** I couldn't resist the Hanna's Cleopatra to Vetinari's Caesar reference, Tindomiel! Jenny, yes, it's the volume and the minute knowledge so many people have of obscure DW stuff. I'm a fan but I'm not anything compared to many afpers! Twist, are you ever coherent, chica? (*grin*) So…on with the story! **
III.
In Ankh-Morpork, it rained.
July rain, coming down hard like it was milked from the sky. The clouds were only sporadic so that Shades dwellers were fashioning sun hats out of dirty postcards while butlers in the fine houses in Ankh were shutting windows to keep the damask curtains dry.
The rain didn't bother Lady Sybil Ramkin Vimes. Despite the good soak her thick dragon protection gear was getting, she performed the tasks that needed to be done around the pens, tasks involving buckets, shovels, unpleasant odors, occasional graceless leaps behind barriers set up strategically for the times when the littler dragons just learning to digest hard food failed to keep it down. A dragon's digestion was explosive.
She carried a bucket in each fist across the barn, handed one full of coal to an assistant who helped do the dirty work, and continued with the second, more malodorous bucket to a side door. She opened it. A young Assassin straightened up as if he'd been caught slouching. Which he had. He had a sensitive, aristocratic face, heavy on the nose and light on the eyes and lips. The nose twitched as he stared at the contents of the bucket.
"Lady Bigelow-Smythe isn't keeping down her kibble," said Sybil briskly. "This is fresh, and I've got to examine it before it goes boom."
"Will it go boom?" asked the Assassin, holding a delicate black handkerchief to his nose.
"At any moment, you and I will be covered in very unpleasant acids if I don't get this into a controlled container right away."
This was an explanation Sybil was proud of having come up with. It seemed to impress the Assassin. Or the smell did. Under orders from Downey, he was to control for unnecessary communications between the Vimeses and certain "undesirable elements." Vimes had thrown the first half dozen Assassins off his property but had given up when Sybil pointed out that there was only one of him and thousands of Assassins in the city. Better to be polite and consult the Guild of Lawyers. Until the legal question was sorted out, Sybil invited the rotating crew of Assassins for tea or dragon tending tutorials and had quickly got the reputation at the Guild for being the least desirable assignment in the city.
Yet Lord Downey was convinced the Vimeses had to be watched. Sam Vimes wasn't a loose canon, he was a loaded, aimed and lit one pointing directly at the Palace. He'd been like that when he was Watch Commander but Lord Vetinari had encouraged him to serve the law, not the office of the Patrician or the man who filled it. The trial hadn't convinced Vimes that Downey's coup was legal, so of course he was removed from his post. A good number of the coppers went with him as a sort of mass protest. Downey was perfectly aware that they would become a corps of dissidents if not in sympathy with Vetinari, at least in opposition to the new regime. They had to be watched at the source.
For every Assassin the Vimeses could see near the house and grounds, they assumed there were a half dozen they couldn't. Which was true.
The Assassin holding his nose in front of Sybil knew that his duty was to search the bucket. But he was also a gentleman and had not gone to the Assassins School to poke around in what the dragon brought up. He stepped aside.
Sybil hurried down the path to the infirmary, where three of the sickest dragons slept in stalls with protective walls. All dragons had a low level instability that made the pens something of a hospital. Sybil had made such a careful study of some illnesses that she'd written a book about them. She could work in her little laboratory, a part of the infirmary that stunk so unbearably that the Assassins would never enter it. Illness was not their style.
Humming to herself, she plunked the bucket onto a counter, looked around to see if she was being watched just in case, and used a ladle to scoop out a hand-sized cylinder made of brown pottery and sealed at the top. After rinsing it off, she set the cylinder on the floor in front of a hole that resembled the entrance to a mouse sanctuary between the walls. Then she set about ladling the contents of the bucket into separate bowls and beakers and generally making the kind of observations she would do if she was really interested in examining the contents of Lady Bigelow-Smythe's stomach.
A half hour later, she glanced at the wall. The cylinder was gone.
Ex-Watch Corporal Buggy Swires, gnome, chewed a leaf of fresh mint as he sprinted between the walls, his rucksack weighed down by the cylinder. He ducked into a tunnel lately occupied by a family of garden snakes he'd summarily evicted, and proceeded in total darkness, following his nose and sense of direction. The tunnel the snakes had made and Buggy had expanded extended under the gardens of the Ramkin House and connected up with a system of additional tunnels that went off in every direction. Buggy Swires, and anyone else under ten inches tall, could get almost anywhere in Ankh-Morpork without being seen. The Assassins had not allowed in gnomes. More fool them. The Assassins monitoring the Ramkin property were oblivious to the subterranean activity.
Buggy made good progress and could soon feel by the dampening of the tunnel walls and the coolness that he was nearing the river. He chose the left branch of the tunnel and rushed down.
He heard nothing. Not a twitch of a whisker, not a swish of tail or the natter of sharp teeth. Buggy smelled it, though. The obstruction.
