‘Snap,’ he said.
‘You passed too?’ said Teppic.
Chidder grinned. ‘No problem,’ he said. ‘It was Nivor. No problem. He gave me a bit of trouble on the Emergency Drop, though. How about you?’
‘Hmm? Oh. No.’ Teppic tried to get a grip on himself. ‘No trouble,’ he said.
‘Heard from any of the others?’
‘No.’
Chidder leaned back. ‘Cheesewright will make it,’ he said loftily, ‘and young Arthur. I don’t think some of the others will. We could give them twenty minutes, what do you say?’
Teppic turned an agonized face towards him.
‘Chiddy, I—’
‘What?’
‘When it came to it, I—’
‘What about it?’
Teppic looked at the cobbles. ‘Nothing,’ he said.
‘You’re lucky — you just had a good airy run over the rooftops. I had the sewers and then up the garderobe in the Haberdashers’ Tower. I had to go in and change when I got here.’
‘You had a dummy, did you?’ said Teppic.
‘Good grief, didn’t you?’
‘But they let us think it was going to be real!’
Teppic wailed.
‘It felt real, didn’t it?’
‘Yes!’
‘Well, then. And you passed. So no problem.’
‘But didn’t you wonder who might be under the blanket, who it was, and why—?’
‘I was worried that I might not do it properly,’ Chidder admitted. ‘But then I thought, well, it’s not up to me.’
‘But I—’ Teppic stopped. What could he do? Go and explain? Somehow that didn’t seem a terribly good idea.
His friend slapped him on the back.
‘Don’t worry about it!’ he said. ‘We’ve done it!’
And Chidder held up his thumb pressed against the first two fingers of his right hand, in the ancient salute of the assassins.
A thumb pressed against two fingers, and the lean figure of Dr Cruces, head tutor, looming over the startled boys.
‘We do not murder,’ he said. It was a soft voice; the doctor never raised his voice, but he had a way of giving it the pitch and spin that could make it be heard through a hurricane.
‘We do not execute. We do not massacre. We never, you may be very certain, we never torture. We have no truck with crimes of passion or hatred or pointless gain. We do not do it for a delight in inhumation, or to feed some secret inner need, or for petty advantage, or for some cause or belief; I tell you, gentlemen, that all these reasons are in the highest degree suspect. Look into the face of a man who will kill you for a belief and your nostrils will snuff up the scent of abomination. Hear a speech declaring a holy war and, I assure you, your ears should catch the clink of evil’s scales and the dragging of its monstrous tail over the purity of the language.
‘No, we do it for the money.
‘And, because we above all must know the value of a human life, we do it for a great deal of money.
‘There can be few cleaner motives, so shorn of all pretence.
‘Nil mortifi, sine lucre. Remember. No killing without payment.’
He paused for a moment.
‘And always give a receipt,’ he added.
‘So it’s all okay,’ said Chidder. Teppic nodded gloomily. That was what was so likeable about Chidder. He had this enviable ability to avoid thinking seriously about anything he did.
A figure approached cautiously through the open gates[7]. The light from the torch in the porters’ lodge glinted off blond curly hair.
‘You two made it, then,’ said Arthur, nonchalantly flourishing the slip.
Arthur had changed quite a lot in seven years. The continuing failure of the Great Orm to wreak organic revenge for lack of piety had cured him of his tendency to run everywhere with his coat over his head. His small size gave him a natural advantage in those areas of the craft involving narrow spaces. His innate aptitude for channelled violence had been revealed on the day when Fliemoe{13} and some cronies had decided it would be fun to toss the new boys in a blanket, and picked Arthur first; ten seconds later it had taken the combined efforts of every boy in the dormitory to hold Arthur back and prise the remains of the chair from his fingers. It had transpired that he was the son of the late Johan Ludorum,{14} one of the greatest assassins in the history of the Guild. Sons of dead assassins always got a free scholarship. Yes, it could be a caring profession at times.
There hadn’t been any doubt about Arthur passing. He’d been given extra tuition and was allowed to use really complicated poisons. He was probably going to stay on for post-graduate work.
They waited until the gongs of the city struck two. Clockwork was not a precise technology in Ankh-Morpork, and many of the city’s various communities had their own ideas of what constituted an hour in any case, so the chimes went on bouncing around the rooftops for five minutes.
When it was obvious that the city’s consensus was in favour of it being well past two the three of them stopped looking silently at their shoes.
‘Well, that’s it,’ said Chidder.
‘Poor old Cheesewright,’ said Arthur. ‘It’s tragic, when you think about it.’
‘Yes, he owed me fourpence,’ agreed Chidder. ‘Come on. I’ve arranged something for us.’
King Teppicymon XXVII got out of bed and clapped his hands over his ears to shut out the roar of the sea. It was strong tonight.
It was always louder when he was feeling out of sorts. He needed something to distract himself. He could send for Ptraci,{15} his favourite handmaiden. She was special. Her singing always cheered him up. Life seemed so much brighter when she stopped.
Or there was the sunrise. That was always comforting. It was pleasant to sit wrapped in a blanket on the topmost roof of the palace, watching the mists lift from the river as the golden flood poured over the land. You got the warm, contented feeling of another job well done. Even if you didn’t actually know how you’d done it …
He got up, shuffled on his slippers, and padded out of his bedroom and down the wide corridor that led to the huge spiral stairs and the roof. A few rushlights illuminated the statues of the other local gods, painting the walls with shifting shadow pictures of things dog-headed, fish-bodied, spider-armed. He’d known them since childhood. His juvenile nightmares would have been quite formless without them.
The sea. He’d only seen it once, when he was a boy. He couldn’t recall a lot about it, except the size. And the noise. And the seagulls.
They’d preyed on his mind. They seemed to have it far better worked out, seagulls. He wished he could come back as one, one day, but of course that wasn’t an option if you were a pharaoh. You never came back. You didn’t exactly go away, in fact.
‘Well, what is it?’ said Teppic.
‘Try it,’ said Chidder, ‘just try it. You’ll never have the chance again.’
‘Seems a shame to spoil it,’ said Arthur gallantly, looking down at the delicate pattern on his plate. ‘What are all the little red things?’
‘They’re just radishes,’ said Chidder dismissively. ‘They’re not the important part. Go on.’
Teppic reached over with the little wooden fork and skewered a paper-thin sliver of white fish. The squishi chef was scrutinizing him with the air of one watching a toddler on his first birthday. So, he realized, was the rest of the restaurant.
7
The gates of the Assassins’ Guild were never shut. This was said to be because Death was open for business all the time, but it was really because the hinges had rusted centuries before and no one had got around to doing anything about it.