The Truth Read online

  Things glittered in the gloom. The dresses also smelled strongly of mothballs.

  “Dat’s interestin’,” said Rocky, behind her.

  “Oh, it’s just to keep the moths away,” said Sacharissa.

  “I’m lookin’ at all the footprints,” said the troll. “Der were in the hall, too.”

  She tore her gaze away from the rows of dresses, and looked down. The dust was certainly disturbed.

  “Er…cleaning lady?” she said. “Someone must come in to keep an eye on things?”

  “What she do, kick der dust to death?”

  “I suppose there must be…caretakers and things?” said Sacharissa uncertainly. A blue dress was saying: Wear me, I’m just your type. See me shimmer.

  Rocky prodded a box of mothballs that had spilled out across a dressing table and rolled into the dust.

  “Looks like dem moths are really keen on dese things,” he said.

  “You don’t think a dress like this would be a bit…forward, do you?” said Sacharissa, holding the dress against herself.

  Rocky looked worried. He hadn’t been hired for his dress sense, and certainly not for his grasp of colloquial Middle Class.

  “You’re quite a lot forward already,” he opined.

  “I meant, make me look like a fast woman!”

  “Ah, right,” said Rocky, getting there. “No. Def’nitly not.”

  “Really?”

  “Sure. No one could run much in a dress like dat.”

  Sacharissa gave up. “I suppose Mrs. Hotbed could let it out a bit,” she said, reflectively. It was tempting to stay, because some of the racks were quite full, but she felt like a trespasser here and part of her was certain that a woman with hundreds of dresses was more likely to miss one than a woman with a dozen or so. In any case, the empty darkness was getting on her nerves. It was full of other people’s ghosts. “Let’s get back.”

  When they were halfway across the hall, someone started to sing. The words were incoherent, and the tune was being modulated by alcohol, but it was singing of a sort and it was under their feet.

  Rocky shrugged when Sacharissa glanced at him.

  “Maybe all dem moths is having a ball?” he said.

  “There must be a caretaker, mustn’t there? Maybe we’d better just, you know, mention we’ve been here?” Sacharissa agonized. “It hardly seems polite, just taking things and running…”

  She headed for a green door tucked away beside the staircase, and pushed it open. The singing went louder for a moment, but stopped as soon as she said “Excuse me?” into the darkness.

  After a few moments’ silence a voice said: “Hello! How are you? I’m fine!”

  “It’s only, er, me? William said it was all right?” She presented the statement like a question, in the voice of someone who was apologizing to a burglar for discovering him.

  “Mr. Mothball Nose? Whoops!” said the voice in the shadows at the bottom of the stairs.

  “Er…are you all right?”

  “Can’t get…it’s a…hahaha…it’s all chains…hahaha…”

  “Are you…ill?”

  “No, I’m fine, not ill at all, jus’ had a few too many…”

  “Few too many what?” said Sacharissa, speaking from a sheltered upbringing.

  “…wazza…things you put drink in…barrels?”

  “You’re drunk?”

  “Tha’s right! Tha’s the word! Drunk as a…thing…smelly thing…ahahaha…”

  There was a tinkle of glass.

  The lantern’s weak glow showed what looked like a wine cellar, but a man was slumped on a bench against one wall and a chain ran from his ankle to a ring set in the floor.

  “Are you…a prisoner?” said Sacharissa.

  “Ahaha…”

  “How long have you been down here?” She crept down.

  “Years…”

  “Years?”

  “Got lots of years…” The man picked up a bottle and peered at it. “Now…Year of the Amending Camel…that was bloodigoodyear…and this one…Year of the Translated Rat…another bloodigoodyear…bloodigoodyears, the lot of them. Could do with a biscuit, though.”

  Sacharissa’s knowledge of vintages extended just as far as knowing that Château Maison was a very popular wine. But people didn’t have to be chained up to drink wine, even the stuff from Ephebe that stuck the glass to the table.

  She moved a little closer, and the light fell on the man’s face. It was locked in the grin of the seriously drunk, but it was very recognizable. She saw it every day, on coins.

