Going Postal (26 page)

“Do you think you’re playing a
game
with them? Ringing doorbells and running away? Gilt’s aiming to become Patrician one day, everyone says so. And suddenly there’s this…this
idiot
in a big gold hat reminding everyone what a mess the clacks is, poking fun at it, getting the Post Office working again—”

“Hang on, hang on,” Moist managed. “This is a city, not some cow town somewhere! People don’t kill business rivals just like that, do they?”

“In Ankh-Morpork? You really think so? Oh,
he
won’t kill you. He won’t even bother with the formality of going through the Guild of Assassins. You’ll just die. Just like my brother. And he’ll be behind it.”

“Your brother?” said Moist. On the far side of the huge room, the evening’s fight began with a well-executed Looking-At-Me-In-A-Funny-Way, earning two points and a broken tooth.

“He and some of the people who used to work on the Trunk before it was pirated—
pirated
, Mr. Lipwig—were going to start up a new Trunk,” said Miss Dearheart, leaning forward. “They’d scraped up funding somehow for a few demonstration towers. It was going to be more than four times as fast as the old system, they were going to do all kinds of clever things with the coding, it was going to be wonderful. A lot of people gave them their savings, people who’d worked for my father. Most of the good engineers left when my father lost the Trunk, you see. They couldn’t stand Gilt and his bunch of looters. My brother was going to get all our money back.”

“You’ve lost me there,” said Moist. An ax landed in the table, and vibrated.

Miss Dearheart stared at Moist and blew a stream of smoke past his ear.

“My
father
is Robert Dearheart,” she said distantly. “He was chairman of the
original
Grand Trunk company. The clacks was his vision. Hell, he designed half of the mechanisms in the towers. And he got together with a group of other engineers, all serious men with slide rules, and they borrowed money and mortgaged their houses and built a local system and poured the money back in and started building the Trunk. There was a
lot
of money coming in, every city wanted to be in on it, everyone was going to be rich. We had stables. I had a horse. Admittedly, I didn’t like it much. But I used to feed it and watch it run about or whatever it is they do. Everything was going fine, and suddenly he got this letter and there were meetings and they said he was lucky not to go to prison for, oh, I don’t know, something complicated and legal. But the clacks was still making huge amounts. Can you understand that? Reacher Gilt and his gang acted, oh yes, friendly, but were buying up the mortgages and controlling banks and moving numbers around and they pulled the Grand Trunk out from under us like
thieves
. All they want to do is make money. They don’t
care
about the Trunk. They’ll run it into the ground and make more money by selling it. When Dad was in charge, people were
proud
of what they did. And because they were engineers, they made sure that the towers
worked
properly, all the time. They even had what they called ‘walking towers,’ prefabricated ones that packed onto a couple of big carts so that if a tower was having serious trouble they could set this one up alongside and start it up and take over the traffic without dropping a single code. They were
proud
of it, everyone was, they were proud to be a part of it!”

“
You should’ve been there. You should’ve seen it!
” Moist said to himself. He hadn’t meant to say it out loud.

Across the room, a man hit another man with his own leg and picked up seven points.

“Yes,” said Miss Dearheart. “You should have. And three months ago my brother John raised enough to start a rival to the Trunk. That took some doing. Gilt has got tentacles everywhere. Well, John ended up dead in a field. They said he hadn’t clipped his safety rope on. He always did. And now my father just sits and stares at the wall. He even lost his workshop when everything got taken away. We lost our house, of course. Now we live with my aunt in Dolly Sisters. That’s what we’ve come to. When Reacher Gilt talks about freedom he means his, not anyone else’s. And now
you
pop up, Mr. Moist von Lipwig, all shiny and new, running around doing everything at once. Why?”

“Vetinari offered me the job, that’s all,” said Moist.

“Why did you take it?”

“It was a job for life.”

She stared at Moist so hard that he began to feel uncomfortable.

“Well, you’ve managed to get a table at Le Foie Heureux at a few hours’ notice,” she conceded, as a knife struck a beam behind her. “Are you still going to lie if I ask you how?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Good. Shall we go?”

