The Truth
Page 25
“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.
“What?” said Boddony. “You mean the roads were higher than the pavements?”
“Oh, yes,” said Sacharissa, following him into the gap.
“What happens if a horse pi…if a horse made water on the street?”
“I’m sure I don’t know,” sniffed Sacharissa.
“How did people cross the street?”
“Ladders.”
“Oh, come on, miss!”
“No, they used ladders. And a few tunnels. It wasn’t going to be for very long. And then it was simpler just to put heavy slabs over the old pavements. And so there’s these—well, forgotten spaces.”
“There’s rats up here,” said Dozy, who was wandering into the distance.
“Hot damn!” said Boddony. “Anyone brought the cutlery? Only joking, miss. Hey, what do we have here…?”
He hacked at some planks, which crumbled away under the blows.
“Someone didn’t want to use a ladder,” he said, peering into another hole.
“It goes right under the street?” said Sacharissa.
“Looks like it. Must have been allergic to horses.”
“And…er…you can find your way?”
“I’m a dwarf. We are underground. Dwarf. Underground. What was your question again?”
“You’re not proposing to hack through to the cellars of the Inquirer, are you?” said Sacharissa.
“Who, us?”
“You are, aren’t you.”
“We wouldn’t do anything like that.”
“Yes, but you are, aren’t you.”
“That’d be tantamount to breaking in, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes, and that’s what you’re planning to do, isn’t it.”
Boddony grinned. “Well…a little bit. Just to have a look round. You know.”
“Good.”
“What? You don’t mind?”
“You’re not going to kill anyone, are you?”
“Miss, we don’t do that sort of thing!”
Sacharissa looked a little disappointed. She’d been a respectable young woman for some time. In certain people, that means there’s a lot of dammed-up disreputability just waiting to burst out.
“Well…perhaps just make them a bit sorry, then?”
“Yes, we can probably do that.”
The dwarfs were already creeping along the tunnel at the other side of the buried street. By the light of their torches she saw old frontages, bricked-up doors, windows filled with rubble.
“This should be about the right place,” said Boddony, pointing to a faint rectangle filled with more low-grade brick.
“You’re just going to break in?” said Sacharissa.
“We’ll say we were lost,” said Boddony.
“Lost underground? Dwarfs?”
“All right, we’ll say we’re drunk. People’ll believe that. Okay, lads…”
The rotten bricks fell away. Light streamed out. In the cellar beyond, a man looked up from his desk, mouth open.
Sacharissa squinted through the dust.
“You?” she said.
“Oh, it’s you, miss,” said Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler. “Hello, boys. Am I glad to see you…”
The canting crew were just leaving when Gaspode arrived at the gallop. He took one look at the other dogs that were huddled around the fire, then dived under the trailing folds of Foul Ole Ron’s dreadful coat and whined.
It took some time for the whole of the crew to understand what was going on. These were, after all, people who could argue and expectorate and creatively misunderstand their way through a three-hour argument after someone says “Good morning.”
It was the Duck Man who finally got the message.
“These men are hunting terriers?” he said.
“Right! It was the bloody newspaper! You can’t bloody trust people who write in newspapers!”
“They threw these doggies in the river?”
“Right!” said Gaspode. “It’s all gone fruit-shaped!”
“Well, we can protect you too.”
“Yeah, but I’ve got to be out and about! I’m a figure in this town! I can’t lie low! I need a disguise! Look, we could be looking at fifty dollars here, right? But you need me to get it!”
The crew were impressed with this. In their cashless economy, fifty dollars was a fortune.
“Blewitt,” said Foul Ole Ron.
“A dog’s a dog,” said Arnold Sideways. “On account of bein’ called a dog.”
“Gaarck!” crowed Coffin Henry.
“That’s true,” said the Duck Man. “A false beard isn’t going to work.”
“Well, your huge brains had better come up with somethin’, ’cos I’m staying put until you do,” said Gaspode. “I’ve seen these men. They are not nice.”
There was a rumble from Altogether Andrews. His face flickered as the various personalities reshuffled themselves, and then settled into the waxy bulges of Lady Hermione.
“We could disguise him,” she said.
“What could you disguise a dog as?” said the Duck Man. “A cat?”
