The Truth (32 page)

This wasn’t natural gargoyle territory, any more than Gleam Street.

The thing about gargoyles, he reflected as he stepped back and headed down the stairs, was that they didn’t get bored. They were happy to stay and watch
anything
for days. But, while they moved faster than people thought, they didn’t move faster than people.

He ran through the kitchen so quickly that he only heard Mrs. Arcanum gasp, and then he was through the back door and over the wall into the alley beyond.

Someone was sweeping it. For a moment William wondered if it was a watchman in disguise, or even Sister Jennifer in disguise, but probably there was no one who’d disguise themselves as a gnoll. You’d have to strap a compost heap to your back, to begin with. Gnolls ate almost everything. What they didn’t eat, they collected obsessively. No one had ever studied them to find out why. Perhaps a carefully sorted collection of rotted cabbage stalks was a sign of big status in gnoll society.

“’Ar’t’n, M’r. W’rd,” croaked the creature, leaning on its shovel.

“Er…hello…er…”

“Sn’g’k.”

“Ah? Yes. Thank you. Goodbye.”

He hurried down another alley, crossed the street, and found yet another alley. He wasn’t sure how many gargoyles were watching him, but it took them some time to cross streets…

How was it that the gnoll had known his name? It wasn’t as though they’d met at a party or something. Besides, the gnolls all worked for…Harry King…

Well, they did
say
that King of the Golden River never forgot a debtor…

William ducked and dodged across several blocks, making as much use as he could of the alleys and walkthroughs and noisome courts. He was sure a normal person wouldn’t be able to keep track of him. But then, he’d be amazed if a normal person was following him. Mister Vimes liked to refer to himself as a simple copper, just as Harry King thought of himself as a rough diamond. William suspected that the world was littered with the remains of those people who had taken them at their word.

He slowed down, and climbed some outside stairs. And then he waited.

You’re a fool, said the internal editor. Some people have tried to kill you. You’re concealing information from the Watch. You’re mixing with strange people. You’re about to do something that’s going to get so far up Mister Vimes’s nose it will raise his hat. And why?

Because it makes my blood tingle, he thought. And because I’m not going to be used. By anyone.

There was a faint sound at the end of the alley, which might not have been heard by anyone who wasn’t expecting it. It was the sound of something sniffing.

William looked down and saw, in the gloom, a four-legged shape break into a trot while keeping its muzzle close to the ground.

William measured the distance carefully. Declaring independence was one thing. Assaulting a member of the Watch was a very
different
thing.

He lobbed the fragile bottle so that it landed about twenty feet ahead of the werewolf, dropped from the stairs onto the top of a wall, and jumped down onto a privy roof as the glass broke with a “pof!” inside the sock.

There was a yelp, and the sound of scrabbling claws.

William jumped from the roof onto another wall, inched along the top of it, and climbed down into another alley. Then he ran.

It took five minutes, dodging into convenient cover and cutting through buildings, to arrive at the livery stables. In the general bustle no one took any notice of him. He was just another man coming to fetch his horse.

The stall that may or may not have contained Deep Bone was occupied by a horse now. It looked down its nose at him.

“Don’t turn around, Mr. Paper Man,” said a voice behind him.

William tried to remember what
had
been behind him. Oh, yes…the hay loft. And huge bags of straw. Plenty of room for someone to hide.

“All right,” he said.

“Hark, hark, the dogs do bark,” said Deep Bone. “You must be
ment’l.
”

“But I’m on the right track,” said William. “I think I’ve—”

“’Ere, you sure you weren’t followed?”

“Corporal Nobbs was on my trail,” said William. “But I shook him off.”

“Hah! Walkin’ round the corner’d shake off Nobby Nobbs!”

“Oh, no, he kept right up. I
knew
Vimes would have me tracked,” said William proudly.

“By Nobbs?”

“Yes. Obviously…in his werewolf shape…” There. He’d said it. But today was a day for shadows and secrets.

“A werewolf shape,” said Deep Bone flatly.

“Yes. I’d be grateful if you didn’t tell anyone else.”

“Corporal Nobbs,” said Deep Bone, still in the same dull monotone.