A
LITTLE PRESSURE LAMP
burned in the stuffy snugness of the locker room, its glow a globe of unusual brilliance. In the center of it, magnifying glass in hand, Stanley examined his stamps.

This was…heaven. Peas are known for their thoroughness, and Stanley was conscientious in the extreme. Mr. Spools, slightly unnerved by his smile, had given him all the test sheets and faulty pages, and Stanley was carefully cataloguing them—how many of each, what the errors were, everything.

A little tendril of guilt was curling through his mind: This
was
better than pins, it really was. There could be no
end
to stamps. You could put anything on them. They were amazing. They could move letters around and then you could stick them in a book, all neat. You wouldn’t get “pinhead’s thumb,” either.

He’d read about this feeling in the pin magazines. They said you could come unpinned. Girls and marriage were sometimes mentioned in this context. Sometimes an ex-head would sell off his whole collection, just like that. Or at some pin-meet someone would suddenly throw all their pins in the air and run out, shouting, “Aargh, they’re just pins!” Up until now, such a thing had been unthinkable to Stanley.

He picked up his little sack of unsorted pins, and stared at it. A few days ago, the mere thought of an evening with his pins would have given him a lovely, warm, comfortable feeling inside. But now it was time to put away childish pins.

Something screamed.

It was harsh, guttural, it was malice and hunger given a voice. Small, huddling, shrewlike creatures had once heard sounds like that, circling over the swamps.

After a moment of ancient terror had subsided, Stanley crept over and opened the door.

“H-hello?” he called in the cavernous darkness of the hall. “Is there anyone there?”

There was, fortunately, no reply, but there was some scrabbling up near the roof.

“We’re closed, you know,” he quavered. “But we’re open again at seven in the morning for a range of stamps and a wonderful deal on mail to Pseudopolis.” His voice slowed and his brow creased as he tried to remember everything Mr. Lipwig had told them earlier. “Remember, we may not be the fastest but we always get there. Why not write to your old granny?”

“I ate my grandmother,” growled a voice from high in the darkness. “I gnawed her bones.”

Stanley coughed. He had not been trained in the art of salesmanship.

“Ah,” he said. “Er…perhaps an aunt, then?”

He wrinkled his nose. Why was there the stink of lamp oil in the air?

“Hello?” he said again.

Something dropped out of the dark, bounced off his shoulder, and landed on the floor with a wet thud. Stanley reached down, felt around, and found a pigeon. At least, he found about half a pigeon. It was still warm, and very sticky.

M
R
. G
RYLE
sat on a beam high above the hall. His stomach was on fire.

It was no good, old habits died too hard. They were bred in the bone. Something warm and feathery fluttered up in front of you and
of course
you snapped at it. Ankh-Morpork had pigeons roosting on every gutter, cornice, and statue. Not even the resident gargoyles could keep them down. He’d had six before he sailed in through the broken dome, and then another huge, warm, feathery cloud had risen up, and a red haze had simply dropped in front of his eyes.

They were so
tasty
. You couldn’t stop at one! And, five minutes later, you remembered why you should have.

These were feral, urban birds that lived on what they could find on the streets—Ankh-Morpork streets, at that. They were bobbing, cooing plague pits. You might as well eat a dog-turd burger and wash it down with a jumbo cup of septic tank.

Mr. Gryle groaned. Best to finish the job, get out of here, and go and throw up over a busy street. He dropped his oil bottle into the dark and fumbled for his matches. His species had come to fire late, because nests burned too easily, but it did have its uses…

F
LAME BLOSSOMED
, high up at the far end of the hall. It dropped from the beams and landed on the stacks of letters. There was a whoomph as the oil caught fire; blue runnels of flame began to climb the walls.

Stanley looked down. A few feet away, lit by the fire crawling across the letters, was a figure curled up on the floor. The golden hat with wings lay next to it.

Stanley looked up, eyes glowing red in the firelight, as a figure swooped from the rafters and sped toward him, mouth open.

And that’s when it all went wrong for Mr. Gryle, because Stanley had one of his Little Moments.

A
TTITUDE WAS EVERYTHING
. Moist had studied attitude. Some of the old nobility had it. It was the total lack of any doubt that things would go the way they expected them to go.

