‘Hah!’ said Lu-Tze quietly.
‘Something funny, monk?’
‘Obvious, when you think about it,’ said Lu-Tze, as much to himself as to Ronnie. Then he turned in his seat and stuck out his hand.
‘Pleased to meet you,’ he said. ‘Let me guess your name.’
And said it.
Susan had been unusually inexact. To call Wienrich and Boettcher ‘chocolate makers’ was like calling Leonard of Quirm ‘a decent painter who also tinkered with things’, or Death ‘not someone you’d want to meet every day’. It was accurate, but it didn’t tell the whole story.
For one thing, they didn’t make, they created. There’s an important difference.[17] And, while their select little shop sold the results, it didn’t do anything so crass as to fill the window with them. That would suggest … well, over-eagerness. Generally, W&B had a display of silk and velvet drapes with, on a small stand, perhaps one of their special pralines or no more than three of their renowned frosted caramels. There was no price tag. If you had to ask the price of W&B’s chocolates, you couldn’t afford them. And if you’d tasted one, and still couldn’t afford them, you’d save and scrimp and rob and sell elderly members of your family for just one more of those mouthfuls that fell in love with your tongue and turned your soul to whipped cream.
There was a discreet drain in the pavement in case people standing in front of the window drooled too much.
Wienrich and Boettcher were, naturally, foreigners, and according to Ankh-Morpork’s Guild of Confectioners they did not understand the peculiarities of the city’s tastebuds.
Ankh-Morpork people, said the Guild, were hearty, no-nonsense folk who did not want chocolate that was stuffed with cocoa liquor, and were certainly not like effete la-di-dah foreigners who wanted cream in everything. In fact they actually preferred chocolate made mostly from milk, sugar, suet, hooves, lips, miscellaneous squeezings, rat droppings, plaster, flies, tallow, bits of tree, hair, lint, spiders and powdered cocoa husks. This meant that according to the food standards of the great chocolate centres in Borogravia and Quirm, Ankh-Morpork chocolate was formally classed as ‘cheese’ and only escaped, through being the wrong colour, being defined as ‘tile grout’.
Susan allowed herself one of their cheaper boxes per month. And she could easily stop at the first layer if she wanted to.
‘You needn’t come in,’ she said, as she opened the shop door. Rigid customers lined the counter.
‘Please call me Myria.’
‘I don’t think I—’
‘Please?’ said Lady LeJean meekly. ‘A name is important.’
Suddenly, in spite of everything, Susan felt a brief pang of sympathy for the creature.
‘Oh, very well. Myria, you needn’t come in.’
‘I can stand it.’
‘But I thought chocolate was a raging temptation?’ said Susan, being firm with herself.
‘It is.’
They stared up at the shelves behind the counter.
‘Myria … Myria,’ said Susan, speaking only some of her thoughts aloud. ‘From the Ephebian word myrios, meaning “innumerable”. And LeJean as a crude pun of “legion” … Oh dear.’
‘We thought a name should say what a thing is,’ said her ladyship. ‘And there is safety in numbers. I am sorry.’
‘Well, these are their basic assortments,’ said Susan, dismissing the shop display with a wave of her hand. ‘Let’s try the back room— Are you all right?’
‘I am fine, I am fine …’ murmured Lady LeJean, swaying.
‘You’re not going to pig out on me, are you?’
‘We … I … know about will-power. The body craves the chocolate but the mind does not. At least, so I tell myself. And it must be true! The mind can overrule the body! Otherwise, what is it for?’
‘I’ve often wondered,’ said Susan, pushing open another door. ‘Ah. The magician’s cave …’
‘Magic? They use magic here?’
‘Nearly right.’
Lady LeJean leaned on the door frame for support when she saw the tables.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Uh … I can detect … sugar, milk, butter, cream, vanilla, hazelnuts, almonds, walnuts, raisins, orange peel, various liqueurs, citrus pectin, strawberries, raspberries, essence of violets, cherries, pineapples, pistachios, oranges, limes, lemons, coffee, cocoa—’
‘Nothing there to be frightened of, right?’ said Susan, surveying the workshop for useful weaponry. ‘Cocoa is just a rather bitter bean, after all.’
‘Yes, but …’ Lady LeJean clenched her fists, shut her eyes and bared her teeth, ‘put them all together and they make—’
‘Steady, steady …’
‘The will can overrule the emotions, the will can overrule the instincts—’ the Auditor intoned.
‘Good, good, now just work your way up to the bit where it says chocolate, OK?’
‘That’s the hard one!’
In fact it seemed to Susan, as she walked past the vats and counters, that chocolate lost some of its attraction when you saw it like this. It was the difference between seeing the little heaps of pigment and seeing the whole picture. She selected a syringe that seemed designed to do something intensely personal to female elephants, although she decided that here it was probably used for doing the wiggly bits of decoration.
And over here was a small vat of cocoa liquor.
She stared around at the trays and trays of fondant cremes, marzipans and caramels. Oh, and here was an entire table of Soul Cake eggs. But they weren’t the hollow-shelled, cardboard tasting presents for children, oh, no — these were the confectionery equivalent of fine, intricate jewellery.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw movement. One of the statue-like workers bent over her tray of Praline Dreams was shifting almost imperceptibly.
Time was flowing into the room. Pale blue light glinted in the air.
She turned and saw a vaguely human figure hovering beside her. It was featureless and as transparent as mist, but in her head it said, I’m stronger. You are my anchor, my link to this world. Can you guess how hard it is to find it again in so many? Get me to the clock …
Susan turned and thrust the icing syringe into the arms of the groaning Myria. ‘Grab that. And make some kind of … of sling or something. I want you to be carrying as many of those chocolate eggs as possible. And the cremes. And the liqueurs. Understand? You can do it!’
Oh, gods, there was no alternative. The poor thing needed some kind of morale boost. ‘Please, Myria? And that’s a stupid name! You’re not many, you’re one. OK? Just be … yourself. Unity … that’d be a good name.’
The new Unity raised a mascara-streaked face. ‘Yes, it is, it’s a good name …’
Susan snatched as much merchandise as she could carry, aware of some rustling behind her, and turned to find Unity standing to attention holding, by the look of it, a bench-worth of assorted confectionery in …
… a sort of big cerise sack.
‘Oh. Good. Intelligent use of the materials to hand,’ said Susan weakly. Then the teacher within her cut in and added, ‘I hope you brought enough for everybody.’
‘You were the first,’ said Lu-Tze. ‘You basically created the whole business. Innovative, you were.’
‘That was then,’ said Ronnie Soak. ‘It’s all changed now.’
‘Not like it used to be,’ agreed Lu-Tze.
‘Take Death,’ said Ronnie Soak. ‘Impressive, I’ll grant you, and who doesn’t look good in black? But, after all, Death … What’s death?’