Making Money (Discworld 36)

'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.'

'All right, but it's still a good one,' said Adora Belle. She reached down and picked up something from the floor. 'Your keys, I think. What they were doing in there we shall never know, with any luck.'

Moist took them. The ring was heavy with keys of all sizes.

'And what shall we do with all this stuff?' Adora Belle kicked the heap again. It quivered, and somewhere inside something squeaked.

'Put it back in the cupboard?' Moist suggested uncertainly. The pile of passionless frippery had a brooding, alien look, like some sea monster of the abyss that had been dragged unceremoniously from its native darkness into the light of the sun.

'I don't think I could face it,' said Adora Belle. 'Let's just leave the door open and let it crawl back by itself. Hey!' This was to Mr Fusspot, who'd trotted smartly out of the room with something in his mouth.

'Tell me that was just an old rubber bone,' she said. 'Please?'

'No-o,' said Moist, shaking his head. 'I think that would definitely be the wrong description. I think it was... was... it was not an old rubber bone, is what it was.'

'Now look,' said Hubert, 'don't you think we'd know if the gold had been stolen? People talk about that sort of thing! I'm pretty certain it's a fault in the crossover multivalve, right here.' He tapped a thin glass tube.

'I don't think the Glooper ith wrong, thur,' said Igor gloomily.

'Igor, you realize that if the Glooper is right then I'll have to believe there is practically no gold in our vaults?'

'I believe the Glooper ith not in error, thur.' Igor took a dollar out of his pocket and walked over to the well.

'If you would be tho good ath to watch the "Lotht Money" column, thur?' he said, and dropped the coin into the dark waters. It gleamed for a moment as it sank beyond the pockets of Mankind.

In one corner of the Glooper's convoluted glass tubing a small blue bubble drifted up, dawdling from side to side as it rose, and burst on the surface with a faint 'gloop'.

'Oh dear,' said Hubert.

The comic convention, when two people are dining at a table designed to accommodate twenty, is that they sit at either end. Moist and Adora Belle didn't try it, but instead huddled together. Gladys stood at the other end, a napkin over one arm, her eyes two sullen glows.

The sheep skull didn't help Moist's frame of mind at all. Peggy had arranged it as a centrepiece, with flowers around it, but the cool sunglasses were getting on his nerves.

'How good is a golem's hearing?' he said.

'Extremely,' said Adora Belle. 'Look, don't worry, I have a plan.'

'Oh, good.'

'No, seriously. I'll take her out tomorrow'.

'Can't you just - ' Moist hesitated, and then mouthed: 'change the words in her head?'

'She's a free golem!' said Adora Belle sharply. 'How would you like it?'

Moist remembered Owlswick and the turnip. 'Not much,' he admitted.