Making Money (28 page)

The man had to go. Bent had worked his way up the echelons of the bank over many years, fighting every natural disadvantage, and it hadn’t been to see this…person make a mockery of it all! No!

“A man came to the bank again today,” he said. “He was very odd. And he seemed to know Mr. Lipwig, but he called him Albert Spangler. Talked as if he knew him from long ago and I think Mr. Lipwig was upset at that. Name of Cribbins, or so Mr. Lipwig called him. Very old clothes, very dusty. He made out he was a holy man, but I don’t think so.”

“And that was what was odd, was it?”

“No, Mr. Cosmo—”

“Just call me Cosmo, Malcolm. We surely needn’t stand on ceremony.”

“Er…yes,” said Mavolio Bent. “Well, no, it wasn’t that. It was his teeth. They were those dine-chewers, and they moved and rattled when he spoke, causing him to slurp.”

“Ah, the old type with the springs,” said Cosmo. “Very good. And Lipwig was annoyed?”

“Oh, yes. And the strange thing was, he said he didn’t know the man but he called him by name.”

Cosmo smiled. “Yes, that is strange. And the man left?”

“Well, yes, si—Mr.—Cosmo,” said Bent. “And then I came here.”

“You have done very well, Matthew! Should the man come in again, could you please follow him and try to find out where he is staying?”

“If I can, si—Mr.—Cosmo.”

“Good man!” Cosmo helped Bent out of his chair, shook his hand, waltzed him to the door, opened the door, and ushered him out all in one smooth, balletic movement.

“Hurry back, Mr. Bent, the bank needs you!” he said, closing the door. “He’s a strange creature, don’t you think, Drumknott?”

I wish he’d stop doing that, Heretofore thought. Does he think he’s Vetinari? What do they call those fishes that swim alongside sharks, making themselves useful so they don’t get eaten? That’s me, that’s what I’m doing, just hanging on, because it’s much safer than letting go.

“How would Vetinari find a badly dressed man, new to the city, with ill-fitting teeth, Drumknott?” said Cosmo.

Fifty dollars a month and all found, thought Heretofore, snapping out of a brief marine nightmare. Never forget it. And in another few days you’re free.

“He makes much use of the Beggars’ Guild, sir,” he said.

“Ah, of course. See to it.”

“There will be expenses, sir.”

“Yes, Drumknott, I’m conscious of the fact. There are always expenses. And the other matter?”

“Soon, sir, soon. This is not a job for Cranberry, sir. I’m having to bribe at the highest level.” Heretofore coughed. “Silence is expensive, sir…”

M
OIST ESCORTED ADORA
Belle back to the university in silence. But the important thing was that nothing had been broken and no one was killed.

Then, as if reaching a conclusion after much careful thought, Adora Belle said: “I worked in a bank for a while, you know, and hardly anyone got stabbed.”

“I’m sorry, I forgot to warn you. And I did push you out of the way in time.”

“I must admit that the way you threw me to the floor quite turned my head.”

“Look, I’m sorry, okay? And so is Aimsbury! And now will you tell me what all this is about? You found four golems, right? Have you brought them back?”

“No, the tunnel collapsed before we got down that far. I told you, they were half a mile down, under millions of tons of sand and mud. For what it’s worth, we think there was a natural ice dam up in the mountains, which burst and flooded half the continent. The stories about Um say it was destroyed in a flood, so that fits. The golems were washed away with the rubble, which ended up against some chalk cliffs by the sea.”

“How did you find out they were down there? It’s…well, it’s nowhere!”

“The usual way. One of our golems heard one singing. Imagine that. It’s been underground for sixty thousand years…”

In the night under the world, in the pressure of the depth, in the crushing of the dark…a golem sang. There were no words. The song was older than words; it was older than tongues. It was the call of the common clay, and it carried for miles. It traveled along fault lines, made crystals sing in harmony in dark, unmeasured caverns, followed rivers that never saw the sun…

…and out of the ground and up the legs of a golem from the Golem Trust, who was pulling a wagon loaded with coal along the region’s one road. When he arrived in Ankh-Morpork, he told the Trust. That was what the Trust did: it found golems.

