Truth

by Pratchett, Terry

  Mr Longshaft nodded to himself and then looked up at the frozen expressions.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ he said. ‘I wasn’t listening.’

  At which point, as Sacharissa would have put it, the meeting broke up.

  William purchased his own copy of the Inquirer on the way to Gleam Street and wondered, not for the first time, who was writing this stuff. They were better at it than he would be, that was certain. He’d wondered once about making up a few innocent paragraphs, when not much was happening in the city, and found that it was a lot harder than it looked. Try as he might, he kept letting common sense and intelligence get the better of him. Besides, telling lies was Wrong.

  He noted glumly that they’d used the talking dog story. Oh, and one he hadn’t heard before: a strange figure had been seen swooping around the rooftops of Unseen University at night, HALF MAN HALF MOTH? Half invented and half made up, more likely.

  The curious thing was, if the breakfast table jury was anything to go by, that denying stories like this only proved that they were true. After all, no one would bother to deny something if it didn’t exist, would they?

  He took a short cut through the stables in Creek Alley. Like Gleam Street, Creek Alley was there to mark the back of places. This part of the city had no real existence other than as a place you passed through to somewhere more interesting. The dull street was made up of high-windowed warehouses and broken-down sheds and, significantly, Hobson’s Livery Stable.

  It was huge, especially since Hobson had realized that you could go multi-storey.

  Willie Hobson was another businessman in the mould of the King of the Golden River; he’d found a niche, occupied it and forced it open so wide that lots of money dropped in. Many people in the city occasionally needed a horse, and hardly anyone had a place to park one. You needed a stable, you needed a groom, you needed a hayloft … but to hire a horse from Willie you just needed a few dollars.

  Lots of people kept their own horses there, too. People came and went all the time. The bandy-legged, goblin-like little men who ran the place never bothered to stop anyone unless they appeared to have hidden a horse about their person.

  William looked around when a voice out of the gloom of the loose-boxes said, ‘’scuse me, friend.’

  He peered into the shadows. A few horses were watching him. In the distance, around him, other horses were being moved, people were shouting, there was the general bustle of the stables. But the voice had come out of a little pool of ominous silence.

  ‘I’ve still got two months to go on my last receipt,’ he said to the darkness. ‘And may I say that the free canteen of cutlery seemed to be made of an alloy of lead and horse manure?’

  ‘I’m not a thief, friend,’ said the shadows.

  ‘Who’s there?’

  ‘Do you know what’s good for you?’

  ‘Er … yes. Healthy exercise, regular meals, a good night’s sleep.’ William stared at the long lines of loose-boxes. ‘I think what you meant to ask was: do I know what’s bad for me, in the general context of blunt instruments and sharp edges. Yes?’

  ‘Broadly, yes. No, don’t move, mister. You stand where I can see you and no harm will come to you.’

  William analysed this. ‘Yes, but if I stand where you can’t see me, I don’t see how any harm could come to me there, either.’

  Something sighed. ‘Look, meet me halfway here— No! Don’t move!’

  ‘But you said to—’

  ‘Just stand still and shut up and listen, will you?’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘I am hearing where there’s a certain dog that people are lookin’ for,’ said the mystery voice.

  ‘Ah. Yes. The Watch want him, yes. And …?’ William thought he could just make out a slightly darker shape. More importantly, he could smell a Smell, even above the general background odour of the horses.

  ‘Ron?’ he said.

  ‘Do I sound like Ron?’ said the voice.

  ‘Not … exactly. So who am I talking to?’

  ‘You can call me … Deep Bone.’

  ‘Deep Bone?’

  ‘Anything wrong with that?’

  ‘I suppose not. What can I do for you, Mr Bone?’

  ‘Just supposin’ someone knew where the doggie was but didn’t want to get involved with the Watch?’ said the voice of Deep Bone.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Let’s just say the Watch can be trouble to a certain kind of person, eh? That’s one reason.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘And let’s just say there’s people around who’d much prefer the little doggie didn’t tell what it knew, shall we? The Watch might not take enough care. They’re very uncaring about dogs, the Watch.’

  ‘Are they?’

