April 28 was when Terry Pratchett got born, which explains the date of this entry. Terry then went on to spiral around our sun 55 times, shedding wisdom in the second half of his life like a dandelion explodes into wishes when a child blows on it. Those seeds drifted to the ground and the world moved on -- mostly.
"Mostly", because every so often, a new curious mind gets sucked into the wake of A'tuin -- or something cosmically and no doubt comically similar -- and these new fans then make wry posts trying to describe the magic that is in every Pratchett story, complain about the movie adaptions, or totally geek out on Fandom, the Wiki Lspace, or the OG Lspace. What follows below is none of those.
Instead, it is a little Disk World story that came to me in the night. Now, as an old fan, I have to ask myself if imitating Pratchett’s style is the worst kind of hubris, or just me trying to pay my utmost respects to the literal Knight of Syntax, (that short one with the beard and the glasses and the DIY meteorite sword, yes).
Myself has not answered me yet, but whatever my subconscious motivation, officially, I hope this short foray back to Ankh Morpork will provide an enjoyable Easter egg hunt for old Discworld fans, or show visitors how a properly ordered world should run. At the very least, I trust my midnight story will inspire old and new fans to go read some REAL Pratchett.
The Turtle Moves
We learn how the new webs work. Sort of.
Frik looked at the spider at the bottom of his beer mug. The spider stared back through one eye, which was squinting. Its other seven eyes were rolling worse than a teenager’s.
In the dregs at the bottom of the mug, the little spider’s spiracles bubbled smoke.
“Ieuw! Frik man, there's a spider in your ‘beer’!” shrilled Rose, flapping her huge hands in horror.
Not, it has to be said, because she was worried about the spider’s health. Nor because the inebriated state of the spider at the bottom of Frik’s mug meant the pub’s web would now be down for at least an hour.
No, despite being a seven-foot troll of the Kwarts clan, with cold granite where other bipeds had hearts, Rose had developed a totally un-Trollish phobia of all things octoped ever since she had learned what the tiny male Argonaut does with its modified arm.
“No worries mate,” said Frik as he tipped the stunned spider out onto the table and carefully straightened its long, sodden legs. Like many big young men, he had a surprisingly delicate touch.
The last drop of ‘beer’* sizzled as it soaked into the ancient oak.
“This one reminds me of the ones we have down home. Only ours don’t fall in from the top. They mostly chew their way in from the bottom,” Frik told the rest of the gang.
The Patrician had invited Leonard da Quirm and Adora Bell Dearhart to tell him more of the new Diagonal Disc Dispatches which the Clacks Company crews were rolling out across the Disk.
He had a specific question: How could a spider’s web on one side of the disk be made to vibrate like its paired web on the other end of the disk at the EXACT moment any change in frequency was made?
Both Quirm and Dearhart had assured the Patrician that no magic was involved – only Quantumurgy.
The Patrician had good reason to take an interest. Scarcely a year after Dearhart had subcontracted the Missiver gargoyles to add spiderwebs to all corners in the Clacks towers from which to send the new Diagonal Disc Dispatches, or DDDs, to any other web on the Disc, most eateries and a lot of the better connected homes had at least one glowing spider web strung across a corner, gently vibrating to A'tuin’s low-frequency susurrations.
The Ankh-Morpork Times had quoted Leonard on how these susurrations were always in the air, “like waves expanding from an infinite number of pebbles dropped into an invisible sea, only of course without actual pebbles, that would soon make a new continent, a-ha-ha!; and no water in the sea either, for no ocean is big enough, a-ha-ha,”.
The Patrician had asked Da Quirm for a simpler explanation. De Quirm had said the spiders amplified A’tuin’s whispers into “almost visible, certainly audible, shimmers in the air”.
He had added the goblins were now breeding spiders that spun silk fine enough to transform these shiny susurrations into even moving pictures. Or that was the theory.
In practice, just getting the Blue tits not to eat the clever spiders that thrummed out the messages was still a Disc-wide problem.
Da Quirm had then launched into a long explanation involving a dead cat breathing in a box and future observations changing the past on account of what he called spooky action at a distance, adding it was all because information was basically like a ball made of vibrating bits of string seen end on, trapped in a Mobius curve of time and space... He stopped talking when he saw everyone’s eyes glazing.
“Milord,” Dearhart had interrupted, “I don’t understand it all, but I can assure you it is legit, for on the big scale it all has to do with legs, what with spiders keeping their brains in their legs on account of having too many eyes for their heads, and elephants using their legs like very slow drumsticks to play out the rhythm of information on A’tuin’s carapace, which then acts like a conch shell to stretch the sounds into susurrations.”
The Patrician had mulled this over. “Much like the inside of a goblet stretches the legs of a good wine then?” he had asked.
Dearhart had kept her gaze fixed on the Patrician desk, trying not to think of The Rack that the Patrician had moved from the palace’s torture dungeon into his waiting room.
“Exactly milord,” said Da Quirm, “and of course it helps that the quantumurgy involved fits the goblins’ philosophy that everything is connected to everything, and stays connected whenever and whatever.”
_____
*In the shades, all fermenting liquids sold cheaply in large mugs to students qualify as ‘beer’. Only Assassins’ Guild students can afford beer sold without air quotes.
We get to know the gang a bit better in a milieu of rusted pans and a very bad Italian accent.
“Doan tell. Thingy. Whassiname. Funny termite. Forryfive piss’ent char’extra, want.”
This was Beano, real name Jack, but so thin and gangly, even for an Elf, it had taken his fellow first year students at the Unseen University’s Quantumurgy department only a second to name him Jack the Bean Stalker, later shortened to Beano.
It took Rose a few seconds, using all her analytic expertise, to work out what instructions Beano’s furiously statistical brain had fired at his tongue before returning to the permutations of the next day’s snail races in Sto Lat.
Being attached to Beano’s brain, Beano’s tongue had more muscle memory than most tongues and was therefore unusually good at decrypting the patterns Beano’s brain had spotted in the surrounding data before making a verbal delivery.
But Beano’s adept tongue had by now been sluiced several times in the ‘beer’ that Beano swigged like a sailor on their weekly eat-all-you-can-sausage-inna-a-bun nights, and it was finding it hard not to slur.