  “Er…Rocky,” she said. “Er…can you come down here a minute?”

  The door burst open and the troll came down the steps at speed. Unfortunately, it was because he was rolling.

  Mr. Tulip appeared at the top of the stairs, massaging his fist.

  “It’s Mr. Sneezy!” said Charlie, raising a bottle. “The gang’s all here! Whoopee!”

  Rocky got up, weaving slightly. Mr. Tulip strolled down the steps, ripping out the doorpost as he passed. The troll raised his fists in the classic boxer’s pose, but Mr. Tulip didn’t bother with niceties of that kind and hit him hard with the length of ancient wood. Rocky went over like a tree.

  Only then did the huge man with the revolving eyes try to focus them on Sacharissa.

  “Who the —ing hell are you?”

  “Don’t you dare swear at me!” she said. “How dare you swear in the presence of a lady!”

  This seemed to nonplus him.

  “I don’t —ing swear!”

  “Here, I’ve seen you before, you’re that—I knew you weren’t a proper virgin!” said Sacharissa triumphantly.

  There was the click of a crossbow. Some tiny sounds carry well and have considerable stopping power.

  “There are some thoughts too dreadful to think,” said the skinny man looking at her from the top of the steps and down the length of a pistol bow. “What are you doing here, lady?”

  “And you were Brother Pin! You haven’t got any right here! I’ve got a key!” Some areas of Sacharissa’s mind that dealt with things like death and terror were signaling to be heard at this point, but, being part of Sacharissa, they were trying to do it in a ladylike way, and so she ignored them.

  “A key?” said Brother Pin, advancing down the stairs. The bow stayed pointing at her. Even in his current state of mind, Mr. Pin knew how to aim. “Who’d give you a key?”

  “Don’t you come near me! Don’t you dare come near me! If you come near me I’ll—I’ll write it down!”

  “Yeah? Well, one thing I know is, words don’t hurt,” said Mr. Pin. “I’ve heard lots of—”

  He stopped, and grimaced, and for a moment it looked as if he’d fall to his knees. He righted himself and focused on her again.

  “You are coming with us,” he said. “An’ don’t say you’re going to scream, because we’re all alone here and I’ve…heard…lots…of…screams…”

  Once again he seemed to run down, and again he recovered. Sacharissa stared in horror at the weaving crossbow. Those parts of her advocating silence as a survival aid had finally made themselves heard.

  “What about these two?” said Mr. Tulip. “We’re scragging ’em now?”

  “Chain them up and leave them.”

  “But we always—”

  “Leave them!”

  “You sure you feel all right?” said Mr. Tulip.

  “No! I don’t! Just leave them, okay? We haven’t got time!”

  “We’ve got lots of—”

  “I haven’t!” Mr. Pin strode up to Sacharissa. “Who gave you that key?”

  “I’m not going to—”

  “Do you want Mr. Tulip here to say goodbye to our drunken friends?” In his buzzing head, and with his shaky grasp of how things were supposed to work in a moral universe, Mr. Pin reckoned that this was all right. After all, their shadows would follow Mr. Tulip, not him…

  “This house belongs to Lord de Worde and his son gave me the ke
y!” said Sacharissa triumphantly. “There! He was the one you met at the newspaper! Now you know what you’ve got yourself into, eh?”

  Mr. Pin stared at her.

  Then he said, “I’m going to find out. Don’t run. Really don’t scream. Walk normally and everything—” He paused. “I was going to say it will be all right,” he said. “But that would be silly, wouldn’t it…”

  It wasn’t fast, going through the streets with the crew. To them the world was a permanent theater, art gallery, music hall, restaurant, and spittoon, and in any case no member of the crew would dream of going anywhere in a straight line.

