The Truth (6 page)

“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 neighborhood, and which seeks only the rite, ahaha, 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.

“Aha,” he said. “Innocently taken from the overgrown ruins of a megalithic stone circle, this stone is redolent with the blood of thousands, I have no doubt, who will emerge to seek revenge, you may depend upon it.”

“It was cut specially for me by my brother,” said Gunilla. “And I don’t have to take that kind of talk, mister. Who do you think you are, coming in here and talking daft like that?”

William stepped forward at a healthy fraction of the speed of terror.

“I wonder if I might just take Mr. Goodmountain aside and explain one or two things to him?” he said quickly.

The Patrician’s bright, enquiring smile did not so much as flicker.

“What a good idea,” he said, as William frog-marched the dwarf to a corner. “He will be sure to thank you for it later.”

Lord Vetinari stood leaning on his stick and looking at the press with an air of benevolent interest, while behind him William de Worde explained the political realities of Ankh-Morpork, especially those relating to sudden death. With gestures.

After thirty seconds of this, Goodmountain came back and stood foursquare in front of the Patrician, with his thumbs in his belt.

“I speak as I find, me,” he said. “Always have done, always will—”

“And what is it that you call a spade?” said Lord Vetinari.

“What? Never use spades,” said the glowering dwarf. “
Farmers
use spades. But I call a shovel a shovel.”

“Yes, I thought you would,” said Lord Vetinari.

“Young William here says you’re a ruthless despot who doesn’t like printing. But I say you’re a fair-minded man who won’t stand in the way of an honest dwarf making a bit of a living, am I right?”

Once again, Lord Vetinari’s smile remained in place.

“Mr. de Worde, a moment, please…”

The Patrician put his arm companionably around his shoulders and walked William gently away from the watching dwarfs.

“I only said that
some
people call you—” William began.

“Now, sir,” said the Patrician, waving this away, “I think I might just be persuaded, against all experience, that we have here a little endeavor that might just be pursued without filling my streets with inconvenient occult rubbish. It is hard to imagine such a thing in Ankh-Morpork, but I could just about accept it as a possibility. And it so happens that I feel the question of ‘printing’ is one that might, with care, be reopened.”

“You
do?
”

“Yes. So I am minded to allow your friends to proceed with their folly.”

“Er, they’re not exactly—” William began.

“
Of course,
I should add that, in the event of there being any problems of a tentacular nature, you would be held personally responsible.”

“Me? But I—”

“Ah. You feel that I am being unfair? Ruthlessly despotic, perhaps?”

“Well, I, er—”

“Apart from anything else, the dwarfs are a very hardworking and valuable ethnic grouping in the city,” said the Patrician. “On the whole, I wish to avoid any low-level difficulties at this time, what with the unsettled situation in Uberwald and the whole Muntab question.”

“Where’s Muntab?” said William.

“Exactly. How is Lord de Worde, by the way? You should write to him more often, you know.”

William said nothing.

“I always think it is a very sad thing when families fall out,” said Lord Vetinari. “There is far too much mutton-headed ill feeling in the world.” He gave William a companionable pat. “I’m sure you will see to it that the printing enterprise stays firmly in the realms of the cult, the canny, and the scrutable. Do I make myself clear?”

“But I don’t have any control ov—”

“Hmm?”

“Yes, Lord Vetinari,” said William.

“Good. Good!” The Patrician straightened up, turned, and beamed at the dwarfs.

“Jolly good,” he said. “My word. Lots of little letters, all screwed together. Possibly an idea whose time has come. I may even have an occasional job for you myself.”

William waved frantically at Gunilla from behind the Patrician’s back.

“Special rate for government jobs,” the dwarf muttered.

“Oh, but I wouldn’t dream of paying any less than other customers,” said the Patrician.

“I wasn’t going to charge you less than—”

“Well, I’m sure we’ve all been very pleased to see you here, Your Lordship,” said William brightly, swiveling the Patrician in the direction of the door. “We look forward to the pleasure of your custom.”

