The Truth

Chapter 12

'Was there?' said Mr Slant.
The chair that had first mentioned the Times had something on its mind.
'I'd feel happier if a few likely lads smashed up the press,' it said.
That would attract attention,' said a chair. The Times wants attention. The... writer craves to be noticed.'
'Oh, well, if you insist.'
'I would not dream of insisting. But the Times will collapse,' said the chair, and this was the chair that other chairs listened to. The young man is also an idealist. He has yet to find out that what's in the public interest is not what the public is interested in.'
'Say again?'
'I mean, gentlemen, that people probably think he's doing a good job, but what they are buying is the Inquirer. The news is more interesting. Did I ever tell you, Mr Slant, that a lie will go round the world before the truth has got its boots on?'
'A great many times, sir,' said Slant, with slightly less than his usual keen diplomacy. He realized this, and added, 'A valuable insight, I'm sure.'
'Good.' The most important chair sniffed. 'Keep an eye on our... workmen, Mr Slant.'
It was midnight in the Temple of Om in the Street of Small Gods, and one light burned in the vestry. It was a candle in a very heavy ornate candlestick and it was, in a way, sending a prayer to heaven.
The prayer, from the Gospel According to the Miscreants, was: don't let anyone find us pinching this stuff.
Mr Pin rummaged in a cupboard.
'I can't find anything in your size,' he said. 'It looks as though-- Oh, no... sheesh, incense is for burning.'
Tulip sneezed, pebble-dashing the opposite wall with sandal-wood.
'You could've --ing told me before,' he muttered. I've got some papers.'
'Have you been Chasing the Oven Cleaner again?' said Mr Pin accusingly. I want you focused, understand? Now, the only thing I can find in here that will fit you--'
The door creaked open and a small elderly priest wandered into the room. Mr Pin instinctively grasped the big candlestick.
'Hello? Are you here for the, mm, midnight service?' said the old man, blinking in the light.
This time it was Tulip who grabbed Mr Pin's arm as he raised the candlestick.
'Are you mad? What kind of person are you?' he growled.
'What? We can't let him--'
Mr Tulip snatched the silver stick out of his partner's hand.
'I mean, look at the --ing thing, will you?' he said, ignoring the bemused priest. 'That's a genuine Sellini! Five hundred years old! Look at the chasing work on that snuffer, will you? Sheesh, to you it's nothing more than five --ing pounds of silver, right?'
'Actually, mm, it's a Futtock,' said the old priest, who still hadn't yet got up to mental speed.
'What, the pupil?' said Mr Tulip, his eyes ceasing their spin out of surprise. He turned the candlestick over and looked at the base. 'Hey, that's right! There's the Sellini mark, but it's stamped with a little "f", too. First time I've ever seen his --ing early stuff. He was a better --ing silversmith, too, it's just a shame he had such a --ing stupid name. You know how much it'd sell for, reverend?'
'We thought about seventy dollars,' said the priest, looking hopeful. 'It was in a lot of furniture that an old lady left to the church. Really, we kept it for sentimental value
'Have you still got the box it came in?' said Mr Tulip, turning the candlestick over and over in his hands. 'He did wonderful --ing presentation boxes. Cherrywood.'
'Er... no, I don't think so...'
'--ing shame.'
'Er... is it still worth anything? I think we've got another one somewhere.'
To the right collector, maybe four thousand --ing dollars,' said Mr Tulip. 'But I reckon you could get twelve thousand if you've got a --ing pair. Futtock is very collectable at the moment.'
'Twelve thousand!' burbled the old man. His eyes gleamed with a deadly sin.
'Could be more,' Mr Tulip nodded. 'It's a --ing delightful piece. I feel quite privileged to have seen it.' He looked sourly at Mr Pin. 'And you were going to use it as a --ing blunt instrument.'
He put the candlestick reverentially on the vestry table and buffed it carefully with his sleeve. Then he spun round and brought his fist down hard on the head of the priest, who folded up with a sigh.
'And they were just keepin' it in a --ing cupboard,' he said. 'Honestly, I could --ing spiti'
'You want to take it with us?' said Mr Pin, stuffing clothes into a bag.
'Nah, all the fences round here'd probably just melt it down for the silver,' said Mr Tulip. 'I couldn't have something like that on my --ing conscience. Let's find this --ing dog and get right out of this dump, shall we? It makes me so --ing despondent.'
William turned over, woke up and stared wide-eyed at the ceiling.
Two minutes later Mrs Arcanum came downstairs and into the kitchen armed with a lamp, a poker and most importantly with her hair in curlers. The combination would be a winner against all but the most iron-stomached intruder.
