'Probably very little,' said Mr Bent, watching them go.
'Hmm?' said Moist.
'You were wondering how much money is walking out with them, I believe.'
'Well, yes.'
'Very little, I think. They say that after a while the money becomes just... stuff,' said the chief cashier, leading the way back into the bank.
'It costs more than a penny to make a penny,' Moist murmured. 'Is it just me, or is that wrong?'
'But, you see, once you have made it, a penny keeps on being a penny,' said Mr Bent. 'That's the magic of it.'
'It is?' said Moist. 'Look, it's a copper disc. What do you expect it to become?'
'In the course of a year, just about everything,' said Mr Bent smoothly. 'It becomes some apples, part of a cart, a pair of shoelaces, some hay, an hour's occupancy of a theatre seat. It may even become a stamp and send a letter, Mr Lipwig. It might be spent three hundred times and yet - and this is the good part - it is still one penny, ready and willing to be spent again. It is not an apple, which will go bad. Its worth is fixed and stable. It is not consumed.' Mr Bent's eyes gleamed dangerously, and one of them twitched. 'And this is because it is ultimately worth a tiny fraction of the everlasting gold!'
'But it's just a lump of metal. If we used apples instead of coins, you could at least eat the apple,' said Moist.
'Yes, but you can only eat it once. A penny is, as it were, an everlasting apple.'
'Which you can't eat. And you can plant an apple tree.'
'You can use money to make more money,' said Bent.
'Yes, but how do you make more gold? The alchemists can't, the dwarfs hang on to what they've got, the Agateans won't let us have any. Why not go on the silver standard? They do that in BhangBhangduc.'
'I imagine they would, being foreign,' said Bent. 'But silver blackens. Gold is the one untarnishable metal.' And once again there was that tic: gold clearly had a tight hold on the man. 'Have you seen enough, Mr Lipwig?'
'Slightly too much for comfort, I think.'
'Then let us go and meet the chairman.'
Moist followed Bent's jerky walk up two flights of marble stairs and along a corridor. They halted in front of a pair of dark wooden doors and Mr Bent knocked, not once but with a sequence of taps that suggested a code. Then he pushed the door open, very carefully.
The chairman's office was large, and simply furnished with very expensive things. Bronze and brass were much in evidence. Probably the last remaining tree of some rare, exotic species had been hewn to make the chairman's desk, which was an object of desire and big enough to bury people in. It gleamed a deep, deep green, and spoke of power and probity. Moist assumed, as a matter of course, that it was lying.
There was a very small dog sitting in a brass in-tray, but it was only when Bent said 'Mr Lipwig, madam chairman' that Moist realized that the desk also had a human occupant. The head of a very small, very elderly, grey-haired woman was peering over the top of it at him. Resting on the desk on either side of her, gleaming silver steel in this world of gold-coloured things, were two loaded crossbows, fixed on little swivels. The lady's thin little hands were just drawing back from the stocks.
'Oh yes, how nice,' she trilled. 'I am Mrs Lavish. Do take a seat, Mr Lipwig.'
He did so, as much out of the current field of the bows as possible, and the dog leapt down from the desk and on to his lap with happy, scrotum-crushing enthusiasm.
It was the smallest and ugliest dog Moist had ever seen. It resembled those goldfish with the huge bulging eyes that look as though they are about to explode. Its nose, on the other hand, looked staved in. It wheezed, and its legs were so bandy that it must sometimes trip over its own feet.
'That's Mr Fusspot,' said the old woman. 'He doesn't normally take to people, Mr Lipwig. I am impressed.'
'Hello, Mr Fusspot,' said Moist. The dog gave a little yappy bark and then covered Moist's face in all that was best in dog slobber.
'He likes you, Mr Lipwig,' said Mrs Lavish approvingly. 'Can you guess at the breed?'
Moist had grown up with dogs and was pretty good at breeds, but with Mr Fusspot there was no place to start. He plumped for honesty. 'All of them?' he suggested.
Mrs Lavish laughed, and the laugh sounded at least sixty years younger than she was.
'Quite right! His mother was a spoon hound, very popular in royal palaces in the olden days. But she got out one night and there was an awful lot of barking and I fear Mr Fusspot is the son of many fathers, poor thing.'
Mr Fusspot turned two soulful eyes on Moist, and his expression began to become a little strained.