Making Money

Lying here now, in the darkness of the bank, rather cold and significantly alone, he sought for some.

His teeth were good and he wasn’t suffering from premature hair loss. There! That wasn’t so hard, was it?

And the Watch hadn’t actually arrested him, as such. But there was a troll guarding the vault, which had ominous black and yellow ropes strung around it.

No gold in the vault. Well, even that wasn’t entirely true. There was five pounds of it, at least, coating the lead ingots. Someone had done a pretty good job there. That was a silver lining, right? At least it was some gold. It wasn’t as if there was no gold at all

, right?

He was alone because Adora Belle was spending a night in the cells for assaulting an officer of the Watch. Moist considered that this was unfair. Of course, depending on what kind of day a copper has had there is no action, short of being physically somewhere else, that may not be construed as assault, but Adora Belle hadn’t actually assaulted Sergeant Detritus, she’d merely attempted to stab his huge foot with her shoe, resulting in a broken heel and a twisted ankle. Captain Carrot said this had been taken into consideration.

The clocks of the city chimed four, and Moist considered his future, specifically in terms of length.

Look on the bright side. He might just be hanged.

He should have gone down to the vaults on Day 1, with an alchemist and a lawyer in tow. Didn’t they ever audit the vaults? Was it done by a bunch of jolly decent chaps who’d poke their heads into some other chaps’ vault and sign it off quickly so’s not to miss lunch? Can’t go doubting a chap’s word, eh? Especially when you didn’t want him to doubt yours.

Maybe the late Sir Joshua had blown it all on exotic leather goods and young ladies. How many nights in the arms of beautiful women were worth a sack of gold? The price of a good woman was proverbially above rubies, so a skilfully bad one was presumably worth a lot more.

He sat up and lit the candle, and his eye fell on Sir Joshua’s journal, on the bedside table.

Thirty-nine years ago … well, it was the right year, and since at the moment he had nothing else to do …

The luck that had been draining from his boots all day came back to him. Even though he wasn’t certain what he was looking for, he found it on the sixth random page:

A pair of funny-looking people came to the bank today, asking for the boy Bent. I bade the staff send them away. He is doing exceedingly well. One wonders what he must have suffered.

Quite a lot of the journal seemed to be in some sort of code, but the nature of the secret symbols suggested that Sir Joshua painstakingly recorded every amorous affair. You had to admire his directness, at least. He’d worked out what he wanted to get from life, and had set out to get as much of it as he could. Moist had to take his hat off to the man.

And what had he wanted? He’d never sat down to think about it. But mostly, he wanted tomorrow to be different from today.

He looked at his watch. Four-fifteen, and no one about but the guards. There were watchmen on the main doors. He was indeed not under arrest, but this was one of those civilized little arrangements: he was not under arrest provided that he didn’t try to act like a man who was not under arrest.

Ah, he thought, as he pulled on his trousers, there was another small blessing: he had been there when Mr Fusspot proposed to the werewolf –

— which was, by then, balancing on one of the huge ornamental urns that grew like toadstools in the bank’s corridors. It was rocking. So was Corporal Nobbs, who was laughing himself sick at –

— Mr Fusspot, who was bouncing up and down with wonderfully optimistic enthusiasm. But he was holding in his mouth his new toy, which appeared to have been mysteriously wound up, and beneficent fate had decreed that at the top of each jump its unbalancing action would cause the little dog to do one slow cartwheel in the air.

And Moist thought: so the werewolf is female and has a Watch badge on her collar, and I’ve seen that hair colour before. Ha!

But his gaze had gone straight back to Mr Fusspot, who was jumping and spinning with a look of total bliss on his little face –

— and then Captain Carrot had plucked him out of the air, the werewolf fled, and the show was over. But Moist would always have the memory. Next time he walked past Sergeant Angua he’d growl under his breath, although that would probably constitute assault.

Now, fully dressed, he went for a walk along endless corridors.

The Watch had put a lot of new guards in the bank for the night. Captain Carrot was clever, you had to give him that. They were trolls. Trolls were very hard to talk round to your point of view.