Raising Steam (Discworld 40)

sp; The old homestead in the forest was all that Moist had expected, and Mrs Wesley burst into tears when he told her about Harry’s offer. She was determined to think of Sir Harry as a saint or angel and if Moist knew anything about the ways of the world Harry’s gesture would be all over the forest within hours; and because news spreads, it would get as far as Ankh-Morpork by the end of the day. Moist knew Harry the man as he was: extremely sharp with a heart of gold and tears of soppy. Harry’s gesture was entirely Harry, with no ulterior motive, but nevertheless once the news had got around, he would be in all the papers as a benefactor of the poor and therefore a celebrity. Not for the first time Moist deplored his own tendency to see the angles in whatever happened, good or bad.

‘How much?’

The simple question sounded like a declaration of war, which it almost was, as Harry was presented with the costings for the express line to Bonk.

Moist stood his ground. ‘Dick says there’s iron everywhere, Harry, but it needs digging out and then it’s the making of the steel that uses up the money,’ he put in hastily, before Harry could throw anyone down the stairs.

‘You’ve got to put the gold in to get t’steel out, Harry,’ said Simnel calmly. ‘We’ve been getting a good deal from the lads down at the smelters, but it’s twelve hundred miles to Uberwald, and that’s a lot of steel.’

‘Harry,’ Moist said patiently. ‘I know very well that when you and your lady first married you used to cut the matches in half to make them last longer. But you are not that man any more. You can afford this.’

They watched Harry’s face. In truth, Moist knew Harry had kicked his way up from the gutter and was proud of it, but he had made his money cheaply – since minions, on the whole, don’t incur much of an overhead – and looked at every suggestion that he should pay for anything as evidence that something was wrong in the world.

Dick Simnel had got the measure of the man and said, ‘If I was you, sir, I’d look at my money box and buy as much steel as I possibly could while I can, not making a big fuss about it, otherwise it’ll suddenly get more expensive, if you know what I mean. Supply and demand.’

Harry still looked as if he thought people were trying to get something of a move on him, which was his ground state of being, and Moist thought, well, what does Harry spend his mountains of money on?

And so he plunged on. ‘Go on, Harry, as a customer in good standing, the Royal Bank’ll definitely give you a loan, if indeed you ever need one. Though frankly, I know your balance is more than enough to get rails all the way to the moon and back and that’s including a fleet of locomotives as well.’

There was a rumble from Mr Thunderbolt. ‘Of course, Sir Harry, you could sell shares: that means you share some of the outlays but, alas, you also have to share some of the dividends. It’s up to you.’

Moist saw his cue right there and said, ‘You see, Harry, everybody who buys your railway shares would then be dead keen on their railway and on your side. It’s what the trolls call a no-brain. When the smoke is making you rich, it’s your smoke and you don’t complain about it. And,’ Moist took a deep breath, ‘if you share the risks you can afford to build houses for the railway workers, too. That way they’ll live close to the railway, right alongside it, so they’ll always be ready—’

‘I don’t need any telling on that score, Mister Lipwig. The lads that work for me on the conveyor belts all live on the doorstep. Difference is they built their own.’

‘The buildings don’t have to be little palaces,’ Moist said, ‘just comfortable, with a bit of a garden, which is nice for the kiddies, and then everyone is happy and you’ve got it made. After all, who doesn’t like to have a place close to their work? Nice and warm with all the coal you need thrown in.’

Harry King would probably punch anyone who called him a philanthropist, but beneath the grumbling there was an undercurrent of curious softness. Elderly employees, no matter their species, ended up with a pension, a rare beast in Ankh-Morpork as a whole, and Moist, as Harry’s bank manager, was aware that expensive hospital bills had a habit of disappearing when he got to hear about them. And most certainly at Hogswatch, Harry, grumbling like an elderly troll with a headache, nevertheless made sure all employees had actual named meat on their tables, and lots of it.fn52

Moist, who knew his man, continued, ‘Look at it like this: I know that as a self-made man, sharing would be anathema to your soul, and so you could take all the risk and become as rich as Creosote. However, it seems to me, Harry, that you’re already as rich as Creosote and so, as a scoundrel, I’d suggest that another fortune is not exactly what you need right now! As your bank manager I’d like to suggest that sharing both the risks and the profits would be the most prudent and socially acceptable way.’

