The Truth Read online

  “Scraplit,” it said. “Thatch and trouser, a blewit the grawney man. I told ’im. I told ’im. Millennium hand and shrimp. Bugrit.”

  After a bit of a pause it reached into its pocket and produced a sausage, which broke into two pieces. One bit disappeared under the hat, and the other got tossed to the smaller figure who was doing most of the talking or, at least, most of the coherent talking.

  “Looks like a dirty deed to me,” said the smaller figure, which had four legs.

  The sausage was consumed in silence. Then the pair set off into the night again.

  In the same way that a pigeon can’t walk without bobbing its head, the taller figure appeared unable to walk without a sort of low-key, random mumbling:

  “I told ’em, I told ’em. Millennium hand and shrimp. I said, I said, I said. Oh, no. But they only run out, I told ’em. Sod ’em. Doorsteps. I said, I said, I said. Teeth. Wassa name of age, I said I told ’em, not my fault, matterofact, matterofact, stand to reason…”

  The rumor did come to its ears later on, but by then it was part of it.

  As for Mr. Pin and Mr. Tulip, all that need be known about them at this point is that they are the kind of people who call you “friend.” People like that aren’t friendly.

  William opened his eyes. I’ve gone blind, he thought.

  Then he moved the blanket.

  And then the pain hit him.

  It was a sharp and insistent sort of pain, centered right over the eyes. He reached up gingerly. There seemed to be some bruising and what felt like a dent in the flesh, if not the bone.

  He sat up. He was in a sloping-ceilinged room. A bit of grubby snow crusted the bottom of a small window. Apart from the bed, which was just a mattress and blanket, the room was unfurnished.

  A thump shook the building. Dust drifted down from the ceiling.

  He got up, clutching at his forehead, and staggered to the door. It opened into a much larger room or, more accurately, a workshop.

  Another thump rattled his teeth.

  William tried to focus.

  The room was full of dwarfs, toiling over a couple of long benches. But at the far end several of them were clustered around something like a complex piece of weaving machinery.

  It went thump again.

  William winced.

  “What’s happening?” he said.

  The nearest dwarf looked up at him and nudged a colleague urgently. The nudge passed itself along the rows, and the room was suddenly filled wall to wall with a cautious silence. A dozen solemn dwarf faces looked hard to William.

  No one can look harder than a dwarf. Perhaps it’s because there is only quite a small amount of face between the statutory round iron helmet and the beard. Dwarf expressions are more concentrated.

  “Um,” he said. “Hello?”

  One of the dwarfs in front of the big machine was the first to unfreeze.

  “Back to work, lads,” he said, and came and looked William sternly in the groin.

  “You all right, Your Lordship?” he said.

  William rubbed his forehead.

  “Um…what happened?” he said. “I, uh, remember seeing a cart, and then something hit…”

  “It ran away from us,” said the dwarf. “Load slipped, too. Sorry about that.”

  “What happened to Mr. Dibbler?”

  The dwarf put his head on one side.

  “Was he the skinny man with the sausages?” he said.

  “That’s right. Was he hurt?”

  “I don’t think so,” said the dwarf carefully. “He sold young Thunderaxe a sausage in a bun, I do know that.”

  William thought about this. Ankh-Morpork had many traps for the unwary newcomer.

  “Well, then is Mr. Thunderaxe all right?” he said.

  “Probably. He shouted under the door just now that he was feeling a lot better but would stay where he was for the time being,” said the dwarf. He reached under a bench and solemnly handed William a rectangle wrapped in grubby paper.

  “Yours, I think.”

  William unwrapped his wooden block. It was split right across where a wheel of the cart had run over it, and the writing had been smudged. He sighed.

  “’Scuse me,” said the dwarf, “but what was it meant to be?”

  “It’s a block prepared for a woodcut,” said William. He wondered how he could possibly explain the idea to a dwarf from outside the city. “You know? Engraving? A…a sort of very nearly magical way of getting lots of copies of writing? I’m afraid I shall have to go and make another one now.”

  The dwarf gave him an odd look, and then took the block from him and turned it over and over in his hands.

  “You see,” said William, “the engraver cuts away bits of—”

  “Have you still got the original?” said the dwarf.

  “Pardon?”

  “The original,” said the dwarf patiently.

  “Oh, yes.” William reached inside his jacket and produced it.

  “Can I borrow it for a moment?”

  “Well, all right, but I shall need it again to—”

  The dwarf scanned the letter a while, and then turned and hit the nearest dwarf a resounding boing on the helmet.

  “Ten point across three,” he said. The struck dwarf nodded, and then its right hand moved quickly across the rack of little boxes, selecting things.

  “I ought to be getting back so I can—” William began.

  “This won’t take long,” said the head dwarf. “Just you step along this way, will you? This might be of interest to a man of letters such as yourself.”

  William followed him along the avenue of busy dwarfs to the machine, which had been thumping away steadily.

  “Oh. It’s an engraving press,” said William vaguely.

  “This one’s a bit different,” said the dwarf. “We’ve…modified it.” He took a large sheet of paper off a pile by the press and handed it to William, who read:

  “What do you think?” said the dwarf shyly.

