'This morning.'
It had been easy. Door after door seemed to have opened for her and every time a little voice in her head said, 'Are you doing the right thing?' a slightly deeper voice, which sounded remarkably like Madame Sharn, said, 'He wants to make it. You want to sell it. They want to buy it. The dream goes round and round and so does the money.'
'The lipstick went down very well,' she said. 'Those troll girls put it on with a trowel and I'm not kidding. So what you ought to do, sir, is sell a trowel. A pretty one, in a nice box with sprinkles on it.'
He gave her an admiring look. 'This isn't like you, Glenda.'
'Not sure about that,' said Glenda, as more samples were dropped into the battered case. 'Have you thought about getting into shoes?'
'Do you think it would be worth a try? They don't normally wear shoes.'
'They didn't wear lipstick until they moved here,' said Glenda. 'It could be the coming thing.'
'But they've got feet like granite. They don't need shoes.'
'But they'll want them,' said Glenda. 'You could be in on the ground floor, as it were.'
Stronginthearm looked puzzled and Glenda remembered that even city dwarfs were used to the topsy-turvy language of home. 'Oh, sorry, I meant to say the top floor.'
'And then there's dresses,' said Glenda. 'I've been looking around and no one makes proper dresses for trolls. They're just outsized human dresses. And they're cut to make the troll look smaller, but they'd be better if they were cut to make them look bigger. More like a troll and less like a fat human. You know, you want the clothing to shout, "I'm a great big troll lady and proud of it".' unbuckled his belt, faced a noisome wall and stared upwards nonchalantly, as a man does in these circumstances. However, most men don't look up into the astonished faces of two birdlike women who were standing, no, perching on the roof. They screeched Awk! Awk! and flew up into the darkness.
Trev scuttled quickly and damply back into the shop. This city got bloody stranger every day.
After that, time flew past for Trev, and every second stank of sulphur. He'd seen Nutt dribbling candles, but that was at snail's pace compared with the speed at which the leather was cut for the ball. But that wasn't creepy, that was just Nutt. What was creepy was that he didn't measure anything. Eventually, Trev couldn't stand it any more, and stopped leaning against the wall, pointed to one of the multi-sided little leather strips and said, 'How long is that?'
'One and fifteen sixteenths of an inch.'
'How can you tell without measuring?'
'I do measure, with my eyes. It is a skill. It can be learned.'
'An' that makes you worthy?'
'Yes.'
'An' who judges?'
'I do.'
'Here we are, Mister Nutt, still warm,' said Glang, arriving from the back of the shop holding something that looked like something taken from an animal that was now, you hoped for its own sake, dead.
'Of course, I could do a lot better with more time,' he continued, 'but if you blow down this little tube... '
Trev watched in wonder, and it occurred to him that in all his life he'd made a few candles and a lot of mess. How much was he worth?
Gloing! Gloing!
Two balls in harmony, thought Trev, but clapped as Nutt and Glang shook hands, then, while they were still admiring their handiwork, he reached behind him and slipped a dagger off the bench and into his pocket.
He wasn't a thief. Oh, fruit off stalls, but everyone knew that didn't count, and picking a toff's pocket was just a case of social redistribution, everyone knew that, too, and maybe you found something that looked lost, well, someone would pick it up, so why not you?
Weapons got you killed, often because you were holding one. But things were going too far. He had heard Andy's bones creak and Nutt had brought the man to his knees without sweating. And there were two reasons for taking precautions right there. One was that if you put Andy down you'd better put him out, right out, because he would come back, blood around the corner of his mouth. And two, the worst, was that right now Nutt was more worrying than Andy. At least he knew what Andy was...
Carrying a ball each, they hurried back to the university, with Trev keeping a watchful eye on high buildings. 'It's amazin' what's turnin' up in this city,' he said. 'There were a couple of vampire types back there, did you know?'
'Oh, those? They work for Ladyship. They are there for protection.'
'Whose?' said Trev.