‘You should’ve been there. You should’ve seen it !’ Moist said to himself. He hadn’t meant to say it out loud. Across the room, a man hit another man with his own leg and picked up seven points.

‘Yes,’ said Miss Dearheart. ‘You should have. And three months ago my brother John raised enough to start a rival to the Trunk. That took some doing. Gilt has got tentacles everywhere. Well, John ended up dead in a field. They said he hadn’t clipped his safety rope on. He always did. And now my father just sits and stares at the wall. He even lost his workshop when everything got taken away. We lost our house, of course. Now we live with my aunt in Dolly Sisters. That’s what we’ve come to. When Reacher Gilt talks about freedom he means his, not anyone else’s. And now you pop up, Mr Moist von Lipwig, all shiny and new, running around doing everything at once. Why?’

‘Vetinari offered me the job, that’s all,’ said Moist.

‘Why did you take it?’

‘It was a job for life.’

She stared at Moist so hard that he began to feel uncomfortable. ‘Well, you’ve managed to get a table at Le Foie Heureux at a few hours’ notice,’ she conceded, as a knife struck a beam behind her. ‘Are you still going to lie if I ask you how?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘Good. Shall we go?’

A little pressure lamp burned in the stuffy snugness of the locker room, its glow a globe of unusual brilliance. In the centre of it, magnifying glass in hand, Stanley examined his stamps.

This was… heaven. Peas are known for their thoroughness, and Stanley was conscientious in the extreme. Mr Spools, slightly unnerved by his smile, had given him all the test sheets and faulty pages, and Stanley was carefully cataloguing them - how many of each, what the errors were, everything.

A little tendril of guilt was curling through his mind: this was better than pins, it really was. There could be no end to stamps. You could put anything on them. They were amazing. They could move letters around and then you could stick them in a book, all neat. You wouldn’t get ‘pinhead’s thumb’, either.

He’d read about this feeling in the pin magazines. They said you could come unpinned. Girls and marriage were sometimes mentioned in this context. Sometimes an ex-head would sell off his whole collection, just like that. Or at some pin-meet someone would suddenly throw all their pins in the air and run out shouting, ‘Aargh, they’re just pins!’ Up until now, such a thing had been unthinkable to Stanley.

He picked up his little sack of unsorted pins, and stared at it. A few days ago, the mere thought of an evening with his pins would have given him a lovely warm, comfortable feeling inside. But now it was time to put away childish pins.

Something screamed.

It was harsh, guttural, it was malice and hunger given a voice. Small huddling shrew-like creatures had once heard sounds like that, circling over the swamps.

After a moment of ancient terror had subsided, Stanley crept over and opened the door.

‘H-hello?’ he called, into the cavernous darkness of the hall. ‘Is there anyone there?’

There was fortunately no reply, but there was some scrabbling up near the roof.

‘We’re closed, you know,’ he quavered. ‘But we’re open again at seven in the morning for a range of stamps and a wonderful deal on mail to Pseudopolis.’ His voice slowed and his brow creased as he tried to remember everything Mr Lipwig had told them earlier. ‘Remember, we may not be the fastest but we always get there. Why not write to your old granny?’

‘I ate my grandmother,’ growled a voice from high in the darkness. ‘I gnawed her bones.’

Stanley coughed. He had not been trained in the art of salesmanship.

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Er… perhaps an aunt, then?’

He wrinkled his nose. Why was there the stink of lamp oil in the air?

‘Hello?’ he said again.

Something dropped out of the dark, bounced off his shoulder and landed on the floor with a wet thud. Stanley reached down, felt around and found a pigeon. At least, he found about half a pigeon. It was still warm, and very sticky.

Mr Gryle sat on a beam high above the hall. His stomach was on fire. It was no good, old habits died too hard. They were bred in the bone. Something warm and feathery fluttered up in front of you and of course you snapped at it. Ankh-Morpork had pigeons roosting on every gutter, cornice and statue. Not even the resident gargoyles could keep them down. He’d had six before he sailed in through the broken dome, and then another huge warm feathery cloud had risen up and a red haze had simply dropped in front of his eyes.

They were so tasty . You couldn’t stop at one! And five minutes later you remembered why you should have done.

These were feral, urban birds, that lived on what they could find on the streets. Ankh-Morpork streets, at that. They were bobbing, cooing plague pits. You might as well eat a dog turd burger and wash it down with a jumbo cup of septic tank.

Mr Gryle groaned. Best to finish the job, get out of here and go and throw up over a busy street. He dropped his oil bottle into the dark and fumbled for his matches. His species had come to fire late, because nests burned too easily, but it did have its uses…

Flame blossomed, high up at the far end of the hall. It dropped from the beams and landed on the stacks of letters. There was a whoomph as the oil caught fire; blue runnels of flame began to climb the walls.

Stanley looked down. A few feet away, lit by the fire crawling across the letters, was a figure curled up on the floor. The golden hat with wings lay next to it.

Stanley looked up, eyes glowing red in the firelight, as a figure swooped from the rafters and sped towards him, mouth open.

And that’s when it all went wrong for Mr Gryle, because Stanley had one of his Little Moments.

Attitude was everything. Moist had studied attitude. Some of the old nobility had it. It was the total lack of any doubt that things would go the way they expected them to go.

The maitre d’ ushered them to their table without a moment’s hesitation.

‘Can you really afford this on a government salary, Mr Lipwig?’ said Miss Dearheart as they sat down. ‘Or are we going to exit via the kitchens?’

‘I believe I have adequate funds,’ said Moist.

He probably hadn’t, he knew. A restaurant that has a waiter even for the mustard stacks up the prices. But right now Moist wasn’t worrying about the bill. There were ways to deal with bills, and it was best to deal with them on a full stomach.

They ordered starters that probably cost more than the weekly food bill for an average man. There was no point in looking for the cheapest thing on the menu. The cheapest thing theoretically existed but somehow, no matter how hard you stared, didn’t quite manage to be there. On the other hand, there were a lot of most expensive things.

‘Are the boys settling in okay?’ said Miss Dearheart.

The boys , Moist thought. ‘Oh, yes. Anghammarad has really taken to it. A natural postman,’ he said.

‘Well, he’s had practice.’

‘What’s that box he’s got riveted to his arm?’

‘That? A message he’s got to deliver. Not the original baked clay tablet, I gather. He’s had to make copies two or three times and the bronze lasts hardly any time at all, to a golem. It’s a message to King Het of Thut from his astrologers on their holy mountain, telling him that the Goddess of the Sea was angry and what ceremonies he’d have to do to placate her.’

‘Didn’t Thut slide into the sea anyway? I thought he said—’

‘Yeah, yeah, Anghammarad got there too late and was swept away by the ferocious tidal wave and the island sank.’

‘So… ?’ said Moist.

‘So what?’ said Miss Dearheart.

‘So… he doesn’t think that delivering it now might be a bit on the tardy side?’

‘No. He doesn’t. You’re not seeing it like a golem. They believe the universe is doughnut-shaped.’