Mort

'He lived a long time ago, did he?'

'Two thousand years, I think. Look, I don't know why —'

'I bet he didn't die, though,' said Mort. 'I bet he just disappeared one day. Did he?'

Cutwell was silent for a moment.

'Funny you should say that,' he said slowly. There was a legend I heard. He got up to some weird things, they say. They say he blew himself into the Dungeon Dimensions while trying to perform the Rite of AshkEnte backwards. All they found was his hat. Tragic, really. The whole city in mourning for a day just for a hat. It wasn't even a particularly attractive hat; it had burn marks on it.'

'Alberto Malich,' said Mort, half to himself. 'Well. Fancy that.'

He drummed his fingers on the table, although the sound was surprisingly muted.

'Sorry,' said Cutwell. 'I can't get the hang of treacle sandwiches, either.'

'I reckon the interface is moving at a slow walking pace,' said Mort, licking his fingers absent-mindedly. 'Can't you stop it by magic?'

Cutwell shook his head. 'Not me. It'd squash me flat,' he said cheerfully.

'What'll happen to you when it arrives, then?'

'Oh, I'll go back to living in Wall Street. I mean, I never will have left. All this won't have happened. Pity, though. The cooking here is pretty good, and they do my laundry for free. How far away did you say it was, by the way?'

'About twenty miles, I guess.'.

Cutwell rolled his eyes heavenwards and moved his lips. Eventually he said: 'That means it'll arrive around midnight tomorrow, just in time for the coronation.'

'Whose?'

'Hers.'

'But she's queen already, isn't she?'

'In a way, but officially she's not queen until she's crowned.' Cutwell grinned, his face a pattern of shade in the candlelight, and added, 'If you want a way of thinking about it, then it's like the difference between stopping living and being dead.'

Twenty minutes earlier Mort had been feeling tired enough to take root. Now he could feel a fizzing in his blood. It was the kind of late-night, frantic energy that you knew you would pay for around midday tomorrow, but for now he felt he had to have some action or else his muscles would snap out of sheer vitality.

'I want to see her,' he said. 'If you can't do anything, there might be something I can do.'

There's guards outside her room,' said Cutwell. 'I mention this merely as an observation. I don't imagine for one minute that they'll make the slightest difference.'

It was midnight in Ankh-Morpork, but in the great twin city the only difference between night and day was, well, it was darker. The markets were thronged, the spectators were still thickly clustered around the whore pits, runners-up in the city's eternal and byzantine gang warfare drifted silently down through the chilly waters of the river with lead weights tied to their feet, dealers in various illegal and even illogical delights plied their sidelong trade, burglars burgled, knives flashed starlight in alleyways, astrologers started their day's work and in the Shades a nightwatch-man who had lost his way rang his bell and cried out: 'Twelve o'clock and all's arrrrrgghhhh, . . .'

However, the Ankh-Morpork Chamber of Commerce would not be happy at the suggestion that the only real difference between their city and a swamp is the number of legs on the alligators, and indeed in the more select areas of Ankh, which tend to be in the hilly districts where there is a chance of a bit of wind, the nights are gentle and scented with habiscine and Cecillia blossoms.

On this particular night they were scented with saltpetre, too, because it was the tenth anniversary of the accession of the Patrician

[7]

and he had invited a few friends round for a drink, five hundred of them in this case, and was letting off fireworks. Laughter and the occasional gurgle of passion filled the palace gardens, and the evening had just got to that interesting stage where everyone had drunk too much for their own good but not enough actually to fall over. It is