Making Money d-36

by Terry Pratchett

  'No!'

  In the counting house all the pens ceased moving for a few seconds, before scribbling again with frantic activity.

  Eyes watering with shame and rage, Mr Bent tried to unscrew the top from his patent fountain pen. In the muted silence of the banking hall, the click of the green pen being deployed had the same effect as the sound of the axe-man sharpening his blade. Every clerk bent low to his desk. Mr Bent Had Found A Mistake. All anyone could do was keep their eyes on the paper in front of them and hope against hope that it was not theirs.

  Someone, and please gods it would not be them, would have to go and stand in front of the high desk. They knew that Mr Bent did not like mistakes: Mr Bent believed that mistakes were the result of a deformity of the soul.

  At the sound of the Pen of Doom, one of the senior clerks hurried to Mr Bent's side. Those workers who risked being turned to water by the ferocity of Mr Bent's stare essayed a quick glance, saw her being shown the offending document. There was a distant tut-tut sound. Her tread as she came down the steps and crossed the floor echoed in deadly, praying silence. She did not know it as she scurried, button-boots flashing, to the desk of one of the youngest and newest clerks, but she was about to meet a young man who was destined to go down in history as one of the great heroes of banking.

  The dark organ music filled the Department of Post-Mortem Communications. Moist assumed it was all part of the ambience, although the mood would have been more precisely obtained if the tune it was playing did not appear to be Cantata and Fugue for Someone Who Has Trouble with the Pedals.

  As the last note died, after a long illness, Dr Hicks spun round on the stool and raised the mask.

  'Sorry about that, I have two left feet sometimes. Could you both just chant a bit while I do the mystic waving, please? Don't worry about words. Anything seems to work if it sounds sepulchral enough.'

  As he walked around the circle chanting variants on oo! and raah! Moist wondered how many bankers raised the dead during the course of an afternoon. Probably not a high number. He shouldn't be doing this, surely. He should be out there making money. Owls— Clamp must have finished the design by now. He could be holding his first note in his hands by tomorrow! And then there was damn Cribbins, who could be talking to anyone. True, the man had a sheet as long as a roller towel, but the city worked by alliances and if he met up with the Lavishes then Moist's life would unravel all the way back to the gallows—

  'In my day we at least hired a decent mask,' growled an elderly voice. 'I say, is that a woman over there?'

  A figure had appeared in the circle, without any bother or fuss, apart from the grumbling. It was in every respect the picture of a wizard — robed, pointy-hatted, bearded and elderly — with the addition of a silvery monochrome effect overall and some slight transparency.

  'Ah, Professor Flead,' said Hicks, 'it's kind of you to join us…'

  'You know you brought me here and it's not as if I had anything else to do,' said Flead. He turned back to Adora Belle and his voice became pure syrup. 'What is your name, my dear?'

  'Adora Belle Dearheart.' The warning tone of voice was lost on Flead.

  'How delightful,' he said, giving her a gummy smile. Regrettably, this made little strings of saliva vibrate in his mouth like the web of a very old spider. 'And would you believe me if I told you that you bear a striking resemblance to my beloved concubine Fenti, who died more than three hundred years ago? The likeness is astounding!'

  'I'd say that was a pick-up line,' said Adora Belle.

  'Oh dear, such cynicism,' sighed the late Flead, turning to the Head of Post-Mortem Communications. 'Apart from this young lady's wonderful chanting it was frankly a mess, Hicks,' he said sharply. He tried to pat Adora Belle's hand, but his fingers passed right through.

  'I'm sorry, professor, we just don't get the funding these days,' said Hicks.

  'I know, I know. It was ever thus, doctor. Even in my day, if you needed a corpse you had to go out and find your own! And if you couldn't find one, you jolly well had to make one! It's all so nice now, so damn correct. So a fresh egg technically does the trick, but whatever happened to style? They tell me they've made an engine that can think now, but of course the Fine Arts are always last in the queue! And so I'm brought to this: one barely competent Post-Mortem Communicator and two people from Central Groaning!'

