Terry Pratchett - The Truth

It wasn't fast, going through the streets with the crew. To them the world was a permanent theatre, art gallery, music hall, restaurant and spittoon, and in any case no member of the crew would dream of going anywhere in a straight line.

The poodle Trixiebell accompanied them, keeping as close to the centre of the group as possible. Of Deep Bone there was no sign. William had offered to carry Wuffles, because in a way he felt he owned him. A hundred dollars' worth of him, at least. It was a hundred dollars he hadn't got but, well, surely tomorrow's edition would pay for that. And anyone after the dog now surely wouldn't try anything out here on the street, in broad daylight, especially since it was barely narrow daylight now. Clouds filled the sky like old eiderdowns, the fog that was descending was meeting the river mist coming up, and the light was draining out of everything.

He tried to think of the headline. He couldn't quite get a grip on it yet. There was too much to say, and he wasn't good at getting the huge complexities of the world into fewer than half a dozen words. Sacharissa was better at it, because she treated words as lumps of letters that could be hammered together any old how. Her best one had been on some tedious inter-Guild squabble and, in single column, read:

PROBE

INTO

SHOCK

GUILD

RUMPUS

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William just wasn't used to the idea of evaluating words purely in terms of their length, whereas she'd picked up the habit in two days. He'd already had to stop her calling Lord Vetinari CITY BOSS. It was technically correct that if you spent some time with a thesaurus you could arrive at that description, and it did fit in a single column, but the sight of the words had made William feel extremely exposed.

It was self-absorption like this that allowed him to walk into the printing shed, with the crew tagging along, and not notice anything wrong until he saw the expression on the faces of the dwarfs.

'Ah, our writer man,' said Mr Pin, stepping forward. 'Shut the door, Mr Tulip.'

Mr Tulip slammed the door with one hand. The other was clamped over Sacharissa's mouth. She rolled her eyes at William.

'And you've brought me the little doggie,' said Mr Pin. Wuffles started to growl as he approached. William backed away.

'The Watch will be here soon,' said William. Wuffles still growled, on a rising note.

'Doesn't worry me now,' said Mr Pin. 'Not with what I know. Not with who I know. Where's the damn vampire?'

'I don't know! He's not always with us!' snapped William.

'Really? In that case let me retort!' said Mr Pin, his pistol bow inches from William's face. 'If it doesn't arrive within two minutes I will--'

Wuffles leapt out of William's arms. His bark was the frantic whurwhur of a small dog mad with fury. Pin reared back, one arm raised to protect his face. The bow fired. The arrow hit one of the lamps over the press. The lamp exploded.

A cloud of burning oil rained down. It splattered across type metal and old rocking horses and dwarfs.

Mr Tulip let go of Sacharissa to help his colleague, and in the slow dance of rushing events Sacharissa spun round and planted her knee hard and firmly in the place that made a parsnip a very funny thing indeed.

William grabbed her on the way past and rushed her out into the freezing air. When he fought his way back in through the

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stampeding crew, who had the same instinctive reaction to fire as they did to soap and water, it was into a room full of burning debris. Dwarfs were fighting fires in the rubbish. Dwarfs were fighting fires in their beards. Several were advancing on Mr Tulip, who was on his hands and knees and throwing up. And Mr Pin was spinning around, flailing at an enraged Wuffles, who was managing to growl while sinking his teeth into Pin's arm all the way to the bone.

William cupped his hands. 'Get out right now!' he yelled. 'The tins!'

One or two dwarfs heard him, and looked around at the shelves of old paint tins just as the first one blew off its lid.

The tins were ancient, no more now than rust held together with chemical sludge. Several others were starting to burn.

Mr Pin danced across the floor, trying to shake the enraged dog from his arm.

'Get the damn thing off'f me!' he yelled.

'Forget the --ing dog, my --ing suit's on fire!' shouted Mr Tulip, flailing at his own sleeve.

A tin of what had once been enamel paint took off from the blazing mess, spinning with a wzipwzip noise, and exploded on the press.

William grabbed Goodmountain's shoulder. 'I said come on!'

'My press! It's on fire!'

'Better it than us! Come on\'

It was said of the dwarfs that they cared more about things like iron and gold than they did about people, because there was only a limited supply of iron and gold in the world whereas there seemed to be more and more people everywhere you looked. It was said mostly by people like Mr Windling.

But they did care fiercely about things. Without things, people were just bright animals.

The printers clustered around the doorway, axes at the ready. Choking brown smoke billowed out. Flames licked out among the roof eaves. Several sections of tin roof buckled and collapsed.

As they did so a smouldering ball rocketed out through the door

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and three dwarfs who took a swipe only just missed hitting one another.

It was Wuffles. Patches of fur were still smoking, but his eyes gleamed and he was still whining and growling.

He let William pick him up. He had a triumphant air about him, and turned to watch the burning doorway with his ears cocked.

'That must be it, then,' said Sacharissa.

'They might have got out of the back door,' said Goodmountain. 'Boddony, some of you go round and check, will you?'

'Plucky dog, this,' said William.

' "Brave" would be better,' said Sacharissa distantly. 'It's only five letters. It would look better in a single-column sidebar. No... "Plucky" would work, because then we'd get:

PLUCKY DOG PUTS

BITE ON VILLAINS

... although that first line is a bit shy.' 'I wish I could think in headlines,' said William, shivering.

It was cool and damp down here in the cellar.

Mr Pin dragged himself to a corner and slapped at the burns on his suit.

'We're --ing trapped,' moaned Tulip.

'Yeah? This is stone,' said Pin. 'Stone floor, stone walls, stone ceiling! Stone doesn't bum, okay? We just stay nice and calm down here and wait it out.'

Mr Tulip listened to the sound of the fire above them. Red and yellow light danced on the floor under the cellar hatchway.

'I don't --ing like it,' he said.

'We've seen worse.'

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'I don't --ing like it!'

'Just keep cool. We're going to get out of this. I wasn't born to fry!'

The flames roared around the press. A few late paint tins pin-wheeled through the heat, spraying burning droplets.

The fire was yellow-white at the heart, and now it crackled around the metal formes that held the type.

Silver beads appeared around the leaden, inky slugs. Letters shifted, settled, ran together. For a moment the words themselves floated on the melting metal, innocent words like 'the' and 'truth' and 'shall make ye fere', and then they were lost. From the red-hot press, and the wooden boxes, and amongst the racks and racks of type, and even out of the piles of carefully stockpiled metal, thin streams began to flow. They met and merged and spread. Soon the floor Was a moving, rippling mirror in which the orange and yellow flames danced upside down.

On Otto's workbench the salamanders detected the heat. They liked heat. Their ancestors had evolved in volcanoes. They woke up and began to purr.

Mr Tulip, walking up and down the cellar like a trapped animal, picked up one of the cages and glared at the creatures.