He spat out his mint leaf and drew a truncheon out of his belt the size of a butter knife. Actually, it was a butter knife.
"There ain't room in this here tunnel for the both of us," he said.
The rat didn't seem impressed. It was a brown rat from the Ankh, proud of its bacteria-infested hide and reputation for mercilessness and dirty fighting. It was a Shades rat.
Buggy didn't wait for it to attack.
***
"Three million dollars."
The Patrician Lord Downey folded his hands carefully and set them on the thick stack of papers in front of him. He was in the Oblong Office, sitting in a new chair of rose wood with a spongy seat and back with wings to block any projectile aimed at his profile, a knife embedded in secret compartments in each arm. Vetinari's chair had been removed, chopped up and burned, an attempt to rid the office of something resembling his ghost. It hadn't really worked. Downey's heart still skipped when there was a knock at the door, and he found himself looking over his shoulder, half expecting Vetinari to materialize out of the shadows like a wraith.
He had spent his first week as Patrician jimmying open locked drawers and file cabinets, purging the Palace staff and, just that day, looking over the city finances. He was playing with the idea of throwing some sort of festival for the citizens to show them what a personable, man-of-the-people type Patrician he wanted them to believe he was going to be. But there appeared to be a problem.
"Three million dollars," he repeated.
"3,139,426 dollars," corrected the accountant sitting opposite Downey with a folio on his knees. "Once you have that, the treasury will be solvent. A festival would cost no more than about 100,000. No problem."
"No problem? How did Vetinari keep this place running on an empty treasury?"
The accountant looked over his spectacles at Lord Downey as if he expected the Patrician to fail to grasp what he was about to say.
"Debt," he said.
"But everybody owes us money! There's not a country on the Disc that doesn't hold promissory notes from us."
"There are eleven countries on the Disc that do not hold promissory notes from Ankh-Morpork," said the accountant. "The larger ones do, though, yes."
"And?"
"Your lordship?"
"Why is the treasury empty?"
"You do not fill a treasury with credit slips, your lordship."
Downey absently picked up a small dagger he'd been using to pry open various desk drawers and began flipping it in his hand.
"Who did Vetinari borrow from?" he asked.
"From Ankh-Morpork," said the accountant.
The dagger point penetrated the desk top so firmly that it didn't waver.
"He borrowed funds for the Ankh-Morpork treasury from…Ankh-Morpork," said Downey.
"Not exactly, your lordship. He borrowed funds for the Ankh-Morpork treasury from Ankh-Morpork on paper. There is a difference."
***
Buggy Swires swung the bread knife into a defensive position at the moment the rat took a second swipe at his legs with its claws. Buggy's initial attack hadn't gone as well as he'd hoped; the full charge while screaming a high-pitched gnomic battle cry had ended with him swatted to the side of the tunnel, rolling for a moment over Sybil's cylinder and springing back to his feet to counter the rat's rebound.
Two creatures with excellent night vision fighting in a pitch black tunnel looked much like two creatures fighting in broad daylight, the showdown glare of the eyes, reading muscle movements, twitches, blinks of the opponent to see where he'd move next.
With a loud crack, the flat of Buggy's knife collided with the rat's right front leg. It screeched and lunged, teeth bared and at the last moment, spun around to allow its tail to strike Buggy's arm like a whip. The knife fell. Before Buggy could react, the rat closed its claws around it.
***
Downey flipped once again through the paper stack in front of him. The city budget. All 839 pages of it. Tables covered the pages, columns of numbers, some in parentheses, some with plusses, some printed in italics, some in bold. There were sub-totals and totals, adjustments of quarterly projections, lists of outstanding bills of exchange. There were comments on taxes and tariffs, liens and liquidity. Downey had always left the budget of the Assassins Guild to the burser. Math had not been his strong point at school and his family was wealthy enough to make an interest in economics unnecessary. He needed a list of definitions of key terms before he could even begin to decipher what lay in front of him.
The accountant cleared his throat. "This is municipal finance, your lordship. It doesn't matter how much money is actually in the treasury. Goodness, I don't believe I've been in the vaults in years. What matters is public confidence."
"How do you pay the city staff with public confidence?" said Downey. "It won't pay for a gourmet sausage or a room on Easy Street."
"If others believe the government will one fine day," the accountant waved a hand, "in the faraway future make good on its debts, they will act in a certain way. They will accept a relationship with the government which is a benefit to us both. Business contracts with advance payments, tax relief, trade privileges and so on."
Downey latched onto this.
"Advance payments. Vetinari got businesses to pay him for privileges?"
"He negotiated a system in which companies and the government coexisted in a mutually beneficial economic environment," the accountant corrected. "Last year when Lord Vetinari successfully convinced the Tsortians to lower their harbour taxes on Morporkian goods, it benefited all city manufacturers trading there. If we take the case of caviar, we were in a better position to negotiate for the twelve tons of caviar required by the Palace per year."
Downey pried his knife from the desktop. "This place doesn't smell like fish, and even Vetinari didn't like dried toast enough to eat all of that."