  'Necromancy is a Fine Art?' said Moist.

  'None finer, young man. Get things just a tiny bit wrong and the spirits of the vengeful dead may enter your head via your ears and blow your brains out down your nose.'

  The eyes of Moist and Adora Belle focused on Dr Hicks like those of an archer on his target. He waved his hands frantically and mouthed, 'Not very often!'

  'What is a pretty young woman like you doing here, hmm?' said Flead, trying to grab Adora Belle's hand again.

  'I'm trying to translate a phrase from Umnian,' she said, giving him a wooden smile and absent-mindedly wiping her hand on her dress.

  'Are women allowed to do that sort of thing these days? What fun! One of my greatest regrets, you know, is that when I was in possession of a body I didn't let it spend enough time in the company of young ladies…'

  Moist looked around to see if there was any kind of emergency lever. There had to be something, if only in the event of nasal brain explosion.

  He sidled up to Hicks. 'It's going to go really bad in a moment!' he hissed.

  'It's all right, I can banish him to the Undead Zone in a moment,' Hicks whispered.

  'That won't be far enough if she loses her temper! I once saw her put a stiletto heel right through a man's foot while she was smoking a cigarette. She hasn't had a cigarette for more than fifteen minutes, so there's no telling what she'll do!'

  But Adora Belle had pulled the golem's arm out of her bag, and the late Professor Flead's eyes twinkled with something more compelling than romance. Lust comes in many varieties.

  He picked up the arm. That was the second surprising thing. And then Moist realized that the arm was still there, by Flead's feet, and what he was lifting was a pearly, tenuous ghost.

  'Ah, part of an Umnian golem,' he said. 'Bad condition. Immensely rare. Probably dug up on the site of Um, yes?'

  'Possibly,' said Adora Belle.

  'Hmm. Possibly, eh?' said Flead, turning the spectral arm around. 'Look at the wafer-thinness! Light as a feather but strong as steel while the fires burned within! There has been nothing like them since!'

  'I might know where such fires still burn,' said Adora Belle.

  'After sixty thousand years? I think not, madam!'

  'I think otherwise.'

  She could say things in that tone of voice and turn heads. She projected absolute certainty. Moist had worked hard for years to get a voice like that.

  'Are you saying an Umnian golem has survived?

  'Yes. Four of them, I think,' said Adora Belle.

  'Can they sing?'

  'At least one can.'

  'I'd give anything to see one before I die,' said Flead.

  'Er…' Moist began.

  'Figure of speech, figure of speech,' said Flead, waving a hand irritably.

  'I think that could be arranged,' said Adora Belle. 'In the meantime, we've transcribed their song into Boddely's Phonetic Runes.' She dipped into her bag and produced a small scroll. Flead reached out and once again an iridescent ghost of the scroll was now in his hands.

  'It appears to be gibberish,' he said, glancing at it, 'although I have to say that Umnian always does at first glance. I shall need some time to work it out. Umnian is entirely a contextual language. Have you seen these golems?'

  'No, our tunnel collapsed. We can't even talk to the golems who were digging any more. Song doesn't travel well under salt water. But we think they are… unusual golems.'

  'Golden, probably,' said Flead, the words leaving a thoughtful silence in their wake.

  Then Adora Belle said, 'Oh.' Moist shut his eyes; on the inside of the lids the gold reserve
s of Ankh-Morpork walked up and down, gleaming.

  'Anyone who researches Um finds the golden golem legend,' said Flead. 'Sixty thousand years ago some witch doctor sitting by a fire made a clay figure and worked out how to make it live and that was the only invention they ever needed, do you understand? Even had horse golems, did you know that? No one has ever been able to create one since. Yet the Umnians never worked iron! They never invented the spade or the wheel! Golems herded their animals and span their cloth! The Umnians did make their own jewellery, though, which largely consisted of scenes of human sacrifice, badly executed in every sense of the word. They were incredibly inventive in that area. A theocracy, of course,' he added, with a shrug. 'I don't know what it is about stepped pyramids that brings out the worst in a god… Anyway, yes, they did work gold. They dressed their priests in it. Quite possibly they made a few golems out of it. Or, equally, the "golden golem" was a metaphor referring to the value of golems to the Umnians. When people wish to express the concept of worth, "gold" is always the word of choice—'

  'Isn't it just,' murmured Moist.