  ‘Oh yes, the Watch fink a dog has no human rights at all. That’s another reason.’

  ‘Is there a third reason?’

  ‘Yes. I read in the paper where there’s a reward.’

  ‘Ah. Yes?’

  ‘Only it got printed wrong, ’cos it said twenty-five dollars instead of a hundred dollars, see?’

  ‘Oh. I see. But a hundred dollars is a lot of money for a dog, Mr Bone.’

  ‘Not for this dog, if you know what I mean,’ said the shadows. ‘This dog’s got a story to tell.’

  ‘Oh, yes? It’s the famous talking dog of Ankh-Morpork, is it?’

  Deep Bone growled. ‘Dogs can’t talk, everyone knows that. But there’s them as can understand dog language, if you catch my drift.’

  ‘Werewolves, you mean?’

  ‘Could be people of that style of kidney, yes.’

  ‘But the only werewolf I know is in the Watch,’ said William. ‘So you’re just telling me to pay you a hundred dollars so that I could hand Wuffles over to the Watch?’

  ‘That’d be a feather in your cap with old Vimes, wouldn’t it?’ said Deep Bone.

  ‘But you said you didn’t trust the Watch, Mr Bone. I do listen to what people say, you know.’

  Deep Bone went quiet for a while.

  Then: ‘All right, the dog and an interpreter, one hundred and fifty dollars.’

  ‘And the story this dog could tell deals with events in the palace a few mornings ago?’

  ‘Could be. Could be. Could very well be. Could be exactly the kind of fing I’m referrin’ to.’

  ‘I want to see who I’m talking to,’ said William.

  ‘Can’t do that.’

  ‘Oh, well,’ said William. ‘That’s reassuring. I’ll just go and get a hundred and fifty dollars, shall I, and bring it back to this place and hand it over to you, just like that?’

  ‘Good idea.’

  ‘Not a chance.’

  ‘Oh, so you don’t trust me, eh?’ said Deep Bone.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Er … supposin’ I was to tell you a little piece of free news information for gratis and nothin’. A lick of the lolly. A little taste, style of fing.’

  ‘Go on …’

  ‘It wasn’t Vetinari who stabbed the other man. It was another man.’

  William wrote this down, and then looked at it. ‘Exactly how helpful is this?’ he said.

  ‘That’s a good bit of news, that is. Hardly anyone knows it.’

  ‘There’s not a lot to know! Isn’t there a description?’

  ‘He’s got a dog bite on his ankle,’ said Deep Bone.

  ‘That’ll make him easy to find in the street, won’t it? What are you expecting me to do, try a little surreptitious trouser lifting?’

  Deep Bone sounded hurt. ‘That’s kosher news, that is. It’d worry certain people if you put that in your paper.’

  ‘Yes, they’d worry that I’d gone mad! You’ve got to tell me something better than that! Can you give me a description?’

  Deep Bone went silent for a while, and when the voice spoke again it sounded uncertain. ‘You mean, what he looked like?’ it said.

  ‘Well, yes!’

  ‘Ah … well, it dunt
work like that with dogs, see? What w— what your average dog does, basic’ly, is look up. People are mostly just a wall with a pair of nostril holes at the top, is my point.’

  ‘Not a lot of help, then,’ said William. ‘Sorry we can’t do busin—’

  ‘What he smells like, now, that’s somethin’ else,’ said the voice of Deep Bone, hurriedly.

  ‘All right, tell me what he smells like.’

  ‘Do I see a pile of cash in front of me? I don’t think so.’

  ‘Well, Mr Bone, I’m not even going to think about getting that kind of money together until I’ve got some proof that you really know something.’

  ‘All right,’ said the voice from the shadows after a while. ‘You know there’s a Committee to Unelect the Patrician? Now that’s news.’

  ‘What’s new about that? People have plotted to get rid of him for years.’

  There was another pause.

  ‘Y’know,’ said Deep Bone, ‘it’d save a lot of trouble if you just gave me the money and I told you everything.’

  ‘So far you haven’t told me anything. Tell me everything, and then I’ll pay you, if it’s the truth.’

  ‘Oh, yes, pull one of the others, it’s got bells on!’

