The Truth
Page 18
“All right, all right, it’s a magical light that takes uncanny pictures,” said Sacharissa.
“That’s a very…newspaper vay of putting it,” said Otto politely. He showed her the iconograph. “Look at zis one. I vanted a picture of a dwarf vorking in the Patrician’s study and I got zis.”
The picture was a wash of blurs and swirls, and there was a vague outline of a dwarf, lying down on the floor and examining something. But superimposed on this was quite a clear picture of Lord Vetinari. Two pictures of Lord Vetinari, each figure staring at the other.
“Well, it’s his office and he’s always in there,” said Sacharissa. “Does the…magic light pick that up?”
“Maybe,” said Otto. “Ve know that vot is physically zere is not alvays vot is really zere. Look at zis vun.”
He handed her another picture.
“Oh, that’s a good one of William,” she said. “In the cellar. And…that’s Lord de Worde standing just behind him, isn’t it?”
“Is it?” said the vampire. “I don’t know zer man. I do know that he vas not in zer cellar ven I took the picture. But…you only have to talk to Villiam for any length of time to see that, in a vay, his father is alvays looking over his shoulder—”
“That’s creepy.”
Sacharissa looked around the cellar. The stone walls were old and stained, but they certainly weren’t blackened.
“I just saw…people. Men fighting. Flames. And…silver rain. How can it rain underground?”
“I do not know. That’s vhy I study dark light.”
Noises above suggested that William and Goodmountain had returned.
“I wouldn’t mention this to anyone else,” said Sacharissa, heading for the ladder. “We’ve got enough to deal with. That’s creepy.”
There was no name outside the bar, because those who knew what it was didn’t need one. Those who didn’t know what it was shouldn’t go in. Ankh-Morpork’s undead were, on the whole, a law-abiding bunch, if only because they knew the law paid them a certain amount of special attention, but if you walked into the place known as Biers on a dark night and had no business there, who would ever know?
For the vampires (those, that is, that weren’t gathered around a harmonium at the Temperance Mission nervously singing songs about how much they liked cocoa) it was a place to hang up. For the werewolves, it was where you let your hair down. For the bogeymen, it was a place to come out of the closet. For the ghouls, it did a decent meat pasty and chips.
All eyes, and that was not the same thing as the number of heads multiplied by two, turned to the door when it creaked open. The newcomers were surveyed from dark corners. They wore black, but that didn’t mean anything. Anyone could wear black.
They walked up to the bar, and Mr. Pin rapped on the stained wood.
The barman nodded. The important thing, he’d found, was to make sure ordinary people paid for their drinks as they bought them. It wasn’t good business to let them run a tab. That showed an unwarranted optimism about the future.
“What can I—” he began, before Mr. Tulip’s hand caught him around the back of the neck and rammed his head down hard on the bar.
“I am not having a nice day,” said Mr. Pin, turning to the world in general, “and Mr. Tulip here suffers from unresolved personality conflicts. Has anyone got any questions?”
An indistinct hand rose in the gloom.
“What cook?” said a voice.
Mr. Pin opened his mouth to reply, and then turned to his colleague, who was examining the bar’s array of very strange drinks. All cocktails are sticky; the ones in Biers tended to be stickier.
“Says ‘Kill the Cook!!!’” said the voice.
Mr. Tulip rammed two long kebab skewers into the bar, where they vibrated.
“What cooks’ve you got?” he said.
“It’s a good apron,” said the voice in the gloom.
“It is the —ing envy of all my friends,” Mr. Tulip growled.
In the silence Mr. Pin heard the unseen drinkers calculating the likely number of friends of Mr. Tulip. It was not a calculation that would involve a simple thinker taking off his shoes.
“Ah. Right,” said someone.
“Now, we don’t want any trouble with you people,” said Mr. Pin. “Not as such. We simply wish to meet a werewolf.”
Another voice in the gloom said: “Vy?”
“Got a job for him,” said Mr. Pin.
There was some muffled laughter in the darkness and a figure shuffled forwards. It was about the size of Mr. Pin; it had pointy ears; it had a hairstyle that clearly continued to its ankles, inside its ragged clothes. Tufts of hair stuck out of holes in its shirt and densely thatched the backs of its hands.
“’m part werewolf,” it said.
“Which part?”
“That’s a funny joke.”
“Can you talk to dogs?”
The self-confessed part-werewolf looked around at its unseen audience, and for the first time Mr. Pin felt a twinge of disquiet. The sight of Mr. Tulip’s slowly spinning eye and throbbing forehead was not having the usual effect. There were rustlings in the dark. He was sure he heard a snigger.
“Yep,” said the werewolf.
The hell with this, thought Mr. Pin. He pulled out his pistol bow in one practiced movement, and held it an inch from the werewolf’s face.
“This is tipped with silver,” he said.
He was amazed at the speed of movement. Suddenly a hand was against his neck, and five sharp points pressed into his skin.
“These ain’t,” said the werewolf. “Let’s see who finishes squeezin’ first, eh?”
“Yeah, right,” said Mr. Tulip, who was also holding something.
“That’s just a barbecue fork,” said the werewolf, giving it barely a glance.