The eat-all-you-can nights were the latest idea Luigi, the new owner of the Mended Drum, was trying out to attract a new clientele to Ankh Morpork’s legendary bar in The Shades. Normally, offering students free anything was a very bad business idea, but My-Cut Dibbler, son of the famous Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler, had assured Luigi no species on the Disc would be able to eat too many of his latest line of MC’buns, a taste fusion of ancient dwarf bread and modern cabbage leaf sausages.
To hide the taste, My-Cut locked each new batch of sausages overnight in a zinc-lined cold room alongside one small bottle of Vanglemesht Red Python Chilly. Luigi had noted with approval how he could not chip the buns even with the sharpened axe his wife kept behind the bar. And when he took a tiny bite out of the slice of grey, spongy matter between the rock-hard buns, he had to hold his tongue in a glass of ice water for most of the afternoon before it stopped steaming.
After these tests, Luigi was satisfied that few students would eat more than two MC’buns. Three, tops, if the ‘beer’ had fermented longer than usual in the slop kegs behind the pub.
“I think he was referring to Luigi’s joke about the termite asking where is the bar tender,” Rose told Frik. “So what he meant to say was ‘Don’t complain to Luigi, there’s a 45 percent probability of him wanting to charge extra for the spider’.”
Beano beamed at her and went back to doodling calculus in a puddle of spilled beer. Beside him Hannah snored gently into her beard, her chin hooked onto the table. She somehow managed to pack into her three foot square frame both a fiercely traditional dwarf and militant feminist.
But like all brilliant psychologists, Hannah could not handle her beer. Based on the experience of many nights of her tongue going numb, Luigi had already prepared a second round of MC’buns, with one side order of fried rat tails.
He now waddled over to the four students to check if their mugs needed refilling.
They were his favourite regulars, just the kind of high-foreheaded clientele he wanted to see more of: an Elf so thin he could disappear sideways; a big she-Troll showing a rather immodest amount of lichen; a bigger red-faced male from Fourecks and therefore presumably human; and a dwarf, who could be female on account of the now very much wilted little flowers woven into the plaited, glittering beard, but these days one couldn’t know for sure.
Unlike the other students, this group did not cheat on quiz nights, mostly did not regurgitate their evening’s libation on the porch as soon as the fresh* air of the Shades hit them and – unlike the Librarian and that ’ing Camel – never quibbled over the change.
As he approached, the one called Frik clamped his huge hand over something on the table.
Luigi checked that all the breakables were still in one piece and shrugged. It was never a good idea to look too closely at what students were hiding, especially Unseen University students.
“Everything-ah still in-ah order-ah kan hai refill-ah?” he sang his same sing-song.
Hannah’s left hand rose from under the table and crabbed its way past the empty mugs to a plate littered with rat tail tips and mustard smears, tapped it once and then held up two fingers in a V sign. Meanwhile her right hand rose vertically, pointed to the assortment of empty mugs and shot glasses and whirled two little circles in the air before both hands collapsed back under the table.
Like Beano’s tongue, Hannah’s hands had to learn to get on with life while her brilliant brain was otherwise engaged. They could now do sleight of hand in several sign languages while pushing a hand sleigh. Ordering another round anywhere on the disk without the need for words was easy, digital work.
“Ha second-ah plate-ah of MC’bun-na and another round of the same coming up…paah,” Luigi said as he reversed bowed away, hoping the students did not notice his slip in what he thought of as his “adding-atmosphere” accent.
Rose watched as Frik lifted his cupped hand off the still very drunk spider and proffered it a dead fly. “Howzit looking mate, you really should try to eat something to help soak up the ‘beer’,” he crooned.
All eight of the spider legs shuddered as it vomited a tiny dribble of nastiness onto the table. The tiny drop also sizzled into the ancient oak.
Rose sighed. As a troll, she was no expert in the more … squidgy sides of human affairs, but some signs were universal to all species that paired off to make smaller versions of themselves.
“A big spider like that is probably not a mate, mate, but one of those she-thingies, what do you call a female again over on your side of the Disc?” she asked Frik.
“A sheila you mean? Oh goodness, I’m sorry miss, meaning no disrespect!” said Frik, pulling his cupped hand away from the sheila spider like it was resting on a hot plate.
“Did you go to the Seamstresses’ kitten sale then?” Rose asked Frik, her deep rumble not unkind.
She tried hard not to fuss, she really did, but time was pressing to find Frik a partner for their graduation gala dinner. With speciesism either long forgotten or soon stomped on by her great uncle Detritus, either Hannah or Rose could have been Frik’s date without anyone in Ankh Morpork throwing anything. Anything sharp or heavy, anyways.
She had even found a nice little black lichen number, should it come to that. But like all students who had survived their first month at uni, Frik had filled in and then sent home one of Mr De Worde’s traditional “all is well” templates.
Only, he did not notice it was signing the “Stepping out” template, the one designed to prepare the family for the soon-to-follow “Surprise Wedding” template. And so the last paragraph – “I am stepping out with Adde Nym Hereth who is very nice from a good family” – had been flashed, pigeoned and finally kangarooed all the way to the farm near Dijabringabeeralong in the Fourecks Outback.
That was of course a year before a Frik had noticed that a hatch of spiderlings were making non-sinusoidal waves in the tall stems of Octarine grass that he and Beano had been growing under domed candles in their dorm cupboard.
Now it has to be noted that Frik had a thing for waves. He could wax philosophical and often very empirical about the functions of sinusoidal waves in nature ever since he had first noticed the very nice sinusoidal curves on the young ’rigometry teacher who had replaced the gnarled old master who had taught the other three ’Aars** at the farm school in Didyabringabeeralong.
Looking at the non-sinusoidal waves the busy little spiders were making in the Octarine grass stems, Frik instinctively realised they were as unnatural as open sinuses on harvest day and perhaps as welcome.
Frik and Beano had co-opted the goblins to help breed more spiders on a diet of high grade Octarine and less than a year after this “Dell’s Discovery”, they were seen climbing up various Clacks towers in different parts of Ankh Morpork to test the repeatability of the non-sinusoidal waves on the clunky webs the goblins had glued to the ropes that operated the clacks.