  “Are you Gunilla Goodmountain?”

  “Yes. What do you think?”

  “We—ell…you’ve got the letters nice and regular, I must say,” said William. “But I can’t see what’s so new about it. And you’ve spelled hitherto’ wrong. There should be another H after the first T. You’ll have to cut it all out again unless you want people to laugh at you.”

  “Really?” said Goodmountain. He nudged one of his colleagues.

  “Just give me a ninety-six-point uppercase H, will you, Caslong? Thank you.” Goodmountain bent over the press, picked up a spanner, and busied himself somewhere in the mechanical gloom.

  “You must have a really steady hand to get the letters so neat,” said William. He felt a bit sorry that he’d pointed out the mistake. Probably no one would have noticed in any case. Ankh-Morpork people considered that spelling was a sort of optional extra. They believed in it in the same way they believed in punctuation; it didn’t matter where you put it, so long as it was there.

  The dwarf finished whatever arcane activity he had been engaged in, dabbed with an inked pad at something inside the press, and got down.

  “I’m sure it won’t”—thump—“matter about the spelling,” said William.

  Goodmountain opened the press again and wordlessly handed William a damp sheet of paper.

  William read it.

  The extra H was in place.

  “How—?” he began.

  “This is a very nearly magical way of getting lots of copies quickly,” said Goodmountain. Another dwarf appeared at his elbow, holding a big metal rectangle. It was full of little metal letters, back to front. Goodmountain took it and gave William a big grin.

  “Want to make any changes before we go to press?” he said. “Just say the word. A couple of dozen prints be enough?”

  “Oh dear,” said William. “This is printing, isn’t it…”

  The Bucket was a tavern, of sorts. There was no passing trade. The street was, if not a dead end, t
hen seriously wounded by the area’s change in fortunes. Few businesses fronted onto it. It consisted mainly of the back ends of yards and warehouses. No one even remembered why it was called Gleam Street. There was nothing very sparkling about it.

  Besides, calling a tavern the Bucket was not a decision destined to feature in Great Marketing Decisions of History. Its owner was Mr. Cheese, who was thin, dry, and only smiled when he heard news of some serious murder. Traditionally he had sold short measure but, to make up for it, had shortchanged as well. However, the pub had been taken over by the City Watch as the unofficial policemen’s pub, because policemen like to drink in places where no one else goes and they don’t have to be reminded that they are policemen.

  This had been a benefit in some ways. Not even licensed thieves tried to rob the Bucket now. Policemen didn’t like their drinking disturbed. On the other hand, Mr. Cheese had never found a bigger bunch of petty criminals than those wearing the Watch uniform. He saw more dud dollars and strange pieces of foreign currency cross his bar in the first month than he’d found in ten years in the business. It made you depressed, it really did. But some of the murder descriptions were quite funny.

  He made part of his living by renting out the rat’s nest of old sheds and cellars that backed onto the pub. They tended to be occupied very temporarily by the kind of enthusiastic manufacturer who believed that what the world really, really needed today was an inflatable dartboard.

  But there was a crowd outside the Bucket now, reading one of the slightly misprinted posters that Goodmountain had nailed up on the door. He followed William out and nailed up the corrected version.

  “Sorry about your head,” he said. “Looks like we made a bit of an impression on you. Have this one on the house.”

  William skulked home, keeping in the shadows in case he met Mr. Cripslock. But he folded his printed sheets into their envelopes and took them down to Hub Gate and gave them to the messengers, reflecting as he did so that he was doing this several days before he had expected to.

  The messengers gave him some very odd looks.

  He went back to his lodgings and had a look at himself in the mirror over the washbasin.

  A large R, printed in bruise colors, occupied a lot of his forehead.

  He stuck a bandage over it.

  And he still had eighteen more copies. As an afterthought, and feeling rather daring, he looked through his notes for the addresses of eighteen prominent citizens who could probably afford it, wrote a short covering letter to each one offering this service for…he thought for a while, and then carefully wrote “$5”…and folded the free sheets into eighteen envelopes. Of course, he could always have asked Mr. Cripslock to do more copies as well, but it had never seemed right. After the old boy had spent all day chipping out the words, asking him to sully his craftsmanship by making dozens of duplicates seemed disrespectful. But you didn’t have to respect lumps of metal and machines. Machines weren’t alive.

  That, really, was where the trouble was going to start. And there was going to be trouble. The dwarfs had seemed quite unconcerned when he’d told them how much of it there was going to be.

  The coach arrived at a large house in the city. A door was opened. A door was shut. Another door was knocked on. It was opened. It shut. The carriage pulled away.

  One ground-floor room was heavily curtained, and only the barest gleam of light filtered out. Only the faintest of noises filtered out, too, but any listener would have heard a murmur of conversation die down. Then a chair was knocked over and several people shouted, all at once.

  “That is him!”

  “It’s a trick…isn’t it?”

  “I’ll be damned!”

  “If it is him, so are we all!”

  The hubbub died away. And then, very calmly, someone began to talk.

  “Good. Good. Take him away, gentlemen. Make him comfortable in the cellar.”