“Yes. Look, Vimes told me not to—”

“
Vimes
told you Nobby Nobbs was a werewolf?”

“Well…no, not
exactly.
I worked that out for myself, and Vimes told me not to tell anyone else…”

“About Corporal Nobbs bein’ a werewolf…”

“Yes.”

“Corporal Nobbs is not a werewolf, mister. In any way, shape, or form. Whether he’s human is another matter, but he ain’t a lycr—a lynco—a lycantro—a bloody werewolf, that’s for sure!”

“Then whose nose did I just drop a scent bomb in front of?” said William triumphantly.

There was silence. And then there was the sound of a thin trickle of water.

“Mr. Bone?” said William.

“What kind of a scent bomb?” said the voice. It sounded rather strained.

“I think oil of scallatine was probably the most active ingredient.”

“Right in front of a werewolf’s nose?”

“More or less, yes.”

“Mister Vimes is going to go round the twist,” said the voice of Deep Bone. “He’s going to go totally Librarian-poo. He’s going to invent new ways of being angry just so’s he can try them out on you—”

“Then I’d better get hold of Lord Vetinari’s dog as soon as possible,” said William. “I can give you a check for fifty dollars, and that’s all I can afford.”

“What’s one of them, then?”

“It’s like a legal IOU.”

“Oh,
great,
” said Deep Bone. “Not much good to me when you’re locked up, though.”

“Right now, Mr. Bone, there’s a couple of very nasty men hunting down every terrier in the city, by the sound of it—”

“Terriers?” said Deep Bone. “
All
terriers?”

“Yes, and while I don’t expect you to—”

“Like…pedigree terriers, or just people who might happen to look a bit terrierlike?”

“They didn’t look like they were inspecting any paperwork. Anyway, what do you
mean,
people who look like terriers?”

Deep Bone went silent again.

William said, “Fifty dollars, Mr. Bone.”

At length the sacks of straw said, “All right. Tonight. On the Misbegot Bridge. Just you. Er…I won’t be there but there will be…a messenger.”

“Who shall I make the check out to?” said William.

There was no answer. He waited a while, and then eased himself into a position where he could peer around the sacks. There was a rustling from them. Probably rats, he thought, because certainly none of them could hold a man.

Deep Bone was a very tricky customer.

Some time after William had gone, looking surreptitiously into the shadows, one of the grooms turned up with a trolley and began to load up the sacks.

One of them said: “Put me down, mister.”

The man dropped the sack, and then opened it cautiously.

A small terrierlike dog struggled up, shaking itself free of clinging wisps.

Mr. Hobson did not encourage independence of thought and an enquiring mind, and at fifty pence a day plus all the oats you could steal he didn’t get them. The groom looked owlishly at the dog.

“Did you just say that?” he said.

“’Course not,” said the dog. “Dogs can’t talk. Are you stupid or somethin’? Someone’s playin’ a trick on you. Gottle o’geer, gottle o’geer, vig viano.”

“You mean like, throwing their voice? I saw a man do that down at the music hall.”

“That’s the ticket. Hold on to that thought.”

The groom looked around.

“Is that you playin’ a trick, Tom?” he said.

“That’s right, it’s me, Tom,” said the dog. “I got the trick out of a book. Throwin’ my voice into this harmless little dog what cannot talk at all.”

“What? You never told me you were learnin’ to read!”

“There were pictures,” said the dog hurriedly. “Tongues an’ teeth an’ that. Dead easy to understand. Oh, now the little doggie’s wanderin’ off…”

The dog edged its way to the door.

“Sheesh,” it appeared to say. “A couple of thumbs and they’re lords of bloody creation…”

Then it ran for it.

“How will this work?” said Sacharissa, trying to look intelligent. It was much better to concentrate on something like this than think about strange men getting ready to invade again.

“Slowly,” mumbled Goodmountain, fiddling with the press. “You realize that this means it’ll take us much longer to print each paper?”