“You want to see how —ing fast I can throw it?” said Mr. Tulip.
Mr. Pin tried to swallow, but only got halfway. Dead people, he knew, didn’t squeeze that hard, but it was at least ten steps to the door and the space seemed to be getting wider by the heartbeat.
“Hey,” he said. “There’s no need for this, right? Why don’t we all loosen up? And, hey, it would help me talk to you if you were your normal shape…”
“No problem, my friend.”
The werewolf winced and shuddered, without at any point letting go of Mr. Pin’s neck. The face contorted so much, features flowing together, that even Mr. Pin, who in other circumstances quite enjoyed that sort of thing, had to look away.
This allowed him to see the shadow on the wall. It was, contrary to expectations, growing. So were its ears.
“Any qvestions?” said the werewolf. Now its teeth seriously interfered with its speech. Its breath smelled even worse than Mr. Tulip’s suit.
“Ah…” said Mr. Pin, standing on tiptoe. “I think we’ve come to the wrong place.”
“I think zat also.”
At the bar, Mr. Tulip bit the top off a bottle in a meaningful way.
Once again, the room was filled with the ferocious silence of calculation and the personal mathematics of profit and loss.
Mr. Tulip smashed a bottle against his forehead. At this point, he did not appear to be paying much attention to the room. He’d just happened to have a bottle in his hand which he did not need anymore. Putting it onto the bar would have required an unnecessary expenditure of hand-eye coordination.
People recalculated.
“Is he human?” said the werewolf.
“Well, of course, ‘human’ is just a word,” said Mr. Pin.
He felt weight slowly press down onto his toes as he was lowered to the floor.
“I think perhaps we’ll just be going,” he said carefully.
“Right,” said the werewolf. Mr. Tulip had smashed open a big jar of pickles, or at least things that were long, chubby, and green, and was trying to insert one up his nose.
“If we wanted to stay, we would,” said Mr. Pin.
“Right. But you wan
t to go. So does your…friend,” said the werewolf.
Mr. Pin backed towards the door.
“Mr. Tulip, we have business elsewhere,” he said. “Sheesh, take the damn pickle out of your nose, will you? We’re supposed to be professionals!”
“That’s not a pickle,” said a voice in the dark.
Mr. Pin was uncharacteristically thankful when the door slammed behind them. To his surprise, he also heard the bolts shoot home.
“Well, that could have gone better,” he said, brushing dust and hair off his coat.
“What now?” said Mr. Tulip.
“Time to think of a plan B,” said Mr. Pin.
“Why don’t we just —ing hit people until someone tells us where the dog is?” said Mr. Tulip.
“Tempting,” said Mr. Pin. “But we’ll leave that for plan C—”
“Bugrit.”
They both turned.
“Bent treacle edges, I told ’em,” said Foul Ole Ron, lurching across the street, a wad of Timeses under one arm and the string of his nondescript mongrel in his other hand. He caught sight of the New Firm.
“Harglegarlyurp?” he said. “LayarrrBnip! You gents want a paper?”
It seemed to Mr. Pin that the last sentence, while in pretty much the same voice, had an intrusive, not-quite-right quality. Apart from anything else, it made sense.
“You got some change?” he said to Mr. Tulip, patting his pockets.
“You’re going to —ing buy one?” said his partner.
“There’s a time and a place, Mr. Tulip, a time and a place. Here you are, mister.”
“Millennium hand and shrimp, bugrit,” said Ron, adding, “Much obliged, gents.”
Mr. Pin opened the Times. “This thing has got—” He stopped, and looked closer. “‘Have You Seen This Dog?’” he said. “Sheesh…” He stared at Ron.
“You sell lots of these things?” he said.
“Qeedle the slops, I told ’em. Yeah, hundreds.”
There it was again, the slight sensation of two voices.
“Hundreds,” said Mr. Pin. He looked down at the paper seller’s dog. It looked pretty much like the one in the paper, but all terriers looked alike. Anyway, this one was on a string. “Hundreds,” he said again, and read the short article again.
He stared.
“I think we have a plan B,” he said.
At ground level, the newspaper seller’s dog watched them carefully as they walked away.
“That was too close for comfort,” it said, when they’d turned the corner.
Foul Ole Ron put down his papers in a puddle and pulled a cold sausage from the depths of his hulking coat.
He broke it in three equal pieces.
William had dithered over that, but the Watch had supplied quite a good drawing and he felt right now a little friendly gesture in that direction would be a good idea. If he found himself in deep trouble, head downwards, he’d need someone to pull him out.
He’d rewritten the Patrician story, too, adding as much as he was certain of, and there wasn’t much of that. He was, frankly, stuck.
Sacharissa had penned a story about the opening of the Inquirer. William had hesitated about this, too. But it was news, after all. They couldn’t just ignore it, and it filled some space.
Besides, he liked the opening line, which began: “A would-be rival to Ankh-Morpork’s old established newspaper, the Times, has opened in Gleam Street…”
“You’re getting good at this,” he said, looking across the desk.
“Yes,” she said, “I now know that if I see a naked man I should definitely get his name and address, because—”
William joined in the chorus: “—names sell newspapers.”
