Heretofore couldn't see any difference in the boots presented, and no one was actually claiming as a fact that these were the fabled Boots Of Vetinari, but well-worn yet still useful boots floated down from the upper floors to the servants' quarters on a tide of noblesse oblige, and if these weren't the boots of the man himself then they had almost certainly, at the very least, sometimes been in the same room as his feet.
Heretofore handed over ten dollars for them and spent an evening wearing down the left heel enough to be noticeable. Cosmo paid him fifty dollars without flinching, although he did wince when he tried them on.
'If you want to understand a man, walk a mile in his shoes,' he'd said, hobbling the length of his office. What insight he'd glean if they were the man's under-butler's shoes, Heretofore couldn't guess at, but after half an hour Cosmo rang for a basin of cold water and some soothing herbs, and the shoes had not made an appearance since.
And then there had been the black skullcap. That had been the one stroke of luck in this whole business. It was even genuine. It was a safe bet that Vetinari bought them from Bolters in the Maul, and Heretofore had cased the place, entered when the senior partners were at lunch, spoke to the impecunious youth who worked the steamy cleaning and stretching machines in the back room - and found that one had been sent in for cleaning. Heretofore walked out with it, uncleaned, leaving the young man extremely pecunious and with instructions to wash a new cap for return to the palace.
Cosmo was beside himself and wanted to know all the details.
Next evening, it turned out that the pecunious youth spent the evening in a bar and died outside in a drunken brawl around midnight, short of money and even shorter of breath. Heretofore's room was next to Cranberry's. On reflection, he'd heard the man come in late that night.
And now there was the signet ring. Heretofore had told Cosmo that he could get a replica made and use his contacts - his very expensive contacts - at the palace to get it swapped for the real thing. He'd been paid five thousand dollars!
Five thousand dollars!
And the boss was overjoyed. Overjoyed and mad. He'd got a fake ring but he swore it had the spirit of Vetinari flowing in it. Perhaps it did, because Cranberry became part of the arrangement. If you got drawn into Cosmo's little hobby, Heretofore realized too late, you died.
He reached his room, darted inside and shut the door. Then he leaned on it. He ought to run, right now. His savings would buy a lot of distance. But the fear subsided a little as he collected his thoughts.
They told him: relax, relax. The Watch hadn't come knocking yet, had they? Cranberry was a professional, and the boss was full of gratitude.
So... why not one last trick? Make some real money! What could he 'obtain' that the boss would pay him another five thousand for?
Something simple but impressive, that would be the trick, and by the time he found out - if he ever did - Heretofore would be on the other side of the continent, with a new name and suntanned beyond recognition.
Yes... the very thing...
The sun was hot, and so were the dwarfs. They were mountain dwarfs and were not at home under open skies.
And what were they here for? The King wanted to know if anything valuable was taken out of the hole that the golems were digging for the mad smoking woman, but they weren't allowed to set foot in it, because that would be trespass. So they sat in the shade and sweated while, about once a day, the mad smoking woman who smoked all the time came and laid... things on a crude trestle table in front of them. The things had this in common: they were dull.
Theere was nothing to mine here, everyone knew. It was barren silt and sand all the way down. There was no fresh water. Such plants as survived here stored winter rain in swollen, hollow roots, or lived off the moisture in the sea mist. The place contained nothing of interest, and what came out of the long sloping tunnel bore this out to the point of boredom.
There were bones of old ships, and occasionally the bones of old sailors. There were a couple of coins, one silver, one gold, which were not dull enough and were duly confiscated. There were broken pots and pieces of statue, which were puzzled over, part of an iron cauldron, an anchor with a few links of chain.
It was clear, the dwarfs considered as they sat in the shade, that nothing came here except by boat. But remember: in matters of commerce and gold, never trust anyone who could see over your helmet.
And then there were the golems. They hated golems, because they moved silently, for all their weight, and looked like trolls. They arrived and departed all the time, fetching timbers from who knew where, marching down into the dark...
And then one day golems came pouring out of the hole, there was a lengthy discussion and the smoking woman marched over to the watchers. They watched her nervously, as fighters do when approached by a self-confident civilian they know they're not allowed to kill.
In broken dwarfish she told them that the tunnel had collapsed, and she was going to leave. All the things they'd dug out, she said, were gifts for the King. And she left, taking the wretched golems with her.[3]
That was last week. Since then the tunnel had completely fallen in and the blowing sand had covered everything.
The money looked after itself. It sailed down the centuries, buried in paperwork, hidden behind lawyers, groomed, invested, diverted, converted, laundered, dried, ironed and polished and kept safe from harm and taxes, and above all kept safe from the Lavishes themselves. They knew their descendants - they'd raised them, after all - and so the money came with bodyguards of trustees, managers and covenants, disgorging only a measured amount of itself to the next generation, enough to maintain the lifestyle for which their name had become synonymous and with a bit left over for them to indulge in the family tradition of fighting amongst themselves over, yes, the money.
Now they were arriving, each family branch and often each individual with their own lawyer and bodyguards, being careful about whom they deigned to notice, just in case they inadvertently smiled at someone they were currently suing. As a family, people said, the Lavishes got along like a bagful of cats. Cosmo had watched them at the funeral, and they spent all their time watching one another, very much like cats, each one waiting for someone else to attack. But even so it would have been a decently dignified occasion, if only that moron nephew the old bitch had allowed to live in the cellar hadn't turned up in a grubby white coat and a yellow rain hat and kept on blubbing all through the ceremony. He had completely spoiled the occasion for everyone.
But now the funeral was over and the Lavishes were doing what they always did after funerals, which was talk about The Money.
You couldn't sit Lavishes around a table. Cosmo had set out small tables in a pattern that represented to the best of his knowledge the current state of the alliances and minor fratricidal wars, but there was a lot of shifting and scraping and threats of legal action before people settled down. Behind them the alert ranks of their lawyers paid careful attention, earning a total of a dollar every four seconds.
Apparently the only relative that Vetinari had was an aunt, Cosmo mused. That man had all the luck. When he was Vetinari, there would have to be a cull.
'Ladies and gentlemen,' he said, when the hissing and name-calling had died away, 'I am so glad to see so many of you here today - '
'Liar!'