The Truth (27 page)

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 shortcut 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 multistory.

Willie Hobson was another businessman in the mold of 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, goblinlike 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 analyzed 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 important, he could smell a smell, even above the general background odor 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 a 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 for a dog 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,” it said. “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, as you might say.”

“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 it spoke again it sounded uncertain.

“You mean, what he looked like?” it said.

“Well, yes!”

“Ah…well, it dun’t 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 which kept oozing into center stage. What kind of phrase 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 crueler than usual ruler in Ankh-Morpork who 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 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 his way 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 towards 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.

“Mister 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-word,” 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 vhich only goes to show vot ve can achieve when our brains are not clouded by thoughts of open vindows and bare necks, vhich 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.