“You vanted color, I gif you color,” said Otto sulkily. “You never said
qvick.
”

Sacharissa looked at the experimental iconograph. Most pictures were painted in color these days. Only really cheap imps painted in black and white, even though Otto insisted that monochrome “vas an art form in itself.” But
printing
color…

Four imps were sitting on the edge of it, passing a very small cigarette from hand to hand and watching with interest the work on the press. Three of them wore goggles of colored glass—red, blue, and yellow.

“But not green…” she said. “So…if something’s green—have I got this right?—Guthrie there sees the…blue in the green and paints
that
on the plate in blue”—one of the imps gave her a wave—“and Anton sees the yellow and paints
that,
and when you run it through the press—”

“…very, very slowly,” muttered Goodmountain. “It’d be quicker to go around to everyone’s house and
tell
’em the news.”

Sacharissa looked at the test sheets that had been done of the recent fire. It was definitely a fire, with red, yellow, and orange flames, and there was some, yes, blue sky, and the golems were a pretty good reddish brown, but the flesh tones…well, “flesh-colored” was a bit of a tricky one in Ankh-Morpork, where if you picked your subject it could be any color except maybe light blue, but the faces of many of the bystanders did suggest that a particularly virulent plague had passed through the city. Possibly the Multicolored Death, she decided.

“Zis is only the beginning,” said Otto. “Ve vill get better.”

“Better maybe, but we’re as fast as we can go,” said Goodmountain. “We can do maybe two hundred an hour. Maybe two hundred and fifty, but someone’s going to be looking for their fingers before this day’s out. Sorry, but we’re doing the best we can. If we had a day to redesign and rebuild properly—”

“Print a few hundred and do the rest in black and white, then,” said Sacharissa, and sighed. “At least it’ll catch people’s attention.”

“Vunce zey see it, the
Inqvirer
vill vork out how it vas done,” said Otto.

“Then at least we’ll go down with our colors flying,” said Sacharissa. She shook her head, as a little dust floated down from the room.

“Hark at that,” said Boddony. “Can you feel the floor shake? That’s their big presses again.”

“They’re undermining us everywhere,” said Sacharissa. “And we’ve all worked so hard. It’s so
unfair
.”

“I’m surprised the floor takes it,” said Goodmountain. “It’s not as though anything’s on solid ground round here.”

“Undermining us, eh?” said Boddony.

One or two of the dwarfs looked up when he said this. Boddony said something in Dwarfish. Goodmountain snapped something in reply. A couple of other dwarfs joined in.

“Excuse
me,
” said Sacharissa tartly.

“The lads were…wondering about going in and having a look,” said Goodmountain.

“I tried going in the other day,” said Sacharissa. “But the troll on the door was
most
impolite.”

“Dwarfs…approach matters differently,” said Goodmountain.

Sacharissa saw a movement. Boddony had pulled his ax out from under the bench. It was a traditional dwarf ax. One side was a pickax, for the extraction of interesting minerals, and the other side was a war ax, because the people who own the land with the valuable minerals in it can be so unreasonable sometimes.

“You’re not going to
attack
anyone, are you?” she said, shocked.

“Well, someone
did
say that if you want a good story you have to dig and dig,” said Boddony. “We’re just going to go for a walk.”

“In the cellar?” said Sacharissa, as they headed for the steps.

“Yeah, a walk in the dark,” said Boddony.

Goodmountain sighed. “The rest of us will get on with the paper, shall we?” he said.

After a minute or two there was the sound of a few ax blows below them, and then someone swore in Dwarfish, very loudly.

“I’m going to see what they’re doing,” said Sacharissa, unable to resist anymore, and hurried away.

The bricks that once had filled the old doorway were already down when she got there. Since the stones of Ankh-Morpork were recycled over the generations, no one had ever seen the point of making strong mortar, and especially not for blocking up an old doorway. Sand, dirt, water, and phlegm would do the trick, they felt. They always had done up to now, after all.

The dwarfs were peering into the darkness beyond. Each one had stuck a candle on his helmet.

“I thought your man said they filled up the old street,” said Boddony.

“He’s not my man,” said Sacharissa evenly. “What’s in there?”

One of the dwarfs had stepped through with a lantern.

“There’s like…tunnels,” he said.