'Don't know, lordship,' he said. 'They wouldn't let me in. They made me wait outside the door, lordship.'
He twisted his forgers together nervously. The Patrician's stare had him pinned. It was a good stare, and one of the things it was good at was making people go on talking when they thought they had finished.
Only the Patrician knew how many spies he had in the city. This particular one was a servant in the Alchemists' Guild. He had once had the misfortune to come up before the Patrician accused of malicious lingering, and had then chosen of his own free will to become a spy.[3]
'That's all, lordship,' he whined. 'There was just this clicking noise and this sort of flickery glow under the door. And, er, they said the daylight here was wrong.'
'Wrong? How?'
'Er. Dunno, sir. just wrong, they said. They ought to go somewhere where it was better, they said. Uh. And they told me to go and get them some food.'
The Patrician yawned. There was something infinitely boring about the antics of alchemists.
'Indeed,' he said.
'But they'd had their supper only fifteen minutes before,' the servant blurted out.
'Perhaps whatever they were doing makes people hungry,' said the Patrician.
'Yes, and the kitchen was all shut up for the night and I had to go and buy a tray of hot sausages in buns from Throat Dibbler.'
I'm thinking about the bugger over Tsort way, or somewhere. He was in his bath and he had this idea for something, and he ran out down the street yelling.'
'Yelling what?'
'Dunno. P'raps “Give me a towel!” '
'Bet he'd be yellin' all right if he tried that sort of thing round here,' said Throat cheerfully. 'Now, ladies and gents, I have here some sausage in a bun that'd make your-'
'Eureka,' said the soot-coloured one, swaying back and forth.
'What about it?' said Throat.
'No, that's the word. Eureka.' A worried grin spread across the black features. 'It means “I have it”.'
'Have what?' said Throat.
'It. At least, I had it. Octo-cellulose. Amazing stuff. Had it in my hand. But I held it too close to the fire,' said the figure, in the perplexed tones of the nearly concussed. 'V'ry important fact. Mus' make a note of it. Don't let it get hot. V'ry important. Mus' write down v'ry important fact.'
He tottered back into the smoking ruins.
Dibbler watched him go.
'Wonder what that was all about?' he said. Then he shrugged and raised his voice to a shout. 'Meat pies! Hot sausages! Inna bun! So fresh the pig h'an't noticed they're gone!'
The glittering, swirling idea from the hill had watched all this. The alchemist didn't even know it was there. All he knew was that he was being unusually inventive today.
Now it had spotted the pie merchant's mind.
It knew that kind of mind. It loved minds like that. A mind that could sell nightmare pies could sell dreams.
It leaped.
On a hill far away the breeze stirred the cold, grey ash.
Further down the hill, in a crack in a hollow between two rocks where a dwarf juniper bush struggled for a Ping, a little trickle of sand began to move.
Boom.