'What is this key for?' she asked, after a mere few seconds. Moist turned. Adora Belle held up a silvery key on a ring.

'No, there'll be a lot more than that,' said Moist. 'Where did you find it, anyway?'

She pointed to the big desk. 'I just touched the side here and -  Oh, it didn't do it this time...'

It took Moist more than a minute to find the trigger that slid the little drawer out. Shut, it disappeared seamlessly into the grain of the wood.

'It must be for something important,' he said, heading for another desk. 'Maybe the rest of the keys were kept somewhere else. Just try it on anything. I've only been camping here, really. I don't know what's in half of these drawers.'

He returned to a bureau and was sifting through its contents when he heard a click and creak behind him and Adora Belle said, in a rather flat voice: 'You did say Sir Joshua entertained young ladies up here, right?'

'Apparently, yes. Why?'

'Well, that's what I call entertainment.'

Moist turned. The door of a heavy cupboard stood wide open. 'Oh, no,' he said. 'What's all that for?'

'You are joking?'

'Well, yes, all right. But it's all so... so black.'

'And leathery,' said Adora Belle. 'Possibly rubbery, too.'

They advanced on the museum of inventive erotica just revealed. Some of it, freed at last from confinement, unfolded, slid or, in a few cases, bounced on to the floor.

'This...' Moist prodded something, which went spoing!... 'is, yes, rubbery. Definitely rubbery.'

'But all this here is pretty much frilly,' said Adora Belle. 'He must have run out of ideas.'

'Either that or there were no more ideas to have. I think he was eighty when he died,' said Moist, as a seismic shift caused some more piles to slide and slither downwards.

'Well done him,' said Adora Belle. 'Oh, and there's a couple of shelves of books, too,' she went on, investigating the gloom at the back of the cupboard. 'Just here, behind the rather curious saddle and the whips. Bedtime reading, I assume.'

'I don't think so,' said Moist, pulling out a leather-bound volume and flicking it open at a random page. 'Look, it's the old boy's journal. Years and years of it. Good grief, there's decades!

'Let's publish it and make a fortune,' said Adora Belle, kicking the heap. 'Plain covers, of course.'

'No, you don't understand. There may be something in here about Mr Bent! There's some secret...' Moist ran a finger along the spines. 'Let's see, he's forty-seven, he came here when he was about thirteen, and a few months later some people came looking for him. Old Lavish didn't like the look of them -  Ah!' He pulled out a couple of volumes. 'These should tell us something, they're around the right time...'

'What are these, and why do they jingle?' Adora Belle said, holding up a couple of strange devices.

'How should I know?'

'You're a man.'

'Well, yes. And? I mean, I don't go in for this stuff.'

'You know, I think it's like horseradish,' said Adora Belle thoughtfully.

'Pardon?'

'Like... well, horseradish is good in a beef sandwich, so you have some. But one day a spoonful just doesn't cut the mustard - '

'As it were,' said Moist, fascinated.

' - and so you have two, and soon it's three, and eventually there's more horseradish than beef, and then one day you realize the beef fell out and you didn't notice.'

'I don't think that is the metaphor you're looking for,' said Moist, 'because I have known you to make yourself a horseradish sandwich.'

Tags: Terry Pratchett Discworld Fantasy
Source: readsnovelonline.net