In the months that Frik and Beano spent on refining glue, the spider’s diet and the mix of manure on which the ocatrine gras grew, Frik’s mom started asking with increasing insistence for more details of “dear Addy”. These queries arrived first in letters and later in susurrated messages, or s-messes which she sent over the DDD.
Frik's mom was the chief wrangler on a farm the size of the Sto Plains and Frik had sent her one of the first series of DDD kits, thinking it could help her to talk to her far flung crew as they wrestled bullocks in the muddy billabongs or waltzed their Matildas to the shade of a coolaba tree. They were a tough, sunburnt team who to a man (and one kangaroo) all but venerated his mom. She was so tough she dangled the famously poisonous Fourecks spiders, rather than old corks, from her hat brim to keep the flies away.
“Um, I got a bit busy,” said Frik, morosely staring into his empty mug. He often forgot that he still needed to find a date for the gala dinner, if only to get Rose – and his mom – off his back. Her last s-mess had made pointed remarks about the farm needing the pitter patter of tiny Frik and/or Addy feet.
Hannah harrumphed and Beano grimaced.
They all knew the big exchange student was as painfully shy as he was a genius with cause and effect distortion. Hence, at their last eat-all-you-can night, Beano had calculated an 86,1 percent probability of Frik meeting a nice girl of, if not steadfast, at least negotiable affection at the Seamstresses’ weekly kitten sale. Hannah had only muttered darkly about horses and water while she sharpened her throwing axe.
Hannah now tilted her helmet so that one eye could glower at Frik over her beer-soaked beard. Her left hand emerged and pointed at him, her right hand tapped the timing imp’s sleek black casing on her left wrist, thumped the table, and then lovingly clasped the left hand. The tiny imp popped out. It yelled: “Frik, attention, emphasis!”
Hannah’s hands then held both index fingers aloft in a manner that reminded Frik of how the umpires indicated a score in game called Footy back home, then aimed both fingers at him before the left hand made the V sign again while the index finger of the right hand proceeded to do things in the V that made even the spider’s eye widen.
Before the imp could translate, Rose interrupted primly: “We get the gist of that, thank you very much Hannah. And the data is clear. The question now is how to make the water flow to the horse?”
Beano paused doodling a possible proof of Adam’s Axiom*** in his puddle of beer. After a bit of a pause his tongue slurred, “Hogg Father lisht. Seamstreshes too sweet. Need naughty girl.”
“A whole list of naughty girls …,” mused Rose with a faraway look, then she boomed, “Beano, you did it again! That’s the answer! Frik man, we are going to find you a date for your ball after all!”
Hannah’s hands stopped twining and both made enthusiastic thumb-up signs. Then the right hand lit a cigarette for the left.
Beano hiccuped, then his tongue slurred something.
“Sorry?” asked Frik.
“Ish juss foh duh... duh ball. No yoh ball,” muttered Beano’s tongue. Being quite learned, his tonque could be pedantic about pronouns even when horribly slurry.
_________
* For a given value of ‘fresh’, this being the canal side of the Shades.
** For the non-classically educated: Reading, Riting and Rithmetic.
*** The Adam’s Axiom is that, in order to deliver all the gifts to the good girls and boys on the Disc in one night, Hogfather would not only have to stay ahead of the morning light in his heavy sleigh, but he would also have to bend both Space and Time. The two entities who are faster than light, viz. Bad News and Death, are both well known and indeed frequent visitors to the Unseen University, but to date the only known entity that is both fast and rude enough to bend over Space and Time for simultaneous gift deliveries in several orifices, is Rumour. Which is why a nest of rumours now pull Hogfather’s sleigh instead of the Reindeers that had replaced the hogs.
Rudolf TRNiii senses trouble; we learn about the fascinating life of the Skeptic worm; and Death plays die.
Rudolf The Red Nose The Third twitched his famous nose. Something was amiss, he could smell it even over the odour of his yearly musk that left him both embarrassed and ready to ram any male in reach.
His heirloom of a nose twitched again. There it was, like the faintest whiff of Klots Rutting Ram Cheese, the swift swirl of a sniff whisking around the semi-transparent carcasses in the Pork Futures Warehouse, which the Hogfather consortium will soon sign a past-dated rental contract for.
Rudolf TRNiii had not approved of moving the consortium from the Ram Top peaks to the futures warehouse district, but with so few people now keeping Crueltide, they had to find a place cold enough to keep the Rumour Vault, and no building was colder than a futures warehouse. Also, he had to admit having a regular date for Hogwatch made arranging all the logysticks and security a lot easier than when they had to wait on some local sage to pronounce the weather cold enough to freeze even a Thimbleberry tart’s juices.
But he didn’t have to like it, no sir. Nor did he like having to say sir to that whippersnapper Slagfith, the new head of the Security Elves. But those were the new protocols Hogfather had set and while he was currently rank, he would not shame his ancestors’ antlers by breaking rank, no sirree.
Rudolf followed his The Red Nose the Third until it reached the security room. Ah well, might as well make a sit-rep while he was at it. He hoofed open the heavy door to the only room in the icy warehouse that had a heater.
As usual, the room was in almost total darkness. Such illumination as there was, came from the glow of thaum-sensitive gasses floating in big glass bottles and an occasional fluorescent bubble bursting from the mud tanks holding Skeptic worms.
The Skeptic worms migrate annually from the river Ankh to hatch in the high magic fields of the Unseen University’s sewers. As a result, the worms’ life cycle has a lot in common with that of the faculty, who also live on rumours and are equally content to wriggle slowly in the same circles. Like the faculty, the little worms advance rapidly when they sense a rumour, stabbing small calcified secretions into the backs of any too slow Skeptic Worm ahead. Keen buyers in the Counterweight Continent call these sharp little bits of chalk “love darts”.
Slagfith was throwing dice with someone in the shadows. Rudolf TRNiii could just make out the bright yellow “Visitor” badge pinned to the person’s black hood. Correction, noted Rudolf TRNiii to himself, Slagfith and the visitor were each throwing a die.
“How do you DO that! The odds of your die landing the same as mine EACH time are infinite to nil, surely!?,” Slagfith asked his hooded visitor. Over his shoulder he added: “What’s up Rudi?”
