The Truth

by Terry Pratchett

  “Er…I think we’d like to see who we’re employing, though,” he said aloud.

  Otto emerged, very slowly and nervously, from behind the lens. He was thin, pale, and wore little oval dark glasses. He still clutched the twist of black ribbon as if it was a talisman, which it more or less was.

  “It’s all right, we won’t bite you,” said Sacharissa.

  “And one good turn deserves another, eh?” said Goodmountain.

  “That was a bit tasteless, Mr. Goodmountain,” said Sacharissa.

  “So am I,” said the dwarf, turning back to the stone. “Just so long as people know where I stand, that’s all.”

  “You vill not be sorry,” said Otto. “I am completely reformed, I assure you. Vot is it you want me to take pictures of, please?”

  “News,” said William.

  “What is news, please?”

  “News is…” William began. “News…is what we put in the newspaper—”

  “What d’you think of this, eh?” said a cheerful voice.

  William turned. There was a horribly familiar face, looking at him over the top of a cardboard box.

  “Hello, Mr. Wintler,” he said. “Er…Sacharissa, I wonder if you could go and—”

  He wasn’t quick enough. Mr. Wintler, a man of the variety that thinks a whoopee cushion is the last word in repartee, was not the kind to let a mere freezing reception stand in his way. “I was digging my garden this morning and up came this parsnip, and I thought: that young man at the paper will laugh himself silly when he sees it, ’cos my lady wife couldn’t keep a straight face, and—”

  To William’s horror he was already reaching into the box.

  “Mr. Wintler, I really don’t think—”

  But the hand was already rising, and there was the sound of something scraping on the side of the box. “I bet the young lady here would like a good chuckle too, eh?”

  William shut his eyes.

  He heard Sacharissa gasp. Then she said, “Golly, it’s amazingly lifelike!” William opened his eyes.

  “Oh, it’s a nose,” he said. “A parsnip with a sort of knobbly face and a huge nose!”

  “You vant I should take a picture?” said Otto.

  “Yes!” said William, drunk with relief. “Take a big picture of Mr. Wintler and his wonderfully nasal parsnip, Otto! Your first job! Yes, indeed!”

  Mr. Wintler beamed.

  “And shall I run back home and fetch my carrot?” he said.

  “No!” said William and Goodmountain, in whiplash unison.

  “You vant the picture right now?” said Otto.

  “We certainly do!” said William. “The sooner we can let him go home, the sooner our Mr. Wintler can find another wonderful vegetable, eh, Mr. Wintler? What will it be next time? A bean with ears? A beetroot shaped like a potato? A sprout with an enormous hairy tongue?”

  “Right here and now is ven you vant the picture?” said Otto, anxiety hanging off every syllable.

  “Right now, yes!”

  “As a matter of fact, there is a rutabaga coming along that I’ve got great hopes of—” Mr. Wintler began.

  “Oh, vell…if you vill look zis vay, Mr. Vintler,” said Otto. He got behind the iconograph and uncovered the lens. William got a glimpse of the imp peering out, brush poised. In his spare hand Otto slowly held up, on a stick, a cage containing a fat and drowsing salamander, and positioned his finger on the trigger that would bring a small hammer down on its head just hard enough to annoy it.

  “Be smiling, please!”

  “Hold on,” said Sacharissa, “should a vampire really—”

  Click.

  The salamander flared, etching the room with searing white light and dark shadows.

  Otto screamed. He fell to the floor, clutching at his throat. He sprang to his feet, goggle-eyed and gasping, and staggered, knock-kneed and wobbly legged, the length of the room and back again. He sank down behind a table, scattering paperwork with a wildly flailing hand.

  “Aarghaarghaaargh…”

  And then there was a shocked silence.

  Otto stood up, adjusted his cravat, and dusted himself off. Only then did he look up at the row of shocked faces.

  “Vell?” he said sternly. “Vot you all looking at? It is just a normal reaction, zat is all. I am vorking on it. Light in all itz forms is mine passion. Light is my canvas, shadows are my brush.”