He sat back and drank the really horrible tea the dwarfs made. Just for a moment there was an unusual feeling of bliss. Strange word, he thought. It’s one of those words that describe something that does not make a noise but, if it did make a noise, would sound just like that. Bliss. It’s like the sound of a soft meringue melting gently on a warm plate.
Here and now, he was free. The paper was put to bed, tucked up, had its prayers listened to. It was finished. The crew were already filing back in for more copies, cursing and spitting; they’d commandeered a variety of old trolleys and prams to cart their papers out into the streets. Of course, in an hour or so, the mouth of the press would be hungry again and he’d be back pushing the huge rock uphill, just like that character in mythology…what was his name…
“Who was that hero who was condemned to push a rock up a hill and every time he got it to the top it rolled down again?” he said.
Sacharissa didn’t look up.
“Someone who needed a wheelbarrow?” she said, spiking a piece of paper with some force.
William recognized the voice of someone who still has an annoying job to do.
“What are you working on?” he said.
“A report from the Ankh-Morpork Recovering Accordion Players Society,” she said, scribbling fast.
“Is there something wrong with it?”
“Yes. The punctuation. There isn’t any. I think we might have to order an extra box of commas.”
“Why are you bothering with it, then?”
“Twenty-six people are mentioned by name.”
“As accordionists?”
“Yes.”
“Won’t they complain?”
“They didn’t have to play the accordion. Oh, and there was a big crash on Broad Way. A cart overturned and several tons of flour fell onto the road, causing a couple of horses to rear and upset their cartload of fresh eggs, and that caused another cart to shed thirty churns of milk…so what do you think of this as a headline?”
She held up a piece of paper on which she’d written:
CITY’S BIGGEST CAKE MIX-UP!!
William looked at it. Yes. Somehow it had everything. The sad attempt at humor was exactly right. It was just the sort of thing that would cause much mirth around Mrs. Arcanum’s table.
“Lose the second exclamation mark,” he said. “Otherwise I think it’s perfect. How did you hear about it?”
“Oh, Constable Fiddyment dropped in and told me,” said Sacharissa. She took down and shuffled papers unnecessarily. “I think he’s a bit sweet on me, to tell you the truth.”
A tiny, hitherto unregarded bit of William’s ego instantly froze solid. An awful lot of young men seemed happy to tell Sacharissa things. He heard himself say: “Vimes doesn’t want any of his officers to speak to us.”
“Yes, well, I don’t think telling me about a lot of smashed eggs counts, does it?”
“Yes, but—”
“Anyway, I can’t help it if young men want to tell me things, can I?”
“I suppose not, but—”
“Anyway, that’s it for tonight.” Sacharissa yawned. “I’m going home.”
William got up so quickly he skinned his knees on the desk.
“I’ll walk you there,” he said.
“Good grief, it’s nearly a quarter to eight,” said Sacharissa, putting on her coat. “Why do we keep on working?”
“Because the press doesn’t go to sleep,” said William.
As they stepped out into the silent street he wondered if Lord Vetinari had been right about the press. There was something…compelling about it. It was like a dog that stared at you until you fed it. A slightly dangerous dog. Dog bites man, he thought. But that’s not news. That’s olds.
Sacharissa let him walk her to the end of her street, where she made him stop.
“It’ll embarrass Grandfather if you’re seen with me,” she said. “I know it’s stupid, but…neighbors, you know? And all this Guild stuff…”
“I know. Um.”
The air hung heavy for a moment as they looked at each other.
“Er…I don’t know how to put this,” said William, knowing that sooner or later it had to be said, “but I ought to say that, though you are a very attractive girl, you’re not my type.”
“I just thought that with me and you working together all the time—”
“No, I’m glad one of us said it,” she said. “And with smooth talk like that I bet you have the girls just lining up, right? See you tomorrow.”
He watched her walk down the street to her house. After a few seconds a lamp went on in an upper window.
By running very fast he arrived back at his lodgings just late enough for a Look from Mrs. Arcanum, but not so late as to be barred from the table for impoliteness; serious latecomers had to eat their supper at the table in the kitchen.
It was curry tonight. And one of the strange things about eating at Mrs. Arcanum’s was that you got more leftovers than you got original meals. That is, there were far more meals made up from what were traditionally considered the prudently usable remains of earlier meals—stews, bubble-and-squeak, curry—than there were meals at which those remains could have originated.
The curry was particularly strange, since Mrs. Arcanum considered foreign parts only marginally less unspeakable than private parts and therefore added the curious yellow curry powder with a very small spoon, lest everyone should suddenly tear their clothes off and do foreign things. The main ingredients appeared to be turnip and gritty rainwater-tasting sultanas and the remains of some cold mutton, although William couldn’t remember when they’d had the original mutton, at any temperature.
This was not a problem for the other lodgers. Mrs. Arcanum provided big helpings, and they were men who measured culinary achievement by the amount you got on your plate. It might not taste astonishing, but you went to bed full and that was what mattered.
At the moment the news of the day was being discussed. Mr. Mackleduff had bought both the Inquirer and the two editions of the Times, in his role as keeper of the fire of communication.