The maître d’ ushered them to their table without a moment’s hesitation.

“Can you really afford this on a government salary, Mr. Lipwig?” said Miss Dearheart as they sat down. “Or are we going to exit via the kitchens?”

“I believe I have adequate funds,” said Moist.

He probably hadn’t, he knew. A restaurant that has a waiter even for the mustard stacks up the prices. But right now Moist wasn’t worrying about the bill. There were ways to deal with bills, and it was best to deal with them on a full stomach.

They ordered appetizers that probably cost more than the weekly food bill for an average man. There was no point in looking for the cheapest thing on the menu. The cheapest thing theoretically existed but somehow, no matter how hard you stared, didn’t quite manage to be there. On the other hand, there were a lot of most expensive things.

“Are the boys settling in okay?” said Miss Dearheart.

The boys
, Moist thought. “Oh, yes. Anghammarad has really taken to it. A natural postman,” he said.

“Well, he’s had practice.”

“What’s that box he’s got riveted to his arm?”

“That? A message he’s got to deliver. Not the original baked-clay tablet, I gather. He’s had to make copies two or three times and the bronze lasts hardly any time at all, to a golem. It’s a message to King Het of Thut from his astrologers on their holy mountain, telling him that the Goddess of the Sea was angry and what ceremonies he’d have to do to placate her.”

“Didn’t that slide into the sea anyway? I thought he said—”

“Yeah, yeah, Anghammarad got there too late and was swept away by the ferocious tidal wave, and the island sank.”

“So…?” said Moist.

“So what?” said Miss Dearheart.

“So…he doesn’t think that delivering it now might be a bit on the tardy side?”

“No. He doesn’t. You’re not seeing it like a golem. They believe the universe is doughnut-shaped.”

“Would that be a ring doughnut or a jam doughnut?” said Moist.

“Ring, definitely, but don’t push for further culinary details, because I can see you’ll try to make a joke of it. They think it has no start or finish. We just keep going round and round, but we don’t have to make the same decisions every time.”

“Like getting an angel the hard way,” said Moist.

“What do you mean?” said Miss Dearheart.

“Er…he’s waiting until the whole tidal-wave business comes around again and this time he’ll get there earlier and do it right?”

“Yes. Don’t point out all the flaws in the idea. It works for him.”

“He’s going to wait for millions and millions of years?” said Moist.

“
That’s
not a flaw, not to a golem. That’s only a matter of time. They don’t get bored. They repair themselves and they’re very hard to shatter. They survive under the sea or in red-hot lava. He might be able to do it, who knows? In the meantime, he keeps himself busy. Just like you, Mr. Lipwig. You’ve been
very
busy—”

She froze, staring over his shoulder. He saw her right hand scrabble frantically among the cutlery and grab a knife.

“That bastard has just walked into the place!” she hissed. “Reacher Gilt! I’ll just kill him and join you for the pudding…”

“You can’t do that!” hissed Moist.

“Oh? Why not?”

“You’re using the wrong knife! That’s for the fish! You’ll get into trouble!”

She glared at him, but her hand relaxed, and something like a smile appeared on her face.

“They don’t have a knife for stabbing rich, murdering bastards?” she said.

“They bring it to the table when you order one,” said Moist urgently. “Look, this isn’t the Drum, they don’t just throw the body into the river! They’ll call the Watch! Get a grip. Not on the knife! And get ready to run.”

“Why?”

“Because I forged his signature on Grand Trunk notepaper to get us in here, that’s why.”

Moist turned to look around at the great man in the flesh for the first time. He
was
great, a bear-shaped man, in a frock coat big enough for two, and a gold-braid waistcoat. And he had a cockatoo on his shoulder, although a waiter was hurrying forward with a shiny brass perch and, presumably, the seed-and-nut menu.

There was a party of well-dressed people with Gilt, and as they progressed across the room the whole place began to revolve around the big man, gold being very dense and having a gravity all of its own. Waiters bustled and groveled and did unimportant things with an air of great importance, and it was probably only a matter of minutes before one of them told Gilt that his other guests had been seated. But Moist was scanning the rest of the room for the—ah, there they were, two of them. What was it about hired muscle that made it impossible to get a suit to fit?