“IT IS SPOOKY ISN’T IT,” agreed his guest. “I’M TOLD IT HAS TO DO WITH VERY SMALL BITS THAT ARE ENTANGLED OVER VERY LARGE DISTANCES. AND YOU ARE RIGHT ABOUT THE ODDS, BUT ONLY BECAUSE NIL EQUALS INFINITE. GOOD EVENING RUDOLF THE RED NOSED THE THIRD, WOULD YOU CARE TO JOIN IN A GAME OF DIE?” Death asked Rudolf.
“No, thanks milord,” said Rudolf, “I am following a suspicious scent. We may have a code Chartreuse, sir,” he added with what he thought was a meaningful look to the head of security.
No one would ever catch Rudolf TRNiii playing dice, or die, or whatever, while on duty, even on the graveyard shift before Hogswatch night. Calling me ‘Rudi’ indeed, he sniffed to himself.
Slagfith was already paging through the Emergency Protocol book. “Code Chartreuse, is that the one just above phthalo green for smaller time-bound projects that are not being attended to in a timeous manner, for example the kettle is boiling dry?” asked Slagfith.
“NO, THAT’S CELADON, BUT ONLY IF IT IS A POTTERY KETTLE, WHICH GLOWS PHTHALO WHEN VERY HOT. METAL KETTLES ARE CODE MINT GREEN, BECAUSE THEY GLOW A PALER SHADE OF GREEN WHEN, WELL, WHITE HOT,” said Death, who had a knack for knowing all the potentially terminal emergency protocols in any place of business he set foot in.
“Ah, I’ve always wondered about that distinction. But pray tell Rudi old boy, what nature of disturbance are we talking about then, is the sugar finished; are the rumours getting a bit frisky in the vault, what’s twitching your nose eh?”
Despite his bored tone, Rudolf TRNiii noted Slagfith had given all the Skeptic worms the quick Elvin eye. But the scent was too faint to disturb even those sensitive alarms.
“I shall continue patrolling and update on the possible incident As Soon As Possible, sir,” said Rudolf TRNiii.
To the guest he added, “My regards to Blinky and Mrs Nitemare milord, I trust her gestation is proceeding in good health?”
“ALL FINE ON THE HOME FRONT AND IN THE STABLES AT THE BACK, THANK YOU FOR ASKING, I AM SURE THEY WILL SEND THEIR REGARDS BACK,” intoned Death.
The rattle of dice hitting the metal table followed Rudolf TRNiii as he clip-clopped down the corridor.
“You matched me again, how do you DO it!” Slagfith yelled.
The gang are trapped in a rumour maelstrom and totally fail to stop word getting out.
Deep under the massive Pork Futures Warehouse, Hannah was axing a path through brittle cellar walls on a course that would place the gang directly under the Rumour Vault.
She was softly singing the chorus of a happy little song, the lyrics of which seemed to entail only “hi hoooo”.
The gang never had to pause long for Hannah to axe another hole through any of the walls, as even this area – which had been prosperous before the effluence of all the affluence had forced a move to a more ventilated part of town – had observed the venerable Morporkian tradition of building any wall with as little cement as gravity allowed.
“Are you sure we are going in the right direction?” asked Frik as he squeezed his bulk through the Hannah-sized hole.
She shot him a withering look. “I’m a dwarf. Underground. It’s what dwarfs do.”
Beano interrupted smoothly to prevent an argument. “I’ve been counting steps and if the map is correct, we are now 14,2 yards from the centre of the vault”.
“The map is correct, I fed the imp a bit of apple before he copied it,” said Rose, who got the map from her current date, Lias Bluestone. Among her many beliefs was the unshakable conviction that the little folk operating any mechanical device worked better with a small bite of apple, or in the case of Lias, who is a very big type of little folk, a swig from a bottle of scrumpy, which is basically just a lot of very well bitten apples.
Not that Lias needed a lot of persuading to show Rose the map. As happens frequently with drummers, Lias was temporarily between bands and working as a security guard at Chrysoprase Developers. In exchange for the rest of the scrumpy and a lock of lichen from Rose, he had allowed her imp to copy the floor plan of the warehouse.
“Well then, this means there are no walls left, so I’ll leave you two heavies to put phase one of the plan into play then,” said Hannah, sheathing her axe. “Beano and I will get back upstairs to the clerks’ office.”
The plan was simple. The “heavies”, Rose and Frik, would thump the vault’s reinforced floor to excite the rumours penned up above, so as to distract the guards inside. Meanwhile the “brains”, Hannah and Beano, were to use the distraction to get past the door guards and into Hogfather’s office, there to find and make a quick copy of the list of all the girls in Ankh Morpork who would not be getting presents this Hogwatch.
“Imps, synchronise timers! Rose, wait 40 Svedburgs.” said Beano.
“How long is a Svedburg?” Frik asked Rose when the brains were out of earshot.
It’s the standard time we Trolls require to make, umm, sediment after eating a human, or about half the wait between the Unseen Clock’s silences,” replied Rose, trying to be diplomatic about what was now old history of the species wars on the Disk.
“Ah, seven and a half minutes then. Only six left now,” said Frik as he hefted the large hammer he had borrowed from Lias. Rose rolled her shoulders and cracked her knuckles. This was going to be fun.
---
Exactly six minutes and forty seconds later, Hannah turned a corner and sauntered up to where two of Hogfather’s little helpers stood guard at the single entry to the warehouse.
Only, she noticed they were not so little. One of them left dents in the paving. Distracting them was going to take all her skill as a professional psychologist versed in all the various processes of deceit used by the many different species inhabiting the Disc.
Squaring up in front of the guards, she held out a hand… “Pick a card… any card,” she said.
Right on time, Hannah saw the pebbles around her jump as the pavement started to thump an insistent Troll war song, which comprised only of the chorus “boomboom boom BOOMBOOMBOOM, boomboom, boomboom”.
Ten seconds later, Beano’s thin frame blurred behind the guards’ legs as he slid full length on the ground to flit through the gap between the floor and the door.
Hannah found her hips swaying and saw those of the guards were also following the beat. She realised there was still a lot of music with rocks in it left over in Lias’ hammer. Rose did say the priestess at the Anoia temple had cleansed the hammer of all these dangerous rhythms, but the hips don’t lie.
Nevermind, Hannah thought, the insidious rhythm would aid her goal to distract the guards. “Is this your card, sir?” she asked, plucking a card from the scabbard of one guard.
