Moving pictures

It went on for several minutes, to a background of cheers. And then a voice said:

'That's all, folks.'

'That's all what?' said the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, next morning.

The man in front of him shivered with fear.

'Don't know, lordship,' he said. 'They wouldn't let me in. They made me wait outside the door, lordship.'

He twisted his forgers together nervously. The Patrician's stare had him pinned. It was a good stare, and one of the things it was good at was making people go on talking when they thought they had finished.

Only the Patrician knew how many spies he had in the city. This particular one was a servant in the Alchemists' Guild. He had once had the misfortune to come up before the Patrician accused of malicious lingering, and had then chosen of his own free will to become a spy.[3]

'That's all, lordship,' he whined. 'There was just this clicking noise and this sort of flickery glow under the door. And, er, they said the daylight here was wrong.'

'Wrong? How?'

'Er. Dunno, sir. just wrong, they said. They ought to go somewhere where it was better, they said. Uh. And they told me to go and get them some food.'

The Patrician yawned. There was something infinitely boring about the antics of alchemists.

'Indeed,' he said.

'But they'd had their supper only fifteen minutes before,' the servant blurted out.

'Perhaps whatever they were doing makes people hungry,' said the Patrician.

'Yes, and the kitchen was all shut up for the night and I had to go and buy a tray of hot sausages in buns from Throat Dibbler.'

'Indeed.' The Patrician looked down at the paperwork on his desk. 'Thank you. You may go.'

'You know what, lordship? They liked them. They actually liked them!'

That the Alchemists had a Guild at all was remarkable. Wizards were just as unco-operative, but they also were by nature hierarchical and competitive. They needed organization. What was the good of being a wizard of the Seventh Level if you didn't have six other levels to look down on and the Eighth Level to aspire to? You needed other wizards to hate and despise.

Whereas every alchemist was an alchemist alone, working in darkened rooms or hidden cellars and endlessly searching for the big casino - the Philosopher's Stone, the Elixir of Life. They tended to be thin, pink-eyed men, with beards that weren't really beards but more like groups of individual hairs clustering together for mutual protection, and many of them had that vague, unworldly expression that you get from spending too much time in the presence of boiling mercury.

It wasn't that alchemists hated other alchemists. They often didn't notice them, or thought they were walruses.

And so their tiny, despised Guild had never aspired to the powerful status of the Guilds of, say, the Thieves or the Beggars or the Assassins, but devoted itself instead to the aid of widows and families of those alchemists who had taken an overly relaxed attitude to potassium cyanide, for example, or had distilled some interesting fungi, drunk the result, and then stepped off the roof to play with the fairies. There weren't actually very many widows and orphans, of course, because alchemists found it difficult to relate to other people long enough, and generally if they ever managed to marry it was only to have someone to hold their crucibles.

By and large, the only skill the alchemists of Ankh-Morpork had discovered so far was the ability to turn gold into less gold.

Until now ...

Now they were full of the nervous excitement of those who have found an unexpected fortune in their bank account and don't know whether to draw people's attention to it or simply take the lot and run.