'Mr de Worde! What are you doing? It's midnight!'
William glanced up and then went back to opening cupboards. 'Sorry I knocked the saucepans over, Mrs Arcanum. I'll pay for any damage. Now, where are the scales?'
'Scales?'
'Scales! Kitchen scales! Where are they?'
'Mr de Worde, I--'
'Where are the damn scales, Mrs Arcanum?' said William desperately.
'Mr de Worde! For shame!'
The future of the city hangs in the balance, Mrs Arcanum!'
Perplexity slowly took the place of stern affront. 'What, in my scales?'
'Yes! Yes! It could very well be!'
'Well, er... they're in the pantry by the flour bag. The whole city, you say?'
'Quite possibly!' William felt his jacket sag as he forced the big brass weights into his pocket.
'Use the old potato sack, do,' said Mrs Arcanum, now quite flustered by events.
William grabbed the sack, rammed everything in and ran for the door.
'The University and the river and everything?' said the landlady nervously.
'Yes! Yes indeed!'
Mrs Arcanum set her jaw. 'You will wash it out thoroughly afterwards, won't you?' she said to his retreating back.
William's progress slowed towards the end of the road. Big iron kitchen scales and a full set of weights aren't carried lightly.
But that was the point, wasn't it? Weight! He ran and walked and dragged them through the freezing, foggy night until he reached Gleam Street.
The lights were still on in the Inquirer building. How late do you need to stay up when you can make up the news as you go along? thought William. But this is real. Heavy, even.
He hammered on the door of the Times shed until a dwarf opened up. The dwarf was amazed to see a frantic William de Worde rush past and drop the scales and weights on a desk.
'Please get Mr Goodmountain up. We've got to get out another edition! And can I have ten dollars, please?'
It took Goodmountain to sort things out when, night-shirted but still firmly helmeted, he clambered out of the cellar.
'No, ten dollars,' William was explaining to the bewildered dwarfs. 'Ten dollar coins. Not ten dollars' worth of money.'
'Why?'
'To see how much seventy thousand dollars weigh!'
'We haven't got seventy thousand dollars!'
'Look, even one dollar coin would do,' said William patiently. Ten dollars would just be more accurate, that's all. I can work it out from there.'
Ten assorted coins were eventually procured from the dwarfs' cash box and were duly weighed. Then William turned to a fresh page in his notebook and bent his head in ferocious calculation. The dwarfs watched him solemnly, as if he was conducting an alchemical experiment. Finally he looked up from his figures, the light of revelation in his eyes.
That's almost a third of a ton,' he said. That's how much seventy thousand dollar coins weigh. I suppose a really good horse could carry that and a rider, but... Vetinari walks with a stick, you saw him. It'd take him for ever to load the horse up, and even if he got away he could hardly travel fast. Vimes must have worked it out. He said the facts were stupid facts!'
Goodmountain had stationed himself before the rows of cases. 'Ready when you are, chief,' he said.
'All right...' William hesitated. He knew the facts, but what did the facts suggest?
'Er... make the heading: "Who framed Lord Vetinari?" and then the story starts... er...' William watched the hand pounce and grab among the little boxes of type, 'A... er... "Ankh-Morpork City Watch now believe that at least one other person was involved in the... the..."'
'Fracas?' suggested Goodmountain.
'No.'
'Rumpus?'
'"... in the attack at the palace on Tuesday morning."' William waited until the dwarf had caught up. It was getting easier and easier to read the words forming in Goodmountain's hands as the fingers jumped from box to box: m-i-g-h-t...
'You got an m for an n there,' he said.
'Oh, yes. Sorry. Carry on.'
'Er... "Evidence suggests that far from attacking his clerk as believed, Lord Vetinari may have discovered a crime in progress."'
The hand flew across the type... c-r-i-m-e-space-i-n...
It stopped.
'Are you sure about this?' said Goodmountain.
'No, but it's as good a theory as any other,' said William. 'That horse hadn't been loaded to escape, it had been loaded to be discovered. Someone had some plan and it went wrong. I'm sure of that at least. Right... new paragraph. "A horse in the stables had been loaded with a third of a ton of coins, but in his current state of health the Patrician--"'
One of the dwarfs had lit the stove. Another was stripping out the formes that contained the last edition. The room was coming alive again.
'That's about eight inches plus the heading,' said Goodmountain, when William had finished. That should rattle people. You want to add any more stuff? Miss Sacharissa did something about Lady Selachii's ball, and there's a few small things.'
William yawned. He didn't seem to be getting enough sleep these days.
Tut them in,' he said.
