from
Making Money
by
Terry Pratchett

“Perhaps you could assuage my curiosity, madam?” he said. “Since the ink is drying on the lease?”

Miss Dearheart looked around the room conspiratorially, as if the heavy old bookcases concealed a multitude of ears.

“Can you keep a secret, Mr. Blister?”

“Oh, indeed, madam. Indeed!”

She looked around cautiously.

“Even so, this should be said quietly,” she hissed.

He nodded hopefully, leaned forward, and for the first time in many years felt a woman’s breath in his ear:

“So can I,” she said.

Some of the things you could learn up a drainpipe at night were surprising. For example, people paid attention to small sounds—the click of a window catch, the clink of a lock pick—more than they did to big sounds, like a brick falling into the street or even (for this was, after all, Ankh-Morpork) a scream.

These were loud sounds, which were, therefore, public sounds, which, in turn, meant they were everyone’s problem and, therefore, not mine. But small sounds were nearby and suggested such things as stealth betrayed, and were, therefore, pressing and personal.

It was only an hour before dawn. He’d never get to sleep again. He might as well arise formally and enhance a reputation for keenness.

What harm can it do to find out? It’s a question that left bruises down the centuries, even more than “It can’t hurt if I only take one” and “It’s all right if you only do it standing up.”

“But I don’t know anything about running a bank!”

“Good. No preconceived ideas.”

“I’ve robbed banks!”

“Capital! Just reverse your thinking,” said Lord Vetinari, beaming. “The money should be on the inside.”

It would be hard to imagine an uglier building that hadn’t won a major architectural award.

“I read somewhere that the coins represent a promise to hand over a dollar’s worth of gold,” said Moist helpfully.

Mr. Bent steepled his hands in front of his face and turned his eyes upward, as though praying.

“In theory, yes,” he said after a few moments. “I would prefer to say that it is a tacit understanding that we will honor our promise to exchange it for a dollar’s worth of gold, provided we are not, in point of fact, asked to.”

“So . .  it’s really not a promise?”

“It certainly is, sir, in financial circles. It is, you see, about trust.”

“You mean, trust us, we’ve got a big expensive building?”

“Isn’t the fornication wonderful?”

After quite a lengthy pause, Moist ventured, “Is it?”

“Don’t you think so? There’s more here than anywhere else in the city, I’m told.”

“Really?” said Moist, looking around nervously. “Er . . . do you have to come down here at some special time?”

“Well, during banking hours usually, but we let groups in by appointment.”

“You know,” said Moist, “I think this conversation has somehow got away from me . . .”

Bent waved vaguely at the ceiling.

“I refer to the wonderful vaulting,” he said. “The word derives from fornix, meaning ‘arch’.”

“Ah! Yes? Right!” said Moist. “You know, I wouldn’t be surprised if not many people knew that.”

Too late, he saw the signs. Hubert grasped the lapels of his jacket, as if addressing a meeting, and swelled with the urge to communicate, or at least talk at length in the belief that it was the same thing.

It wasn’t that he wasn’t good at delegating. He was extremely good at delegating. But the talent requires people on the other end of the chain to be good at being delegated onto.

On a desert island gold is worthless. Food gets you through times of no gold much better than gold gets you through times of no food. If it comes to that, gold is worthless in a gold mine, too. The medium of exchange in a gold mine is the pickax.

It was a dream, but Moist was good at selling dreams. And if you could sell the dream to enough people, no one dared to wake up.

Don’t let me detain you. What a wonderful phrase Vetinari had devised. The jangling double meaning set up undercurrents of uneasiness in the most innocent of minds. The man had found ways of bloodless tyranny that put the rack to shame.

Moist had always been careful about disguises. A mustache that could come off at a tug had no place in his life. But since he had the world’s most forgettable face, a face that was still a face in the crowd even when it was by itself, it helped, sometimes, to give people something to tell the Watch about. Spectacles were an obvious choice, but Moist achieved very good results with his own design of nose and ear wigs. Show a man a pair of ears that small songbirds had apparently nested in, watch the polite horror in his eyes, and you could be certain that would be all he would remember.

“Do good by stealth, that is my watchword.” It’ll get found out soon enough, he added to himself, and then I’m not only a jolly good chap but a decently modest one, too.

I wonder . . . am I really a bastard or am I just really good at thinking like one?

“Why are you always in such a hurry, Mr. Lipwig?”

“Because people don’t like change. But make the change happen fast enough and you go from one type of normal to another.”

Every Assassin knew that real black often stood out in the dark, because the night in the city is usually never full black, and that gray or dark green merge much better. But they wore black anyway, because style trumps utility every time.

“You forgot to take the cap off. It’s the kind of mistake amateurs always make!”

Owlswick hesitated, and then said, “You mean there’s people who commit suicide professionally?”

Mavolio Bent had a definition of “silly” that most people would have considered a touch on the broad side. Laughter was silly. Theatricals, poetry, and music were silly. Clothes that weren’t gray, black, or at least of undyed cloth were silly. Pictures of things that weren’t real were silly (pictures of things that were real were unnecessary). The ground state of being was silliness, which had to be overcome with every mortal fiber.

Missionaries from the stricter religions would have found in Mavolio Bent an ideal convert, except that religion was extremely silly.

He was a great believer in letting a thousand voices be heard, because this meant that all he actually needed to do was listen only to the ones that had anything useful to say, “useful” in this case being defined in the classic civil-service way as “inclining to my point of view.” In his experience, it was a number generally smaller than ten. The people who wanted a thousand, etc., really meant that they wanted their own voice to be heard while the other nine hundred and ninety-nine were ignored, and for this purpose the gods had invented the committee. Vetinari was very good at committees, especially when Drumknott took the minutes. What the iron maiden was to stupid tyrants, the committee was to Lord Vetinari; it was only slightly more expensive,^* far less messy, considerably more efficient, and, best of all, you had to force people to climb inside the iron maiden.

^* The only real expense was tea and biscuits halfway through, which seldom happened with the iron maiden.