“Very well,” said Mr. Slant. “And the imp?”
“It goes with us. We get caught, it gets caught. We die mysteriously, then…some people find out about things. When we are safely away…you’re in no position to argue, Slant.” Mr. Pin shuddered. “I am not having a good day!”
Mr. Slant pulled open a desk drawer and tossed three small velvet bags onto the leather top. Mr. Pin mopped his brow with a handkerchief.
“Take a look at ’em, Mr. Tulip.”
There was a pause while both men watched Mr. Tulip pour the gems into one enormous palm. He scrutinized several through an eyeglass. He sniffed at them. He gingerly licked one or two.
Then he picked four out of the heap and tossed them back to the lawyer.
“You think I’m some kind of a —ing idiot?” he said.
“Don’t even think of arguing,” said Mr. Pin.
“Perhaps the jewelers made a mistake,” said Mr. Slant.
“Yeah?” said Mr. Pin. His hand darted into his jacket again, but this time came out holding a weapon.
Mr. Slant looked into the muzzle of a spring-gonne. It was technically and legally a crossbow, in that human strength compressed the spring, but it had been reduced by patient technology to a point where it was more or less a pipe with a handle and a trigger. Anyone caught with one by the Assassins’ Guild, it was rumored, would find its ability to be hidden on the human body tested to extremes; any city Watch that found one used against them would see to it that the offender’s feet did not touch the ground, but instead swung gently as the breeze pushed them around.
There must have been a switch in this desk, too. A door flew open and two men burst in, one armed with two long knives, one with a crossbow.
It was quite horrible, what Mr. Tulip did to them.
It was, in its way, a kind of skill. When an armed man runs into a room in the knowledge that there is trouble, he needs a fraction of a second to assess, to decide, to calculate, to think. Mr. Tulip didn’t need a fraction of a second. He didn’t think. His hands moved by themselves.
It required, even to the calculating eyes of Mr. Slant, a mental action replay. And even in the slow-mo of horror, it was hard to see Mr. Tulip grab the nearest chair and swing it. At the end of the blur two men lay unconscious, one with an arm twisted in a disconcerting way, and a knife was shuddering in the ceiling.
Mr. Pin hadn’t turned around. He kept the gonne pointed at the zombie. But he produced from a pocket a small cigarette lighter in the shape of a dragon, and then Mr. Slant…Mr. Slant, who crackled when he walked, and smelled of dust…Mr. Slant saw, wrapped around the evil little bolt that just projected from the tube, a wad of cotton.
Without taking his eyes off the lawyer, Mr. Pin applied the flame. The cloth flared. And Mr. Slant was very dry indeed.
“This is a bad thing I’m about to do,” he said, as if hypnotized. “But I done so many bad things, this one’ll hardly count. It’s like…a killing is a big thing, but another killing, that’s kind of half the size. You know? So it’s, like, when you’ve done twenty killings, they barely notice, on average. But…it’s a nice day today, the birds is singing, there’s stuff like…kittens and stuff, and the sun is shining off the snow, bringin’ the promise of Spring to come, with flowers, and fresh grass, and more kittens and hot summer days an’ the gentle kiss of the rain and wonderful clean things which you won’t ever see if you don’t give us what’s in that drawer ’cos you’ll burn like a torch you double-dealing twisty dried-up cheating son of a bitch!”
Mr. Slant scrabbled in the drawer and threw down another velvet bag. Glancing nervously at his partner, who’d never even mentioned kittens before except in the same sentence as “water barrel,” Mr. Tulip took it and examined the contents.
“Rubies,” he said. “—ing good ones.”
“Now go away from here,” rasped Mr. Slant. “Right away. Never come back. I’ve never heard of you. I’ve never seen you.”
He stared at the spluttering flame.
Mr. Slant had faced many bad things in the last few hundred years, but right now nothing seemed more menacing than Mr. Pin. Or more erratically deranged, either. The man was swaying, and his gaze kept flickering into the shadowy corners of the room.
Mr. Tulip shook his partner’s shoulder.
“Let’s —ing scrag him and go?” he suggested.