“Are you quite
sure
Mr. Dibbler isn’t involved in this concern?”

“I think he’s having some things printed, but that’s all,” said William.

“Astonishing. Astonishing,” said Lord Vetinari, getting into his coach. “I do hope he isn’t ill.”

Two figures watched his departure from the rooftop opposite.

One of them said, very,
very
quietly, “—!”

The other said, “You have a point of view, Mr. Tulip?”

“And
he’s
the man who runs the city?”

“Yeah.”

“So where’s his —ing bodyguards?”

“If we wanted to scrag him, here and now, how useful would, say, four bodyguards be?”

“As a —ing chocolate kettle, Mr. Pin.”

“There you are, then.”

“But I could knock him over from here with a —ing brick!”

“I gather there are many organizations who hold Views on that, Mr. Tulip. People tell me this dump is thriving. The man at the top has a lot of friends when everything is going well. You would soon run out of bricks.”

Mr. Tulip looked down at the departing coach.

“From what I hear he mostly doesn’t do a —ing thing!” he complained.

“Yeah,” said Mr. Pin smoothly. “One of the hardest things to do properly, in politics.”

Both Mr. Tulip and Mr. Pin brought different things to their partnership, and in this instance what Mr. Pin brought was political savvy. Mr. Tulip respected this, even if he didn’t understand it. He contented himself with muttering, “It’d be simpler to —ing kill him.”

“Oh, for a —ing simple world,” said Mr. Pin. “Look, lay off the Honk, eh? That stuff’s for
trolls
. It’s worse than Slab. And they cut it with ground glass.”

“’s chemical,” said Mr. Tulip sullenly.

Mr. Pin sighed.

“Shall I try again?” he said. “Listen
carefully
. Drugs equals chemicals,
but,
and please
listen
to this part, sheesh, chemicals do not equal drugs. Remember all that trouble with the calcium carbonate? When you paid the man five dollars?”

“Made me feel good,” muttered Mr. Tulip.

“Calcium carbonate?” said Mr. Pin. “Even for you, I mean…look, you put up your actual nose enough chalk that someone could probably cut your head off and write on a blackboard with your neck.”

That was the major problem with Mr. Tulip, he thought as they made their way to the ground. It wasn’t that he had a drug habit. He
wanted
to have a drug habit. What he
had
was a stupidity habit, which cut in whenever he found anything being sold in little bags, and this had resulted in Mr. Tulip seeking heaven in flour, salt, baking powder, and pickled beef sandwiches. In a street where furtive people were selling Clang, Slip, Chop, Rhino, Skunk, Triplin, Floats, Honk, Double Honk, Gongers, and Slack, Mr. Tulip had an unerring way of finding the man who was retailing curry powder at what worked out as six hundred dollars a pound. It was so —ing
embarrassing.

Currently he was experimenting with the whole range of recreational chemicals available to Ankh-Morpork’s troll population, because at least when dealing with trolls Mr. Tulip had a moderate chance of outsmarting somebody. In theory Slab and Honk shouldn’t have any effect on the human brain, apart from maybe dissolving it. Mr. Tulip was hanging in there. He’d tried normality once, and hadn’t liked it.

Mr. Pin sighed again. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s feed the geek.”

In Ankh-Morpork it is very hard to watch without being watched in turn, and the two barely visible heads were indeed under observation.

They were being watched by a small dog, variously colored but mainly a rusty gray. Occasionally it scratched itself, with a noise like someone trying to shave a wire brush.

There was a piece of string around its neck. It was attached to another piece of string or, rather, to a length made up of pieces of string inexpertly knotted together.

The string was being held in the hand of a man. At least, such might be deduced from the fact that it disappeared into the same pocket of the grubby coat as one sleeve, which presumably had an arm in it, and theoretically therefore a hand on the end.

