The Truth (Discworld 25)

'There were pictures,' said the dog hurriedly. Tongues an' teeth an' that. Dead easy to understand. Oh, now the little doggie's wanderin' off...'

The dog edged its way to the door.

'Sheesh,' it appeared to say. 'A couple of thumbs and they're lords of bloody creation

Then it ran for it.

'How will this work?' said Sacharissa, trying to look intelligent. It was much better to concentrate on something like this than think about strange men getting ready to invade again.

'Slowly,' mumbled Goodmountain, fiddling with the press. 'You realize that this means it'll take us much longer to print each paper?'

'You vanted colour, I gif you colour,' said Otto sulkily. 'You never said qvick.'

Sacharissa looked at the experimental iconograph. Most pictures were painted in colour these days. Only really cheap imps painted in black and white, even though Otto insisted that monochrome 'vas an art form in itself. But printing colour... '

Four imps were sitting on the edge of it, passing a very small cigarette from hand to hand and watching with interest the work on the press. Three of them wore goggles of coloured glass - red, blue and yellow.

'But not green...' she said. 'So... if something's green - have I got this right? - Guthrie there sees the... blue in the green and paints that on the plate in blue' - one of the imps gave her a wave - 'and Anton sees the yellow and paints that, and when you run it through the press--'

'... very, very slowly,' muttered Goodmountain. 'It'd be quicker to go round to everyone's house and tell 'em the news.'

Sacharissa looked at the test sheets that had been done of the recent fire. It was definitely a fire, with red, yellow and orange flames, and there was some, yes, blue sky, and the golems were a pretty good reddish-brown, but the flesh tones... well, 'flesh-coloured' was a bit of a tricky one in Ankh-Morpork, where if you picked your subject it could be any colour except maybe light blue, but the faces of many of the bystanders did suggest that a particularly virulent plague had passed through the city. Possibly the Multi-coloured Death, she decided.

'Zis is only the beginning,' said Otto. 'Ve vill get better.'

'Better maybe, but we're as fast as we can go,' said Good-mountain. 'We can do maybe two hundred an hour. Maybe two hundred and fifty, but someone's going to be looking for their fingers before this day's out. Sorry, but we're doing the best we can. If we had a day to redesign and rebuild properly--'

'Print a few hundred and do the rest in black and white, then,' said Sacharissa, and sighed. 'At least it'll catch people's attention.'

'Vunce zey see it, the Inqvirer vill vork out how it vas done,' said Otto.

'Then at least we'll go down with our colours flying,' said Sacharissa. She shook her head as a little dust floated down from the ceiling.

'Hark at that,' said Boddony. 'Can you feel the floor shake? That's their big presses again.'

They're undermining us everywhere,' said Sacharissa. 'And we've all worked so hard. It's so unfair.'

I'm surprised the floor takes it,' said Goodmountain. 'It's not as though anything's on solid ground round here.'

'Undermining us, eh?' said Boddony.

One or two of the dwarfs looked up when he said this. Boddony said something in dwarfish. Goodmountain snapped something in reply. A couple of other dwarfs joined in.

'Excuse me,' said Sacharissa tartly.

The lads were... wondering about going in and having a look,' said Goodmountain.

'I tried going in the other day,' said Sacharissa. 'But the troll on the door was most impolite.'

'Dwarfs... approach matters differently,' said Goodmountain.

Sacharissa saw a movement. Boddony had pulled his axe out from under the bench. It was a traditional dwarf axe. One side was a pickaxe, for the extraction of interesting minerals, and the other side was a war axe, because the people who own the land with the valuable minerals in it can be so unreasonable sometimes.

'You're not going to attack anyone, are you?' she said, shocked.

'Well, someone did say that if you want a good story you have to dig and dig,' said Boddony. 'We're just going to go for a walk.'

'In the cellar?' said Sacharissa, as they headed for the steps.