'Yes, yes, until you're dead. But you don't even believe that! You were telling me how much you hated the whole Guild and everything!'
'Well, yes. But I still have to do it. I gave my word.'
Magrat came close to stamping her foot, but didn't sink so low.
'Just when we were getting to know one another!' she shouted. 'You're pathetic!'
The Fool's eyes narrowed. 'I'd only be pathetic if I broke my word,' he said. 'But I may be incredibly ill-advised. I'm sorry. I'll be back in a few weeks, anyway.'
'Don't you understand I'm asking you not to listen to him?'
'I said I'm sorry. I couldn't see you again before I go, could I?'
'I shall be washing my hair,' said Magrat stiffly.
'When?'
'Whenever!'
Hwel pinched the bridge of his nose and squinted wearily at the wax-spattered paper.
The play wasn't going at all well.
He'd sorted out the falling chandelier, and found a place for a villain who wore a mask to conceal his disfigurement, and he'd rewritten one of the funny bits to allow for the fact that the hero had been born in a handbag. It was the clowns who were giving him trouble again. They kept changing every time he thought about them. He preferred them in twos, that was traditional, but now there seemed to be a third one, and he was blowed if he could think of any funny lines for him.
His quill moved scratchily over the latest sheet of paper, trying to catch the voices that had streamed through his dreaming mind and had seemed so funny at the time.
His tongue began to stick out of the corner of his mouth. He was sweating.
This iss My Little Study, he wrote. Hey, with a Little Study youe could goe a Long Way. And I wishe youed start now. Iffe You can't leave yn a Cab then leave yn a Huff. Iffthates too soone, thenn leave yn a minute and a Huff. Say, have you Gott a Pensil? A crayon?—
Hwel stared at this in horror. On the page it looked nonsensical, ridiculous. And yet, and yet, in the thronged auditorium of his mind . . .
He dipped the quill in the inkpot, and chased the echoes further.
Seconde Clown: Atsa right, Boss.
Third Clowne: [businesse with bladder on stick] Honk. Honk.
Hwel gave up. Yes, it was funny, he knew it was funny, he'd heard the laughter in his dreams. But it wasn't right. Not yet. Maybe never. It was like the other idea about the two clowns, one fat, one thin . . . Thys ys amain Dainty Messe youe have got me into, Stanleigh . . . He had laughed until his chest ached, and the rest of the company had looked at him in astonishment. But in his dreams it was hilarious.
He laid down the pen and rubbed his eyes. It must be nearly midnight, and the habit of a lifetime told him to spare the candles although, for a fact, they could afford all the candles they could eat now, whatever Vitoller might say.
Hour gongs were being struck all across the city and nightwatchmen were proclaiming that it was indeed midnight and also that, in the face of all the evidence, all was well. Many of them got as far as the end of the sentence before being mugged.
Hwel pushed open the shutters and looked out at Ankh-Morpork.
It would be tempting to say the twin city was at its best this time of year, but that wouldn't be entirely correct. It was at its most typical.
The river Ankh, the cloaca of half a continent, was already pretty wide and silt laden when it reached the city's outskirts. By the time it left it didn't so much flow as exude. Owing to the accretion of the mud of centuries the bed of the river was in fact higher than some of the low lying areas and now, with the snow melt swelling the flow, many of the low-rent districts on the Morpork side were flooded, if you can use that word for a liquid you could pick up in a net. This sort of thing happened every year and would have caused havoc with the drains and sewage systems, so it is just as well that the city didn't have very many. Its inhabitants merely kept a punt handy in the back yard and, periodically, built another storey on the house.
It was reckoned to be very healthy there. Very few germs were able to survive.
Hwel looked across a sort of misty sea in which buildings clustered like a sandcastle competition at high tide. Flares and lighted windows made pleasing patterns on the iridescent surface, but there was one glare of light, much closer to hand, which particularly occupied his attention.
On a patch of slightly higher ground by the river, bought by Vitoller for a ruinous sum, a new building was rising. It was growing even by night, like a mushroom – Hwel could see the cressets burning all along the scaffolding as the hired craftsmen and even some of the players themselves refused to let the mere shade of the sky interrupt their labours.
New buildings were rare in Morpork, but this was even a new type of building.