“Ae dog is not just ae dog,” said Lady Hermione. “Ai think Ai have an idea…”
The dwarfs were in a huddle when William got back. The epicenter of the huddle, its huddlee, turned out to be Mr. Dibbler, who looked just like anyone would look if they’re being harangued. William had never seen anyone to whom the word “harangued” could be so justifiably applied. It meant someone who had been talked at by Sacharissa for twenty minutes.
“Is there a problem?” he said. “Hello, Mr. Dibbler…”
“Tell me, William,” said Sacharissa, while pacing slowly around Dibbler’s chair, “if stories were food, what kind of food would be Goldfish Eats Cat?”
“What?” William stared at Dibbler. Realization dawned. “I think it would be a sort of long, thin kind of food,” he said.
“Filled with rubbish of suspicious origin?”
“Now, there’s no need for anyone to take that tone—” Dibbler began, and then subsided under Sacharissa’s glare.
“Yes, but rubbish that’s sort of attractive. You’d keep on eating it even though you wished you didn’t,” said William. “What’s going on here?”
“Look, I didn’t want to do it,” Dibbler protested.
“Do what?” said William.
“Mr. Dibbler’s been writing those stories for the Inquirer,” said Sacharissa.
“I mean, no one believes what they read in the paper, right?” said Dibbler.
William pulled up a chair and sat straddling it, resting his arms on the back.
“So, Mr. Dibbler…when did you start pissing in the fountain of Truth?”
“William!” snapped Sacharissa.
“Look, times haven’t been good, see?” said Dibbler. “And I thought, this news business…well, people like to hear about stuff from a long way away, you know, like in the Almanacke—”
“‘Plague of Giant Weasels in Hersheba’?” said William.
“That’s the style. Well, I thought…it doesn’t sort of matter if they’re, you know, really true…I mean…” William’s glassy grin was beginning to make Dibbler uncomfortable. “I mean…they’re nearly true, aren’t they? Everyone knows that sort of thing happens…”
“You didn’t come to me,” said William.
“Well, of course not. Everyone knows you’re a bit…a bit unimaginative about that sort of thing.”
“You mean I like to know that things have actually happened?”
“That’s it, yes. Mr. Carney says people won’t notice the difference anyway. He doesn’t like you very much, Mr. de Worde.”
“He’s got wandering hands,” said Sacharissa. “You can’t trust a man like that.
”
William pulled the latest copy of the Inquirer towards him and picked a story at random.
“‘Man Stolen by Demons,’” he said. “This refers to Mr. Ronnie ‘Trust Me’ Begholder, known to owe Chrysoprase the troll more than two thousand dollars, last seen buying a very fast horse?”
“Well?”
“Where do the demons fit in?”
“Well, he could’ve been stolen by demons,” said Dibbler. “It could happen to anybody.”
“What you mean, then, is that there is no evidence that he wasn’t stolen by demons?”
“That way people can make up their own minds,” said Dibbler. “That’s what Mr. Carney says. People should be allowed to choose, he said.”
“To choose what’s true?”
“He doesn’t clean his teeth properly, either,” said Sacharissa. “I mean, I’m not one of those people who think cleanliness is next to godliness, but there are limits.”*
Dibbler shook his head sadly. “I’m losin’ my touch,” he said. “Imagine…me, working for someone? I must’ve been mad. It’s the cold weather getting to me, that’s what it is. Even…wages”—he said the word with a shudder—“looked attractive. D’you know,” he added, in a horrified voice, “he was telling me what to do? Next time I’ll have a quiet lie-down until the feeling goes away.”
“You are an immoral opportunist, Mr. Dibbler,” said William.
“It’s worked so far.”
“Can you sell some advertising for us?” said Sacharissa.
“I’m not going to work for anyone ag—”
“On commission,” snapped Sacharissa.
“What? You want to employ him?” said William.
“Why not? You can tell as many lies as you like if it’s advertising. That’s allowed,” said Sacharissa. “Please? We need the money!”
“Commission, eh?” said Dibbler, rubbing his unshaven chin. “Like…fifty percent for you two and fifty percent for me, too?”
“We’ll discuss it, shall we?” said Goodmountain, patting him on the shoulder. Dibbler winced. When it came to hard bargaining, dwarfs were diamond-tipped.
“Have I got a choice?” he mumbled.
Goodmountain leaned forward. His beard was bristling. He wasn’t currently holding a weapon but Dibbler could see, as it were, the great big ax that wasn’t there.