“What next?” she said.
WHAT HAVE WE HAD SO FAR?
“Let’s see…hessian, calico, linen…how about satin? Here’s a piece.”
Bill Door took the rag and wiped it gently along the blade.
Miss Flitworth reached the bottom of the bag, and pulled out a swatch of white cloth.
YES?
“Silk,” she said softly. “Finest white silk. The real stuff. Never worn.”
She sat back and stared at it.
After a while he took it tactfully from her fingers.
THANK YOU.
“Well now,” she said, waking up. “That’s it, isn’t it?”
When he turned the blade, it made a noise like whommmm. The fires of the forge were barely alive now, but the blade glowed with razor light.
“Sharpened on silk,” said Miss Flitworth. “Who’d believe it?
”
AND STILL BLUNT.
Bill Door looked around the dark forge, and then darted into a corner.
“What have you found?”
COBWEB.
There was a long thin whine, like the torturing of ants.
“Any good?”
STILL TOO BLUNT.
She watched Bill Door stride out of the forge, and scuttled after him. He went and stood in the middle of the yard, holding the scythe blade edge-on to the faint, dawn breeze.
It hummed.
“How sharp can a blade get, for goodness’ sake?”
IT CAN GET SHARPER THAN THIS.
Down in his henhouse, Cyril the cockerel awoke and stared blearily at the treacherous letters chalked on the board. He took a deep breath.
“Floo-a-cockle-dod!”
Bill Door glanced at the rimward horizon and then, speculatively, at the little hill behind the house.
He jerked forward, legs clicking over the ground.
The new daylight sloshed onto the world. Discworld light is old, slow and heavy; it roared across the landscape like a cavalry charge. The occasional valley slowed it for a moment and, here and there, a mountain range banked it up until it poured over the top and down the far slope.