The Truth (37 page)

PROBE
INTO
SHOCK
GUILD
RUMPUS

William just wasn’t used to the idea of evaluating words purely in terms of their length, whereas she’d picked up the habit in two days. He’d already had to stop her calling Lord Vetinari CITY BOSS. It was technically correct that if you spent some time with a thesaurus you
could
arrive at that description, and it did fit in a single column, but the sight of the words had made William feel extremely exposed.

It was self-absorption like this that allowed him to walk into the printing shed, with the crew tagging along, and not notice anything wrong until he saw the expression on the faces of the dwarfs.

“Ah, our writer man,” said Mr. Pin, stepping forward. “Shut the door, Mr. Tulip.”

Mr. Pin slammed the door with one hand. The other was clamped over Sacharissa’s mouth. She rolled her eyes at William.

“And you’ve brought me the little doggie,” said Mr. Pin. Wuffles started to growl as he approached. William backed away.

“The Watch will be here soon,” said William. Wuffles still growled, on a rising note.

“Doesn’t worry me now,” said Mr. Pin. “Not with what I know. Not with
who
I know.
Where’s the damn vampire?
”

“I don’t know! He’s not always with us!” snapped William.

“Really? In that case let me retort!” said Mr. Pin, his pistol bow inches from William’s face. “If it doesn’t arrive within two minutes, I will—”

Wuffles leapt out of William’s arms. His bark was the frantic
whurwhur
of a small dog mad with fury. Pin reared back, one arm raised to protect his face. The bow fired. The arrow hit one of the lamps over the press. The lamp exploded.

A cloud of burning oil rained down. It splattered across type metal and old rocking horses and dwarfs.

Mr. Tulip let go of Sacharissa to help his colleague, and in the slow dance of rushing events Sacharissa spun around and planted her knee hard and firmly in the place that made a parsnip a very funny thing indeed.

William grabbed her on the way past and rushed her out into the freezing air. When he fought his way back in through the stampeding crew, who had the same instinctive reaction to fire as they did to soap and water, it was into a room full of burning debris. Dwarfs were fighting fires in the rubbish. Dwarfs were fighting fires in their beards. Several were advancing on Mr. Tulip, who was on his hands and knees and throwing up. And Mr. Pin was spinning around, flailing at an enraged Wuffles, who was managing to growl while sinking his teeth into Pin’s arm all the way to the bone.

William cupped his hands.

“Get out right now!” he yelled. “The tins!”

One or two dwarfs heard him, and looked around at the shelves of old paint tins just as the first one blew its lid off.

The tins were ancient, no more now than rust held together with chemical sludge. Several others were starting to burn.

Mr. Pin danced across the floor, trying to shake the enraged dog from his ankle.

“Get the damn thing off’f me!” he yelled.

“Forget the —ing dog, my —ing
suit’s
on fire!” shouted Mr. Tulip, flailing at his own sleeve.

A tin of what had once been enamel paint took off from the blazing mess, spinning with a wzipwzip noise, and exploded on the press.

William grabbed Goodmountain’s shoulder.

“I said
come on
!”

“My press! It’s on fire!”

“Better it than us! Come
on!
”

It was said of the dwarfs that they cared more about things like iron and gold than they did about people, because there was only a limited supply of iron and gold in the world whereas there seemed to be more and more people everywhere you looked. It was said mostly by people like Mr. Windling.

But they
did
care fiercely about things. Without things, people were just bright animals.

The printers clustered around the doorway, axes at the ready. Choking brown smoke billowed out. Flames licked out among the roof eaves. Several sections of tin roof itself buckled and collapsed.

As they did so a smoldering ball rocketed through the door and three dwarfs who took a swipe only just missed hitting one another.

It was Wuffles. Patches of fur were still on fire, but his eyes gleamed and he was still whining and growling.

He let William pick him up. He had a triumphant air about him, and turned to watch the burning doorway with his ears cocked.

“That must be it, then,” said Sacharissa.

“They might have got out of the back door,” said Goodmountain. “Boddony, some of you go around and check, will you?”

“Plucky dog, this,” said William.

