He took a key from a cabinet by his desk and walked over to the wall. His hands touched a mark on the plaster that was apparently no different from a dozen other marks, but this one caused a section of wall to swing aside on well-oiled hinges.
No one knew all passages and tunnels hidden in the walls of the Palace; it was said that some of them went a lot further than that. And there were any amount of old cellars under the city. A man with a pick-axe and a sense of direction could go where he liked just by knocking down forgotten walls.
He walked down several narrow flights of steps and along a passage to a door, which he unlocked. It swung back on well-oiled hinges.
It was not, exactly, a dungeon; the room on the other side was quite airy and well lit by several large but high windows. It had a smell of wood shavings and glue.
‘Look out!’
The Patrician ducked.
Something batlike clicked and whirred over his head, circled erratically in the middle of the room, and then flew apart into a dozen jerking pieces.
‘Oh dear,’ said a mild voice. ‘Back to the drawing tablet. Good afternoon, your lordship.’
‘Good afternoon, Leonard,’ said the Patrician. ‘What was that?’
‘I call it a flapping-wing-flying-device,’ said Leonard da Quirm, getting down off his launching stepladder. ‘It works by gutta-percha strips twisted tightly together. But not very well, I’m afraid.’{51}
Leonard of Quirm was not, in fact, all that old. He was one of those people who started looking venerable around the age of thirty, and would probably still look about the same at the age of ninety. He wasn’t exactly bald, either. His head had just grown up through his hair, rising like a mighty rock dome through heavy forest.
Inspirations sleet through the universe continuously. Their destination, as if they cared, is the right mind in the place at the right time. They hit the right neuron, there’s a chain reaction, and a little while later someone is blinking foolishly in the TV lights and wondering how the hell he came up with the idea of pre-sliced bread in the first place.{52}
Leonard of Quirm knew about inspirations. One of his earliest inventions was an earthed metal nightcap, worn in the hope that the damn things would stop leaving their white-hot trails across his tortured imagination. It seldom worked. He knew the shame of waking up to find the sheets covered with nocturnal sketches of unfamiliar siege engines and novel designs for apple-peeling machines.
The da Quirms had been quite rich and young Leonard had been to a great many schools, where he had absorbed a ragbag of information despite his habit of staring out of the window and sketching the flight of birds. Leonard was one of those unfortunate individuals whose fate it was to be fascinated by the world, the taste, shape and movement of it …
He fascinated Lord Vetinari as well, which is why he was still alive. Some things are so perfect of their type that they are hard to destroy. One of a kind is always special.
He was a model prisoner. Give him enough wood, wire, paint and above all give him paper and pencils, and he stayed put.
The Patrician moved a stack of drawings and sat down.
‘These are good,’ he said. ‘What are they?’
‘My cartoons,’ said Leonard.
‘This is a good one of the little boy with his kite stuck in a tree,’ said Lord Vetinari.{53}
‘Thank you. May I make you some tea? I’m afraid I don’t see many people these days, apart from the man who oils the hinges.’
‘I’ve come to …’
The Patrician stopped and prodded at one of the drawings.
‘There’s a piece of yellow paper stuck to this one,’ he said, suspiciously. He pulled at it. It came away from the drawing with a faint sucking noise, and then stuck to his fingers. On the note, in Leonard’s crabby backward script, were the words: ‘krow ot smees sihT: omeM’.
‘Oh, I’m rather pleased with that,’ said Leonard. ‘I call it my “Handy-note-scribbling-piece-of-paper-with-glue-that-comes-unstuck-when-you-want”.’
The Patrician played with it for a while.
‘What’s the glue made of?’
‘Boiled slugs.’
The Patrician pulled the paper off one hand. It stuck to the other hand.
‘Is that what you came to see me about?’ said Leonard.
‘No. I came to talk to you,’ said Lord Vetinari, ‘about the gonne.’
‘Oh, dear. I’m very sorry.’
‘I am afraid it has … escaped.’
‘My goodness. I thought you said you’d done away with it.’
‘I gave it to the Assassins to destroy. After all, they pride themselves on the artistic quality of their work. They should be horrified at the idea of anyone having that sort of power. But the damn fools did not destroy it. They thought they could lock it away. And now they’ve lost it.’
‘They didn’t destroy it?’
‘Apparently not, the fools.’
‘And nor did you. I wonder why?’
‘I … do you know, I don’t know?’
‘I should never have made it. It was merely an application of principles. Ballistics, you know. Simple aerodynamics. Chemical power. Some rather good alloying, although I say it myself. And I’m rather proud of the rifling idea. I had to make a quite complicated tool for that, you know. Milk? Sugar?’
‘No, thank you.’
‘People are searching for it, I trust?’
‘The Assassins are. But they won’t find it. They don’t think the right way.’ The Patrician picked up a pile of sketches of the human skeleton. They were extremely good.
‘Oh, dear.’
‘So I am relying on the Watch.’
‘This would be the Captain Vimes you have spoken of.’
Lord Vetinari always enjoyed his occasional conversations with Leonard. The man always referred to the city as if it was another world. ‘Yes.’
‘I hope you have impressed upon him the importance of the task.’
‘In a way. I’ve absolutely forbidden him to undertake it. Twice.’
Leonard nodded. ‘Ah. I … think I understand. I hope it works.’
He sighed.
‘I suppose I should have dismantled it, but … it was so clearly a made thing. I had this strange fancy I was merely assembling something that already existed. Sometimes I wonder where I got the whole idea. It seemed … I don’t know … sacrilege, I suppose, to dismantle it. It’d be like dismantling a person. Biscuit?’
‘Dismantling a person is sometimes necessary,’ said Lord Vetinari.
‘This, of course, is a point of view,’ said Leonard da Quirm politely.
‘You mentioned sacrilege,’ said Lord Vetinari. ‘Normally that involves gods of some sort, does it not?’
‘Did I use the word? I can’t imagine there is a god of gonnes.’
‘It is quite hard, yes.’
The Patrician shifted uneasily, reached down behind him, and pulled out an object.
‘What,’ he said, ‘is this?’
‘Oh, I wondered where that had gone,’ said Leonard. ‘It’s a model of my spinning-up-into-the-air machine.’[20]
Lord Vetinari prodded the little rotor.
‘Would it work?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Leonard. He sighed. ‘If you can find one man with the strength of ten men who can turn the handle at about one thousand revolutions a minute.’
The Patrician relaxed, in a way which only then drew gentle attention to the foregoing moment of tension.
‘Now there is in this city,’ he said, ‘a man with a gonne. He has used it successfully once, and almost succeeded a second time. Could anyone have invented the gonne?’
‘No,’ said Leonard. ‘I am a genius.’ He said it quite simply. It was a statement of fact.
20
It has probably been gathered that although Leonard da Quirm was absolutely the greatest technological genius of all time, he was a bit of a Detritus when it came to thinking up names.