  '—or it is simply a legend without foundation. Exploration of the site has never found anything except a few fragments of broken golem,' said Flead, sitting back and making himself comfortable on empty air.

  He winked at Adora Belle. 'Perhaps you looked elsewhere? One story tells us that upon the death of all the humans, the golems walked into the sea… ?' The question mark hung in the air like the hook it was.

  'What an interesting story,' said Adora Belle, poker-faced.

  Flead smiled. 'I will find the sense of this message. Of course you will come and see me again tomorrow?

  Moist didn't like the sound of that, whatever it was. It didn't help that Adora Belle was smiling.

  Flead added:

  'Have you, sir?' said Adora Belle, laughing.

  'No, but I have an excellent memory!'

  Moist frowned. He liked it better when she was giving the old devil the cold shoulder. 'Can we go now?' he said.

  Probationary Trainee Junior Clerk Hammersmith Coot watched Miss Drapes looming ever closer with slightly less apprehension than his older colleagues did, and they knew this was because the poor kid had not been there long enough to know the meaning of what was about to happen.

  The senior clerk put the paper on his desk with some force. The total had been ringed around in green ink which was still wet. 'Mr Bent,' she said, with a tincture of satisfaction, 'says you must do this again properly.'

  And because Hammersmith was a well-brought-up young man and because this was only his first week in the bank, he said: 'Yes, Miss Drapes,' took the paper neatly and set to work.

  There were many different stories told about what happened next. In years to come, clerks measured their banking experience by how close they were when the Thing Happened. There were disagreements on what was actually said. Certainly there was no violence, no matter what some of the stories implied. But it was a day that brought the world, or at least the part of it that included the counting house, to its knees.

  Everyone agreed that Hammersmith spent some time working on the percentages. They say he produced a notebook — a personal notebook, which was an offence in itself— and did some work in it. Then, after some say fifteen minutes, some say nearly half an hour, he walked back to the desk of Miss Drapes, and declared: 'I'm sorry, Miss Drapes, but I can't find where the mistake is. I have checked my workings and believe my total is correct.'

  His voice was not loud, but the room went silent. In fact, it was more than silent. The sheer straining of hundreds of ears meant that spiders spinning cobwebs near the ceiling wobbled in the suction. He was sent back to his desk to 'do it again and don't waste people's time' and after a further ten minutes, some say fifteen, Miss Drapes went to his desk and looked over his shoulder.

  Most people agree that after half a minute or so she picked up the paper, pulled a pencil from the tight bun on the back of her head, ordered the young man out of his seat, sat down and spent some time staring at the numbers. She got up. She went to the desk of another senior clerk. Together they pored over the piece of paper. A third clerk was summoned. He copied out the offending columns, worked on them for a while and looked up, his face grey. No one needed to say it aloud. By now all work had stopped, but Mr Bent, up on the high stool, was still engrossed in the numbers before him and, significantly, he was muttering under his breath.

  People sensed it in the air.

  Mr Bent had Made a Mistake.

  The most senior clerks conferred hastily in a corner. There was no higher authority that they could appeal to. Mr Bent was the higher authority, second only to the inexorable Lord of Mathematics. In the end it was left to the luckless Miss Drapes, who so recently had been the agent of Mr Bent's displeasure, to write on the document, 'I am sorry, Mr Bent, I believe the young man is right.' She placed this at the bottom of a number of working slips that she was delivering to the in-tray, dropped it in as the tray rumbled past, and then the sound of her little boots echoed as she rushed, weeping, the length of the hall to the ladies' restroom, where she had hysterics.

  The remaining members of the staff looked around, warily, like ancient monsters who can see a second sun getting bigger in the sky but have absolutely no idea what they should do about it. Mr Bent was a fast man with an in-tray and by the look of it there was about two minutes or less before he was confronted with the message. Suddenly and all at once, they fled for the exits.

