“Good. That elevator should be getting down about… now.”
Slivers of blue light, like trout slipping through a stream, danced around the elevator door.
The Auditors gathered. They had been learning. Many of them had acquired weapons. And a number of them had taken care not to communicate to the others that gripping something offensive in the hand seemed a very natural thing to do. It spoke to something right down in the back of the brain.
It was therefore unfortunate that when a couple of them pulled open the elevator door it was to reveal, slightly melting in the middle of the floor, a cherry liqueur chocolate.
The scent wafted.
There was only one survivor and, when Miss Tangerine ate the chocolate, there wasn't even that.
“One of life's little certainties,” said Susan, standing on the edge of the museum's parapet, “is that there is generally a last chocolate hidden in all those empty wrappers.”
Then she reached down and grabbed the top of a drainpipe.
She wasn't certain how this would work. If she fell… but would she fall? There was no time to fall. She had her own personal time. In theory, if anything so definite as a theory existed in a case like this, that meant she could just drift down to the ground. But the time to test a theory like that was when you had no other choice. A theory was just an idea, but a drainpipe was a fact.
The blue light flickered around her hands.
“Lobsang?” she said quietly. “It is you, isn't it?”
That name is as good as any for us. The voice was as faint as a breath.
“This may seem a stupid question, but where are you?”
We are just a memory. And I am weak.
“Oh.” Susan slid a little further.
But I will grow strong. Get to the clock.
“What's the point? There was nothing we could do!”
Times have changed.
Susan reached the ground. Lady LeJean followed, moving clumsily. Her evening dress had acquired several more tears.
“Can I offer a fashion tip?” said Susan.
“It would be welcomed,” said her ladyship politely.
“Long cerise bloomers with that dress? Not a good idea.”
“No? They are very colourful, and quite warm. What should I have chosen instead?”
“With that cut? Practically nothing.”
“That would have been acceptable?”
“Er…” Susan blanched at unfolding the complex laws of lingerie to someone who wasn't even, she felt, anybody. “To anyone likely to find out, yes,” she finished. “It would take too long to explain.”
Lady LeJean sighed. “All of it does,” she said. “Even clothing. Skin-substitutes to preserve body heat? So simple. So easy to say. But there are so many rules and exceptions, impossible to understand.”
Susan looked along Broad Way. It was thick with silent traffic, but there was no sign of an Auditor.
“We'll run into more of them,” she said aloud.
“Yes. There will be hundreds, at least,” said Lady LeJean.
“Why?”
“Because we have always wondered what life is like.”
“Then let's get up into Zephire Street,” said Susan.
“What is there for us?”
“Wienrich and Boettcher.”
“Who are they?”
“I think the original Herr Wienrich and Frau Boettcher died a long time ago. But the shop still does very good business,” said Susan, darting across the street. “We need ammunition.”
Lady LeJean caught up. “Oh. They make chocolate?” she said.
“Does a bear poo in the woods?” said Susan, and realized her mistake straight away.16
Too late. Lady LeJean looked thoughtful for a moment.
“Yes,” she said at last. “Yes, I believe that most varieties do indeed excrete as you suggest, at least in the temperate zones, but there are several that—”
“I meant to say that, yes, they make chocolate,” said Susan.
Vanity, vanity, thought Lu-Tze, as the milk cart rattled through the silent city. Ronnie would have been like a god, and people of that stripe don't like hiding. Not really hiding. They like to leave a little clue, some emerald tablet somewhere, some code in some tomb under the desert, something to say to the keen researcher: I was here, and I was great.
What else had the first people been afraid of? Night, maybe. Cold. Bears. Winter. Stars. The endless sky. Spiders. Snakes. One another. People had been afraid of so many things.
He reached into his pack for the battered copy of the Way, and opened it at random.
Koan 97: “Do unto otters as you would have them do unto you.” Hmm. No real help there. Besides, he'd occasionally been unsure that he'd written that one down properly, although it certainly had worked. He'd always left aquatic mammals well alone, and they had done the same to him.
