The Truth (3 page)

“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.

“Just you trot down there, why don’t you, and see if it’s just a lot of hot air. But walk, please.”

William felt drawn back to the sheds behind the Bucket next day. Apart from anything else, he had nothing to do and he didn’t like being useless.

There are, it has been said, two types of people in the world. There are those who, when presented with a glass that is exactly half full, say: this glass is half full. And then there are those who say: this glass is half empty.

The world
belongs,
however, to those who can look at the glass and say: What’s up with this glass? Excuse me? Excuse
me? This
is my glass? I don’t
think
so.
My
glass was full!
And
it was a bigger glass! Who’s been pinching my beer?

And at the other end of the bar the world is full of the other type of person, who has a broken glass, or a glass that has been carelessly knocked over (usually by one of the people calling for a larger glass), or who had no glass at all, because he was at the back of the crowd and had failed to catch the barman’s eye.

William was one of the glassless. And this was odd, because he’d been born into a family that not only had a very large glass indeed but could afford to have people discreetly standing around with bottles to keep it filled up.

It was self-imposed glasslessness, and it had started at a fairly early age when he’d been sent away to school.

William’s brother, Rupert, being the elder, had gone to the Assassins’ School in Ankh-Morpork, widely regarded as being the best school in the world for the full-glass class. William, as the less important son, had been sent to Hugglestones, a boarding school so bleak and spartan that only the upper glasses would send their sons there.

Hugglestones was a granite building on a rain-soaked moor, and its stated purpose was to make men from boys. The policy employed involved a certain amount of wastage, and consisted, in William’s recollection at least, of very simple and violent games in the healthy outdoor sleet. The small, slow, fat, or merely unpopular were mown down, as nature intended, but natural selection operates in many ways and William found that he had a certain capacity for survival. A good way to survive on the playing fields of Hugglestones was to run very fast and shout a lot while inexplicably always being a long way from the ball. This had earned him, oddly enough, a reputation for being keen, and keenness was highly prized at Hugglestones, if only because actual achievement was so rare.

He
had
been truly keen on anything involving words. At Hugglestones this had not counted for a great deal, since most of its graduates never expected to have to do much more with a pen than sign their names, a feat that most of them could manage after three or four years, but it had meant long mornings peacefully reading anything that took his fancy while the hulking front-row forwards who would one day be at least the deputy-leaders of the land learned how to hold a pen without crushing it.

William left with a good report, which tends to be the case with pupils that most of the teachers could only vaguely remember. Those who could recall William had a hazy picture of someone always arriving just too late at some huge and painful collision of bodies. A keen boy, they decided. The staff at Hugglestones prized keenness, believing that in sufficient quantities it could take the place of lesser attributes like intelligence, foresight, and training.

Afterwards, his father had faced the problem of what to do with him.

He was the younger son in any case, and family tradition sent youngest sons into some church or other, where they couldn’t do much harm on a physical level. But too much reading had taken its toll. William found that he now thought of prayer as a sophisticated way of pleading with thunderstorms.

Going into land management was just about acceptable, but it seemed to William that land managed itself pretty well, on the whole. He was all in favor of the countryside, provided that it was on the other side of a window.

A military career somewhere was unlikely. William had a rooted objection to killing people he didn’t know.

He enjoyed reading and writing. He
liked
words. Words didn’t shout or make loud noises, which pretty much defined the rest of his family. They didn’t involve getting muddy in the freezing cold. They didn’t hunt inoffensive animals, either. They did what he told them to. So, he’d said, he wanted to write.

His father had erupted. In his personal world, a scribe was only one step higher than a teacher. Good gods, man, they didn’t even ride a horse! So there had been Words.

As a result, William had gone off to Ankh-Morpork, the usual destination for the lost and the aimless. There he’d made words his living, in a quiet sort of way, and considered that he’d got off easy compared to brother Rupert, who was big and good-natured and a Hugglestones natural apart from the accident of birth.

And then there had been the war against Klatch…

It was an insignificant war, which was over before it started, the kind of war that both sides pretended hadn’t really happened, but one of the things that did happen in the few confused days of wretched turmoil was the death of Rupert de Worde. He had died for his beliefs; chief among them was the very Hugglestonian one that bravery could replace armor, and that Klatchians would turn and run if you shouted loud enough.

William’s father, during their last meeting, had gone on at some length about the proud and noble traditions of the de Wordes. They had mostly involved unpleasant deaths, preferably of foreigners, but somehow, William gathered, the de Wordes had always considered that it was a decent second prize to die themselves. A de Worde was always to the fore when the city called. That was why they
existed.
Wasn’t the family motto
Le Mot Juste
? The Right Word in the Right Place, said Lord de Worde. He simply could not understand why William did not want to embrace this fine tradition and he dealt with it, in the manner of his kind, by not dealing with it.