  ‘Then it looks like we can’t do business,’ said William, putting his notebook away.

  ‘Wait, wait … this’ll do. You ask Vimes what Vetinari did just before the attack.’

  ‘Why, what did he do?’

  ‘See if you can find out.’

  ‘That’s not a lot to go on.’

  There was no reply. William thought he heard a shuffling noise.

  ‘Hello?’

  He waited a moment and then very carefully stepped forward.

  In the gloom a few horses turned to look at him. Of an invisible informant there was no sign.

  A lot of thoughts jostled for space in his mind as he headed out into the daylight, but surprisingly enough it was a small and theoretically unimportant one that kept oozing into centre stage. What kind of expression was ‘pull one of the others, it’s got bells on’? Now, ‘pull the other one, it’s got bells on’, he’d heard of – it stemmed from the days of a crueller than usual ruler in Ankh-Morpork who had had any Morris dancers ritually tortured. But ‘one of the others’ … where was the sense in that?

  Then it struck him.

  Deep Bone must be a foreigner. It made sense. It was like the way Otto spoke perfectly good Morporkian but hadn’t got the hang of colloquialisms.

  He made a note of this.

  He smelled the smoke at the same time as he heard the pottery clatter of golem feet. Four of the clay people thudded past him, carrying a long ladder. Without thinking he fell in behind, automatically turning to a new page in his notebook.

  Fire was always the terror in those parts of the city where wood and thatch predominated. That was why everyone had been so dead set against any form of fire brigade, reasoning – with impeccable Ankh-Morpork logic – that any bunch of men who were paid to put out fires would naturally see to it that there was a plentiful supply of fires to put out.

  Golems were different. They were patient, hardworking, intensely logical, virtually indestructible and they volunteered. Everyone knew golems couldn’t harm people.

  There was some mystery about how the golem fire brigade had got formed. Some said the idea had come from the Watch, but the generally held theory was that golems simply would not allow people and property to be destroyed. With eerie discipline and no apparent communication they would converge on a fire from all sides, rescue any trapped people, secure and carefully pile up all portable property, form a bucket chain along which the buckets moved at a blur, trample every last ember … and then hurry back to their abandoned tasks.

  These four were hurrying to a blaze in Treacle Mine Road. Tongues of fire curled out of first-floor rooms.

  ‘Are you from the paper?’ said a man in the crowd.

  ‘Yes,’ said William.

  ‘Well, I reckon this is another case of mysterious spontaneous combustion, just like you reported yesterday,’ and he craned his neck to see if William was writing this down.

  William groaned. Sacharissa had reported a fire in Lobbin Clout, in which one poor soul had died, and had left it at that. But the Inquirer had called it a Mystery Fire.

  ‘I’m not sure that one was very mysterious,’ he said. ‘Old Mr Hardy decided to light a cigar and forgot that he was bathing his feet in turpentine.’ Apparently someone had told him this was a cure for athlete’s foot and, in a way, they had been right.

  ‘That’s what they say,’ said the man, tapping his nose. ‘But there’s a lot we don’t get told.’

  ‘That’s true,’ said William. ‘I heard only the other day that giant rocks hundreds of miles across crash into the country every week, but the Patrician hushes it up.’

  ‘There you are, then,’ said the man. ‘It’s amazing the way they treat us as if we’re stupid.’

  ‘Yes, it’s a puzzle to me, too,’ said William.

  ‘Gangvay, gangvay, please!’

  Otto pushed through the onlookers, struggling under the weight of a device the size and general shape of an accordion. He elbowed his way to the front of the crowd, balanced the device on its tripod and aimed it at a golem who was climbing out of a smoking window holding a small child.

  ‘All right, boys, zis is zer big vun!’ he said, and raised the flash cage. ‘Vun, two, thre— aarghaarghaarghaargh …’

  The vampire became a cloud of gently settling dust. For a moment something hovered in the air. It looked like a small jar on a necklace made of string.

  Then it fell and smashed on the cobbles.

  The dust mushroomed up, took on a shape … and Otto stood blinking and running his hands over himself to check that he was all there. He caught sight of William and gave him the kind of big broad smile that only a vampire can give.

