Mort

clapped him on the back and said things like 'You've got time for a quick half in there, my old mate, no need to rush off home' or invited him to make up a skittles team and come out for a Klatchian take-away afterwards, or . . . It struck Mort with sudden, terrible poignancy that Death must be the loneliest creature in the universe. In the great party of Creation, he was always in the kitchen.

'I'm sure I don't know what's come over the master lately,' mumbled Albert. 'Out of the chair, my girl. Let's have a look at these nodes.'

They opened the ledger.

They looked at it for a long time.

Then Mort said, 'What do all those symbols mean?'

'Sodomy non sapiens,' said Albert under his breath.

'What does that mean?'

'Means I'm buggered if I know.'

That was wizard talk, wasn't it?' said Mort.

'You shut up about wizard talk. I don't know anything about wizard talk. You apply your brain to this here.'

Mort looked down again at the tracery of lines. It was as if a spider had spun a web on the page, stopping at every junction to make notes. Mort stared until his eyes hurt, waiting for some spark of inspiration. None volunteered.

'Any luck?'

'It's all Klatchian to me,' said Mort. 'I don't even know whether it should be read upside down or sideways.'

'Spiralling from the centre outwards,' sniffed Ysabell from her seat in the corner.

Their heads collided as they both peered at the centre of the page. They stared at her. She shrugged.

'Father taught me how to read the node chart,' she said, 'when I used to do my sewing in here. He used to read bits out.'

'You can help?' said Mort.

'No,' said Ysabell. She blew her nose.

'What do you mean, no?' growled Albert. 'This is too important for any flighty —'

'I mean,' said Ysabell, in razor tones, 'that I can do them and you can help.'

The Ankh-Morpork Guild of Merchants has taken to hiring large gangs of men with ears like fists and fists like large bags of walnuts whose job it is to re-educate those misguided people who publicly fail to recognize the many attractive points of their fine city. For example the philosopher Catroaster was found floating face downward in the river within hours of uttering the famous line, 'When a man is tired of Ankh-Morpork, he is tired of ankle-deep slurry.'

Therefore it is prudent to dwell on one — of the very many, of course — on one of the things that makes Ankh-Morpork renowned among the great cities of the multiverse.

This is its food.

The trade routes of half the Disc pass through the city or down its rather sluggish river. More than half the tribes and races of the Disc have representatives dwelling within its sprawling acres. In Ankh-Morpork the cuisines of the world collide: on the menu are one thousand types of vegetable, fifteen hundred cheeses, two thousand spices, three hundred types of meat, two hundred fowl, five hundred different kinds of fish, one hundred variations on the theme of pasta, seventy eggs of one kind or another, fifty insects, thirty molluscs, twenty assorted snakes and other reptiles, and something pale brown and warty known as the Klatchian migratory bog truffle.

Its eating establishments range from the opulent, where the portions are tiny but the plates are silver, to the secretive, where some of the Disc's more exotic inhabitants are rumoured to eat anything they can get down their throat best out of three.