'Oh, they're awful,' breathed Sacharissa, looking away from the tortured shadows.
'I feel so wretched,' said Otto. 'Obviously they vere too stronk--'
'Tell us, Otto!'
'Veil... the iconograph does not lie, you have heard zis?'
'Of course.'
'Yes? Veil... under stronk dark light, the picture really does not lie. Dark light reveals zer truth to the dark eyes of zer mind...' He paused and sighed. 'Ah, vunce again no ominous roll of thunder, vot a vaste. But at least you could look apprehensively at the shadows.'
All heads turned towards the shadows, in the corner of the room and under the roof. They were simply shadows, haunted by nothing more than dust and spiders.
'But there's just dust and--' Sacharissa began.
Otto held up a hand. 'Dear lady... I have just told you. Philosophically, the truth can be vot is metaphorically there
William stared at the picture again.
'I had hoped that I could use filters and so on to cut down zer, er, unvanted effects,' said Otto behind him. 'But alas--'
'This gets worse and worse,' said Sacharissa. 'It gives me the humorous vegetables.'
Goodmountain shook his head. 'This is unholy stuff,' he said. 'No more meddling with it, understand?'
'I didn't think dwarfs were religious,' said William.
'We're not,' said Goodmountain. 'But we know unholy when we see it, and I'm looking at it right now, I'm telling you. I don't want any more of these, these... prints of darkness!'
William grimaced. It shows the truth, he thought. But how do we know the truth when we see it? The Ephebian philosophers think that a hare can never outrun a tortoise, and they can prove it. Is that the truth? I heard a wizard say that everything is made of little numbers, whizzing around so fast that they become stuff. Is that true? I think a lot of things that have been happening over the last few days are not what they seem, and I don't know why I think that, but I think it's not the truth...
'Yes, no more of this stuff, Otto,' he said.
'Damn right,' said Goodmountain.
'Let's just try to get back to normal and get a paper out, shall we?'
'You mean normal where mad priests start to collect dogs, or normal where vampires mess around with evil shadows?' said Gowdie.
'I mean like normal before that,' said William.
'Oh, I see. You mean like back in the old days,' said Gowdie.
After a while, though, silence settled on the press room, although there was an occasional sniff from the desk opposite.
William wrote a story about the fire. That was easy. Then he tried to write a coherent account of the recent events, but found he couldn't get beyond the first word. He'd written The'. It was a reliable word, the definite article. The trouble was, all the things he was definite about were bad.
He'd expected to... what? Inform people? Yes. Annoy people? Well, some people, at least. What he hadn't expected was that it wouldn 't make any difference. The paper came out, and it didn 't matter.
People just seemed to accept things. What was the point of writing another story on the Vetinari business? Well, of course, it had a lot of dogs in it, and there was always a lot of human interest in a story about animals.
'What did you expect?' said Sacharissa, as if she was reading his thoughts. 'Did you think people would be marching in the streets? Vetinari isn't a very nice man, from what I hear. People say he probably deserves to be locked up.'
'Are you saying people aren't interested in the truth?'
'Listen, what's true to a lot of people is that they need the money for the rent by the end of the week. Look at Mr Ron and his friends. What's the truth mean to them? They live under a bridge!'
She held up a piece of lined paper, crammed edge to edge with the careful looped handwriting of someone for whom holding a pen was not a familiar activity.