The Truth

by Terry Pratchett

  “One of them was Mr. Bendy,” Sacharissa warned. “He wants more work. Not many interesting people are dying. Did you know he attends meetings for fun and very carefully writes down everything that’s said?”

  “Does he do it accurately?”

  “I’m sure he does. He’s exactly that sort of person. But I don’t think we’ve got the space—”

  “Tomorrow morning we’ll go to four pages. Don’t look like that. I’ve got more stuff about Vetinari, and we’ve got, oh, twelve hours to get some paper.”

  “I told you, King won’t sell us any more paper at a decent price,” said Goodmountain.

  “There’s a story right there, then,” said William.

  “I mean—”

  “Yes, I know. I’ve got some stuff to write, and then you and me will go to see him. Oh, and send someone to the semaphore tower, will you? I want to send a clacks to the King of Lancre. I think I met him once.”

  “Clacks cost money. Lots of money.”

  “Do it anyway. We’ll find the money somehow.” William leaned over towards the cellar ladder. “Otto?”

  The vampire emerged to waist height. He was holding a half-dismantled iconograph in his hand.

  “Vot can I do for you?”

  “Can you think of anything extra we can do to sell more papers?”

  “Vot do you vant now? Pictures that jump out of zer page? Pictures zat talk? Pictures vere zer eyes follow you around zer room?”

  “There’s no need to take offense,” said William. “It wasn’t as if I asked for color or anything—”

  “Color?” said the vampire. “Is that all? Color iss eazypeazy. How soon do you vant it?”

  “Can’t be done,” said Goodmountain firmly.

  “Oh, zo you say? Is there somevhere here that makes colored glass?”

  “Yeah, I know the dwarf who runs the stained-glass works in Phedre Road,” said Goodmountain. “They do hundreds of shades, but—”

  “I vish to see samples right now. And of inks, too. You can get colored inks alzo?”

  “That’s easy,” said the dwarf, “but you’d need hundreds of different ones…wouldn’t you?”

  “No, ziz is not so. I vill make you a list of vot I require. I cannot promise an absolutely vunderful job first cat out of zer bag, off course. I mean you should not ask me for zer subtle play of light of autumn leafs or anyzing like zat. But zomething with stronk shades should be fine. Zis vill be fine?”

  “It’d be amazing.”

  “Zank you.”

  William stood up. “And now,” he said, “let’s go and see the King of the Golden River.”

  “I’ve always been puzzled why people call him that,” said Sacharissa. “I mean, there’s no river of gold around here, is there?”

  “Gentlemen.”

  Mr. Slant was waiting in the hall of the empty house. He stood up when the New Firm entered, and clutched his briefcase. He looked as if he was in an unusually bad temper.

  “Where have you been?”

  “Getting a bite, Mr. Slant. You didn’t turn up this morning, and Mr. Tulip gets hungry.”

  “I told you to maintain a very low profile.”

  “Mr. Tulip isn’t good at low profiles. Anyway, it all went off well. You must have heard. Oh, we nearly got killed because you didn’t tell us a lot of stuff, and that’s going to cost you but, hey, who cares about us? What’s the problem?”

  Mr. Slant glared at them.

  “My time is valuable, Mr. Pin. So I will not spin this out. What did you do with the dog?”

  “No one said anything to us about that dog,” said Mr. Tulip, and Mr. Pin knew he’d got the tone wrong.

  “Ah, so you encountered the dog,” said Mr. Slant. “Where is it?”

  “Gone. Ran off. Bit our —ing legs and ran off.”

  Mr. Slant sighed. It was like the wind from an ancient tomb.

  “I did tell you that the Watch has a werewolf on the staff,” he said.

  “Well? So what?” said Mr. Pin.

  “A werewolf would have no difficulty in talking to a dog.”

  “What? You’re telling us people will listen to a dog?” said Mr. Pin.

  “Unfortunately, yes,” said Mr. Slant. “A dog has got personality. Personality counts for a lot. And the legal precedents are clear. In the history of this city, gentlemen, we have put on trial at various times seven pigs, a tribe of rats, four horses, one flea, and a swarm of bees. Last year a parrot was allowed as a prosecution witness in a serious murder case, and I had to arrange a witness protection scheme for it. I believe it is now pretending to be a very large budgerigar a long way away.”