Cities, kingdoms, countries came and went, but the golems that priests had baked from clay and filled with holy fire tended to go on forever. When they had no more orders, no more water to fetch or wood to hew, perhaps because the land was now on the ocean floor or the city was inconveniently under fifty feet of volcanic ash, they did nothing but wait for the next order. They were, after all, property. They obeyed whatever instructions were written on the little scroll in their head. Sooner or later, rock erodes. Sooner or later a new city would arise. One day there would be orders.

Golems had no concept of freedom. They knew they were artifacts; some even still bore, on their clay, the finger marks of the long-dead priests. Golems were made to be owned.

There had always been a few in Ankh-Morpork, running errands, doing chores, pumping water deep underground, unseen and silent and not getting in anyone’s way. Then, one day, someone freed a golem by inserting in its head the receipt for the money he’d paid for it. And then he told it that it owned itself.

A golem could not be freed by orders, or a war, or a whim. But it could be freed by freehold. When you have been a possession, then you really understand what freedom means, in all its magnificent terror.

Dorfl, the first freed golem, had a plan. He worked hard, around the clock he had no time for, and bought another golem. The two golems worked hard and bought a third golem…and now there was the Golem Trust, which bought golems, found golems entombed underground or in the depths of the sea, and helped golems buy themselves.

In the booming city golems were worth their weight in gold. They would accept small wages but they earned them for twenty-four hours a day. It was still a bargain—stronger than trolls, more reliable than oxen, and more indefatigable and intelligent than a dozen of each, a golem could power every machine in a workshop.

This didn’t make them popular. There was always a reason to dislike a golem. They didn’t drink, eat, gamble, swear, or smile. They worked. If a fire broke out, they hurried to it en masse and put it out and then walked back to what they had been doing. No one knew why a creature that had been baked into life had the urge to do this, but all it won them was a kind of awkward resentment. You couldn’t be grateful to an unmoving face with glowing eyes.

“How many are down there?” said Moist.

“I told you. Four.”

Moist felt relieved. “Well, that’s good. Well done. Can we have a proper celebratory meal tonight? Of something the animal wasn’t so attached to? And then, who knows—”

“There may be a snag,” said Adora Belle slowly.

“No, really?”

“Oh, please.” Adora Belle sighed. “Look, the Umnians were the first golem-builders, do you understand? Golem legend says that the Umnians invented golems. It’s easy to believe, too. Some priest baking a votive offering says the right words, and the clay sits up. It was their only invention. They didn’t need any more. Golems built their city, golems tilled their fields. They invented the wheel, but as a children’s toy. They didn’t need wheels, you see. You don’t need weapons, either, when you’ve got golems instead of city walls. You don’t even need shovels—”

“You’re not going to tell me they built fifty-foot-high killer golems, are you?”

“Only a man would think of that.”

“It’s our job,” said Moist. “If you don’t think of fifty-foot-high killer golems first, someone else will.”

“Well, there’s no evidence of them,” said Adora Belle briskly. “The Umnians never even worked iron. They did work bronze, though…and gold.”

There was something about the way gold was left hanging there that Moist didn’t like.

“Gold,” he said.

“Umnian is a very complex language,” said Adora Belle quickly. “None of the Trust golems know much about it, so we can’t be certain—”

“Gold,” said Moist, his voice leaden.

“So, when the digging team found caves down there, we came up with a plan. The tunnel was getting unstable anyway, so they closed it off, we said it had collapsed, and by now the team will have brought the golems out under the sea and be bringing them underwater all the way into the city,” said Adora Belle.

Moist pointed at the golem’s arm in its bag. “That one isn’t gold,” he said hopefully.

“We found a lot of golem remains about halfway down,” said Adora Belle with a sigh. “The others are deeper…er, perhaps because they are heavier.”

“Gold’s twice the weight of lead,” said Moist gloomily.

“The buried golem is singing in Umnian, which is the most complex language ever,” said Adora Belle. “I can’t be certain of our translation, so I thought, let’s start by getting them into Ankh-Morpork, where they will be safe.”

Moist took a deep breath. “Do you know how much trouble you can get into by breaking a contract with a dwarf?”

“Oh, come on! I’m not starting a war!”