“Ooh, that was good one, now do the one where I get to find the card in a packet of Big Cabbage crisps,” said the other. “I would like a bite of crispy cabbage.”
“Alas, ’tis be only a free show, no dinner and dance sir,” said Hannah, “but I can do you a snack, like, is that your card in this wrapping of rat biltong?”
---
Beano meanwhile was having difficulty sifting through the lists stacked in Hogfather’s office next to the Rumour Vault. Fast as elves are, which is fast enough to lap a jiffy in a vacuum, no speed can make up for bad admin; and Hogfather’s little filing helpers seemed to rely largely on the oldest filing system still practiced in warehouse offices throughout the known universe, which is piling up the pages and then holding them down with tannin-stained tea mugs.
He was flicking through the last pile, looking for any name with a red cross behind it while swaying to the faint “boooomboomboom BOOMBOOM, BOOMBOOM” from below, when a quiet sniff announced the arrival of The Red Nose The Third.
Then an angry snort announced the arrival of the rest of Rudolf.
The strapping reindeer did not hesitate. He was working a double shift with no overtime, he was in musk and here, precisely in target range, was an opposing male. Half a ton of solid muscle arched into the air, Rudolf’s powerful neck scythed down and only Beano’s quick turn and thin frame saved him from becoming an instant Elf kebab as the antlers buried themselves deep into the reinforced concrete on both sides of his head, cracks zigzagging away from the impact zone.
Above his nose, Rudolf dazed eyes reverberated in their sockets as his antlers quivered from the impact.
Lying between the quivers, Beano thought, this can’t be right. The tensile strength of antlers, which are basically bony fingers in velvet gloves, should never be able penetrate reinforced concrete, surely? Meanwhile, like rats swimming from a sinking ship, several tiny wooden horses rolled rapidly from the piles of paper. One had made it all the way into the gaping pocket of Beano’s cloak when both Rudolf TRNiii and the floor groaned.
Beano fell down into the basement, followed by a torrent of concrete chunks and flailing reindeer hooves.
---
Underneath the vault, as soon as she sensed the first crack appear above them, Rose had flattened Frik in a high tackle that would have earned her a year in the penalty box on any footy pitch in Fourecks, as well as immediate offer to contract on any footy team. Trolls know far in advance when stone, even grounded-to-dust limestone like cement, or what passed for cement in Ankh Morpork, have had enough.
As the falling chunks of concrete crumbled like wet mud on her back, Rose also thought, this can’t be right. Surely a vault must have harder masonry?”
Then the Rumours flooded out.
Pent up since last year's Hogwatch and fed a weekly mix of whispered insinuations, innuendo, gossip and hints, (both thinly and thickly veiled) the Rumours were raring to go grab space to bend it and shove that sleigh where the sun …
But there was no sleigh.
Instead, unbridled and unchannelled, the maelstrom of madly giggling rumours boiled through the tunnel made by Hannah, rushed up the stairs and burst out onto the sunlit pavement, pausing only to tell the paving stones about good intentions before thrumming into a passing cart full of supplies and equipment destined for Ankh Morporks’ burgeoning hair and beard care industry.
The carter suddenly had the idea that his wife, dead five years this Hogwatch, were suffering overtures from an oaf in the next grave over, and he whipped his nag into a froth to get to the graveyard and give that ungentlemanly cadaver what for. Fancy taking advantage of his dead sweetheart like that.
His careening wheels narrowly missed Hannah’s back. In front of Hannah, the two guards suddenly had an ugly inkling* that the cart was racing away with pork futures.
Only Hannah was unaffected by the fading ripple of rumours, partly because she was wearing a light, tin foil helmet**, but mostly because any dwarf who heeded a rumour did not last long enough underground to pass on their roughly stitched, blue-dyed canvas work pants to any little dwarfs.
“Uh-oh,” said Hannah as she watched the cart’s wheels strike sparks from the cobbles, the two beefy little helpers in hot pursuit, the ugly little inkling struggling to keep up.
A moment later, Rose and Frik burst from the cellar, carrying Beano.
“What happened?!” they all yelled at Beano. But having been so close to the vortex of rumours, Beano’s brain had been sucked dry of cryptic notes. All that was left were years of unused verbosity spurred by the powerful backwash of rumours getting up to speed.
“You would never believe me, my brave and fearless colleagues in strife, my brother and sisters, yes, indeed, my siblings in arms, it was incredible, awesome, really, so it behoves us, as it happens, at this point in time, to all find common ground for a debriefing in which each and every stakeholder, indeed, us as a collective, can go forward in a mutual meeting of minds –”
Hannah’s hand clamped over his mouth. “For A’tuin’s sake, you sound like a politician. Can you at least think clearly, how many hands am I holding?”
“Well, see now, at this juncture,” Beano paused and clamped his lips together in an effort to hold back the verbiage flooding his tongue, “if you were to play Cripple Mr Onion, I’d have to surmise a grand total of exactly and precisely 2,598,960 hands, which coincidentally, apropos of nothing, is the same permutation, numerically speaking, as a game of pokers of my own devising, which relies for victory, in rather a droll fashion, if I may say so myself, on a facial glow of royal mien breaking over the table like the morning sewers into the Ankh.”
“A royal flush you mean?” asked a fascinated Hannah before shaking her head, realising she was being sidetracked, as are elves’ wont. “Well, yes, you got the number close enough, now don’t speak. Just nod, did you get the list of bad girls?
Beano miserably shook his head.
“I didn’t think you did,” Hannah said, turning to face Rose and Frik, “for apart from a card that my left hand did not put there, look what my right hand found in a sleeve of one of those not-so-little helpers.”
She flourished an alphabetical list on top of which, underlined once and exclaimed thrice, were the headline “No presents for these!!!”
“I knew it!” said Rose. “That’s why the little helpers are always going out to party. They know where all the naughty kids live! Frik, no more seamstresses’ kittens for you. Tonight, we are going to find you a pa-haaar-tey!”
“But I like kittens,” said a crestfallen Frik, “and shouldn’t we try to put those rumours back?”
They all turned to look down the hill. The cart was only a speck in the distance. Along its path, several fires burned and at least one mob was fighting.
