The Truth (Discworld 25)

'Do I see a pile of cash in front of me? I don't think so.'

'Well, Mr Bone, I'm not even going to think about getting that kind of money together until I've got some proof that you really know something.'

'All right,' said the voice from the shadows after a while. 'You know there's a Committee to Unelect the Patrician? Now that's news.'

'What's new about that? People have plotted to get rid of him for years.'

There was another pause.

'Y'know,' said Deep Bone, 'it'd save a lot of trouble if you just gave me the money and I told you everything.'

'So far you haven't told me anything. Tell me everything, and then I'll pay you, if it's the truth.'

'Oh, yes, pull one of the others, it's got bells on!'

Then it looks like we can't do business,' said William, putting his notebook away.

'Wait, wait... this'll do. You ask Vimes what Vetinari did just before the attack.'

'Why, what did he do?'

'See if you can find out.'

That's not a lot to go on.'

There was no reply. William thought he heard a shuffling noise.

'Hello?'

He waited a moment and then very carefully stepped forward.

In the gloom a few horses turned to look at him. Of an invisible informant there was no sign.

A lot of thoughts jostled for space in his mind as he headed out into the daylight, but surprisingly enough it was a small and theoretically unimportant one that kept oozing into centre stage. What kind of expression was 'pull one of the others, it's got bells on'? Now, 'pull the other one, it's got bells on', he'd heard of - it stemmed from the days of a crueller than usual ruler in Ankh-Morpork who had had any Morris dancers ritually tortured. But 'one of the others'... where was the sense in that?

Then it struck him.

Deep Bone must be a foreigner. It made sense. It was like the way Otto spoke perfectly good Morporkian but hadn't got the hang of colloquialisms.

He made a note of this.

He smelled the smoke at the same time as he heard the pottery clatter of golem feet. Four of the clay people thudded past him, carrying a long ladder. Without thinking he fell in behind, automatically turning to a new page in his notebook.

Fire was always the terror in those parts of the city where wood and thatch predominated. That was why everyone had been so dead set against any form of fire brigade, reasoning -with impeccable Ankh-Morpork logic - that any bunch of men who were paid to put out fires would naturally see to it that there was a plentiful supply of fires to put out.

Golems were different. They were patient, hard-working, intensely logical, virtually indestructible and they volunteered. Everyone knew golems couldn't harm people.

There was some mystery about how the golem fire brigade had got formed. Some said the idea had come from the Watch, but the generally held theory was that golems simply would not allow people and property to be destroyed. With eerie discipline and no apparent communication they would converge on a fire from all sides, rescue any trapped people, secure and carefully pile up all portable property, form a bucket chain along which the buckets moved at a blur, trample every last ember... and then hurry back to their abandoned tasks.

These four were hurrying to a blaze in Treacle Mine Road. Tongues of fire curled out of first-floor rooms.

'Are you from the paper?' said a man in the crowd.

'Yes,' said William.

'Well, I reckon this is another case of mysterious spontaneous combustion, just like you reported yesterday,' and he craned his neck to see if William was writing this down.

William groaned. Sacharissa had reported a fire in Lobbin Clout, in which one poor soul had died, and had left it at that. But the Inquirer had called it a Mystery Fire.