DOOR.
“Yeah. Sorry. All right, Bill Door…”
CALL ME BILL.
“And you can call me Miss Flitworth. I expect you want some dinner?”
I WOULD? AH. YES. THE MEAL OF THE EVENING. YES.
“You look half starved, to tell the truth. More than half, really.” She squinted at the figure. Somehow it was very hard to be certain what Bill Door looked like, or even remember the exact sound of his voice. Clearly he was there, and clearly he had spoken—otherwise why did you remember anything at all?
“There’s a lot of people in these parts as don’t use the name they were born with,” she said. “I always say there’s nothing to be gained by going around asking pers’nal questions. I suppose you can work, Mr. Bill Door? I’m still getting the hay in off the high meadows and there’ll be a lot of work come harvest. Can you use a scythe?”
Bill Door seemed to meditate on the question for some time. Then he said, I THINK THE ANSWER TO THAT IS A DEFINITE “YES,” MISS FLITWORTH.
Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler also never saw the sense in asking personal questions, at least insofar as they applied to him and were on the lines of “Are these things yours to sell?” But no one appeared to be coming forward to berate him for selling off their property, and that was good enough for him. He’d sold more than a thousand of the little globes this morning, and he’d had to employ a troll to keep up a flow from the mysterious source of supply in the cellar.
People loved them.
The principle of operation was laughably simple and easily graspable by the average Ankh-Morpork citizen after a few false starts.
If you gave the globe a shake, a cloud of little white snowflakes swirled up in the liquid inside and settled, delicately, on a tiny model of a famous Ankh-Morpork landmark. In some globes it was the University, or the Tower of Art, or the Brass Bridge, or the Patrician’s Palace. The detail was amazing.
And then there were no more left. Well, thought Throat, that’s a shame. Since they hadn’t technically belonged to him—although morally, of course, morally they were his—he couldn’t actually complain. Well, he could complain, of course, but only under his breath and not to anybody specific. Maybe it was all for the best, come to think of it. Stack ’em high, sell ’em cheap. Get ’em off your hands—it made it much easier to spread them in a gesture of injured innocence when you said “Who, me?”
They were really pretty, though. Except, strangely enough, for the writing. It was on the bottom of each globe, in shaky, amateurish letters, as if done by someone who had never seen writing before and was trying to copy some down. On the bottom of every globe, below the intricate little snowflake-covered building, were the words:
Mustrum Ridcully, Archchancellor of Unseen University, was a shameless autocondimentor.* He had his own special cruet put in front of him at every meal. It consisted of salt, three types of pepper, four types of mustard, four types of vinegar, fifteen different kinds of chutney and his special favorite: Wow-Wow Sauce, a mixture of mature scumble, pickled cucumbers, capers, mustard, mangoes, figs, grated wahooni, anchovy essence, asafetida and, significantly, sulfur and saltpetre for added potency. Ridcully inherited the formula from his uncle who, after half a pint of sauce on a big meal one evening, had a charcoal biscuit to settle his stomach, lit his pipe and disappeared in mysterious circumstances, although his shoes were found on the roof the following summer.
There was cold mutton for lunch. Mutton went well with Wow-Wow Sauce; on the night of Ridcully senior’s death, for example, it had gone at least three miles.
Mustrum tied his napkin behind his neck, rubbed his hands together, and reached out.
The cruet moved.
He reached out again. It slid away.
Ridcully sighed.
“All right, you fellows,” he said. “No magic at Table, you know the rules. Who’s playing silly buggers?”
The other senior wizards stared at him.
“I, I, I don’t think we can play it anymore,” said the Bursar, who at the moment was only occasionally bouncing off the sides of sanity, “I, I, I think we lost some of the pieces…”
He looked around, giggled, and went back to trying to cut his mutton with a spoon. The other wizards were keeping knives out of his way at present.
The entire cruet floated up into the air and started to spin slowly. Then it exploded.
The wizards, dripping vinegar and expensive spices, watched it owlishly.
“It was probably the sauce,” the Dean ventured. “It was definitely going a bit critical last night.”
Something dropped on his head and landed in his lunch. It was a black iron screw, several inches long.
Another one mildly concussed the Bursar.
After a second or two, a third landed point down on the table by the Archchancellor’s hand and stuck there.