  The poodle Trixiebell accompanied them, keeping as close to the center of the group as possible. Of Deep Bone there was no sign. William had offered to carry Wuffles, because in a way he felt he owned him. A hundred dollars worth of him, at least. It was a hundred dollars he hadn’t got but, well, surely tomorrow’s edition would pay for that. And anyone after the dog now surely wouldn’t try anything out here on the street, in broad daylight, especially since it was barely narrow daylight now. Clouds filled the sky like old eiderdowns, the fog that was descending was meeting the river mist coming up, and the light was draining out of everything.

  He tried to think of the headline. He couldn’t quite get a grip on it yet. There was too much to say, and he wasn’t good at getting the huge complexities of the world into fewer than half a dozen words. Sacharissa was better at it, because she treated words as lumps of letters that could be hammered together any old how. Her best one had been on some tedious inter-Guild squabble and, in a single column, read:

  PROBE

  INTO

  SHOCK

  GUILD

  RUMPUS

  William just wasn’t used to the idea of evaluating words purely in terms of their length, whereas she’d picked up the habit in two days. He’d already had to stop her calling Lord Vetinari CITY BOSS. It was technically correct that if you spent some time with a thesaurus you could arrive at that description, and it did fit in a single column, but the sight of the words had made William feel extremely exposed.

  It was self-absorption like this that allowed him to walk into the printing shed, with the crew tagging along, and not notice anything wrong until he saw the expression on the faces of the dwarfs.

  “Ah, our writer man,” said Mr. Pin, stepping forward. “Shut the door, Mr. Tulip.”

  Mr. Pin slammed the door with one hand. The other was clamped over Sacharissa’s mouth. She rolled her eyes at William.

  “And you’ve brought me the little doggie,” said Mr. Pin. Wuffles started to growl as he approached. William backed away.

  “The Watch will be here soon,” said William. Wuffles still growled, on a rising note.

  “Doesn’t worry me now,” said Mr. Pin. “Not with what I know. Not with who I know. Where’s the damn vampire?”

  “I don’t know! He’s not always with us!” snapped William.

  “Really? In that case let me retort!” said Mr. Pin, his pistol bow inches from William’s face. “If it doesn’t arrive within two minutes, I will—”

  Wuffles leapt out of William’s arms. His bark was the frantic whurwhur of a small dog mad with fury. Pin reared back, one arm raised to protect his face. The bow fired. The arrow hit one of the lamps over the press. The lamp exploded.

  A cloud of burning oil rained down. It splattered across type metal and old rocking horses and dwarfs.

  Mr. Tulip let go of Sacharissa to help his colleague, and in the slow dance of rushing events Sacharissa spun around and planted her knee hard and firmly in the place that made a parsnip a very funny thing indeed.

  William grabbed her on the way past and rushed her out into the freezing air. When he fought his way back in through the stampeding crew, who had the same instinctive reaction to fire as they did to soap and water, it was into a room full of burning debris. Dwarfs were fighting fires in the rubbish. Dwarfs were fighting fires in their beards. Several were advancing on Mr. Tulip, who was on his hands and knees and throwing up. And Mr. Pin was spinning around, flailing at an enraged Wuffles, who was managing to growl while sinking his teeth into Pin’s arm all the way to the bone.

  William cupped his hands.

  “Get out right now!” he yelled. “The tins!”

  One or two dwarfs heard him, and looked around at the shelves of old paint tins just as the first one blew its lid off.

  The tins were ancient, no more now than rust held together with chemical sludge. Several others were starting to burn.

  Mr. Pin danced across the floor, trying to shake the enraged dog from his ankle.

  “Get the damn thing off’f me!” he yelled.

  “Forget the —ing dog, my —ing suit’s on fire!” shouted Mr. Tulip, flailing at his own sleeve.

  A tin of what had once been enamel paint took off from the blazing mess, spinning with a wzipwzip noise, and exploded on the press.

  William grabbed Goodmountain’s shoulder.

  “I said come on!”

  “My press! It’s on fire!”

  “Better it than us! Come on!”

  It was said of the dwarfs that they cared more about things like iron and gold than they did about people, because there was only a limited supply of iron and gold in the world whereas there seemed to be more and more people everywhere you looked. It was said mostly by people like Mr. Windling.