He tried again.
Koan 124: “It's amazing what you see if you keep your eyes open.”
“What's the book, monk?” said Ronnie.
“Oh, just… a little book,” said Lu-Tze. He looked around.
The cart was passing a funeral parlour. The owner had invested in a large plate-glass window, even though the professional undertaker does not, in truth, have that much to sell that looks good in a window and they usually make do with dark, sombre drapes and perhaps a tasteful urn.
And the name of the Fifth Horseman.
“Hah!” said Lu-Tze quietly.
“Something funny, monk?”
“Obvious, when you think about it,” said Lu-Tze, as much to himself as to Ronnie. Then he turned in his seat and stuck out his hand. “Pleased to meet you,” he said. “Let me guess your name.”
And said it.
Susan had been unusually inexact. To call Wienrich and Boettcher “chocolate makers” was like calling Leonard of Quirm “a decent painter who also tinkered with things”, or Death “not someone you'd want to meet every day”. It was accurate, but it didn't tell the whole story.
For one thing, they didn't make, they created. There's an important difference.17 And, while their select little shop sold the results, it didn't do anything so crass as to fill the window with them. That would suggest… well, over-eagerness. Generally, W&B had a display of silk and velvet drapes with, on a small stand, perhaps one of their special pralines or no more than three of their renowned frosted caramels. There was no price tag. If you had to ask the price of W&B's chocolates, you couldn't afford them. And if you'd tasted one, and still couldn't afford them, you'd save and scrimp and rob and sell elderly members of your family for just one more of those mouthfuls that fell in love with your tongue and turned your soul to whipped cream.
There was a discreet drain in the pavement in case people standing in front of the window drooled too much.
Wienrich and Boettcher were, naturally, foreigners, and according to Ankh-Morpork's Guild of Confectioners they did not understand the peculiarities of the city's tastebuds.
Ankh-Morpork people, said the Guild, were hearty, no-nonsense folk who did not want chocolate that was stuffed with cocoa liquor, and were certainly not like effete la-di-dah foreigners who wanted cream in everything. In fact they actually preferred chocolate made mostly from milk, sugar, suet, hooves, lips, miscellaneous squeezings, rat droppings, plaster, flies, tallow, bits of tree, hair, lint, spiders and powdered cocoa husks. This meant that according to the food standards of the great chocolate centres in Borogravia and Quirm, Ankh-Morpork chocolate was formally classed as “cheese” and only escaped, through being the wrong colour, being defined as “tile grout”.
Susan allowed herself one of their cheaper boxes per month. And she could easily stop at the first layer if she wanted to.
“You needn't come in,” she said, as she opened the shop door. Rigid customers lined the counter.
“Please call me Myria.”
“I don't think I—”
“Please?” said Lady LeJean meekly. “A name is im
portant.”
Suddenly, in spite of everything, Susan felt a brief pang of sympathy for the creature.
“Oh, very well. Myria, you needn't come in.”
“I can stand it.”
“But I thought chocolate was a raging temptation?” said Susan, being firm with herself.
“It is.”
They stared up at the shelves behind the counter.
“Myria… Myria,” said Susan, speaking only some of her thoughts aloud. “From the Ephebian word myrios, meaning ‘innumerable’. And LeJean as a crude pun of ‘legion’… Oh dear.”
“We thought a name should say what a thing is,” said her ladyship. “And there is safety in numbers. I am sorry.”
“Well, these are their basic assortments,” said Susan, dismissing the shop display with a wave of her hand. “Let's try the back room—Are you all right?”
“I am fine, I am fine…” murmured Lady LeJean, swaying.
“You're not going to pig out on me, are you?”
“We… I… know about will-power. The body craves the chocolate but the mind does not. At least, so I tell myself. And it must be true! The mind can overrule the body! Otherwise, what is it for?”
“I've often wondered,” said Susan, pushing open another door. “Ah. The magician's cave…”
“Magic? They use magic here?”
“Nearly right.”
