After all, you couldn’t plan for every eventuality, because that would involve knowing what was going to happen, and if you knew what was going to happen, you could probably see to it that it didn’t, or at least happened to someone else. So the Patrician never planned. Plans often got in the way.
And, finally, he kept Leonard around because the man was easy to talk to. He never understood what Lord Vetinari was talking about, he had a world view about as complex as that of a concussed duckling and, above all, never really paid attention. This made him an excellent confidant. After all, when you seek advice from someone it’s certainly not because you want them to give it. You just want them to be there while you talk to yourself.
‘I’ve just made some tea,’ said Leonard. ‘Will you join me?’
He followed the Patrician’s gaze to a brown stain all up one wall, which ended in a star of molten metal in the plaster.
‘I’m afraid the automatical tea engine went wrong,’ he said. ‘I shall have to make it by hand.’
‘So kind,’ said Lord Vetinari.
He sat down amidst the easels and, while Leonard busied himself at the fireplace, leafed through the latest sketches. Leonard sketched as automatically as other people scratched; genius — a certain kind of genius — fell off him like dandruff.
There was a picture of a man drawing, the lines catching the figure so accurately it appeared to stand out of the paper. And around it, because Leonard never wasted white space, were other sketches, scattered aimlessly. A thumb. A bowl of flowers. A device, apparently, for sharpening pencils by water power…
Vetinari found what he was looking for in the bottom left-hand corner, sandwiched between a sketch for a new type of screw and a tool for opening oysters. It, or something very much like it, was always there somewhere.
One of the things that made Leonard such a rare prize, and kept him under such secure lock and key, was that he really didn’t see any difference between the thumb and the roses and the pencil-sharpener and this.
‘Ah, the self-portrait,’ said Leonard, returning with two cups.
‘Yes, indeed,’ said Vetinari. ‘But my eye was drawn to this little sketch here. The war machine…’
‘Oh, that? A mere nothing. Have you ever noticed the way in which the dew on roses—’
‘This bit here… what is it for?’ said Vetinari, pointing persistently.
‘Oh, that? That’s just the throwing arm for the balls of molten sulphur,’ said Leonard, picking up a plate of small cakes. ‘I calculate that one should get a range of almost half a mile, if one detaches the endless belt from the driving wheels and uses the oxen to wind the windlass.’
‘Really?’ said Vetinari, taking in the carefully numbered parts. ‘And it could be built?’
‘What? Oh, yes. Macaroon? In theory.’
‘In theory?’
‘No one would ever actually do it. Raining unquenchable fire down upon fellow humans? Hah!’ Leonard sprayed macaroon crumbs. ‘You’d never find an artisan to build it, or a soldier who would pull the lever… That’s part 3(b) on the plan, just here, look…’
‘Ah, yes,’ said Vetinari. ‘Anyway,’ he added, ‘I imagine these huge power arms here couldn’t possibly be operated without them breaking…’
‘Seasoned ash and yew, laminated and held together by special steel bolts,’ said Leonard promptly. ‘I made a few calculations, just there below the sketch of light on a raindrop. As an intellectual exercise, obviously.’
Vetinari ran his eye along several lines of Leonard’s spidery mirror-writing.
‘Oh, yes,’ he said glumly. He put the paper aside.
‘Have I told you that the Klatchian situation is intensely political? Prince Cadram is trying to do a great deal very fast. He needs to consolidate his position. He is depending on support that is somewhat volatile. There are many plotting against him, I understand.’
‘Really? Well, this is the sort of thing people do,’ said Leonard. ‘Incidentally, I’ve recently been examining cobwebs and, I know this will interest you, their strength in relation to their weight is much greater even than our best steel wire. Isn’t that fascinating?’
‘What kind of weapon do you intend to make out of them?’ said the Patrician.
‘Sorry?’
‘Oh, nothing. I was just thinking aloud.’
‘And you haven’t touched your tea,’ said Leonard.
Vetinari looked around the room. It was full of… things. Tubes and odd paper kites and things that looked like the skeletons of ancient beasts. One of Leonard’s saving graces, in a very real sense from Vetinari’s point of view, was his strange attention span. It wasn’t that he soon got bored with things. He didn’t seem to get bored with anything. But since he was interested in everything in the universe all the time the end result tended to be that an experimental device for disembowelling people at a distance then became a string-weaving machine and ended up as an instrument for ascertaining the specific gravity of cheese.
He was as easily distracted as a kitten. All that business with the flying machine, for example. Giant bat wings hung from the ceiling even now. The Patrician had been more than happy to let him waste his time on that idea, because it was obvious to anyone that no human being would ever be able to flap the wings hard enough.
He needn’t have worried. Leonard was his own distraction. He had ended up spending ages designing a special tray so that people could eat their meals in the air.
A truly innocent man. And yet always, always, some little part of him would sketch these wretchedly beguiling engines, with their clouds of smoke and carefully numbered engineering diagrams…
‘What’s this?’ Vetinari said, pointing to yet another doodle. It showed a man holding a large metal sphere.
‘That? Oh, something of a toy, really. Makes use of the strange properties of some otherwise quite useless metals. They don’t like being squeezed. So they go bang. With extreme alacrity.’
‘Another weapon…’
‘Certainly not, my lord! It would be no possible use as a weapon! I did think it might have a place in the mining industries, though.’
‘Really…’
‘For when they need to move mountains out of the way.’
‘Tell me,’ Vetinari said, putting this paper aside as well, ‘you don’t have any relatives in Klatch, do you?’
‘I don’t believe so. My family lived in Quirm for generations.’
‘Oh. Good. But… very clever people in Klatch, are they?’
‘Oh, in many disciplines they practically wrote the scroll. Fine metalwork, for example.’
‘Metalwork…’ The Patrician sighed.
‘And Alchemy, of course. Affir Al-chema’s Principia Explosia has been the seminal work for more than a hundred years.’
‘Alchemy,’ said the Patrician, glumly. ‘Sulphur and so forth…’
‘Yes, indeed.’
‘But the way you put it, these major achievements were some considerable time ago…’ Lord Vetinari sounded like a man straining to see a light at the end of the tunnel.
‘Certainly! I would be astonished if they haven’t made considerable progress!’ said Leonard of Quirm happily.
‘Ah?’ The Patrician sank a little in his chair. It had turned out that the end of the tunnel was on fire.
‘A splendid people with much to recommend them,’ said Leonard. ‘I always thought it was the presence of the desert. It leads to an urgency of thought. It makes you aware of the briefness of life.’
The Patrician glanced at another page. Between a sketch of a bird’s wing and a careful drawing of a ball-joint was a little doodle of something with spiked wheels and spinning blades. And then there was the device for moving mountains aside…