For a moment Moist saw the psyche of Harry King putting together a retort that social acceptability could go and get its hands dirty by doing a proper day’s work rather than interfering with honest entrepreneurs who were working their guts out day and night. But Moist also saw the grin, and realized that Harry knew this was all part of the solution. After all, Lord Vetinari liked the people of Ankh-Morpork to feel they had a stake in their city.

‘Anyway,’ he said, to clinch it, ‘Vetinari wants the Uberwald route and he’s the ultimate boss. Who knows, the city might be very generous with its level of funding. The trains go round and round and so does the money.’

The main line to Quirm was completed with a ceremony at the Ankh-Morpork terminus in which, regrettably, alcohol played a major role. The new engine was launched and named Fierté d’Quirm with an especially good bottle of champagne smashed across its boiler by the Marquis des Aix en Pains and his wife who, Moist noticed, was now very cheerfully, as they say in Quirm, enceinte.

And amid all the celebrations, it seemed that it was only Moist who noticed that Simnel had wandered away from the party to wipe the engine clean of sizzling champagne with his handkerchief, which immediately became a greasy rag. He gave Moist a severe look.

‘We can’t have this kind of thing going on, Mister Lipwig, interfering with the engine … not when I’m determined to get us up to forty miles per hour across the flat of the maquis, just to show those lobsters what we can do.’

On the maiden journey, Moist rode with Simnel and the stoker on the footplate as the maquis passed away behind them at terrible speed, with goblins waving from every rock and ancient tree. He thought at one point that he had spotted Of the Twilight the Darkness, waving, but to his surprise found the egregious goblin waiting when they pulled into the Quirm city terminus. It seemed to Moist that the little bastard had channels through the world that weren’t available to humans.

In the carriages behind, a good time was had by all, with avec galore and lashings of the famous entente cordiale. The smart new passenger carriages were much admired. A highlight for many was the dapper gentleman looking after the First Class gentlemen’s facilities, who was adept at handling towels and explaining the workings of the glass cistern – which contained goldfish that appeared to revel in the rush of the flush but were, in fact, kept from going with the flow by a concealed sieve of some kind.

There was a big parade to greet them at Quirm Central, heralding another round of civic and political razzmatazz, all punctuated with more alcohol and ending with a huge dinner in the engine shed. And there were yet more toasts before the locomotive was turned around on the new-fangled turning table to take the Ankh-Morpork contingent home, where they had to be decanted from the train.

And so it was that one fine summer evening shortly afterwards, Moist and Adora Belle sat down to an excellent dinner of fresh lobsters from Quirm brought up on the new Fruits de Mer Express. They were good, and cheaper now than he ever remembered, and the dish went very well with the watercress, which burned all the way down as they ate it.

And afterwards there were fresh strawberries and a soft bed with fluffy pillows and somehow it made all the running around worthwhile.

It began i

n Higher Overhang in the Shires. People locally were saying they could hear noises in the night … metallic noises, clanking, and the occasional scream of metal straining in torment. Of course everybody said, Well, goblins, what can you expect?

And all this came to the notice of Chief Constable Feeney Upshot, attached to the Ankh-Morpork constabulary. Feeney liked the attachment. It meant that anyone getting stroppy with him would sooner or later have to deal with Commander Vimes or even Sergeant Detritus, whose appearance in this sleepy hinterland had caused such a big stir a couple of years before. So Feeney got on his horse and headed to the Overhangs, so called because in the flaming distant past the landscape had been twisted all over the place with unfathomable caverns and a jagged unforgiving terrain.

Feeney was a decent and sensible copper and such men made friends because they never knew when they would need one, especially when they were a copper all alone, although in theory Feeney had the support of Special Constable Of the Chimney the Bones. There had to be a law, and law applied to everyone, and now the law had decreed that goblins were people and therefore protected by the law in these parts, which, in fact, was made incarnate in Chief Constable Feeney and his constable. Amazingly, the constable allowed his superior officer to call him Boney on the sensible basis that if there was some mêlée or other and you needed help you’d want a simple word to scream.fn53