It was a strange coat. It stretched from the pavement almost to the brim of the hat above it, which was shaped rather like a sugarloaf. There was a suggestion of gray hair around the join. One arm burrowed in the suspicious depths of a pocket and produced a cold sausage.

“Two men spyin’ on the Patrician,” said the dog. “An interestin’ fing.”

“Bug’rem,” said the man and broke the sausage into two democratic halves.

William wrote a short paragraph about Patrician Visits The Bucket and examined his notebook.

Amazing, really. He’d found no less than a dozen items for his newsletter in only a day. It was astonishing what people would tell you if you asked them.

Someone had stolen one of the golden fangs of the statue of Offler the Crocodile God; he’d promised Sergeant Colon a drink for telling him that, but in any case had got some way towards payment by appending to his paragraph the phrase: “The Watch Are Mightily in Pursuit of the Wrongdoer, and Are Confident of Apprehenƒion at an Early Juncture.”

He was not entirely sure about this, although Sergeant Colon had looked very sincere when he said it.

The nature of truth always bothered William. He had been brought up to tell it or, more correctly, to “own up” and some habits are hard to break if they’ve been beaten in hard enough. And Lord de Worde had inclined to the old proverb that as you bend the twig, so grows the tree. William had not been a particularly flexible twig. Lord de Worde had not, himself, been a violent man. He’d merely employed them. Lord de Worde, as far as William could recall, had no great enthusiasm for anything that involved touching people.

Anyway, William always told himself, he was no good at making things up; anything that wasn’t the truth simply unraveled for him. Even little white lies, like “I shall definitely have the money by the end of the week,” always ended in trouble. That was “telling stories,” a sin in the de Worde compendium that was worse than lying; it was trying to make lies
interesting.
So William de Worde told the truth, out of cosmic self-defense. He’d found a hard truth less hard than an easy lie.

There had been rather a good fight in the Mended Drum. William was very pleased with that one: “Whereupon Brezock the Barbarian picked up a table and delivered a blow to Moltin the Snatcher, who in his turn seized hold of the Chandeliers and swung thereon, the while crying, ‘Take that, thou B*st*rd that you are!!!’ at which juncture, a ruckus commenced and 5 or 6 people were hurt…”

He took it all down to the Bucket.

Gunilla read it with interest; it seemed to take very little time for the dwarfs to set it up in type.

And it was odd, but……once it
was
in type, all the letters so neat and regular…

…it looked more
real.

Boddony, who seemed to be second in command of the print room, squinted at the columns of type over Goodmountain’s shoulder.

“Hmm,” he said.

“What do you think?” said William.

“Looks a bit…gray,” said the dwarf. “All the type bunched up. Looks like a book.”

“Well, that’s all right, isn’t it?” said William. Looks like a book sounded like a good thing.

“Maybe you want it more sort of spaced out?” said Gunilla.

William stared at the printed page. An idea crept over him. It seemed to evolve from the page itself.

“How about,” he said, “if we put a little title on each piece?”

He picked up a scrap of paper and doodled: 5/6 Hurt in Tavern Brawl.

Boddony read it solemnly.

“Yes,” he said eventually. “That looks…suitable.” He passed the paper across the table.

“What do you call this news sheet?” he said.

“I don’t,” said William.

“You’ve got to call it something,” said Boddony. “What do you put at the top?”

“Generally something like ‘To my Lord The…’” William began. Boddony shook his head.

“You can’t put that,” he said. “You want something a bit more general. More
snappy
.”

“How about ‘Ankh-Morpork Items,’” said William. “Sorry, but I’m not much good at names.”

Gunilla pulled his little hod out of his apron and selected some letters from one of the cases on the table. He screwed them together, inked them, and rolled a sheet of paper over them.

William read: Ankh-Morpork tImes.

“Messed that up a bit. Wasn’t paying attention,” muttered Gunilla, reaching for the type. William stopped him.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Er. Leave it as it is…just make it a bigger
T
and a smaller
i
.”