Pin blinked.
“Right,” he said, appearing to return to his own head. “Right.” He glanced at the zombie. “I think I shall let you live today,” he said, blowing out the flame. “Tomorrow…who knows?”
It wasn’t a bad threat, but somehow his heart wasn’t in it.
Then the New Firm had gone.
Mr. Slant sat down and stared at the closed door. It was clear to him, and a dead man has experience in these matters, that his two armed clerks, veterans of many a legal battle, were beyond help. Mr. Tulip was an expert.
He took a sheet of writing paper from a drawer, wrote a few words in block letters, sealed it in an envelope, and sent for another clerk.
“Have arrangements made,” he said, when the man stared at his fallen colleagues. “And then take this to de Worde.”
“Which one, sir?”
For a moment Mr. Slant had forgotten that point.
“Lord de Worde,” he said. “Definitely not the other one.”
William de Worde turned a page in his notebook and continued to scribble. The crew were watching him as if he was a public entertainment.
“That’s a grand gift you have there, sur,” said Arnold Sideways. “It does the heart good to see the pencil waggling like that. I wish I had the knowing of it, but I’ve never been mechanical.”
“Would you care for a cup of tea?” said the Duck Man.
“You drink tea down here?”
“Of course. Why not? What kind of people do you think we are?” The Duck Man held up a blackened teapot and a rusty mug.
It was probably a good moment to be polite, thought William. Besides, the water would have been boiled, wouldn’t it?
“No milk, though,” he said quickly. He could imagine what the milk would be like.
“Ah, I said you were a gentleman,” said the Duck Man, pouring a tarry brown liquid into the mug. “Milk in tea is an abomination.” He picked up, with a dainty gesture, a plate and a pair of tongs. “Slice of lemon?” he added.
“Lemon? You have lemon?”
“Oh, even Mr. Ron here would rather wash under his arms than have anything but lemon in his tea,” said the Duck Man, plopping a slice into William’s mug.
“And four sugars,” said Arnold Sideways.
William took a deep draught of the tea. It was thick and stewed, but it was also sweet and hot. And slightly lemony. All in all, he considered, it could have been much worse.
“Yes, we’re very fortunate when it comes to slices of lemon,” said the Duck Man, busily fussing over the tea things. “Why, it is indeed a bad day when we can’t find two or three slices floating down the river.”
William stared fixedly at the river wall.
Spit or swallow, he thought, the eternal conundrum.
“Are you all right, Mr. de Worde?”
“Mmf.”
“Too much sugar?”
“Mmf.”
“Not too hot?”
William gratefully sprayed the tea in the direction of the river.
“Ah!” he said. “Yes! Too hot! That’s what it was! Too hot! Lovely tea but—too hot! I’ll just put the rest down here by my foot to cool down, shall I?”
He snatched up his pencil and pad.
“So…er, Wuffles, which man was it that you bit on the leg?”
Wuffles barked.
“He bit all of them,” said the voice of Deep Bone. “When you’re biting, why stop?”
“Would you know them if you bit them again?”
“He says he would. He says the big man tasted of…you know…” Deep Bone paused. “Like a…wossname…big, big bowl with
hot water and soap in it.”
“A bath?”
Wuffles growled.
“That’d…be the word,” said Deep Bone. “An’ the other one smelled of cheap hair oil. And the one who looked like G—like Lord Vetinari, he smelled of wine.”
“Wine?”
“Yes. Wuffles also says he’d like to apologize for biting you just now, but he got carried away with the recollection. We—that is to say, dogs have very physical memories, if you see what I mean.”
William nodded, and rubbed his leg. The description of the invasion of the Oblong Office had been carried out in a succession of yelps, barks, and growls, with Wuffles running around in circles and snapping at his own tail until he bumped into William’s ankle.
“And Ron’s been carrying him around in his coat ever since?”
“No one bothers Foul Ole Ron,” said Deep Bone.
“I believe you,” said William. He nodded at Wuffles.