  “But strong light hurts you!” said Sacharissa. “It hurts vampires!”

  “Yes. It iss a bit of a bugger, but zere you go.”

  “And, er, that happens every time you take a picture, does it?” said William.

  “No, sometimes it iss a lot vorse.”

  “Worse?”

  “I sometimes crumble to dust. But zat which does not kill us makes us stronk.”

  “Stronk?”

  “Indeed!”

  William caught Sacharissa’s gaze. Her look said it all: We’ve hired him. Have we got the heart to fire him now? And don’t make fun of his accent unless your Uberwaldean is really good, okay?

  Otto adjusted the iconograph and inserted a fresh sheet

  “And now, shall ve try vun more?” he said brightly. “And zis time—everybody zmile!”

  Mail was arriving. William was used to a certain amount, usually from clients of his newsletter complaining that he hadn’t told them about the double-headed giants, plagues, and rains of domestic animals that they had heard had been happening in Ankh-Morpork; his father was right about one thing, at least, when he’d said that lies could run around the world before the truth could get its boots on. And it was amazing how people wanted to believe them.

  These were…well, it was as if he’d shaken a tree, and all the nuts had fallen out. Several letters were complaining that there had been much colder winters than this, although no two of them could agree when it was. One said vegetables were not as funny as they used to be, especially leeks. Another asked what the Guild of Thieves was doing about unlicensed crime in the city. There was one saying that all these robberies were down to dwarfs who shouldn’t be allowed into the city to steal the work out of honest humans’ mouths.

  “Put a title like ‘Letters’ on the top and put them in,” said William. “Except the one about the dwarfs. That sounds like Mr. Windling. It sounds like my father, too, except that at least he can spell ‘undesirable’ and wouldn’t use crayon.”

  “Why not that letter?”

  “Because it’s offensive.”

  “Some people think it’s true, though,” said Sacharissa. “There’s been a lot of trouble.”

  “Yes, but we shouldn’t print it.”

  William called Goodmountain over and showed him the letter. The dwarf read it.

  “Put it in,” he suggested. “It’ll fill a few inches.”

  “But people will object,” said William.

  “Good. Put their letters in, too.”

  Sacharissa sighed. “We’ll probably need them,” she said. “William, Grandfather says no one in the Guild will engrave the iconographs for us.”

  “Why not? We can afford the rates.”

  “We’re not Guild members. It’s all getting unpleasant. Will you tell Otto?”

  William sighed, and walked over to the ladder.

  The dwarfs used the cellar as a bedroom, being naturally happier with a floor over their head. Otto had been allowed to use a dank corner, which he’d made his own by hanging an old sheet across on a rope.

  “Oh, hello, Mr. Villiam,” he said, pouring something noxious from one bottle to another.

  “I am afraid it looks as if we won’t get anyone to engrave your pictures,” said William.

  The vampire seemed unmoved by this.

  “Yes, I vundered about that.”

  “So I’m sorry to say that—”

  “No problem, Villiam. Zere is alvays a vay.”

  “How? You can’t engrave, can you?”

  “No, but…all we are printing is black and vite, yes? And zer paper i
s vite zo all ve are really printink is black, okay? I looked at how zer dwarfs do the letters, and zey haf all zese bits of metal lying around and…you know how zer engravers can engrave metal wiz acid?”

  “Yes?”

  “Zo, all I haf to do is teach zer imps to paint wiz acid. End of problem. Getting gray took a bit of thought, but I zink I haf—”

  “You mean you can get the imps to etch the picture straight onto a plate?”

  “Yes. It is vun of those ideas that are obvious when you zink about it.” Otto looked wistful. “And I zink about light all zer time. All zer…time.”

  William vaguely remembered something someone had once said: the only thing more dangerous than a vampire crazed with blood lust was a vampire crazed with anything else. All the meticulous single-mindedness that went into finding young women who slept with their bedroom window open got channeled into some other interest, with merciless and painstaking efficiency.