Lady LeJean leaned on the door frame for support when she saw the tables.
“Oh,” she said. “Uh… I can detect… sugar, milk, butter, cream, vanilla, hazelnuts, almonds, walnuts, raisins, orange peel, various liqueurs, citrus pectin, strawberries, raspberries, essence of violets, cherries, pineapples, pistachios, oranges, limes, lemons, coffee, cocoa—”
“Nothing there to be frightened of, right?” said Susan, surveying the workshop for useful weaponry. “Cocoa is just a rather bitter bean, after all.”
“Yes, but…” Lady LeJean clenched her fists, shut her eyes and bared her teeth, “put them all together and they make—”
“Steady, steady…”
“The will can overrule the emotions, the will can overrule the instincts—” the Auditor chanted.
“Good, good, now just work your way up to the bit where it says chocolate, okay?”
“That's the hard one!”
In fact, it seemed to Susan, as she walked past the vats and counters, that chocolate lost some of its attraction when you saw it like this. It was the difference between seeing the little heaps of pigment and seeing the whole picture. She selected a syringe that seemed designed to do something intensely personal to female elephants, athough she decided that here it was probably used for doing the wiggly bits of decoration.
And over here was a small vat of cocoa liquor.
She stared around at the trays and trays of fondant cremes, marzipans and caramels. Oh, and here was an entire table of Soul Cake eggs. But these weren't the hollow-shelled, cardboard-tasting presents for children, oh, no—these were the confectionery equivalent of fine, intricate jewellery.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw movement. One of the statue-like workers bent over her tray of Praline Dreams was shifting almost imperceptibly.
Time was flowing into the room. Pale blue light glinted in the air.
She turned and saw a vaguely human figure hovering beside her. It was featureless and as transparent as mist, but in her head it said, I'm stronger. You are my anchor, my link to this world. Can you guess how hard it is to find it again in so many? Get me to the clock…
Susan turned and thrust the icing syringe into the arms of the groaning Myria. “Grab that. And make some kind of… of sling or something. I want you to be carrying as many of those chocolate eggs as possible. And the cremes. And the liqueurs. Understand? You can do it!”
Oh, gods, there was no alternative. The poor thing needed some kind of morale boost. “Please, Myria? And that's a stupid name! You're not many, you're one. Okay? Just be… yourself. Unity… that'd be a good name.”
The new Unity raised a mascara-streaked face. “Yes, it is, it's a good name…”
Susan snatched as much merchandise as she could carry, aware of some rustling behind her, and turned to find Unity standing to attention holding, by the look of it, a benchworth of assorted confectionery in…
…a sort of big cerise sack.
“Oh. Good. Intelligent use of the materials to hand,” said Susan weakly. Then the teacher within her cut in and added, “I hope you brought enough for everybody.”
“You were the first,” said Lu-Tze. “You basically created the whole business. Innovative, you were.”
“That was then,” said Ronnie Soak. “It's all changed now.”
“Not like it used to be,” agreed Lu-Tze.
“Take Death,” said Ronnie Soak. “Impressive, I'll grant you, and who doesn't look good in black? But, after all, Death… What's death?”
“Just a big sleep,” said Lu-Tze.
“Just a big sleep,” said Ronnie Soak. “As for the others… War? If war's so bad, why do people keep doing it?”
“Practically a hobby,” said Lu-Tze. He began to roll himself a cigarette.
“Practically a hobby,” said Ronnie Soak. “As for Famine and Pestilence, well…”
“Enough said,” said Lu-Tze sympathetically.
“Exactly. I mean, Famine's a fearful thing, obviously—”
“—in an agricultural community, but you've got to move with the times,” said Lu-Tze, putting the roll-up in his mouth.
“That's it,” said Ronnie. “You've got to move with the times. I mean, does your average city person fear famine?”
“No, he thinks food grows in shops,” said Lu-Tze. He was beginning to enjoy this. He had eight hundred years' worth of experience in steering the thoughts of his superiors, and most of them had been intelligent. He decided to strike out a little.
