Making Money

Gods wanted belief, not rational thinking. Building the temple first was like giving a pair of wonderful shoes to a man with no legs. Building a temple didn’t mean you believed in gods, it just meant you believed in architecture.

Something akin to a workshop had been built on the end wall of the undercroft, around a huge and ancient fireplace. An Igor was working over an intense, blue-white flame, carefully bending a piece of glass pipe. Behind him, green liquid surged and fizzed in giant bottles: Igors seemed to have a natural affinity with lightning.

You could always recognize an Igor. They went out of their way to be recognized. It wasn’t just the musty dusty old suits, or even the occasional extra digit or mismatched eyes. It was that you could probably stand a ball on the top of their head without it falling off.

The Igor looked up. ‘Good morning, thur. And you are …?’

‘Moist von Lipwig,’ said Moist. ‘And you would be Igor.’

‘Got it in one, thur. I have heard many good thingth about you.’

‘Down here?’

‘I alwayth keep an ear to the ground, thur.’

Moist resisted the impulse to look down. Igors and metaphors didn’t go well together.

‘Well, Igor … the thing is … I want to bring someone into the building without troubling the guards, and I wondered if there was another door down here?’

What he did not say, but which passed between them on the ether, was: you’re an Igor, right? And when the mob are sharpening their sickles and trying to break down the door, the Igor is never there. Igors were masters of the unobtrusive exit.

‘There ith a thmall door we uthe, thur. It can’t be opened from the outthide, tho it’th never guarded.’

Moist looked longingly at the rainwear on its stand. ‘Fine. Fine. I’m just popping out, then.’

‘You’re the bothth, thur.’

‘And I shall be popping back shortly with a man. Er, a gentleman who is not anxious to meet civic authority.’

‘Quite, thur. Give them a pitchfork and they think they own the bloody plathe, thur.’

‘But he’s not a murderer or anything.’

‘I’m an Igor, thur. We don’t athk quethtionth.’

‘Really? Why not?’

‘I don’t know, thur. I didn’t athk.’

Igor took Moist to a small door that opened into a grimy trash-filled stairwell, half flooded by the unremitting rain. Moist paused on the threshold, the water already soaking into his cheap suit. ‘Just one thing, Igor …’

‘Yeth, thur?’

‘When I walked past the Glooper just now, there was water in it.’

‘Oh, yeth, thur. Ith that a problem?’

‘It was moving, Igor. Should that be happening at this time of night?’

‘That? Oh, jutht thyphonic variableth, thur. It happenth all the time.’

‘Oh, the old syphonics, eh? Ah, well, that’s a relief—’

‘Jutht give the barber-thurgeon’th knock when you return, thur.’

‘What is the—’

The door closed.

Inside, Igor went back to his workbench and fired up the gas again.

Some of the little glass tubes lying beside him on a piece of green felt looked … odd, and reflected the light in disconcerting ways.

The point about Igors … the thing about Igors … Well, most people looked no further than the musty suit, lank hair, cosmetic clan scars and stitching, and the lisp. And this was probably because, apart from the lisp, this was all there was to see.

And people forgot, therefore, that most of the people who employed Igors were not conventionally sane. Ask them to build a storm attractor and a set of lightning storage jars and they would laugh at you.[5]

They needed, oh, how they needed someone in possession of a fully working brain, and every Igor was guaranteed to have at least one of those. Igors were, in fact, smart, which was why they were always elsewhere when the fiery torches hit the windmill.

And they were perfectionists. Ask them to build you a device and you wouldn’t get what you asked for. You’d get what you wanted.

In its web of reflections, the Glooper glooped. Water rose in a thin glass tube and dripped into a little glass bucket, which tipped on to a tiny seesaw and caused a tiny valve to open.

Owlswick Jenkins’s recent abode, according to the Times, was Short Alley. There wasn’t a house number because Short Alley was only big enough for one front door. The door in question was shut but hanging by one hinge. A scrap of black and yellow rope indicated, for those who hadn’t spotted the clue of the door, that the place had come to the recent attention of the Watch.

The door fell off the hinge when Moist pushed at it, and landed in the stream of water that was gushing down the alley.

It wasn’t much of a search, because Owlswick hadn’t bothered to hide. He was in a room on the first floor, surrounded by mirrors and candles, a dreamy look on his face, peacefully painting.

He dropped the brush when he saw Moist, grabbed a tube that lay on a bench, and held it in front of his mouth, ready to swallow.

‘Don’t make me use this! Don’t make me use this!’ he warbled, his whole body trembling.

‘Is it some kind of toothpaste?’ said Moist. He sniffed the very lived-in air of the studio and added: ‘That could help, you know.’