“I want to get an iconograph of him,” he said. “This is…amazing stuff. But we must have a picture to prove I’ve really talked to Wuffles. Well…via an interpreter, obviously, I wouldn’t want people to think this is one of the Inquirer’s stupid ‘talking dog’ stories…”
There was some muttering amongst the crew. The request was not being favorably received.
“This is a select neighborhood, you know,” said the Duck Man. “We don’t allow just anybody down here.”
“But there’s a path running right under the bridge!” said William. “Anyone could walk right past!”
“Werll, yerss,” said Coffin Henry. “They could.” He coughed and spat with great expertise into the fire. “Only they don’t no more.”
“Bugrit,” explained Foul Ole Ron. “Choking a tinker? Garn! I told ’em. Millennium hand and shrimp!”
“Then you’d better come back to the office with me,” said William. “After all, you’ve been carrying him around while you’ve been selling the papers, haven’t you?”
“Too dangerous now,” said Deep Bone.
“Would it be less dangerous for another fifty dollars?” said William.
“Another fifty dollars?” said Arnold Sideways. “That’ll make it fifteen dollars!”
“A hundred dollars,” said William wearily. “You do realize, don’t you, that this is in the public interest?”
The crew craned their necks.
“Don’t see anyone watching,” said Coffin Henry.
William stepped forward, quite accidentally knocking over his tea.
“Come on, then,” he said.
Mr. Tulip was beginning to worry now. This was unusual. In the area of worry, he had tended to be the cause rather than the recipient. But Mr. Pin was not acting right, and since Mr. Pin was the man who did the thinking, this was a matter of some concern. Mr. Tulip was good at thinking in split seconds, and when it came to art appreciation he could easily think in centuries, but he was not happy over middle distances. He needed Mr. Pin for that.
But Mr. Pin was talking to himself, and kept staring at shadows.
“We’ll be heading off now?” said Mr. Tulip, in the hope of directing matters. “We’ve got the —ing payment with a —ing big bonus, no —ing point in hanging around?”
He was also worried about the way Mr. Pin had acted with the —ing lawyer. It wasn’t like him to point a weapon at someone and then not use it. The New Firm didn’t go round threatening people. They were the threat. All that —ing stuff about “letting you live for today”…that was amateur stuff.
“I said, are we heading—?”
“What do you think happens to people when they die, Tulip?”
Mr. Tulip was taken aback.
“What kind of —ing question is that? You know what happens!”
“Do I?”
“Certainly. Remember when we had to leave that guy in that —ing barn and it was a week before we got to bury him properly? Remember how his—”
“I don’t mean bodies!”
“Ah. Religion stuff, then?”
“Yes!”
“I never worry about that —ing stuff.”
“Never?”
“Never —ing give it a thought. I’ve got my potato.”
Then Mr. Tulip found that he’d walked a few feet alone, because Mr. Pin had stopped dead.
“Potato?”
“Oh, yeah. Keep it on a string round my neck.” Mr. Tulip tapped his huge chest.
“And that’s religious?”
“Well, yeah. When you die, if you’ve got your potato, everything will be okay.”
“What religion is that?”
“Dunno. Never ran across it outside our village. I was only a kid. I mean, it’s like gods, right? When you’re a kid, they say ‘That’s God, that is.’ Then you grow up and you find there’s —ing millions of ’em. Same with religion.”
“And it’s all okay if you have a potato when you die?”
“Yep. You’re allowed to come back and have another life.”
“Evenif…” Mr. Pinswallowed, for he was in territory that had never before existed on his internal atlas, “…even if you’ve done things that people might think were bad?”
“Like chopping up people and —ing shovin’ ’em off cliffs?”
“Yeah, that kind of thing…”
Mr. Tulip sniffed, causing his nose to flash. “We-ell, it’s okay so long as you’re really —ing sorry about it.”
Mr. Pin was amazed, and a little suspicious. But he could feel things…catching up. There were faces in the darkness and voices on the cusp of hearing. He dared not turn his head now, in case he saw anything behind him.
You could buy a sack of potatoes for a dollar.
“It works?” he said.