_________
* In a rare turn of events for this kind of story, that little Ugly Inkling met up with the little Ugly Duckling and they grew up to live happily ever after, growing quite prosperous from a chain of franchised massage parlour restaurants they opened all over the Disc, called the Happy Ending Sukling Duck.
** A lightly shop-soiled, but mostly undented Shatta helmet, which she got at the back-off-the-cart sale in Zemphis traders’ market.
Rumours grow strong at the Ankh-Morpork Inquirer and the Disc’s first digital images go viral on the DDD.
When the first boom had sounded, Slagfith had jumped up, his sword at the ready and his back to the wall, eyes scanning the gas bottles for the direction of the magic hack.
This close to Hogwatch night, it seemed every bespeckled kid on the Disc was trying to sneak a spider packed into a little hollow horse into the depot to make a last-minute change to their gift requests.
Now his ghost looked at his body where it was pinned to the wall by thousands of tiny love darts. Below his still-twitching feet a wriggling mass of Skeptic worms tried to burrow through the wall.
“Oh dearie me,” he said. “It seems I allowed myself to get between the worms and a sudden feast of rumour.”
On the wall, the fingers of his dead fist flopped open, releasing the die he was holding while alive. It rolled over the floor to stop with a soft clink next to the die of the visitor.
“Ha, look at that, finally the numbers don’t match! Why is that then?” Slagfith asked Death.
“IT IS BECAUSE FOR YOU, SLAGFITH, ALL THE SPOOKY ACTION IS NOW NO LONGER AT A DISTANCE,” said his guest. “A PITY, FOR I ENJOYED OUR GAME. WELCOME TO ENTROPY. SHALL WE GO?”
In the office of the Ankh-Morpork Times, Lord William de Word called down the cellar: “Mr Chriek, could you step over to my desk for a moment?”
“Just a sec,” echoed Otto’s voice from the dark depths. Since Otto had learned pixies use ALL their protruding body parts and some fluids to render the almost instant sketches they make in the popular brownie boxes, the fastidious vampire had insisted his pixies make their drawings using only their fingers. And only after washing up first, all the way to the wrists too.
For practice he had posed for the pixies a basket of kittens, which Miss Batje had brought in to illustrate the next kitten sale. Limited to using just their 12 digits, the pixies took a lot longer to draw the kittens so that the ensuing sketches only showed the blurry back of a kitten’s head or the tip of a tail.
Otto and the pixies were now using the techniques demonstrated by the famous dottylism pixie, Seurat Signat, to just dot down the suggestion of shadows “instead of smearing the whole bloody thing in ink” as the artist had described the pixies’ technique.
Studying the pixies’ latest effort, Otto shook his head. “It is still too pixie-lated,” he said, studying the sketches. “Take five and ven I come back ve try it again vrom ze top. But zis time, viv vilink!” Otto admonished the small folk assembled on his desk.
---
Otto found William standing in front of his much repaired desk in the editor’s cubicle, looking at the jar of transparent jelly containing a young Skeptic worm. William used the worm to check the rumour level of any story by waving the notes in front of the jar.
If the worm turned to follow the notebook, it contained too much rumour. He sent such stories over the road to the office of The Ankh-Morpork Inquirer. As per their gentleman’s agreement, CMOT Dibbler sent The Times any stories The Inquirer's worm found too full of dreary fact.
Otto immediately noticed what was wrong with the Skeptic worm. Normally it pointed straight to The Inquirer’s office, but today it was pointing up the road.
“Clarissa first noted this when she came to feed it with a little juicy titillation she had overheard at the Canary Breeders’ annual general meeting. Look, it is not even sniffing at this little tit-bit. What do you make of it?” William asked Otto.
“Hmpf. It can only be becauz it zenzes a much bigger, much juicier bit of tit in zat direction” said Otto, pointing to the door, which burst open dramatically, as if on cue.
“Mr de Worde! A rumpus! Outside!,” yelled the chief print setter Boddony.
Through the open door, a rumble dopplered past, followed by screams, a loud crash, and more screams, now laced with curses.
Looking over his shoulder, Boddony added, “The rumpus is now a crash, into The Inquirer.”
---
When they rushed outside, they found the carter staggering to his feet, wildly swiping Best Beard Glitter Foam* from his face, his hair caked in what looked like blood but smelled of Thimbleberry hair ointment. The people in the crowd that had followed his cart were slowly coming to their senses as the last rumour remnants, backing carefully away, blasted their thoughts with a few “they did its”.
A steel rim from a broken cartwheel wobbled down the hill up which a still-dazed Rudolf TRNiii was tottering, almost tripping the determined reindeer.
The carter, who was a man of fixed ideas, was not letting go so easily and managed to keep his pet rumour in check for a while.
“Point me to the cemetery, anyone, I’ll show that cuckolding zombie what’s what!” he yelled to no one in particular, while tugging at a hair net around his shoulders.
Then this last rumour slurped out of his mind to join the main body that was streaming to the cellar of The Inquirer.
William was just in time to see a shapeless mass of what looked like a solid body of purple prose shoulder down the newspaper’s sturdy door.
“Was that a cartload of unfettered rumour?” he asked Otto.
“I snapped the vole ving viv my new pocket iconograver,” said Otto, holding up his Light Brownie. “Let’s look at vott the pixie got.”
They leaned together to peer at the tiny sketch the pixie was holding up for inspection through an opening at the back of the box. All it showed was the purple tips of what looked like at least a double entendre, each tip clattering with dyslexic bed pans, slithering into The Inquirer’s office.
“That looks like a lot of bad puns waiting to happen,” muttered William as a second cart clattered up the hill.
_________
* Shatta's latest product in the His&Herstute Range, for the Dwarf Who Dares.
Vimes uses elipses in a very pointed manner and we learn how Faic Book started.
The second cart swerved past Rudolf TRNiii, almost dumping Rose and Hanna over the side as they held a still limp Beano in place before Frik hauled on the reigns to a stop amid the throng of people between Ankh Morpork’s two main newspaper offices. He had to haul hard to stop the surprisingly large horse that was still raring to go, foaming at the mouth and trying to kick at nearby bystanders.
At the back of the car, Beano blearily lifted his head hanging over the sign:
~ RONNIE SOAK ~
!Fresh Dairy Products Delivered Before You Know!