“‘Brave’ would be better,” said Sacharissa distantly. “It’s only five letters. It would look better in a single-column sidebar. No…‘Plucky’
would
work, because then we’d get:

PLUCKY
DOG PUTS
BITE ON
VILLAINS

…although that first line is a bit shy.”

“I wish I could think in headlines,” said William, shivering.

It was cool and damp down here in the cellar.

Mr. Pin dragged himself to a corner and slapped at the burns on his suit.

“We’re —ing trapped,” moaned Tulip.

“Yeah? This is
stone,
” said Pin. “Stone floor, stone walls, stone ceiling! Stone doesn’t burn, okay? We just stay nice and calm down here and wait it out.”

Mr. Tulip listened to the sound of the fire above them. Red and yellow light danced on the floor under the cellar hatchway.

“I don’t —ing like it,” he said.

“We’ve seen worse.”

“I don’t —ing
like
it!”

“Just keep cool. We’re going to get out of this. I wasn’t born to fry!”

The flames roared around the press. A few late paint tins pinwheeled through the heat, spraying burning droplets.

The fire was yellow-white at the heart, and now it crackled around the metal forms that held the type.

Silver beads appeared around the leaden, inky slugs. Letters shifted, settled, ran together. For a moment the words themselves floated on the melting metal, innocent words like “the” and “Truth” and “shall make ye fere,” and then they were lost.

From the red-hot press, and the wooden boxes, and amongst the racks and racks of type, and even out of the piles of carefully stockpiled metal, thin streams began to flow. They met and merged and spread. Soon the floor was a moving, rippling mirror in which the orange and yellow flames danced upside down.

On Otto’s workbench the salamanders detected the heat. They
liked
heat. Their ancestors had evolved in volcanoes. They woke up and began to purr.

Mr. Tulip, walking up and down the cellar like a trapped animal, picked up one of the cages and glared at the creatures.

“What’re these —ing things?” he said, and dropped it back on the bench. Then he noticed the dark jar next to it. “And why’s it —ing got ‘Handle viz Care!!!’ on this one?”

The eels were already edgy. They could detect heat too, and they were creatures of deep caves and buried, icy streams.

There was a flash of dark.

Most of it went straight through the brain of Mr. Tulip. But such as was left of that ragged organ had survived every attempt at scrambling, and in any case Mr. Tulip didn’t use it much, because it hurt such a lot.

But there was a brief remembrance of snow, and fir woods, and burning buildings, and the church. They’d sheltered there. He’d been small. He remembered big shining paintings, more colors than he’d ever seen before…

He blinked, and dropped the jar.

It shattered on the floor. There was another burst of dark from the eels. They wriggled desperately out of the wreckage and slithered along the edge of the wall, squeezing into the cracks between the stones.

Mr. Tulip turned at a sound behind him. His colleague had collapsed to his knees and was clutching at his head.

“You all right?”

“They’re right behind me!” Pin whispered.

“Nah, just you and me down here, old friend.”

Mr. Tulip patted Pin on the shoulder. The veins on his forehead stood out with the effort of thinking of something to do next. The memory had gone. Young Tulip had learned how to edit memories. What Mr. Pin needed, he decided, was to remember the
good
times.

“Hey, remember when Gerhardt the Boot and his lads had us cornered in that —ing cellar in Quirm?” he said. “Remember what we did to him afterwards?”

“Yes,” said Mr. Pin, staring at the blank wall. “I
remember
.”

“And that time with that old man who was in that house in Genua and we didn’t —ing know? So we nailed up the door and—”

“Shut up! Shut up!”

“Just trying to look on the —ing bright side.”

“We shouldn’t have killed all those people…” Mr. Pin whispered, almost to himself.

“Why not?” said Mr. Tulip, but Pin’s nervousness had got through to him again. He pulled at the leather cord around his neck, and felt the reassuring lump on the end. A potato can be a great help in times of trial.

A pattering behind him made him turn around, and he brightened up.

“Anyway, we’re okay now,” he said. “Looks like it’s —ing raining.”

Silver droplets were pouring through the cellar hatch.

