Truth

by Pratchett, Terry

  An engraved page was an engraved page, complete and unique. But if you took the leaden letters that had previously been used to set the words of a god, and then used them to set a cookery book, what did that do to the holy wisdom? For that matter, what would it do to the pie? As for printing a book of spells, and then using the same type for a book of navigation – well, the voyage might go anywhere.

  On cue, because history likes neatness, he heard the sound of a carriage drawing up in the street outside. A few moments later Lord Vetinari stepped inside and stood leaning heavily on his stick and surveying the room with mild interest.

  ‘Why … Lord de Worde,’ he said, looking surprised. ‘I had no idea that you were involved in this enterprise …’

  William coloured as he hurried over to the city’s supreme ruler. ‘It’s Mister de Worde, my lord.’

  ‘Ah, yes. Of course. Indeed.’ Lord Vetinari’s gaze traversed the inky room, paused a moment on the pile of madly smiling rocking horses, and then took in the toiling dwarfs. ‘Yes. Of course. And are you in charge?’

  ‘No one is, my lord,’ said William. ‘But Mr Goodmountain over there seems to do most of the talking.’

  ‘So what exactly is your purpose here?’

  ‘Er …’ William paused, which he knew was never a good tactic with the Patrician. ‘Frankly, sir, it’s warm, my office is freezing, and … well, it’s fascinating. Look, I know it’s not really—’

  Lord Vetinari nodded and raised a hand. ‘Be so good as to ask Mr Goodmountain to come over here, will you?’

  William tried to whisper a few instructions into Gunilla’s ear as he hustled him over to the tall figure of the Patrician.

  ‘Ah, good,’ said the Patrician. ‘Now, I would just like to ask one or two questions, if I may?’

  Goodmountain nodded.

  ‘Firstly, is Mr Cut-My-Own-Throat Dibbler involved in this enterprise in any significant managerial capacity?’

  ‘What?’ said William. He hadn’t been expecting this.

  ‘Shifty fellow, sells sausages—’

  ‘Oh, him. No. Just the dwarfs.’

  ‘I see. And is this building built on a crack in space-time?’

  ‘What?’ said Gunilla.

  The Patrician sighed. ‘When one has been ruler of this city as long as I have,’ he said, ‘one gets to know with a sad certainty that whenever some well-meaning soul begins a novel enterprise they always, with some kind of uncanny foresight, site it at the point where it will do maximum harm to the fabric of reality. There was that Holy Wood moving picture fiasco a few years ago, yes? And that Music with Rocks In business not long after, we never got to the bottom of that. And of course the wizards seem to break into the Dungeon Dimensions so often they might as well install a revolving door. And I’m sure I don’t have to remind you what happened when the late Mr Hong chose to open his Three Jolly Luck Take-Away Fish Bar in Dagon Street during the lunar eclipse. Yes? You see, gentlemen, it would be nice to think that someone, somewhere in this city, is engaged in some simple enterprise that is not going to end up causing tentacled monsters and dread apparitions to stalk the streets eating people. So … ?’

  ‘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 neighbourhood, and which seeks only the rite, ahah, 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 frogmarched 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 William’s shoulders and walked him 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 endeavour 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 re-opened.’

  ‘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 hard-working 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 w
aved 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, swivelling 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.’

  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 do 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 drugs habit. He wanted to have a drugs 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 furtive watchers were indeed under careful observation.

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

  There was a piece of string around its neck. This 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 sugar loaf. There was a suggestion of grey 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.’

  ‘Bugrem,’ 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 news letter 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 sentence: ‘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 unravelled 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-defence. 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 shoulders.

  ‘Hmm,’ he said.

  ‘What do you think?’ said William.

  ‘Looks a bit … grey,’ said the dwarf. ‘All the type bunched up. Looks like a book.’

  ‘Well, that’s all right, isn’t it?’ said William. Looking 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.r />
  ‘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.’

  ‘That’s it, then,’ said Gunilla. ‘All done. All right, lad? How many copies do you want?’

  ‘Er … twenty? Thirty?’

  ‘How about a couple of hundred?’ Gunilla nodded at the dwarfs, who set to work. ‘It’s hardly worth going to press for less.’

  ‘Good grief! I can’t imagine there’s enough people in the city that’d pay five dollars!’

  ‘All right, charge ’em half a dollar. Then it’ll be fifty dollars for us and the same for you.’

  ‘My word! Really?’ William stared at the beaming dwarf. ‘But I’ve still got to sell them,’ he said. ‘It’s not as though they’re cakes in a shop. It’s not like—’

  He sniffed. His eyes began to water.

  ‘Oh dear,’ he said. ‘We’re going to have another visitor. I know that smell.’

  ‘What smell?’ said the dwarf.

  The door creaked open.

  There was this to be said about the Smell of Foul Ole Ron, an odour so intense that it took on a personality of its own and fully justified the capital letter: after the initial shock the organs of smell just gave up and shut down, as if no more able to comprehend the thing than an oyster can comprehend the ocean. After some minutes in its presence, wax would trickle out of people’s ears and their hair would begin to bleach.