  Mr. Slant shook his head. “Animals, alas, have their place in a court of law. There are all kinds of objections that could be made but the point is, Mr. Pin, that Commander Vimes will build a case on it. He will start questioning…people. He already knows things are not right, but he has to work within the bounds of proof and evidence, and he has neither. If he finds the dog, I think things will unravel.”

  “Slip him a few thousand dollars,” said Mr. Pin. “That always works with watchmen.”

  “I believe that the last person who tried to bribe Vimes still doesn’t have full use of one of his fingers,” said Mr. Slant.

  “We did everything you —ing told us!” shouted Mr. Tulip, pointing a sausage-thick finger.

  Mr. Slant looked him up and down, as if seeing him for the first time.

  “‘Kill the Cook!!!’” he said. “How amusing. However, I understood that we were employing professionals.”

  Mr. Pin had seen this one coming and once again caught Mr. Tulip’s fist in midair, being momentarily lifted off his feet.

  “The envelopes, Mr. Tulip,” he sang. “This man knows things…”

  “Hard to know any —ing thing when you’re dead,” snarled Mr. Tulip.

  “Actually the mind becomes crystal clear,” said Mr. Slant. He stood up, and Mr. Pin noticed how a zombie rises, using pairs of muscles in turn, not so much standing as unfolding upwards.

  “Your…other assistant is still safe?” Slant said.

  “Back down in the cellar, drunk as a skunk,” said Mr. Pin. “I don’t see why we don’t just scrag him right now. He nearly turned and ran when he saw Vetinari. If the man hadn’t been so surprised we’d have been in big trouble. Who’d notice one more corpse in a city like this?”

  “The Watch, Mr. Pin. How many times must I tell you this? They are uncannily good at noticing things.”

  “Mr. Tulip here won’t leave ’em much to notice—” Mr. Pin stopped. “The Watch frighten you that much, do they?”

  “This is Ankh-Morpork,” snapped the lawyer. “We are a very cosmopolitan city. Being dead in Ankh-Morpork is sometimes only an inconvenience, do you understand? We have wizards, we have mediums of all sizes. And bodies do have a habit of turning up. We want nothing that is going to give the Watch a clue, do you understand?”

  “They’d listen to a —ing dead man?” said Mr. Tulip.

  “I don’t see why not. You are,” said the zombie. He relaxed a little. “Anyway, it is always possible that there may be further use for your…colleague. Some further little outing to convince the unconvinced. He is too valuable an asset to…retire just yet.”

  “Yeah, okay. We’ll keep him in a bottle. But we want extra for the dog,” said Mr. Pin.

  “It’s only a dog, Mr. Pin,” said Slant, raising his eyebrows. “Even Mr. Tulip could outthink a dog, I expect.”

  “Got to find the dog first,” said Mr. Pin, stepping smartly in front of his colleague. “Lots of dogs in this town.”

  The zombie sighed again.

  “I can add another five thousand dollars in jewels to your fee,” he said. He held up a hand. “And please don’t insult both of us by saying ‘ten’ automatically. The task is not hard. Lost dogs in this town either end up running with one of the feral packs or begin a new life as a pair of gloves.”

  “I want to know who’s giving me
these orders,” said Mr. Pin. He could feel the weight of the Dis-organizer inside his jacket.

  Mr. Slant looked surprised. “Me, Mr. Pin.”

  “Your clients, I meant.”

  “Oh, really!”

  “This is going to get political,” Mr. Pin persisted. “You can’t fight politics. I’m going to need to know how far we’ve got to run when people find out what happened. And who’s going to protect us if we’re caught.”

  “In this city, gentlemen,” said Mr. Slant, “the facts are never what they seem. Take care of the dog, and…others will look after you. There are plans afoot. Who can say what really happened? People are easily confused, and here I speak as one who has spent centuries in courtrooms. Apparently, they say, a lie can run around the world before the truth has got its boots on. What an obnoxious little phrase, don’t you think? So…do not panic, all will be well. And do not be stupid either. My…clients have long memories and deep pockets. Other killers can be hired. Do you understand me?” He snapped the catches on his case. “Good day to you.”

