"evenin', lads,' he said amiably. 'What can I do for you? As if I didn't know.'
'Do you remember me, Mr King?' said William.
Harry nodded. 'You're Lord de Worde's son, right? You put a piece in that letter of yourn last year when our Daphne got wed, right? My Effie was that impressed, all those nobs reading about our Daphne.'
'It's a rather bigger letter now, Mr King.'
'Yes, I did hear about that,' said the fat man. 'Some of 'em's already turnin' up in our collections. Useful stuff, I'm getting the lads to store it sep'rate.'
His cigar shifted from one side of his mouth to the other. Harry could not read or write, a fact which had never stopped him besting those who could. He employed hundreds of workers to sort through the garbage; it was cheap enough to employ a few more who could sort through words.
'Mr King--' William began.
'I ain't daft, lads,' said Harry. 'I know why you're here. But business is business. You know how it is.'
'We won't have a business without paper!' Goodmountain burst out.
The cigar shifted again. 'And you'd be--?'
This is Mr Goodmountain,' said William. 'My printer.'
'Dwarf, eh?' said Harry, looking Goodmountain up and down. 'Nothing against dwarfs, me, but you ain't good sorters. Gnolls don't cost much but the grubby little buggers eat half the rubbish. Trolls are okay. They stop with me 'cos I pays 'em well. Golems is best - they'll sort stuff all day and all night. Worth their weight in
gold, which is bloody near what they want payin' these days.' The cigar began another journey back across the mouth. 'Sorry, lads. A deal's a deal. Wish I could help you. Sold right out of paper. Can't.'
'You're knocking us back, just like that?' said Goodmountain.
Harry gave him a narrow-eyed look through the haze.
'You talking to me about knocking back? Don't know what a tosheroon is, do you?' he said. The dwarf shrugged.
'Yes. I do,' said William. There's several meanings, but I think you're referring to a big caked ball of mud and coins, such as you might find in some crevice in an old drain where the water forms an eddy. They can be quite valuable.'
'What? You've got hands on you like a girl,' said Harry, so surprised that the cigar momentarily drooped. 'How come you know that?'
'I like words, Mr King.'
'I started out as a muckraker when I was three,' said Harry, pushing his chair back. 'Found me first tosheroon on day one. O' course, one of the big kids nicked it off me right there. And you tell me about being knocked back? But I had a nose for the job even then. Then I--'
They sat and listened, William more patiently than Good-mountain. It was fascinating, anyway, if you had the right kind of mind, although he knew a lot of the story; Harry King told it at every opportunity.
Young Harry King had been a mudlark with vision, combing the banks of the river and even the surface of the turbid Ankh itself for lost coins, bits of metal, useful lumps of coal, anything that had some value somewhere. By the time he was eight he was employing other kids. Whole stretches of the river belonged to him. Other gangs kept away, or were taken over. Harry wasn't a bad fighter, and he could afford to employ those who were better.
And so it had gone on, the ascent of the King through horse manure sold by the bucket (guaranteed well stamped-down) to rags and bones and scrap metal and household dust and the famous buckets, where the future really was golden. It was a kind of history of civilization, but seen from the bottom looking up.
'You're not a member of a Guild, Mr King?' said William, during a pause for breath.
The cigar travelled from one side to the other and back quite fast, a sure sign that William had hit a nerve.
'Damn Guilds,' said its owner. They said I should join the Beggars! Me! I never begged for nothin', not in my whole life! The nervel But I've seen 'em all off. I won't deal with no Guild. I pay my lads well and they stand by me.'
'It's the Guilds that are trying to break us, Mr King. You know that. I know you get to hear about everything. If you can't sell us paper, we've lost.'
'What'd I be if I broke a deal?' said Harry King. 'This is my tosheroon, Mr King,' said William. 'And the kids who want to take it off me are big.'
Harry was silent for a while and then lumbered to his feet and crossed to the big window.
'Come and look here, lads,' he said.