“That’s not water!” screamed Pin, standing up.

The drops ran together, became a steady stream. It splashed oddly and mounded up under the hatch, but more liquid poured on top of it and spread out across the floor.

Pin and Tulip backed against the far wall.

“That’s hot lead,” said Pin. “They print their paper with it!”

“How —ing much is there going to be?”

“Down here? Can’t end up more than a couple of inches, can it?”

At the other side of the cellar Otto’s bench started to smolder as the pool touched it.

“We need something to stand on,” said Pin. “Just while it cools! It won’t take long in this chill!”

“Yeah, but there’s nothing here but us! We’re —ing
trapped!
”

Mr. Pin put his hand over his eyes for a moment, and took a deep breath of air that was already getting very warm in the soft silver rain.

He opened his eyes again. Mr. Tulip was watching him obediently. Mr. Pin was the thinker.

“I’ve…got a plan,” he said.

“Yeah, good. Right.”

“My plans are pretty good, right?”

“Yeah, you come up with some —ing wonders, I’ve always said. Like when you said we should twist the—”

“And I’m always thinking about the good of the Firm, right?”

“Yeah, sure, right.”

“So…this plan…it’s not, like, a
perfect
plan, but…oh, the hell with it. Give me your potato.”

“What?”

Suddenly Mr. Pin’s arm was stretched out, his crossbow an inch from Mr. Tulip’s neck.

“No time to argue! Gimme the damn potato right now! This is no time for you to
think!
”

Uncertain, but trusting as ever in Mr. Pin’s survival abilities in a tight corner, Mr. Tulip pulled the thong of the potato over his head and handed it over.

“Right,” said Mr. Pin, one side of his face beginning to twitch. “The way I see it—”

“You better hurry!” said Mr. Tulip. “It’s only a coupla inches away!”

“—
the way I see it,
I’m a small man, Mr. Tulip. You couldn’t stand on me. I wouldn’t do. You’re a big man, Mr. Tulip. I wouldn’t want to see you suffer.”

And he pulled the trigger. It was a good shot.

“Sorry,” he whispered, as the lead splashed. “Sorry. I’m sorry. Sorry. But I wasn’t born to fry…”

Mr. Tulip opened his eyes.

There was darkness around him, but with a suggestion of stars overhead behind an overcast sky. The air was still, but there was distant soughing, as of wind in dead trees.

He waited a while to see if anything would happen, and then said: “Anyone —ing there?”

J
UST ME
, M
R
. T
ULIP
.

Some of the darkness opened its eyes, and two blue glows looked down at Mr. Tulip.

“The —ing bastard stole my potato. Are you —ing Death?”

J
UST
D
EATH WILL SUFFICE
, I
THINK
. W
HO WERE YOU EXPECTING
?

“Eh? For what?”

T
O CLAIM YOU AS ONE OF THEIRS.

“Dunno, really. I never —ing thought…”

Y
OU NEVER SPECULATED?

“All I know is, you got to have your potato, and then it will be all right.” Mr. Tulip parroted the sentence without thinking, but it was all coming back now in the total recall of the dead, from a vantage point of two feet off the ground and three years of age. Old men mumbling. Old women weeping. Shafts of light through holy windows. The sound of wind under the doors, and every ear straining to hear the soldiers. Ours or theirs didn’t matter, when a war had gone on this long…

Death gave the shade of Mr. Tulip a long, cool stare.

A
ND THAT’S IT?

“Right.”

Y
OU DON’T THINK THERE WERE ANY BITS YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSED?

…the sound of wind under the doors, the smell of the oil lamps, the fresh acid smell of snow, blowing in through the…

“And…if I’m sorry for everything…” he mumbled. He was lost in a world of darkness, without a potato to his name.

…candlesticks…they’d been made of gold, hundreds of years ago…there were only ever potatoes to eat, grubbed up from under the snow, but the candlesticks were of gold…and some old woman, she’d said: “It’ll all turn out right if you’ve got a potato”…

W
AS ANY GOD OF SOME SORT MENTIONED TO YOU AT ANY POINT?