  The door swung to after him.

  There was a rattling behind Mr. Pin as Mr. Tulip pulled out his set of stylish executive barbecue tools.

  “What are you doing?”

  “That —ing zombie is going to end up on the end of a couple of —ing handy and versatile kebab skewers,” said Mr. Tulip. “An’ then I’m gonna put an edge on this —ing spatula. An’ then…then I’m gonna get medieval on his arse.”

  There were more pressing problems, but this one intrigued Mr. Pin.

  “How, exactly?” he said.

  “I thought maybe a maypole,” said Mr. Tulip reflectively. “An’ then a display of country dancing, land tillage under the three-field system, several plagues, and, if my —ing hand ain’t too tired, the invention of the —ing horse collar.”

  “Sounds good,” said Mr. Pin. “Now let’s find that damn dog.”

  “How we gonna do that?”

  “Intelligently,” said Mr. Pin.

  “I hate that —ing way.”

  He was called King of the Golden River. This was a recognition of his wealth and achievements and the source of his success, which was not quite the classical river of gold. It was a considerable advance on his former nickname, which was Piss Harry.

  Harry King had made his fortune by the careful application of the old adage: where there’s muck there’s brass. There was money to be made out of things that people threw away. Especially the very human things that people threw away.

  The real foundations of his fortune came when he started leaving empty buckets at various hostelries around the city center, especially those that were more than a gutter’s length from the river. He charged a very modest fee to take them away when they were full. It became part of the life of every pub landlord; they’d hear a clank in the middle of the night and turn over in their sleep content in the knowledge that one of Piss Harry’s men was, in a small way, making the world a better-smelling place.

  They didn’t wonder what happened to the full buckets, but Harry King had learned something that can be the key to great riches: there is very little, however disgusting, that isn’t used somewhere in some industry. There are people out there who want large quantities of ammonia and saltpeter. If you can’t sell it to the alchemists then the farmers probably want it. If even the farmers don’t want it then there is nothing, nothing, however gross, that you can’t sell to the tanners.

  Harry felt like the only man in a mining camp who knows what gold looks like.

  He started taking on a whole street at a time, and branched out. In the well-to-do areas the householders paid him, paid him to take away night soil, the by now established buckets, the horse manure, the dustbins, and even the dog muck. Dog muck? Did they have any idea how much the tanners paid for the finest white dog muck? It was like being paid to take away squishy diamonds.

  Harry couldn’t help it. The world fell over itself to give him money. Someone, somewhere, would pay him for a dead horse or two tons of prawns so far beyond their best-before date it couldn’t be seen with a telescope, and the most wonderful part of all was that someone had already paid him to take them away. If anything absolutely failed to find a buyer, not even from the cats-meat men, not even from the tanners, not even from Mr. Dibbler himself, there were the mighty compost heaps downstream of the city, where the volcanic heat of decomposition made fertile soil (“10p a bag, bring your own bag…”) out of everything that was left including, according to rumor, various shadowy businessmen who had come second in a takeover battle (“…brings your dahlias up a treat”).

  He’d kept the wood-pulp-and-rags business closer to home, though, along with the huge vats that contained the golden foundations of his fortune, because it was the only part of his business that his wife, Effie, would talk about. Rumor had it that she had also been behind the removal of the much admired sign over the entrance to his yard, which said: H. King—Taking the Piss Since 1961. Now it read: H. King—Recycling Nature’s Bounty.

  A small door within the large gates was opened by a troll. Harry was very forward-looking when it came to employing the nonhuman races, and had been among the first employers in the city to give a job to a troll. As far as organic substances were concerned, they had no sense of smell.

  “Yus?”

  “I’d like to speak to Mr. King, please.”

  “What abarht?”

  “I want to buy a considerable amount of paper from him. Tell him it’s Mr. de Worde.”

  “Right.”

  The door slammed shut. They waited. After a few minutes the door opened again.

  “Der King will see you now,” the troll announced.