“No, you’re starting a legal action! And with the dwarfs that’s even worse! You told me the contract said you couldn’t take precious metals out of the land!”

“Yes, but these are golems. They’re alive.”

“Look, you’ve taken—”

“—may have taken—”

“—all right, may have taken, good grief, tons of gold out of dwarf land—”

“Golem Trust land—”

“—All right, but there was a covenant! Which you broke when you took—”

“—didn’t take. It walked off by itself,” said Adora Belle calmly.

“For heavens’ sake, only a woman could think like this! You think because you believe there’s a perfectly good justification for your actions the legal issues don’t matter! And here am I, this close to persuading people here that a dollar doesn’t have to be round and shiny and I’m finding that at any minute four big shiny beaming golems are going to stroll into town, waving and glittering at everybody!”

“There’s no need to get hysterical,” said Adora Belle.

“Yes, there is! What there isn’t a need for is staying calm!”

“Yes, but that’s when you come alive, right? That’s when your brain works best. You always find a way, right?”

And there was nothing you could do about a woman like that. She just turned herself into a hammer and you ran right into her.

Fortunately.

They’d reached the entrance to the university. Above them loomed the forbidding statue of Alberto Malich, the founder. It had a chamber pot on its head. This had inconvenienced the pigeon which, by family tradition, spent most of its time perched on Alberto’s head and now wore on its own head a miniature version of the same pottery receptacle.

Must be Rag Week again, thought Moist. Students, eh? Love ’em or hate ’em, you’re not allowed to hit ’em with a shovel.

“Look, golems or not, let’s have dinner tonight, just you and me, up in the suite. Aimsbury would love it. He doesn’t often get a chance to cook for humans and it’d make him feel better. He’ll do anything you want, I’m sure.”

Adora Belle gave him a lopsided look. “I thought you’d suggest that, so I ordered sheep’s head. He was overjoyed.”

“Sheep’s head,” said Moist gloomily, “you know I hate food that stares back. I won’t even look a sardine in the face.”

“He promised to blindfold it.”

“Oh, good.”

“My granny made a wonderful sheep’s head mold,” said Adora Belle. “That’s where you use pig’s trotters to thicken the broth so that when it gets cold you—”

“You know, sometimes there’s such a thing as too much information?” said Moist. “This evening, then. Now let’s go and see your dead wizard. You should enjoy it. There’s bound to be skulls.”

T
HERE WERE SKULLS.
There were black drapes. There were complex symbols drawn on the floor. There were spirals of incense from black thuribles. And in the middle of all this the Head of Postmortem Communications, in a fearsome mask, was fiddling with a candle.

He stopped when he heard them come in, and straightened up hurriedly.

“Oh, you’re early,” he said, his voice somewhat muffled by the fangs. “Sorry. It’s the candles. They should be cheap tallow for the proper black smoke, but wouldn’t you know it, they’ve given me beeswax. I told them just dribbling is no good to me, acrid smoke is what we want. Or what they want, anyway. Sorry, John Hicks, head of department. Ponder has told me all about you.”

He took off the mask and extended a hand. The man looked as though he’d tried, like any self-respecting necromancer, to grow a proper goatee beard, but owing to some basic lack of malevolence it had turned out a bit sheepish. After a few seconds Hicks realized why they were staring, and pulled off the fake rubber hand with the black fingernails.

“I thought necromancy was banned,” said Moist.

“Oh, we don’t do necromancy here,” said Hicks. “What made you think that?”

Moist looked around at the furnishings, shrugged, and said, “Well, I suppose it first crossed my mind when I saw the way the paint was flaking off the door and you can still just see a crude skull and the letters NECR…”

“Ancient history, ancient history,” said Hicks, quickly. “We are the Department of Postmortem Communications, a force for good, you understand? Necromancy, on the other hand, is a very bad form of magic done by evil wizards.”

“And since you are not evil wizards, what you are doing can’t be called necromancy?”

“Exactly!”

“And, er, what defines an evil wizard?” said Adora Belle.

“Well, doing necromancy would definitely be there right on top of the list.”

“Could you just remind us what you are going to do?”

“We’re going to talk to the late Professor Flead,” said Hicks.