“Sure. Back home people’d been doing it for hundreds of —ing years. They wouldn’t do it if it didn’t —ing work, would they?”
“Where was that?”
Mr. Tulip tried to concentrate on this question, but there were many scabs in his memory.
“There was…forests,” he said. “And…bright candles,” he muttered. “An’…secrets,” he added, staring into nothing.
“And potatoes?”
Mr. Tulip came back to the here and now.
“Yeah, them,” he said. “Always lots of —ing potatoes. If you’ve got your potato, it will be all right.”
“But…I thought you had to pray in deserts, and go to a temple every day, and sing songs, and give stuff to the poor…?”
“Oh, you can do all that too, sure,” said Mr. Tulip. “Just so long as you’ve got your —ing potato.”
“And you come back alive?” said Mr. Pin, still trying to find the small print.
“Sure. No point in coming back dead. Who’d notice the —ing difference?”
Mr. Pin opened his mouth to reply, and Mr. Tulip saw his expression change.
“Someone’s got their hand on my shoulder!” he hissed.
“You feeling all right, Mr. Pin?”
“You can’t see anyone?”
“Nope.”
Clenching his fists, Mr. Pin turned around. There were plenty of people in the street, but no one gave him a second glance.
He tried to reorganize the jigsaw that his mind was rapidly becoming.
“Okay. Okay,” he said. “What we’ll do…we’ll go back to the house, okay, and…and we’ll get the rest of the diamonds, and we’ll scrag Charlie, and, and…we’ll find a vegetable shop…any special kind of potato?”
“Nope.”
“Right…but first…” Mr. Pin stopped, and his mind’s ear heard footsteps stop behind him, a moment later. The damn vampire had done something to him, he knew. The darkness had been like a tunnel, and there had been things…
Mr. Pin believed in threats, and in violence, and at a time like this he believed in revenge. An inner voice that currently passed for sanity was making a clamor, but it was overruled by a deeper and more automatic response.
“That bloody vampire did this,” he
said. “And killing a vampire…hey…that’s practically good, right?” He brightened. Salvation beckoned through Holy Works. “Everyone knows they have evil occult powers. Could even count in a man’s favor, eh?”
“Yeah. But…who cares?”
“I do.”
“Okay.” Even Mr. Tulip didn’t argue with that tone of voice. Mr. Pin could be inventively unpleasant. Besides, part of the code was that you did not leave an insult unavenged. Everyone knew that.
It was just that nervousness was beginning to percolate even into the bath salt and worming powder–ravaged pathways of his own brain. He admired the way Mr. Pin wasn’t frightened of difficult things, like long sentences.
“What’ll we use?” he said. “A stake?”
“No,” said Mr. Pin. “With this one, I want to be certain.”
He lit a cigarette, with a hand that shook just a little, and then let the match flare up.
“Ah. Right,” said Mr. Tulip.
“Let’s just do it,” said Mr. Pin.
Rocky’s brow furrowed as he looked at the seals nailed around the doors of the de Worde town house.
“What’s dem things?” he said.
“They’re to say the Guilds will interest themselves in anyone who breaks in,” said Sacharissa, fumbling with the key. “It’s a sort of curse. Only it works.”
“Dat one’s the Assassins?” said the troll, indicating a crude shield with the cloak-and-dagger and double-cross.
“Yes. It means there’s an automatic contract out on anyone who breaks in.”
“Wouldn’t want dem interested in me. Good job you got a key…”
The lock clicked. The door opened at a push.
Sacharissa had been in a number of Ankh-Morpork’s great houses, when the owners had thrown parts of them open to the public in aid of some of the more respectable charities. She hadn’t realized how a building could change when people no longer wanted to live in it. It felt threatening and out of scale. The doorways were too big, the ceilings too high. The musty, empty atmosphere descended on her like a headache.
Behind her, Rocky lit a couple of lanterns. But even their light left her surrounded by shadows.
At least the main staircase wasn’t hard to find, and William’s hasty directions led her to a suite of rooms bigger than her house. The wardrobe, when she found it, was simply a room full of rails and hangers.