'And there's this clacks from Lancre that came in when you'd gone home,' said the dwarf. 'That'll cost us another 5Op for the messenger. You remember you sent a clacks this afternoon? About snakes?' he added, in the face of William's blank expression.
William read the flimsy sheet of paper. The message had been carefully transcribed in the neat handwriting of the semaphore operator. It was probably the strangest message yet sent on the new technology.
King Verence of Lancre had also mastered the idea that the clacks charged by the word.
WOMEN OF LANCRE NOT RPT NOT IN HABIT BEARING SNAKES STOP CHILDREN BORN THIS MONTH WILLIAM WEAVER CONSTANCE THATCHER CATASTROPHE CARTER ALL PLUS ARMS LEGS MINUS SCALES FANGS
'Hah! We have them!' said William. 'Give me five minutes and I'll put together a story on this. We shall soon see if the sword of truth can't beat the dragon of lies.'
Boddony gave him a kind look. 'Didn't you say a lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on?' he said.
'But this is the truth.'
'So? Where's its boots?'
Goodmountain nodded to the other dwarfs, who were yawning. 'You get back to bed, lads. I'll pull it all together.'
He watched them disappear down the ladder to the cellar. Then he sat down, took out a small silver box and opened it.
'Snuff?' he said, offering the box to William. 'Best thing you humans ever invented. Watson's Red Roasted. Clears the mind a treat. No?'
William shook his head.
'What are you doing all this for, Mr de Worde?' said Goodmountain, taking a monstrous suction of snuff up each nostril.
'What do you mean?'
'I'm not saying we don't appreciate it, mark you,' said Goodmountain. 'It's keeping the money coming in. The jobbing stuff is drying up more every day. Seems like every engraving shop was poised to go over to printing. All we did was give the young rips an opening. They'll get us in the end, though. They've got money behind them. I don't mind saying some of the lads are talking about selling up and going back to the lead mines.'
'You can't do that!'
'Ah, well,' said Goodmountain. 'You mean you don't want us to. I understand that. But we've been putting money by. We should be all right. I daresay we can flog the press to someone. We might have a spot of cash to take back home. That's what this was all about. Money. What were you doing it for?'
'Me? Because--' William stopped. The truth was that he'd never decided to do anything. He'd never really made that kind of decision in his whole life. One thing had just gently led to another, and then the press had to be fed. It was waiting there now. You worked hard, you fed it, and it was still just as hungry an hour later and out in the world all your work was heading for Bin Six in Piss Harry's and that was only the start of its troubles. Suddenly he had a proper job, with working hours, and yet everything he did was only as real as a sandcastle, on a beach where the tide only ever came in.
'I don't know,' he admitted. I suppose it's because I'm no good at anything else. Now I can't imagine doing anything else.'
'But I heard your family's got pots of money.'
'Mr Goodmountain, I'm useless. I was educated to be useless. What we've always been supposed to do is hang around until there's a war and do something really stupidly brave and then get killed. What we've mainly done is hang on to things. Ideas, mostly.'
'You don't get on with them, then.'
'Look, I don't need a heart-to-heart about this, can you understand? My father is not a nice man. Do I have to draw you a picture? He doesn't much like me and I don't like him. If it comes to that, he doesn't like anyone very much. Especially dwarfs and trolls.'
'No law says you have to like dwarfs and trolls,' said Goodmountain.
'Yes, but there ought to be a law against disliking them the way he does.'
'Ah. Now you've drawn me a picture.'
'Maybe you've heard the term "lesser races"?'
'And now you've coloured it in.'
'He won't even live in Ankh-Morpork any more. Says it's polluted.'
'That's observant of him.'
'No, I mean--'
'Oh, I know what you mean,' said Goodmountain. 'I've met humans like him.'
'You said this was all about money?' said William. 'Is that true?'
The dwarf nodded at the ingots of lead stacked up neatly by the press. 'We wanted to turn lead into gold,' he said. 'We'd got a lot of lead. But we need gold.'
William sighed. 'My father used to say that gold is all dwarfs think about.'
'Pretty much.' The dwarf took another pinch of snuff. 'But where people go wrong is... see, if all a human thinks about is gold, well, he's a miser. If a dwarf thinks about gold, he's just being a dwarf. It's diffrent. What do you call them black humans that live in Howondaland?'
'I know what my father calls them,' said William. 'But I call them "people who live in Howondaland".'
'Do you really? Well, I hear tell there's one tribe where, before he can get married, a man has to kill a leopard and give the skin to the woman? It's the same as that. A dwarf needs gold to get married.'
'What... like a dowry? But I thought dwarfs didn't differentiate between--'
'No, no, the two dwarfs getting married each buy the other dwarf off their parents.'