"Of course not. An order for twelve tons of caviar does not mean it shows up on the Palace steps. A portion of it does, and the rest is delivered in hard currency with the understanding that the business relationship with the Palace will continue until the contracted amount – in this case, the value of twelve tons of caviar in today's dollars -- is paid in, perhaps, thirty years. The manufacturer can use this lucrative contract to pad its profit figures and attract investment while the Palace can cover its costs. Which are, may I add, quite modest for the administration in a city of the size of Ankh-Morpork."
Downey sat back in the chair, his head aching slightly because he thought he'd finally got it. "Vetinari borrowed from Ankh-Morpork thirty years from now."
"In some cases twenty. Fifteen even. It's a gamble. Three out of five companies fail before their tenth year in business. At which point, of course, all contracts with the Palace are void. It is amazing how few people read the small print." For the first time, the accountant smiled.
Downey tucked his knife away. "If this works so well, why did you inform me that we need three million dollars?"
"Public confidence, your lordship," said the accountant mildly. "At the moment, it appears there is none."
***
Buggy Swires was running. Once the rat had the knife, Buggy was defenseless, which usually wasn't a problem with the old Swires gnomic grip. But he had a cylinder on his back, a mission to do and no room in the tunnel to scramble onto the rat's back.
The rat had to drop the knife to follow. They raced back up the hill to the houses of Ankh, Buggy fumbling around in a side pocket of his rucksack as he ran. A short tunnel to the left, a sprint, and he finally pulled out what he was looking for.
There was a tearing sound and a hiss.
Then there was light.
***
"There is a hesitation on the part of the business community to enter into new contracts with the new regime at the Palace," said the accountant.
"It will stabilize," said Downey with confidence. "Time heals all wounds. And I'm certainly not going to fund a bunch of maids, thief-catchers and malingering guards out of my own purse."
The accountant shrugged. "You could wait, sir. There are reserves for six weeks. In the meantime, Palace operations must be narrowed. That could lead to a certain amount of…dissatisfaction."
Downey tapped the arms of his chair. He didn't much like economics but he was enjoying the conversation with the accountant. The scope of it. This wasn't just guild business. This was Disc wide. What he said now would affect millions of people on both sides of the city gates. He smiled.
"I can't have my staff dissatisfied. Call in some of the foreign debts."
The accountant blinked.
"I must strongly discourage you from that course, sir. The delicate balance of trade between--"
The knife flipped in the air, tumbling blade to hilt, blade to hilt. The accountant watched it fall perfectly into Downey's hand.
"This conversation is finished," said the Patrician.
***
Buggy had an advantage over the rat for two reasons. First, he knew what would happen when he struck the match. Second, he could close his eyes when it happened.
The rat careened to a halt, blinded.
Buggy's eyes adjusted faster. He waved the fire at the rat and it backed up, scrambling to get its legs in order, to feel with its tail where it was going. It backed into another side tunnel. Buggy now blocked the entrance. He carefully set the match on the soil and added several more until a bonfire made it impossible for the rat to follow him without getting singed.
"Told you, mate," said Buggy, hefting the cylinder more securely on his back. "This here is my tunnel."
He retraced his steps quickly, muttering about damn rats making him late, and emerged from a rabbit hole at the edge of the Ankh river. It had just stopped raining. He hitched a ride on the lip of a raft loaded with barrels and drifted down river until his nose could pick out a whiff of salt air from the stink of the Ankh. He'd reached the delta, the harbour where ships lay in safety to be packed and unpacked for the journey across the Circle Sea. He jumped onto the cable of a passing ship, swung onto the docks and found the Tackle Box.
It was a sailor pub. There was a good deal of shanty singing and drinking and brawls indoors but the real action happened out back. In the late afternoon, several seamstresses were already exposing their wares.
Gnomes had opinions about human women. Usually regarding their feet and ankles, or the seductive curve of a lower knee. Buggy had always been ambitious and made claims about his experiences with women that no one had cared to try to substantiate. When he swaggered up to the seamstresses, the only one who noticed was the one who was looking out for him to begin with. She had red hair, red painted toe nails and a short skirt.
Buggy grinned up at her.
"Get your beady little gnome eyes off me," said Anuschka. Her mood was less than positive. She'd started her career on the docks but had come a long way since then and was only there behind the Tackle Box because Hanna was her friend and Mrs. Palm had ordered her. "It's about time. Where have you been?"
"Gettin' the old Buggy fires burnin', darlin'," he said, wagging his hips. Even from her height five feet above him, Anuschka noticed.
"Leave the stuff and clear off."
"You sure? The Buggy has been a pleasant surprise to ladies across the city."
"I'm sure. Leave the stuff."
Buggy took his time tucking the cylinder into a converted strap of Anuschka's sandal while craning his neck for a better view of the petticoat canopy over his head. Anuschka kicked him and stalked off.
There was a second woman leaning against the wall of the Tackle Box, a brunette.
Buggy rubbed his hands.