  “Er…why do you need to work in a darkroom, though?” he said. “The imps don’t need it, do they?”

  “Ah, zis is for my experiment,” said Otto proudly. “You know zat another term for an iconographer would be ‘photographer’? From the old word ‘photus’ in Latation, vhich means—”

  “‘To prance around like an idiot ordering everyone about as if you owned the place,’” said William.

  “Ah, you know it!”

  William nodded. He’d always wondered about that word.

  “Vell, I am working on an obscurograph.”

  William’s forehead wrinkled. It was turning into a long day.

  “Taking pictures with darkness?” he ventured.

  “Wiz true darkness, to be precise,” said Otto, excitement entering his voice. “Not just absence of light. Zer light on zer ozzer side of darkness. You could call it…living darkness. Ve can’t see it, but imps can. Did you know zer Uberwaldean Deep Cave land eel emits a burst of dark light ven startled?”

  William glanced at a large glass jar on the bench. A couple of ugly things were coiled up in the bottom.

  “And that will work, will it?”

  “I zink so. Hold it vun minute.”

  “I really ought to be getting back—”

  “Zis vill not take a second…”

  Otto gently lifted one of the eels out of its jar and put it into the hod usually occupied by a salamander. He carefully aimed one of his iconographs at William, and nodded.

  “Vun…two…three…BOO!”

  There was—

  —there was a soft noiseless implosion, a very brief sensation of the world being screwed up small, frozen, smashed into tiny little sharp pins, and hammered through every cell of William’s body.* Then the gloom of the cellar flowed back.

  “That was…very strange,” said William, blinking. “It was like something very cold walking through me…”

  “Much may be learned about dark light now ve have left our disgusting past behind us and haf emerged into zer bright new future vhere ve do not zink about the b-word all day in any way at all,” said Otto, fiddling with the iconograph. He looked hard at the picture the imp had painted, and then glanced up at William. “Oh vell, back to zer drawink board,” he said.

  “Can I see?”

  “It vould embarrass me,” said Otto, putting the square of cardboard down on his makeshift bench. “All the time I am doing things wronk.”

  “Oh, but I’d—”

  “Mister de Worde, dere’s something happening!”

  The bellow came from Rocky, whose head eclipsed the hole.

  “What is it?”

  “Something at der Palace. Someone’s been killed!”

  William sprang up the ladder. Sacharissa was sitting at her desk, looking pale.

  “Someone’s assassinated Vetinari?” said William.

  “Er…no,” said Sacharissa. “Not…exactly.”

  Down in the cellar, Otto Chriek picked up the dark light iconograph and looked at it again. Then he scratched it with a long pale finger, as if trying to remove something.

  “Strange…” he said.

  The imp hadn’t imagined it, he knew. Imps had no imagination whatsoever. They didn’t know how to lie.

  He looked around the bare cellar suspiciously.

  “Is there anyvun zere?” he said. “Is anyvun playink the silly buggers?”

  Thankfully, there was no answer. He looked at the picture again.

  Dark light. Oh, dear. There were lots of theories about dark light…

  “Otto!”

  He glanced up, shoving the picture into his pocket.

  “Yes, Mr. Villiam?”

  “Get your stuff together and come with me! Lord Vetinari’s murdered someone! Er, it is alleged,” William added. “And it can’t possibly be true.”

  It sometimes seemed to William that the whole population of Ankh-Morpork was simply a mob waiting to happen. It was mostly spread thin, like some kind of great amoeba, all across the city. But when something happened somewhere, it contracted around that point, like a cell around a piece of food, filling the streets with people.

  It was growing around the main gates to the Palace. It came together apparently at random. A knot of people would attract other people and become a bigger, more complicated knot. Carts and sedan chairs would stop to find out what was going on. The invisible beast grew bigger.