  And so they were led into the yard of a man who, rumor said, was stockpiling used paper hankies against the day somebody found a way of extracting silver from bogeys.

  On either side of the door huge black Rottweilers flung themselves against the bars of their day cages. Everyone knew Harry let them have the run of the yard at night. He made sure that everyone knew. And any nocturnal miscreant would have to be really good with dogs unless they wanted to end up as a few pounds of Tanners Grade 1 (White).

  The King of the Golden River had his office in a two-story shed that overlooked the yard, from where he could survey the steaming mounds and cisterns of his empire.

  Even half-hidden by his big desk, Harry King was an enormous man, pink and shiny-faced, with a few strands of hair teased across his head; it was hard to imagine him not in shirtsleeves and braces, even when he wasn’t, or smoking a huge cigar, which he’d never been seen without. Perhaps it was some kind of defense against the odors which were, in a way, his stock in trade.

  “Evenin’, lads,” he said amiably. “What can I do for you? As if I didn’t know.”

  “Do you remember me, Mr. King?” said William.

  Harry nodded. “You’re Lord de Worde’s son, right? You put a piece in that letter of yourn last year when our Daphne got wed, right? My Effie was that impressed, all those nobs reading about our Daphne.”

  “It’s a rather bigger letter now, Harry.”

  “Yes, I did hear about that,” said the fat man. “Some of ’em’s already turnin’ up in our collections. Useful stuff, I’m getting the lads to store it sep’rate.”

  His cigar shifted from one side of his mouth to the other. Harry could not read or write, a fact which had never stopped him besting those who could. He employed hundreds of workers to sort through the garbage; it was cheap enough to employ a few more who could sort through words.

  “Mr. King—” William began.

  “I ain’t daft, lads,” said Harry. “I know why you’re here. But business is business. You know how it is.”

  “We won’t have a business without paper!” Goodmountain burst out.

  The cigar shifted again.

  “And you’d be—?”

  “This is Mr. Goodmountain,” said William. “My printer.”

  “Dwarf, eh?” said
Harry, looking Goodmountain up and down. “Nothing against dwarfs, me, but you ain’t good sorters. Gnolls don’t cost much but the grubby little buggers eat half the rubbish. Trolls are okay. They stop with me ’cos I pays ’em well. Golems is best—they’ll sort stuff all day and all night. Worth their weight in gold, which is bloody near what they want payin’ these days.” The cigar began another journey back across the mouth. “Sorry, lads. A deal’s a deal. Wish I could help you. Sold right out of paper. Can’t.”

  “You’re knocking us back, just like that?” said Goodmountain.

  Harry gave him a narrow-eyed look through the haze.

  “You talking to me about knocking back? Don’t know what a tosheroon is, do you?” he said. The dwarf shrugged.

  “Yes. I do,” said William. “There’s several meanings, but I think you’re referring to a big caked ball of mud and coins, such as you might find in some crevice in an old drain where the water forms an eddy. They can be quite valuable.”

  “What? You’ve got hands on you like a girl,” said Harry, so surprised that the cigar momentarily drooped. “How come you know that?”

  “I like words, Mr. King.”

  “I started out as a muckraker when I was three,” said Harry, pushing his chair back. “Found me first tosheroon on day one. O’course, one of the big kids nicked it off me right there. And you tell me about being knocked back? But I had a nose for the job even then. Then I—”

  They sat and listened, William more patiently than Goodmountain. It was fascinating, anyway, if you had the right kind of mind, although he knew a lot of the story; Harry King told it at every opportunity.

  Young Harry King had been a mudlark with vision, combing the banks of the river and even the surface of the turbid Ankh itself for lost coins, bits of metal, useful lumps of coal, anything that had some value somewhere. By the time he was eight he was employing other kids. Whole stretches of the river belonged to him. Other gangs kept away, or were taken over. Harry wasn’t a bad fighter, and he could afford to employ those who were better.

  And so it had gone on, the ascent of the King through horse manure sold by the bucket (guaranteed well stamped down) to rags and bones and scrap metal and household dust and the famous buckets, where the future really was golden. It was a kind of history of civilization, but seen from the bottom looking up.