  But they did care fiercely about things. Without things, people were just bright animals.

  The printers clustered around the doorway, axes at the ready. Choking brown smoke billowed out. Flames licked out among the roof eaves. Several sections of tin roof itself buckled and collapsed.

  As they did so a smoldering ball rocketed through the door and three dwarfs who took a swipe only just missed hitting one another.

  It was Wuffles. Patches of fur were still on fire, but his eyes gleamed and he was still whining and growling.

  He let William pick him up. He had a triumphant air about him, and turned to watch the burning doorway with his ears cocked.

  “That must be it, then,” said Sacharissa.

  “They might have got out of the back door,” said Goodmountain. “Boddony, some of you go around and check, will you?”

  “Plucky dog, this,” said William.

  “‘Brave’ would be better,” said Sacharissa distantly. “It’s only five letters. It would look better in a single-column sidebar. No…‘Plucky’ would work, because then we’d get:

  PLUCKY

  DOG PUTS

  BITE ON

  VILLAINS

  …although that first line is a bit shy.”

  “I wish I could think in headlines,” said William, shivering.

  It was cool and damp down here in the cellar.

  Mr. Pin dragged himself to a corner and slapped at the burns on his suit.

  “We’re —ing trapped,” moaned Tulip.

  “Yeah? This is stone,” said Pin. “Stone floor, stone walls, stone ceiling! Stone doesn’t burn, okay? We just stay nice and calm down here and wait it out.”

  Mr. Tulip listened to the sound of the fire above them. Red and yellow light danced on the floor under the cellar hatchway.

  “I don’t —ing like it,” he said.

  “We’ve seen worse.”

  “I don’t —ing like it!”

  “Just keep cool. We’re going to get out of this. I wasn’t born to fry!”

  The flames roared around the press. A few late paint tins pinwheeled through the heat, spraying burning droplets.

  The fire was yellow-white at the heart, and now it crackled around the metal forms that held the type.

  Silver beads appeared around the leaden, inky slugs. Letters shifted, settled, ran together. For a moment the words themselves floated on the melting metal, innocent words like “the” and “Truth” and “shall make ye fere,” and then they were lost.

  From the red-hot press, and the wooden boxes, and amongst the racks and racks of type, and even out
of the piles of carefully stockpiled metal, thin streams began to flow. They met and merged and spread. Soon the floor was a moving, rippling mirror in which the orange and yellow flames danced upside down.

  On Otto’s workbench the salamanders detected the heat. They liked heat. Their ancestors had evolved in volcanoes. They woke up and began to purr.

  Mr. Tulip, walking up and down the cellar like a trapped animal, picked up one of the cages and glared at the creatures.

  “What’re these —ing things?” he said, and dropped it back on the bench. Then he noticed the dark jar next to it. “And why’s it —ing got ‘Handle viz Care!!!’ on this one?”

  The eels were already edgy. They could detect heat too, and they were creatures of deep caves and buried, icy streams.

  There was a flash of dark.

  Most of it went straight through the brain of Mr. Tulip. But such as was left of that ragged organ had survived every attempt at scrambling, and in any case Mr. Tulip didn’t use it much, because it hurt such a lot.

  But there was a brief remembrance of snow, and fir woods, and burning buildings, and the church. They’d sheltered there. He’d been small. He remembered big shining paintings, more colors than he’d ever seen before…

  He blinked, and dropped the jar.

  It shattered on the floor. There was another burst of dark from the eels. They wriggled desperately out of the wreckage and slithered along the edge of the wall, squeezing into the cracks between the stones.

  Mr. Tulip turned at a sound behind him. His colleague had collapsed to his knees and was clutching at his head.

  “You all right?”

  “They’re right behind me!” Pin whispered.

  “Nah, just you and me down here, old friend.”

  Mr. Tulip patted Pin on the shoulder. The veins on his forehead stood out with the effort of thinking of something to do next. The memory had gone. Young Tulip had learned how to edit memories. What Mr. Pin needed, he decided, was to remember the good times.