  There were watchmen on the gate, instead of the Palace Guard. This was a problem. “Let me in, I’m nosy” was not a request likely to achieve success. It lacked a certain authority.

  “Vy are ve stoppink?” said Otto.

  “That’s Sergeant Detritus on the gate,” said William.

  “Ah. A troll. Very stupid,” opined Otto.

  “But hard to fool. I’m afraid I shall have to try the truth.”

  “Vy vill that vork?”

  “He’s a policeman. The truth usually confuses them. They don’t often hear it.”

  The big troll sergeant watched William impassively as he approached. It was a proper policeman’s stare. It gave nothing away. It said: I can see you, now I’m waiting to see what you’re going to do that’s wrong.

  “Good morning, sergeant,” said William.

  A nod from the troll indicated that he was prepared to accept, on available evidence, that it was morning and, in certain circumstances, by some people, might be considered good.

  “I urgently need to see Commander Vimes.”

  “Oh yes?”

  “Yes. Indeed.”

  “And does he urgently need to see you?” The troll leaned closer. “You’re Mr. de Worde, right?”

  “Yes. I work for the Times.”

  “I don’t read dat,” said the troll.

  “Really? We’ll bring out a large-print edition,” said William.

  “Dat was a very funny joke,” said Detritus. “Fing is, fick though I am, I am der one that’s sayin’ you can stay outside, so—what’s dat vampire doing?”

  “Hold it just vun second!” said Otto.

  WHOOMPH.

  “—damndamndamn!”

  Detritus watched Otto roll around on the cobbles, screaming.

  “What was dat about?” he said, eventually.

  “He’s taken a picture of you not letting me into the Palace,” said William.

  Detritus, although born above the snow line on some distant mountain, a troll who had never seen a human until he was five years old, nevertheless was a policeman to his craggy, dragging fingertips and reacted accordingly.

  “He can’t do dat,” he said.

  William pulled out his notebook and poised his pencil.

  “Could you explain to my readers exactly why not?” he said.

  Detritus looked around, a little worried.

  “Where are dey?”

  “No, I mean I’m going to write down what you say.”

  Basic policing rushed to Detritus’s aid once again.

  “You can’t do dat,” he said.

  “Then can I write down why I can’t write anyt
hing down?” William said, smiling brightly.

  Detritus reached up and moved a little lever on the side of his helmet. A barely audible whirring noise became fractionally louder. The troll had a helmet with a clockwork fan, to blow air across his silicon brain when overheating threatened to reduce its operating efficiency. Right now he obviously needed a cooler head.

  “Ah. Dis is some kind of politics, right?” he said.

  “Um…maybe. Sorry.”

  Otto had staggered to his feet and was fiddling with the iconograph again.

  Detritus reached a decision. He nodded to a constable.

  “Fiddyment, you take dese…two to Mister Vimes. Dey are not to fall down any steps on der way or any stuff like dat.”

  Mister Vimes, thought William, as they hurried after the constable. All the watchmen called him that. The man had been a knight and was now a duke and a commander, but they called him Mister. And it was Mister, too, the full two syllables, not the everyday unheeded “Mr.”; it was the “mister” you used when you wanted to say things like “put down that crossbow and turn around real slow, mister.” He wondered why.

  William had not been brought up to respect the Watch. They weren’t our kind of people. It was conceded that they were useful, like sheepdogs, because clearly someone had to keep people in order, heavens knew, but only a fool would let a sheepdog sleep in the parlor. The Watch, in other words, were a regrettably necessary subset of the criminal classes, a section of the population informally defined by Lord de Worde as anyone with less than a thousand dollars a year.

  William’s family and everyone they knew also had a mental map of the city that was divided into parts where you found upstanding citizens, and other parts where you found criminals. It had come as a shock to them…no, he corrected himself, it had come as an affront to learn that Vimes operated on a different map. Apparently he’d instructed his men to use the front door when calling on any building, even in broad daylight, when sheer common sense said that they should use the back, just like any other servant.* The man simply had no idea.