Going Postal

And out in the bustling cavern white feathers began to fall from the roof. They may have been from an angel, but were more likely to be coming from the pigeon that a hawk was just disembowelling on a beam. Still, they were feathers. It’s all about style.

Sometimes the truth is arrived at by adding all the little lies together and deducting them from the totality of what is known.

Lord Vetinari stood at the top of the stairs in the Great Hall of the Palace, and looked down on his clerks. They’d taken over the whole huge floor for this Concludium.

Chalked markings - circles, squares, triangles - were drawn here and there on the floor. Within them, papers and ledgers were piled in dangerously neat heaps. And there were clerks, some working inside the outlines and some moving noiselessly from one outline to another bearing pieces of paper as if they were a sacrament. Periodically clerks and watchmen arrived with more files and ledgers, which were solemnly received, assessed and added to the relevant pile.

Abacuses clicked everywhere. Clerks would pad back and forth and sometimes they would meet in a triangle and bend their heads in quiet discussion. This might result in their heading away in new directions or, increasingly as the night wore on, one clerk would go and chalk a new outline, which would begin to fill with paper. Sometimes an outline would be emptied and rubbed out and its contents distributed among nearby outlines.

No enchanter’s circle, no mystic’s mandala was ever drawn with such painfully meticulous care as the conclusions being played out on the floor. Hour after hour it went on, with a patience that at first terrified and then bored. It was the warfare of clerks, and it harried the enemy through many columns and files. Moist could read words that weren’t there but the clerks found the numbers that weren’t there, or were there twice, or were there but going the wrong way. They didn’t hurry. Peel away the lies, and the truth would emerge, naked and ashamed and with nowhere else to hide.

At 3 a.m. Mr Cheeseborough arrived, in a hurry and bitter tears, to learn that his bank was a shell of paper. He brought his own clerks, with their nightshirts tucked into hastily donned trousers, who went down on their knees alongside the other men and spread out more papers, double-checking figures in the hope that if you stared at numbers long enough they’d add up differently.

And then the Watch turned up with a small red ledger, and it was given a circle of its own, and soon the whole pattern re-formed around it…

It wasn’t until almost dawn that the sombre men arrived. They were older and fatter and better - but not showily, never showily -dressed, and moved with the gravity of serious money. They were financiers too, richer than kings (who are often quite poor), but hardly anyone in the city outside their circle knew them or would notice them in the street. They spoke quietly to Cheeseborough as to one who’d suffered a bereavement, and then talked among themselves, and used little gold propelling pencils in neat little notebooks to make figures dance and jump through hoops. Then quiet agreement was reached and hands were shaken, which in this circle carried infinitely more weight than any written contract. The first domino had been steadied. The pillars of the world ceased to tremble. The Credit Bank would open in the morning, and when it did so bills would be honoured, wages would be paid, the city would be fed.

They’d saved the city with gold more easily, at that point, than any hero could have managed with steel. But in truth it had not exactly been gold, or even the promise of gold, but more like the fantasy of gold, the fairy dream that the gold is there, at the end of the rainbow, and will continue to be there for ever provided, naturally, that you don’t go and look.

This is known as Finance.

On the way back home to a simple breakfast, one of them dropped off at the Guild of Assassins to pay his respects to his old friend Lord Downey, during which current affairs were only lightly touched upon. And Reacher Gilt, wherever he had gone, was now certainly the worst insurance risk in the world. The people who guard the rainbow don’t like those who get in the way of the sun.

Epilogue

Some Time After

The figure in the chair did not have long hair, or an eyepatch. It didn’t have a beard or, rather, it wasn’t intending to have a beard. It hadn’t shaved for several days.

It groaned.

‘Ah, Mr Gilt,’ said Lord Vetinari, looking up from his playing board. ‘You are awake, I see. I’m sorry for the manner in which you were brought here, but some quite expensive people wish to see you dead and I thought it would be a good idea if we had this little meeting before they did.’

‘I don’t know who you’re talking about,’ said the figure. ‘My name is Randolph Stippler, and I have papers to prove it—’

‘And wonderful papers they are, Mr Gilt. But enough of that. No, it is about angels that I wish to talk to you now.’