It reached the pointy ears of the dwarfs.
'Can we?'
'Damned if I know. I can't.'
'Yeah, but if you could, you wouldn't say. I wouldn't say, if I could.'
'Can you?'
'No!'
'Ah-ha!'
It came to the ears of the Night Watch of the city guard, as they did gate duty at ten o'clock on an icy night. Gate duty in Ankh-Morpork was not taxing. It consisted mainly of waving through anything that wanted to go through, although traffic was minimal in the dark and freezing fog.
They hunched in the shelter of the gate arch, sharing one damp cigarette.
'You can't turn something into something else,' said Corporal Nobbs. The Alchemists have been trying it for years.'
They can gen'rally turn a house into a hole in the ground,' said Sergeant Colon.
That's what I'm talking about,' said Corporal Nobbs. 'Can't be done. It's all to do with... elements. An alchemist told me. Everything's made up of elements, right? Earth, Water, Air, Fire and... sunnink. Well-known fact. Everything's got 'em all mixed up just right.'
He stamped his feet in an effort to get some warmth into them.
'If it was possible to turn lead into gold, everyone'd be doing it,' he said.
'Wizards could do it,' said Sergeant Colon.
'Oh, well, magic,' said Nobby dismissively.
A large cart rumbled out of the yellow clouds and entered the arch, splashing Colon as it wobbled through one of the puddles that were such a feature of Ankh-Morpork's highways.
'Bloody dwarfs,' he said, as it continued on into the city. But he didn't say it too loudly.
There were a lot of them pushing that cart,' said Corporal Nobbs reflectively. It lurched slowly round a corner and was lost to view.
'Prob'ly all that gold,' said Colon.
'Hah. Yeah. That'd be it, then.'
And the rumour came to the ears of William de Worde, and in a sense it stopped there, because he dutifully wrote it down.
It was his job. Lady Margolotta of Uberwald sent him five dollars a month to do it. The Dowager Duchess of Quirm also sent him five dollars. So did King Verence of Lancre, and a few other Ramtop notables. So did the Seriph of Al Khali, although in his case the payment was half a cartload of figs, twice a year.
All in all, he considered, he was on to a good thing. All he had to do was write one letter very carefully, trace it backwards on to a piece of boxwood provided for him by Mr Cripslock the engraver in the Street of Cunning Artificers, and then pay Mr Cripslock twenty dollars to carefully remove the wood that wasn't letters and make five impressions on sheets of paper.
Of course, it had to be done thoughtfully, with spaces left after To my Noble Client the', and so on, which he had to fill in later, but even deducting expenses it still left him the best part of thirty dollars for little more than one day's work a month.
A young man without too many responsibilities could live modestly in Ankh-Morpork on thirty or forty dollars a month; he always sold the figs, because although it was possible to live on figs you soon wished you didn't.
And there were always additional sums to be picked up here and there. The world of letters was a closed boo-- mysterious papery object to many of Ankh-Morpork's citizens, but if they ever did need to commit things to paper quite a few of them walked up the creaky stairs past the sign 'William de Worde: Things Written Down'.
Dwarfs, for example. Dwarfs were always coming to seek work in the city, and the first thing they did was send a letter home saying how well they were doing. This was such a predictable occurrence, even if the dwarf in question was so far down on his luck that he'd been forced to eat his helmet, that William had Mr Cripslock produce several dozen stock letters which needed only a few spaces filled in to be perfectly acceptable.
Fond dwarf parents all over the mountains treasured letters which looked something like this:
Dear [Mume & Dad],