'Buy? said William. 'How can you buy people?'
'See? Cultural misunderstanding once again, lad. It costs a lot of money to raise a young dwarf to marriageable age. Food, clothes, chain mail... it all adds up over the years. It needs repaying. After all, the other dwarf is getting a valuable commodity. And it has to be paid for in gold. That's traditional. Or gems. They're fine, too. You must've heard our saying "worth his weight in gold"? Of course, if a dwarf's been working for his parents that gets taken into account on the other side of the ledger. Why, a dwarf who's left off marrying till late in life is probably owed quite a tidy sum in wages - you're still looking at me in that funny way
'It's just that we don't do it like that...' mumbled William.
Goodmountain gave him a sharp look. 'Don't you, now?' he said. 'Really? What do you use instead, then?'
'Er... gratitude, I suppose,' said William. He wanted this conversation to stop, right now. It was heading out over thin ice.
'And how's that calculated?'
'Well... it isn't, as such...'
'Doesn't that cause problems?'
'Sometimes.'
'Ah. Well, we know about gratitude, too. But our way means the couple start their new lives in a state of... g'daraka... er, free, unencumbered, new dwarfs. Then their parents might well give them a huge wedding present, much bigger than the dowry. But it is between dwarf and dwarf, out of love and respect, not between debtor and creditor... though I have to say these human words are not really the best way of describing it. It works for us. It's worked for a thousand years.'
'I suppose to a human it sounds a bit... chilly,' said William.
Goodmountain gave him another studied look.
'You mean by comparison to the warm and wonderful ways humans conduct their affairs?' he said. 'You don't have to answer that one. Anyway, me and Boddony want to open up a mine together, and we're expensive dwarfs. We know how to work lead, so we thought a year or two of this would see us right.'
'You're getting married?'
'We want to,' said Goodmountain.
'Oh... well, congratulations,' said William. He knew enough not to comment on the fact that both dwarfs looked like small barbarian warriors with long beards. All traditional dwarfs looked like that.*
Goodmountain grinned. 'Don't worry too much about your father, lad. People change. My grandmother used to think humans were sort of hairless bears. She doesn't any more.'
'What changed her mind?'
'I reckon it was the dying that did it.'
Goodmountain stood up and patted William on the shoulder. 'Come on, let's get the paper finished. We'll start the run when the lads wake up.'
Breakfast was cooking when William got back, and Mrs Arcanum was waiting. Her mouth was set in the firm line of someone hot on the trail of unrespectable behaviour.
'I shall require an explanation of last night's affair,' she said,
* Most dwarfs were still referred to as 'he' as well, even when they were getting married. It was generally assumed that somewhere under all that chain mail one of them was female and that both of them knew which one this was. But the whole subject of sex was one that traditionally minded dwarfs did not discuss, perhaps out of modesty, possibly because it didn't interest them very much and certainly because they took the view that what two dwarfs decided to do together was entirely their own business. confronting him in the hallway, 'and a week's notice, if you please.'
William was too exhausted to lie. I wanted to see how much seventy thousand dollars weighed,' he said.
Muscles moved in various areas of the landlady's face. She knew William's background, being the kind of woman who finds out about that kind of thing very quickly, and the twitching was a sign of some internal struggle based around the definite fact that seventy thousand dollars was a respectable sum.
'I may perhaps have been a little hasty,' she ventured. 'Did you find out how much the money weighed?'
'Yes, thank you.'
'Would you like to keep the scales for a few days in case you want to weigh any more?'
'I think I've finished the weighing, Mrs Arcanum, but thank you all the same.'
'Breakfast has already begun, Mr de Worde, but... well, perhaps I can make allowances this time.'
He was given a second boiled egg, too. This was a rare sign of favour.
The latest news was already the subject of deep discussion.
'I am frankly amazed,' said Mr Cartwright. 'It beats me how they find this stuff out.'
'It certainly makes you wonder what's going on that we aren't told,' said Mr Windling.
William listened for a while, until he couldn't wait any longer.
'Something interesting in the paper?' he asked innocently.
'A woman in Kicklebury Street says her husband has been kidnapped by elves,' said Mr Mackleduff, holding up the Inquirer. The heading was very clear on the subject:
ELVES STOLE MY HUSBAND!
'That's made up!' said William.
'Can't be,' said Mackleduff. 'There's the lady's name and address, right there. They wouldn't put that in the paper if they were telling lies, would they?'
William looked at the name and address. 'I know this lady,' he said.
'There you are, then!'
