Guards! Guards! (Discworld 8)

“It sounded like nightly to me,” said the invisible doorkeeper cautiously.

“Look, do you want the bloody book or not? I don't have to do this. I could be at home in bed.”

“You sure it was mighty?”

“Listen, I know how deep the bloody deeps are all right,” said Brother Fingers urgently. “I knew how mighty they were when you were a perishing neophyte. Now will you open this door?”

“Well . . . all right.”

There was the sound of bolts sliding back. Then the voice said, “Would you mind giving it a push? The Door of Knowledge Through Which the Untutored May Not Pass sticks something wicked in the damp.”

Brother Fingers put his shoulder to it, forced his way through, gave Brother Doorkeeper a dirty look, and hurried within.

The others were waiting for him in the Inner Sanctum, standing around with the sheepish air of people not normally accustomed to wearing sinister hooded black robes. The Supreme Grand Master nodded at him.

“Brother Fingers, isn't it?”

“Yes, Supreme Grand Master.”

“Do you have that which you were sent to get?”

Brother Fingers pulled a package from under his robe.

“Just where I said it would be,” he said. “No problem.”

“Well done, Brother Fingers.”

“Thank you, Supreme Grand Master.”

The Supreme Grand Master rapped his gavel for attention. The room shuffled into some sort of circle.

“I call the Unique and Supreme Lodge of the Elucidated Brethren to order,” he intoned. “Is the Door of Knowledge sealed fast against heretics and knowlessmen?”

“Stuck solid,” said Brother Doorkeeper. “It's the damp. I'll bring my plane in next week, soon have it-”

“All right, all right,” said the Supreme Grand Master testily. “Just a yes would have done. Is the triple circle well and truly traced? Art all here who Art Here? And it be well for an knowlessman that he should not be here, for he would be taken from this place and his gaskin slit, his moules shown to the four winds, his welchet torn asunder with many hooks and his figgin placed upon a spike yes what is it?”

“Sorry, did you say Elucidated Brethren?”

The Supreme Grand Master glared at the solitary figure with its hand up.

“Yea, the Elucidated Brethren, guardian of the sacred knowledge since a time no man may wot of-”

“Last February,” said Brother Doorkeeper helpfully. The Supreme Grand Master felt that Brother Doorkeeper had never really got the hang of things.

“Sorry. Sorry. Sorry,” said the worried figure. “Wrong society, I'm afraid. Must have taken a wrong turning. I'll just be going, if you'll excuse me . . .”

“And his figgin placed upon a spike,” repeated the Supreme Grand Master pointedly, against a background of damp wooden noises as Brother Doorkeeper tried to get the dread portal open. “Are we quite finished? Any more knowlessmen happened to drop in on their way somewhere else?” he added with bitter sarcasm. “Right. Fine. So glad. I suppose it's too much to ask if the Four Watchtowers are secured? Oh, good. And the Trouser of Sanctity, has anyone bothered to shrive it? Oh, you did. Properly? I'll check, you know ... all right. And have the windows been fastened with the Red Cords of Intellect, in accordance with ancient prescription? Good. Now perhaps we can get on with it.”

With the slightly miffed air of one who has run their finger along a daughter-in-law's top shelf and found against all expectation that it is sparkling clean, the Grand Master got on with it.

What a shower, he told himself. A bunch of incompetents no other secret society would touch with a ten-foot Sceptre of Authority. The sort to dislocate their fingers with even the simplest secret handshake.

But incompetents with possibilities, nevertheless. Let the other societies take the skilled, the hopefuls, the ambitious, the self-confident. He'd take the whining resentful ones, the ones with a bellyful of spite and bile, the ones who knew they could make it big if only they'd been given the chance. Give him the ones in which the floods of venom and vindictiveness were dammed up behind thin walls of ineptitude and low-grade paranoia.

And stupidity, too. They've all sworn the oath, he thought, but not a man jack of 'em has even asked what a figgin is.

“Brethren,” he said. “Tonight we have matters of profound importance to discuss. The good governance, nay, the very future of Ankh-Morpork lies in our hands.”