‘Mr Mothball Nose? Whoops!’ said the voice in the shadows at the bottom of the stairs.
‘Er … are you all right?’
‘Can’t get … it’s a … hahaha … it’s all chains … hahaha …’
‘Are you … ill?’
‘No, I’m fine, not ill at all, jus’ had a few too many …’
‘Few too many what?’ said Sacharissa, speaking from a sheltered upbringing.
‘… wazza … things you put drink in … barrels?’
‘You’re drunk?’
‘Tha’s right! Tha’s the word! Drunk as a … thing … smellything … ahahaha …’
There was a tinkle of glass.
The lantern’s weak glow showed what looked like a wine cellar, but a man was slumped on a bench against one wall and a chain ran from his ankle to a ring set in the floor.
‘Are you … a prisoner?’ said Sacharissa.
‘Ahaha …’
‘How long have you been down here?’ She crept down.
‘Years …’
‘Years?’
‘Got lots of years …’ The man picked up a bottle and peered at it. ‘Now … Year of the Amending Camel … that was bloodigoodyear … and this one … Year of the Translated Rat … another bloodigoodyear … bloodigoodyears, the lot of them. Could do with a biscuit, though.’
Sacharissa’s knowledge of vintages extended just as far as knowing that Chateau Maison was a very popular wine. But people didn’t have to be chained up to drink wine, even the stuff from Ephebe that stuck the glass to the table.
She moved a little closer and the light fell on the man’s face. It was locked in the grin of the seriously drunk, but it was very recognizable. She saw it every day, on coins.
‘Er … Rocky,’ she said. ‘Er … can you come down here a minute?’
The door burst open and the troll came down the steps at speed. Unfortunately, it was because he was rolling.
Mr Tulip appeared at the top of the stairs, massaging his fist.
‘It’s Mr Sneezy!’ said Charlie, raising a bottle. ‘The gang’s all here! Whoopee!’
Rocky got up, weaving slightly. Mr Tulip strolled down the steps, ripping out the doorpost as he passed. The troll raised his fists in the classic boxer’s pose, but Mr Tulip didn’t bother with niceties of that kind and hit him hard with the length of ancient wood. Rocky went over like a tree.
Only then did the huge man with the revolving eyes try to focus them on Sacharissa.
‘Who the — ing hell are you?’
‘Don’t you dare swear at me!’ she said. ‘How dare you swear in the presence of a lady!’
This seemed to nonplus him. ‘I don’t — ing swear!’
‘Here, I’ve seen you before, you’re that— I knew you weren’t a proper virgin!’ said Sacharissa triumphantly.
There was the click of a crossbow. Some tiny sounds carry well and have considerable stopping power.
‘There are some thoughts too dreadful to think,’ said the skinny man looking at her from the top of the steps and down the length of a pistol bow. ‘What are you doing here, lady?’
‘And you were Brother Pin! You haven’t got any right here! I’ve got a key!’ Some areas of Sacharissa’s mind that dealt with things like death and terror were signalling to be heard at this point, but, being part of Sacharissa, they were trying to do it in a ladylike way, and so she ignored them.
‘A key?’ said Brother Pin, advancing down the stairs. The bow stayed pointing at her. Even in his current state of mind, Mr Pin knew how to aim. ‘Who’d give you a key?’
‘Don’t you come near me! Don’t you dare come near me! If you come near me I’ll — I’ll write it down!’
‘Yeah? Well, one thing I know is, words don’t hurt,’ said Mr Pin. ‘I’ve heard lots of—’
He stopped and grimaced, and for a moment it looked as if he’d fall to his knees. He righted himself and focused on her again.
‘You are coming with us,’ he said. ‘An’ don’t say you’re going to scream, because we’re all alone here and I’ve … heard … lots … of … screams …’
Once again he seemed to run down, and again he recovered. Sacharissa stared in horror at the weaving crossbow. Those parts of her advocating silence as a survival aid had finally made themselves heard.
‘What about these two?’ said Mr Tulip. ‘We’re scragging ’em now?’
‘Chain them up and leave them.’
‘But we always—’
‘Leave them!’
‘You sure you feel all right?’ said Mr Tulip.
‘No! I don’t! Just leave them, okay? We haven’t got time!’
‘We’ve got lots of—’
‘I haven’t!’ Mr Pin strode up to Sacharissa. ‘Who gave you that key?’
‘I’m not going to—’
‘Do you want Mr Tulip here to say goodbye to our drunken friends?’ In his buzzing head, and with his shaky grasp of how things were supposed to work in a moral universe, Mr Pin reckoned that this was all right. After all, their shadows would follow Mr Tulip, not him …
‘This house belongs to Lord de Worde and his son gave me the key!’ said Sacharissa triumphantly. ‘There! He was the one you met at the newspaper! Now you know what you’ve got yourself into, eh?’
Mr Pin stared at her.
Then he said, ‘I’m going to find out. Don’t run. Really don’t scream. Walk normally and everything—’ He paused. ‘I was going to say it will be all right,’ he said. ‘But that would be silly, wouldn’t it …?’
It wasn’t fast, going through the streets with the crew. To them the world was a permanent theatre, art gallery, music hall, restaurant and spittoon, and in any case no member of the crew would dream of going anywhere in a straight line.
The poodle Trixiebell accompanied them, keeping as close to the centre of the group as possible. Of Deep Bone there was no sign. William had offered to carry Wuffles, because in a way he felt he owned him. A hundred dollars’ worth of him, at least. It was a hundred dollars he hadn’t got but, well, surely tomorrow’s edition would pay for that. And anyone after the dog now surely wouldn’t try anything out here on the street, in broad daylight, especially since it was barely narrow daylight now. Clouds filled the sky like old eiderdowns, the fog that was descending was meeting the river mist coming up, and the light was draining out of everything.
He tried to think of the headline. He couldn’t quite get a grip on it yet. There was too much to say, and he wasn’t good at getting the huge complexities of the world into fewer than half a dozen words. Sacharissa was better at it, because she treated words as lumps of letters that could be hammered together any old how. Her best one had been on some tedious inter-Guild squabble and, in single column, read:
PROBE
INTO
SHOCK
GUILD
RUMPUS
William just wasn’t used to the idea of evaluating words purely in terms of their length, whereas she’d picked up the habit in two days. He’d already had to stop her calling Lord Vetinari CITY BOSS. It was technically correct that if you spent some time with a thesaurus you could arrive at that description, and it did fit in a single column, but the sight of the words had made William feel extremely exposed.
It was self-absorption like this that allowed him to walk into the printing shed, with the crew tagging along, and not notice anything wrong until he saw the expression on the faces of the dwarfs.
‘Ah, our writer man,’ said Mr Pin, stepping forward. ‘Shut the door, Mr Tulip.’