Making Money (40 page)

“And you just want a few words translated?”

“A small glossary of instructions.”

“And then I can go?”

“Yes!”

“I have your word?”

“Trust me. I’ll just explain this to Dr. Hicks. He may take some persuading.”

Moist strolled over to the huddles of people who weren’t necromancers at all. The postmortem communicator’s response was other than he expected. Second thoughts were arising.

“I wonder if we’d be doing the right thing, setting him loose in a pole-dancing establishment?” said Hicks doubtfully.

“No one will see him. And he can’t touch. They are very big on not touching in that place. I’m told.”

“Yes, I suppose all he can do is ogle the young ladies.” There was some sniggering from the students.

“So? They’re paid to be ogled at,” said Moist. “They are professional oglees. It’s an ogling establishment. For oglers. And you heard what’s going on in the palace. We could be at war in a day. Do you trust that lot? Trust me.”

“You use that phrase an awful lot, Mr. Lipwig,” said Hicks.

“Well, I’m very trustworthy. Ready, then? Hold back until I summon you, and then you can take him to his last resting place.”

T
HERE WERE PEOPLE
in the crowd, with sledgehammers. You’d have a job to crack a golem if it didn’t want you to, but he ought to get them out of here as soon as possible.

This probably wouldn’t work. It was too simple. But Adora Belle had missed it, and so had Flead. The corporal now so bravely holding back the crowds wouldn’t have, because it was all about orders, but nobody had asked him. You just had to think a little.

“Come on, young man,” said Flead, still where his bearers had left him and backed away. “Let’s get on with it, shall we?”

Moist took a deep breath.

“Tell me how to say: ‘Trust me, and only me. Form ranks of four and march ten miles hubward of the city. Walk slowly,’” he said.

“Hee, hee. You are a sharp one, Mr. Lipstick!” said Flead, his mind full of ankles. “But it won’t work, you know. We tried things like that.”

“I can be very persuasive.”

“It won’t work, I tell you. I have found not one single word that they will react to.”

“Well, Professor, it’s not what you say, it’s the way that you say it, isn’t it? Sooner or later it’s all about style.”

“Hah! You are a fool, man.”

“I thought we had a deal, Professor? And I shall want a number of other phrases.” He looked around at the golem horses, as still as statues. “And the one phrase I shall need is the equivalent of ‘giddyup’ and while I think of it I shall need ‘whoa,’ too. Or do you want to go back to the place where they’ve never heard of pole-dancing?”

The golems go
True worth
At work: servants of a higher truth
Back in trouble again
The beautiful butterfly
The insanity of Vetinari
Mr. Bent wakes up
Mysterious requirements

T
HINGS WERE GETTING
heated in the conference room. This, to Lord Vetinari, was not a problem. He was a great believer in letting a thousand voices be heard, because this meant that all he actually needed to do was listen only to the ones that had anything useful to say, “useful” in this case being defined in the classic civil-service way as “inclining to my point of view.” In his experience, it was a number generally smaller than ten. The people who wanted a thousand, etc., really meant that they wanted their own voice to be heard while the other nine hundred ninety-nine were ignored, and for this purpose the gods had invented the committee. Vetinari was very good at committees, especially when Drumknott took the minutes. What the iron maiden was to stupid tyrants, the committee was to Lord Vetinari; it was only slightly more expensive,
*
far less messy, considerably more efficient, and, best of all, you had to force people to climb inside the iron maiden.

He was just about to appoint the ten noisiest people onto a Golem Committee that could be locked in a distant office, when a dark clerk appeared, apparently out of a shadow, and whispered something in Drumknott’s ear. The secretary leaned down toward his master.

“Ah, it would seem that the golems are gone,” said Vetinari cheerfully, as the dutiful Drumknott stepped back.

“Gone?” said Adora Belle, trying to see across to the window. “What do you mean, gone?”

“Not here anymore,” said Vetinari. “Mr. Lipwig, it seems, has taken them away. They are leaving the vicinity of the city in an orderly fashion.”

“But he can’t do that!” Lord Downey was enraged. “We haven’t decided what to do with them yet!”

“He, however, has,” said Lord Vetinari, beaming.

“He shouldn’t be allowed to leave the city! He is a bank robber! Commander Vimes, do your duty and arrest him!” This was from Cosmo.

Vimes’s look would have frozen a saner man.

“I doubt if he’s going far, sir,” he said. “What do you wish me to do, Your Lordship?”

“Well, the ingenious Mr. Lipwig appears to have a purpose,” said Vetinari, “so perhaps we should go and find out what it is?”

The crowd made for the door, where it got stuck and fought itself.

As it piled out into the street, Vetinari put his hands behind his head and leaned back with his eyes shut. “I love democracy. I could listen to it all day. Get the coach out, will you, Drumknott?”

“That is being done at this moment, sir.”

“Did you put him up to this?”

Vetinari opened his eyes. “Miss Dearheart, always a pleasure,” he murmured, waving away the smoke. “I thought you were gone. Imagine my delight at finding you are not.”

“Well, did you?” said Adora Belle, her cigarette noticeably shortening as she took another drag. She smoked as if it were a kind of warfare.

“Miss Dearheart, I believe it would be impossible for me to put Moist von Lipwig up to anything that could be more dangerous than the things he finds to do of his own free will. While you were away, he took to climbing high buildings for fun, picked every lock in the Post Office, and took up with the Extreme Sneezing fraternity, who are frankly insane. He needs the heady whiff of danger to make his life worth living.”

“He never does that sort of thing when I’m here!”

“Indeed. Can I invite you to ride with me?”

“What did you mean by saying ‘indeed’ like that?” said Adora Belle suspiciously.

Vetinari raised an eyebrow. “By now, if I have been adept at judging the way your fiancé thinks, we should be going to see an enormous hole…”

W
E’RE GOING TO
need stone, thought Moist as the golems dug. Lots of stone. Can they make mortar? Of course they can. They’re the Lancre Army Knife of tools.

It was fearful, the way they could dig, even in this worn-out, hopeless soil. Dirt was fountaining into the air. Half a mile away, the Old Wizarding Tower, a landmark on the road to Sto Lat, brooded over an area of scrub and desolation that was unusual on the heavily farmed plains. A lot of magic had been used here once. Plants grew twisty or not at all. The owls that haunted the ruins made sure their meals came from a distance away. It was the perfect site. No one wanted it. It was a wasteland, and a wasteland shouldn’t be allowed to go to waste.

What a weapon, he thought, as his golem horse circled the diggers. They could collapse a city in a day. What a terrible force they would be in the wrong hands.

Thank goodness they are in mine…

The crowd was keeping its distance, but was also getting bigger and bigger. The city had turned out to watch. To be a true citizen of Ankh-Morpork was to never miss a show. As for Mr. Fusspot, he was apparently having the time of his life standing on the horse’s head. There’s nothing a small dog likes more than a high place from which to yap madly at people…no, actually, there was, and the chairman had managed to wedge his toy between a clay ear and his paw, and stopped barking to growl every time Moist made a tentative grab at it.

“Mr. Lipwig!”

He looked around to see Sacharissa hurrying toward him, waving her notebook. How does she do it? he wondered, watching her as, dirt raining around her, she scurried past lines of digging golems. She’s even here before the Watch.

“You have a golem horse, I see,” she shouted as she reached him. “It looks beautiful.”

“It’s rather like riding a flowerpot that you can’t steer,” Moist yelled to make himself heard over the noise. “The saddle could use some padding, too. Good, though, aren’t they? Notice how they keep shifting all the time, just like the real thing?”