“Egad, surmise to say I can only express the fervent hope that we are not, heaven forbid, perchance arriving at a time that may be chronologically disadvantageous to our brave endeavour, one that I think we have already concurred, could be agreed to a fitting defintiion of being an adventure of siblings in arms –”
“Sure mate, we are too late,” Frik interrupted Beano as he surveyed the crashed cart and bewildered people milling about. “Did any of you guys see where they went,” he asked William and Otto.
“Vere voo vent?,” asked Otto, licking his finger and adding “this Thimbleberry juice is full of ice crystals. Crueltide must have come early in the Ram Tops.”
“Hogfather’s rumours,” said Frik, before Rose clamped a huge hand over his mouth, for Bobby, the watchman on the beat, had just ambled onto the scene. He had carefully waited for the last clang of the loose wheel rim to die down before rounding the corner. Bobby now opened the formalities by flipping open his notebook and carefully licking his pencil, just as his dad, the famous Fred Colon, had taught him.
“Roit, wot ’ave we ’ere then?,” he asked. As everyone started to talk and point together, he added calmly, “Now, now! One at a time, I’ve got only one pencil. Lord De Worde, would you care to make a report?
“I am afraid we only arrived in time to see the tail end,” said William. “I think you may have to start with the carter, he’s the one who seems to be bleeding. We shall meanwhile wait in the office to help you with your inquiries when you are done.”
He hustled the four students and Otto back to the Time’s door. As they walked through, it suddenly slammed shut. Leaning against it as he lit his evil smelling cigar was the Duke of Ankh; Commander of the Watch; Wiper of the Blackboard; Sir Samuel “The Butcher” Vimes.
Vimes did not need to say anything… He just glowered with a lot of unspoken elipses that stretched out like tiny dots at the end of a sentence… ready to trap or torture out the… words hiding under the tips of their tongues...
“Oh, no, it’s the Blackboard Monitor, and he is giving us the ... treatment,” wailed Hannah.
“It wasn’t us!” said a defiant Rose then – seeing Vimes cock an eyebrow at her – “well, some of it was, but mostly it wasn’t and how were we supposed to know the vault was built with Ankh Morpork mortar?”
“Which is to say, eight parts Ankh mud, half a part cement-like powder and mostly mucus for the balance,” interjected Beano, who was slowly getting his cryptic back. “Hey, where did this Trojan come from?” he asked as he fished a tiny wooden horse from his cloak.
Vimes puffed. His glower continued to leave pointed little dots for them to fill in...
Desperate to fill the elipses, Frik said: “I really think we have to focus on penning those rumours.”
“That is the first sensible thing you lot said so far. And how do you –” Vimes consulted his notebook, “– Mr Dell, propose to find all those rumours?"
“The probability of all of them being down in the basement of The Inquirer is currently at 110%, and rising,” said Beano.
“And why there, specifically?” asked Vimes.
“They need a vehicle that many believe in,” said Hannah, “something like Hogfather’s sleigh, or The Inquirer or even the new DDD. Actually, especially the new DDD”.
Then she noticed the look from de Worde and hastily added, “It is not like the people don’t believe in The Times, Lord de Word, it’s just that The Times is like braces, you rely on it doing the important but ultimately boring job of keeping pants up. The Inquirer is like a… like a garter belt, you know? It is specifically made to not reliably keep the pants up.
William went pale. “They now have a thing called Faic Book over the road,” he told Vimes. “I hear it’s the latest thing on the DDD. And the basement is where our friend Mr CMOT Dibbler now supervises the daily filling of The Inquirer’s Faic Book page.”
“Faic?” asked Vimes, “I’m guessing as in fact and fiction in one?”
“Afraid so,” said Williams. “But a mere smidgeon of fact to grease a whole lot of fiction. The Engravers Guild are apparently banking on this mix to drag The Inquirer into the Age of the Trumpet, if the future’s market prophet’s prophecies of profits prove true.”
“Scuse me sirs,” said Beano. “Did you say they have the DDD down there?”
“Oh yes!,” interjected Otto. “Zey have even put up many more cubicles to make extra corners to strung ze vebs in. At ze cutting of the ribbon ze old Engravers made sure to, how do you say, rub my face in it, because zey now have ze biggest veb of any newspaper on ze disk, vhile ve at ze modern Times,” he shot William a dirty look, “do not agree ze vebs will benefit ze newspapers.”
Rose and Frik looked in alarm at Beano. All three got out much-modified slide rules and started muttering calculations with increasingly worried expressions.
“Uh oh,” said Hannah at the rest of the group, “I don’t know how bad it is, but when they get out their slide rules, it normally means one of the elephants of which the Disks rests has just dropped a huge pile of quantumurgy.
Rose was tapping the buttons on the imp casing bolted onto her slide rule. “It says here Tramperer is just biding his time to attack Sto Lat if he gets elected as mayor.
“Why would he do that for? It will close all the cabbage delivery routes. Whole industries will crash,” said William.
“Frik was looking at his rather larger, but equally modified Mk 1 Disorganiser. “My news feed quotes a Mr Aaik on the invisible lizards that he saw invading the Watch.”
Vimes glared at Frik’s Mk 1 Disorganiser. “They are not lizards but large geckos and they are not invisible. Lady Sybil could only breed them to be translucent. They catch flies and mosquitoes. I had me one of those Disorganisers. A Mk 2. The imp in it is best left minding the office. A properly digitally manipulated note taking system like this is more reliable,” he said, flourishing his notebook and pencil at Frik.
Consulting said notebook, he added, “So what you are saying is that all Hogfather’s rumours, which were reported to have escaped from…” he flipped back two pages “…the Pork Futures Warehouse district exactly 40 minutes ago, are now loose on the Diagonal Disc Dispatches?”
Our heroes use kittens to clog the Diagonal Disc Dispatches.
Three of the Disc’s brightest Quantumurgists and its top shrink shuffled their feet and looked at the floor. Hannah knew Vimes was using his Blackboard Monitor Stare, but not even her Shatta tin foil helmet could stop it from sparking her guilty reaction.
Surreptitiously looking at his Disorganiser, Frik said: “Sir, you can put us in the dungeon later, but we need to do something now to stop the rumours from spreading any further. My Faic Book newsfeed already said ‘Sources say’ the Patrician is grave and dying, and that you now use a water board when getting the public to help you with your inquiries.