  'And how was that for you?' said Moist, stepping out into the sunlight.

  'Do I detect a note of peevishness?' said Adora Belle.

  'Well, my plans for today did not include dropping in to chat with a three-hundred-year-old letch.'

  'I think you mean lych, and anyway he was a ghost, not a corpse.'

  'He was letching!'

  'All in his mind,' said Adora Belle. 'Your mind, too.'

  'Normally you go crazy if people try to patronize you!'

  'True. But most people aren't able to translate a language so old that even golems can hardly understand a tenth of it. Get a talent like that and it could be you getting the girls when you are three centuries dead.'

  'You were just flirting to get what you wanted?'

  Adora Belle stopped dead in the middle of the square to confront him. 'And? You flirt with people all the time. You flirt with the whole world! That's what makes you interesting, because you're more like a musician than a thief. You want to play the world, especially the fiddly bits. And now I'm going home for a bath. I got off the coach this morning, remember?'

  'This morning,' said Moist, 'I found that one of my staff had swapped the mind of another of my staff with that of a turnip.'

  'Was that good?' said Adora Belle.

  'I'm not sure. In fact I'd better go and check. Look, we've both had a busy day. I'll send a cab at half past seven, all right?'

  Cribbins was enjoying himself. He'd never gone in much for reading, up until now. Oh, he could read, and write too, in a nice cursive script that people thought was quite distinguished. And he'd always liked the Times for its clear, readable font, and had, with the aid of some scissors and a pot of paste, often accepted its assistance in producing those missives that attract attention not by fine writing but by having the messages created in cut-out words and letters and even whole phrases if you were lucky. Reading for pleasure had passed him by, however. But he was reading now, oh yes, and it was extremely pleasurable, goodness yes! It was amazing what you could find if you knew what you were looking for! And now, all his Hogswatches were about to come at once—

  'A cup of tea, reverend?' said a voice by his side. It was the plump lady in charge of the Times's back numbers department, who had taken to him as soon as he doffed his hat to her. She had the slightly wistful, slightly hungry look that so many women of a certain age wore when they'd decided to trust in gods because of the absolute impossibility of continuing to trust in men.

  'Why, thank you, shiste
r,' he said, beaming. 'And is it not written: "The eleemosynary cup is more worthy than the thrown hen"?'

  Then he noticed the discreet little silver ladle pinned to her bosom, and that her earrings were two tiny fish slices. The holy symbols of Anoia, yes. He'd just been reading about her in the religious pages. All the rage these days, thanks to the help of young Spangler. Started out way down the ladder as the Goddess of Things That Get Stuck In Drawers, but the talk in the religious pages was that she was being tipped for Goddess of Lost Causes, a very profitable area, very profitable indeed for a man with a flexible approach but, and he sighed inwardly, it was not such a good idea to do business when the god in question was active, in case Anoia got angry and found a new use for a fish slice. Besides, he'd soon be able to put all that behind him. What a clever lad young Spangler had turned out to be! Smarmy little devil! This wasn't going to be over quick, oh no. This was going to be a pension for life. And it'd be a long, long life, or else—

  'Is there anything more I can get you, reverend?' said the woman anxiously.

  'My cup runneth over, shister,' said Cribbins.

  The woman's anxious expression intensified. 'Oh, I'm sorry, I hope it hasn't gone on the—'

  Cribbins carefully put his hand over the cup. 'I meant that I am more than shatisfied,' he said, and he was. It was a bloody miracle, that's what it was. If Om was going to hand them out like this, he might even start believing in Him.

  And it got better the more you thought about it, Cribbins told himself, as the woman hurried away. How'd the kid done it? There must have been cronies. The hangman, for one, a couple of jailers…

  Reflectively, he removed his false teeth with a twang, swilled them gently in the tea, patted them dry with his handkerchief and wrestled them back into his mouth a few seconds before footsteps told him the woman was returning. She was positively vibrating with genteel courage.

  'Excuse me, reverend, but can I ask a favour?' she said, going pink.