  ‘Mr Villiam! It vorked, your idea!’

  ‘Er … which one?’ said William. A thin plume of yellow smoke was creeping out from under the lid of the big iconograph.

  ‘You said carry a little drop of emergency b-vord,’ said Otto. ‘Zo I thought: if it is in a little bottle around my neck, zen if I crumble to dust, hoopla! It vill crash and smash unt here I am!’

  He lifted the lid of the iconograph and waved the smoke away. There was the sound of very small coughing from within. ‘And if I am not mistaken, ve have a successfully etched picture! All of vich only goes to show vot ve can achieve ven our brains are not clouded by thoughts of open vindows and bare necks, vich never cross my mind at all zese days because I am completely beetotal.’

  Otto had made changes to his clothing. Away had gone the traditional black evening dress preferred by his species, to be replaced by an armless vest containing more pockets than William had ever seen on one garment. Many of them were stuffed with packets of imp food, extra paint, mysterious tools and other essentials of the iconographer’s art.

  In deference to tradition, though, Otto had made it black, with a red silk lining, and had added tails.

  On making gentle inquiries of a family watching disconsolately as the smoke from the fire was turned to steam, William ascertained that the blaze had been mysteriously caused by mysterious spontaneous combustion in an overflowing mysterious chip pan full of boiling fat.

  William left them picking through the blackened remains of their home.

  ‘And it’s just a story,’ he said, putting away the notebook. ‘It does makes me feel a bit of a vampire — oh … sorry.’

  ‘It is okay,’ said Otto. ‘I understand. And I should like to thank you for givink me zis job. It means a lot to me, especially since I can see how nervous you are. Vich is understandable, of course.’

  ‘I’m not nervous! I’m very much at home with other species!’ said William hotly.

  Otto’s expression was amicable, but it was also as penetrative as the smile of a vampire can be.

  ‘Yes, I notice how careful
you are to be friendly with the dvarfs and you are kind to me, also. It is a big effort vich is very commendable—’

  William opened his mouth to protest, and gave up. ‘All right, look, it’s the way I was brought up, all right? My father was definitely very … in favour of humanity, well, ha, not humanity in the sense of … I mean, it was more that he was against—’

  ‘Yes, yes, I understand.’

  ‘And that’s all there is to it, okay? We can all decide who we’re going to be!’

  ‘Yes, yes, sure. And if you vant any advice about vimmin, you only have to ask.’

  ‘Why should I want advice about vi— women?’

  ‘Oh, no reason. No reason at all,’ said Otto innocently.

  ‘Anyway, you’re a vampire. What advice could a vampire give me about women?’

  ‘Oh, my vord, vake up and smell zer garlic! Oh, zer stories I could tell you.’ Otto paused. ‘But I von’t because I don’t do zat sort of thing any more, now that I have seen the daylight.’ He nudged William, who was red with embarrassment. ‘Let us just say, zey don’t alvays scream.’

  ‘That’s a bit tasteless, isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh, that vas in zer bad old days,’ said Otto hurriedly. ‘Now I like nothing better than a nice mug of cocoa and a good sing-song around zer harmonium, I assure you. Oh, yes. My vord.’

  Getting into the office to write up the story turned out to be a problem. In fact, so was getting into Gleam Street.

  Otto caught William up as he stood and stared.

  ‘Vell, I suppose ve asked for it,’ he shouted. ‘Tventy-five dollars is a lot of money.’

  ‘What?’ shouted William.

  ‘I SAID TVENTY-FIVE DOLLARS IS A LOT OF MONEY, VILLIAM!’

  ‘WHAT?’

  Several people pushed past them. They were carrying dogs. Everyone in Gleam Street was carrying a dog, or leading a dog, or being dragged by a dog, or being savaged, despite the owner’s best efforts, by a dog belonging to someone else. The barking had already gone beyond mere sounds, and was now some kind of perceptible force, hitting the eardrums like a hurricane made of scrap iron.

  William pulled the vampire into a doorway, where the din was merely unbearable.

  ‘Can’t you do something?’ he screamed. ‘Otherwise we’ll never get through!’