  There were footsteps. A door opened and closed.

  A more querulous voice said: “We could simply replace—”

  “No, we could not. I understand that our guest is, fortunately, a man of rather low intelligence.” There was this about the first speaker’s voice. It spoke as if disagreeing was not simply unthinkable, but impossible. It was used to being in the company of listeners.

  “But he looks the spit and image—”

  “Yes. Astonishing, isn’t it. Let us not overcomplicate matters, though. We are a bodyguard of lies, gentlemen. We are all that stands between the city and oblivion, so let us make this one chance work. Vetinari may be quite willing to see humans become a minority in their greatest city, but frankly his death by assassination would be…unfortunate. It would cause turmoil, and turmoil is hard to steer. And we all know that there are people who take too much of an interest. No. There is a third way. A gentle slide from one condition to another.”

  “And what will happen to our new friend?”

  “Oh, our employees are known to be men of resource, gentlemen. I’m sure they know how to deal with a man whose face no longer fits, eh?”

  There was laughter.

  Things were a little fraught in Unseen University just at the moment. The wizards tended to scuttle from building to building, glancing at the sky.

  The problem, of course, was the frogs. Not rains of frogs, which were uncommon now in Ankh-Morpork, but specifically foreign treefrogs from the humid jungles of Klatch. They were small, brightly colored, and happy little creatures who secreted some of the nastiest toxins in the world, which is why the job of looking after the large vivarium where they happily passed their days was given to first-year students, on the basis that if they got things wrong there wouldn’t be too much education wasted.

  Very occasionally, a frog was removed from the vivarium and put into a rather smaller jar where it briefly became a very happy frog indeed, and then went to sleep and woke up in that great big jungle in the sky.

  And thus the university got the active ingredient that it made up into pills and fed to the Bursar, to keep him sane. At least, apparently sane, because nothing was that simple at good old UU. In fact he was incurably insane and hallucinated more or less continually, but by a remarkable stroke of lateral thinking his fellow wizards had reasoned, in that case, that the whole business could be sorted out if only they could find a formula that caused him to hallucinate that he was completely sane.*

  This had worked well. There had been a few false starts. For several hours, at one point, he had hallucinated that he was a bookcase. But now he was permanently hallucinating that he was a bursar, and that almost made up for the small side effect which also led him to hallucinate that he could fly.

  Of course, many people in the universe have also had the misplaced belief that they can safely ignore gravity, mostly after taking some local equivalent of dried frog pills, and that has led to much extra work for elementary physics and caused brief traffic jams in the street below. When a wizard hallucinates that he can fly, things are different.

  “Bursaar! You come down here right this minute!” Archchancellor Mustrum Ridcully barked through his megaphone. “You know what I said about going higher than the walls!”

  The Bursar floated gently down towards the lawn.

  “You wanted me, Archchancellor?”

  Ridcully waved a piece of paper at him.

  “You were tellin’ me the other day we were spendin’ a ton of money with the engraver, weren’t you?” he barked.

  The Bursar got his mind up to something approaching the correct speed.

  “I was?” he said.

  “Breakin’ the budget, you said. Remember it distinctly.”

  A few cogs meshed in the jittery gearbox of the Bursar’s brain.

  “Oh, yes. Yes. Very true,” he said. Another gear clonked into place. “A fortune every year, I’m afraid. The Guild of Engravers—”

  “Chap here says”—the Archchancellor glanced at the sheet—“he can do us ten copies of a thousand words each for a dollar. Is that
cheap?”

  “I think, uh, there must be a miscarving there, Archchancellor,” said the Bursar, finally managing to get his voice into the smooth and soothing tones he found best in dealing with Ridcully. “That sum would not keep him in boxwood.”

  “Says here”—rustle—“down to ten-point size,” said Ridcully.

  The Bursar lost control for a moment.

  “Ridiculous!”

  “What?”

  “Sorry, Archchancellor. I mean, that can’t be right. Even if anyone could consistently carve that fine, the wood would crumble after a couple of impressions.”

  “Know about this sort of thing, do you?”

  “Well, my great-uncle was an engraver, Archchancellor. And the print bill is a major drain, as you know. I think I can say with some justification that I have been able to keep the Guild down to a very—”

  “Don’t they invite you to their annual blowout?”

  “Well, as a major customer of course the University is invited to their official dinner, and as the designated officer I naturally see it as part of my duties to—”

  “Fifteen courses, I heard.”

  “—and of course there is our policy of maintaining a friendly relationship with the other Gui—”

  “Not including the nuts and coffee.”

  The Bursar hesitated. The Archchancellor tended to combine wooden-headed stupidity with distressing insight.

  “The problem, Archchancellor,” he tried, “is that we have always been very much against using movable type printing for magic purposes because—”

  “Yes, yes, I know all about that,” said the Archchancellor. “But there’s all the other stuff, more of it every day…forms and charts and gods know what. You know I’ve always wanted a paperless office—”

  “Yes, Archchancellor, that’s why you hide it all in cupboards and throw it out of the window at night.”

  “Clean desk, clean mind,” said the Archchancellor. He thrust the leaflet into the Bursar’s hand.