“Those are all classic half-truths!” said William. “The Patrician has always been rather grave and solemn; we are ALL dying all the time, and we just last week published a photo of the Watch’s new diving board at the Widows and Orphans’ swimming pool.”
“We have to stop these half truths before they spread panic,” said Vimes, spitting out the stub of his cigar and catching it without looking. He pointed to the four students. “You started this. You end this! Now!”
“Have you really got no access to the DDD at all here at The Times?” Beano urgently asked William. “For if we can access the DDD, we can use this Trojan to flip the gullibility index or maybe even clog the Faic Book with cynicism.
“Or I can just go down to The Inquirer and troll ’em all,” said Rose, smacking her granite fists so hard that sparks flew.
“Ve maaay have a taaaainy leetl veb in the cellar,” said Otto, this time with a guilty look at William, “it’s only a leeettle six strinker, just to keep in kontak with my vellow Black Ribbonners, and update my, ahem, Faic book page on the new process to paint using only fingertips.”
The four students were already racing towards the stairs leading to Otto’s lair. Rose was the first down, diamond teeth bared and granite fists ready to troll anything. In the darkness, she tripped over a basket.
“Ooh, look! Kitteeeeeeens!” she yelled.
The rest of the assembly watched in amazement as Hannah sheathed her throwing axe to also plump herself in front of the upset basket from which Miss Batje’s kittens were now crawling and yawning, cute as only sleepy kittens can be. “Whozamomma’s foozy lil’ fluffball then,” she crooned.
Frik looked at Beano. “You thinking what I’m thinking, you know, exponentially?”
Beano fiddled with his slide rule. “Mmh, just over half the users female and say, at least a third of the males also closet kitten petters, I’d rate the probability 68,333%.”
---
Peering at them from the top of the steps, Vimes nudged William. “Do you know what they’re on about?”
“No idea sir. But when Miss Cripslock interviewed them last week on how those tiny wooden horses make the webs hang loose, they seemed to know all the long words to use.”
“Ah, I find when it comes to the DDD it’s best to step back and let the young ones get on with it,” said Vimes, biting the end off a fresh cigar and lighting it.
“How is the family, your boy still enjoying ‘Where Is My Cow’?”
“Oh no, he’s moved onto ‘How The Tortoise Learned To Fly’,” said William. “He is five now. Shall we get a cuppa meanwhile?”
“How time flies,” sighed Vimes as they walked towards the messy table that served as the office canteen.
---
Directly beneath their feet, Beano exhaled softly as he carefully withdrew his thin, elegant index finger from an opening in the tiny Trojan horse and handed it to Frik.
Behind them, Rose and Hannah were still making mewling sounds at the now playful kittens. The pixies had captured the pair of former enemies playing with cute kittens in the soft light streaming from the trap door and the resulting sepia sketch just begged to be printed onto Hogfather cards.
Instead, Beano had rolled the sketch into a tiny tube and shoved it into the slot hidden under the tail of the little wooden horse.
“Ahem, I actually need the horse, Beano, not your finger,” said Frik.
Beano looked down at the elegant index finger he was proffering. “Ah yes, of course, sorry,” said Beano, carelessly slotting the ball of his finger back into its socket* before handing Frik the little hollow horse.
Very, very carefully, Frik balanced the tiny horse on top of Otto’s little six strand web.
A tiny spider emerged stealthily from the hidden slot and played a quick riff on the strands before scuttling back under the tail.
The strands glowed faintly as they picked up the single susurration. It sounded very much like a very happy little purr.
“Here’s hoping 68,333% kitten lovers will be enough,” said Beano. He was holding Frik’s Disorganiser, now linked to Otto’s web with two spliced strands. The strands stiffened for a second as the happy little purr passed onto the DDD.
“That’s one like,” said Beano.
They both anxiously watched as Disorganiser’s little imp placed a neat little flip-over scoreboard on the rim of the device. It cupped a tiny hand behind an ear to listen to a signal from inside the box, then flipped the numbers to show a three. A few seconds later it flipped to show 15.
It cupped its hand again and changed the flaps to show 50 instead. Then it spat on its hands and the numbers started to blur, 120, 200, 410, 850, 1730, 3400, 7900…”
“Yeah!” said Frik.
“Exponential!” agreed Beano.
---
In houses all over Ankh Morpork, the heart-warming of a troll and a dwarf playing with happy little kittens shimmered into the visible spectrum above the webs, causing people to go “aawh.”
These people shared the picture with at least two of their besties, who then shared it with their besties and soon, the happy little purr quickly found its way to webs in Sto Lat, then Quirm, then even the Counterweight Continent.
One purr picture even appeared in the Ramtop Mountains, on the latest model web that Nanny Ogg had one of her grandchildren install in her kitchen, just left of old Greebo’s basket.
She cackled happily as she passed all that cuteness on to her bestie, Granny Weatherwax, who despite now being constantly laid, as it were, was even more active than when she was alive, thanks to the DDD giving her a voice from her coffin.
But her happy cackle soon turned to a frown as the picture only dissolved halfway before the web suddenly ruptured and hung loose.
“Not again,” said Nanny Ogg.
---
Down in Otto’s cellar, the little imp was stamping out the small flames around the still smoking embers of what used to be the scoreboard. As the number of people liking and passing on The Purr grew more and more, the air friction from the fast flipping numbered boards just got too hot.
Then Otto’s little six strand web flashed blue and ruptured.
In the tradition of programmers everywhere, Beano and Frik exchanged clumsy but enthusiastic elevated quintets.
“It worked!” and “We clogged the DDD!” they yelled as they stormed up the stairs.
“Good for you,” said Vimes. “The Luggage is already helping Hogfather’s little helpers to pen the rumours as they fall out of the webs over the road.
“Now, would the four of you care to accompany me to, as we say, help the Watch in their inquiries? I think Dozy would like to know a LOT more about those little wooden horses.”
The End
_________
*It is a truth not universally known about male elves, that they, like all cephalopods, can separate certain limbs from the main body to go forth and work, as it were, independently. This is because elvopologists forget this truth as soon as they learn that male elves also share a lot with the bit that makes a duck a drake.
