells, and then using the same type for a book of navigation – well, the voyage might go anywhere.
On cue, because history likes neatness, he heard the sound of a carriage drawing up in the street outside. A few moments later Lord Vetinari stepped inside and stood leaning heavily on his stick and surveying the room with mild interest.
‘Why . . . Lord de Worde,’ he said, looking surprised. I had no idea that you were involved in this enterprise
William coloured as he hurried over to the city’s supreme ruler. ‘It’s Mister de Worde, my lord.’
‘Ah, yes. Of course. Indeed.’ Lord Vetinari’s gaze traversed the inky room, paused a moment on the pile of madly smiling rocking horses, and then took in the toiling dwarfs. ‘Yes. Of course. And are you in charge?’
‘No one is, my lord,’ said William. ‘But Mr Goodmountain over there seems to do most of the talking.’
‘So what exactly is your purpose here?’
‘Er . . .’ William paused, which he knew was never a good tactic with the Patrician. ‘Frankly, sir, it’s warm, my office is freezing, and . . . well, it’s fascinating. Look, I know it’s not really–‘
Lord Vetinari nodded and raised a hand. ‘Be so good as to ask Mr Goodmountain to come over here, will you?’
William tried to whisper a few instructions into Gunilla’s ear as he hustled him over to the tall figure of the Patrician.
‘Ah, good,’ said the Patrician. ‘Now, I would just like to ask one or two questions, if I may?’
Goodmountain nodded.
40
‘Firstly, is Mr Cut-My-Own-Throat Dibbler involved in this enterprise in any significant managerial capacity?’
‘What?’ said William. He hadn’t been expecting this.
‘Shifty fellow, sells sausages–‘
‘Oh, him. No. Just the dwarfs.’
‘I see. And is this building built on a crack in space-time?’
‘What?’ said Gunilla.
The Patrician sighed. ‘When one has been ruler of this city as long as I have,’ he said, ‘one gets to know with a sad certainty that whenever some well-meaning soul begins a novel enterprise they always, with some kind of uncanny foresight, site it at the point where it will do maximum harm to the fabric of reality. There was that Holy Wood moving picture fiasco a few years ago, yes? And that Music with Rocks In business not long after, we never got to the bottom of that. And of course the wizards seem to break into the Dungeon Dimensions so often they might as well install a revolving door. And I’m sure I don’t have to remind you what happened when the late Mr Hong chose to open his Three Jolly Luck Take-Away Fish Bar in Dagon Street during the lunar eclipse. Yes? You see, gentlemen, it would be nice to think that someone, somewhere in this city, is engaged in some simple enterprise that is hot going to end up causing tentacled monsters and dread apparitions to stalk the streets eating people. So . . . ?’
‘What?’ said Goodmountain.
‘We haven’t noticed any cracks,’ said William.
‘Ah, but possibly on this very site a strange cult once engaged in eldritch rites, the very essence of which permeated the neighbourhood, and which seeks only the rite, ahah, circumstances to once again arise and walk around eating people?’
‘What?’ said Gunilla. He looked helplessly at William, who could only add:
They made rocking horses here.’
‘Really? I’ve always thought there was something slightly sinister about rocking horses,’ said Lord Vetinari, but he looked subtly disappointed. Then he brightened up. He pointed to the big stone on which the type was arranged.