'She was the one last month who said her husband had been carried off by a big silver dish that came out of the sky,' said William, who had a good memory for this sort of thing. He'd nearly put it in his news letter as an 'On a lighter note' but had thought better of it. 'And you, Mr Prone, said everyone knew her husband had carried himself off with a lady called Flo who used to work as a waitress in Harga's House of Ribs.'
Mrs Arcanum gave William a sharp look which said that the whole subject of nocturnal kitchenware theft could be re-opened at any time, extra egg or no.
'I am not partial to that kind of talk at the table,' she said coldly.
'Well, then, it's obvious,' said Mr Cartwright. 'He must've come back.'
'From the silver dish or from Flo?' said William.
'Mr de Worde!'
'I was only asking,' said William. 'Ah, I see they're revealing the name of the man who broke into the jeweller's the other day. Shame it's Done It Duncan, poor old chap.'
'A notorious criminal, by the sound of it,' said Mr Windling. 'It's shocking that the Watch won't arrest him.'
'Especially since he calls on them every day,' said William.
'Whatever for?'
'A hot meal and a bed for the night,' said William. 'Done It Duncan confesses to everything, you see. Original sin, murders, minor thefts... everything. When he's desperate he tries to turn himself in for the reward.'
'Then they ought to do something about him,' said Mrs Arcanum.
'I believe they generally give him a mug of tea,' said William. He paused and then ventured: 'Is there anything in the other paper?'
'Oh, they're still trying to say that Vetinari didn't do it,' said Mr Mackleduff. 'And the King of Lancre says women in Lancre don't give birth to snakes.'
'Well, he would say that, wouldn't he?' said Mrs Arcanum.
'Vetinari must've done something,' said Mr Windling. 'Otherwise why would he be helping the Watch with their inquiries? That's not the action of an innocent man, in my humble opinion.'*
'I believe there's plenty of evidence that throws doubt on his guilt,' said William.
'Really,' said Mr Windling, making the word suggest that William's opinion was considerably more humble than his. 'Anyway, I understand the Guild leaders are meeting today.' He sniffed. 'It's time for a change. Frankly, we could do with a ruler who is a little more responsive to the views of ordinary people.'
William glanced at Mr Longshaft, the dwarf, who was peacefully cutting some toast into soldiers. Perhaps he hadn't noticed. Perhaps there was nothing to notice and William was being over sensitive. But years of listening to Lord de Worde's opinions had given him a certain ear. It told him when phrases like 'the views of ordinary people', innocent and worthy in themselves, were being used to mean that someone should be whipped.
'How do you mean?' he said.
The... city is getting too big,' said Mr Windling. 'In the old days the gates were kept shut, not left open to all and sundry. And people could leave their doors unlocked.'
'We didn't have anything worth stealing,' said Mr Cartwright.
That's true. There's more money around,' said Mr Prone.
'It doesn't all stay here, though,' said Mr Windling. That was true, at least. 'Sending money home' was the major export activity of the city, and dwarfs were right at the front of it. William also knew that most of it came back again, because dwarfs bought from the best dwarf craftsmen and, mostly, the best dwarf craftsmen worked in Ankh-Morpork these days. And they sent money back
* The best way to describe Mr Windling would be like this: you are at a meeting. You'd like to be away early. So would everyone else. There really isn't very much to discuss, anyway. And just as everyone can see Any Other Business coming over the horizon and is already putting their papers neatly together, a voice says 'If I can raise a minor matter, Mr Chairman...' and with a horrible wooden feeling in your stomach you know, now, that the evening will go on for twice as long with much referring back to the minutes of earlier meetings. The man who has just said that, and is now sitting there with a smug smile of dedication to the committee process, is as near Mr Windling as makes no difference. And something that distinguishes the Mr Windlings of the universe is the term 'in my humble opinion', which they think adds weight to their statements rather than indicating, in reality, 'these are the mean little views of someone with the social grace of duckweed'.
home. A tide of gold coins rolled back and forth and seldom had a chance to go cold. But it upset the Windlings of the city.
Mr Longshaft quietly picked up his boiled egg and inserted it into an eggcup.
'There's just too many people in the city,' Mr Windling repeated. 'I've nothing against... outsiders, heavens know, but Vetinari let it go far too far. Everyone knows we need someone who is prepared to be a little more firm.'
There was a metallic noise. Mr Longshaft, still staring fixedly at his egg, had reached down and drawn a smallish but still impressively axe-like axe from his bag. Watching the egg carefully, as if it was about to run away, he leaned slowly back, paused for a moment, then brought the blade round in an arc of silver.
The top of the egg flew up with hardly a noise, turned over in mid-air several feet above the plate, and landed beside the eggcup.
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.'