“Fire, now: city folk really fear fire,” he said. “That's new. Your primitive villager, he reckoned fire was a good thing, didn't he? Kept the wolves away. If it burned down his hut, well, logs and turf are cheap enough. But now he lives in a street of crowded wooden houses and everyone's cooking in their rooms, well—”
Ronnie glared.
“Fire? Fire? Just a demi-god! Some little tea-leaf pinches the flame from the gods and suddenly he's immortal? You call that training and experience?” A spark leapt from Ronnie's fingers and ignited the end of Lu-Tze's cigarette. “And as for gods—”
“Johnny-come-latelys, the pack of 'em,” said Lu-Tze quickly.
“Right! People started worshipping them because they were afraid of me,” said Ronnie. “Did you know that?”
“No, really?” said Lu-Tze innocently.
But now Ronnie sagged. “That was then, of course,” he said. “It's different now. I'm not what I used to be.”
“No, no, obviously not, no,” said Lu-Tze soothingly. “But it's all a matter of how you look at it, am I correct? Now, supposing a man—that is to say a—”
“Anthropomorphic personification,” said Ronnie Soak. “But I've always preferred the term ‘avatar’.”
Lu-Tze's brow wrinkled. “You fly around a lot?” he said.
“That would be aviator.”
“Sorry. Well, supposing an avatar, thank you, who was perhaps a bit ahead of his time thousands of years ago, well, supposing he took a good look around now, he might just find the world is ready for him again.”
Lu-Tze waited. “My abbot, now, he reckons you are the bees' knees,” he said, for a little reinforcement.
“Does he?” said Ronnie Soak suspiciously.
“Bee's knees, cat's pyjamas and dog's… elbows,” Lu-Tze finished. “He's written scrolls and scrolls about you. Says you are hugely important in understanding how the universe works.”
“Yeah, but… he's just one man,” said Ronnie Soak, with all the sullen reluctance of someone cuddling a lifetime's huge snit like a favourite soft toy.
“Technically, yes,” sai
d Lu-Tze. “But he's an abbot. And brainy? He thinks such big thoughts he needs a second lifetime just to finish them off! Let a lot of peasants fear famine, I say, but someone like you should aim for quality. And you look at the cities, now. Back in the old days there were just heaps of mud bricks with names like Ur and Uh and Ugg. These days there's millions of people living in cities. Very, very complicated cities. Just you think about what they really, really fear. And fear… well, fear is belief. Hmm?”
There was another long pause.
“Well, all right, but…” Ronnie began.
“Of course, they won't be living in 'em very long, because by the time the grey people have finished taking them to pieces to see how they work there won't be any belief left.”
“My customers do depend on me…” Ronnie Soak mumbled.
“What customers? That's Soak speaking,” said Lu-Tze. “That's not the voice of Kaos.”
“Hah!” said Kaos bitterly. “You haven't told me yet how you worked that one out.”
Because I've got more than three brain cells and you're vain and you painted your actual name back to front on your cart whether you knew it or not, and a dark window is a mirror, and K and S are still recognizable in a reflection even when they're back to front, thought Lu-Tze. But that wasn't a good way forward.
“It was just obvious,” he said. “You sort of shine through. It's like putting a sheet over an elephant. You might not be able to see it, but you're sure the elephants still there.”
Kaos looked wretched.
“I don't know,” he said, “it's been a long time—”
“Oh? And I thought you said you were Number One?” said Lu-Tze, deciding on a new approach. “Sorry! Still, I suppose it's not your fault you've lost a few skills over the centuries, what with one thing and—”
“Lost skills?” snapped Kaos, waving a finger under the sweeper's nose. “I could certainly take you to the cleaners, you little maggot!”
“What with? A dangerous yoghurt?” said Lu-Tze, climbing off the cart.
Kaos leapt down after him. “Where do you get off, talking to me like that?” he demanded.
Lu-Tze glanced up. “Corner of Merchant and Broad Way,” he said. “So what?”
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