'Why? We haven't--'
'However can we repay you, Mr King?' said the dwarf, dragging William towards the door.
The bridesmaids'll be wearing oh-de-nill, whatever that is,' said the King of the Golden River. 'Oh, and if I don't get eighty dollars from you by the end of the month you lads will be in deep' - the cigar did a double length of the mouth - 'trouble. Head downwards.'
Two minutes later the cart was creaking out of the yard, under the curiously uninterested eyes of the troll foreman.
'No, it's not stealing,' said Goodmountain emphatically, shaking the reins. 'The King pays the bastards back their money and we pay him the old price. So we're all happy
except for the Inquirer, and who cares about them?'
'I didn't like the bit about the deep pause trouble,' said William. 'Head downwards.'
'I'm shorter'n you so I lose out either way up,' said the dwarf.
After watching the cart disappear the King yelled downstairs for one of his clerks and told him to fetch a copy of the Times from Bin Six. He sat impassively, except for the oscillating cigar, while the stained and crumpled paper was read to him.
After a while his smile broadened and he asked the clerk to read a few extracts again.
'Ah,' he said, when the man had finished. 'I reckoned that was it. The boy's a born muckraker. Shame for him he was born a long way from honest muck.'
'Shall I do a credit note for the Engravers, Mr King?'
'Aye.'
'You reckon you'll get your money back, Mr King?'
Harry King usually didn't take this sort of thing from clerks. They were there to do the adding-up, not discuss policy. On the other hand, Harry had made a fortune seeing the sparkle in the mire, and sometimes you had to recognize expertise when you saw it.
'What colour's oh-de-nill?' he said.
'Oh, one of those difficult colours, Mr King. A sort of light blue with a hint of green.'
'Could you get ink that colour?'
'I could find out. It'd be expensive.'
The cigar made its traverse from one side of Harry King to the other. He was known to dote on his daughters, who he felt had suffered rather from having a father who needed to take two baths just to get dirty.
'We shall just have to keep an eye on our little writing man,' he said. Tip off the lads, will you? I wouldn't like to see our Effie disappointed.'
The dwarfs were working on the press again, Sacharissa noticed. It seldom stayed the same shape for more than a couple of hours. The dwarfs designed as they went along.
It looked to Sacharissa that the only tools a dwarf needed were his axe and some means of making fire. That'd eventually get him a forge, and with that he could make simple tools, and with those he could make complex tools, and with complex tools a dwarf could more or less make anything.
A couple of them were rummaging around in the industrial junk that had been piled against the walls. A couple of metal mangles had been melted down for their iron already, and the rocking horses were being used to melt lead. One or two of the dwarfs had left the shed on mysterious errands, too, and had returned carrying small sacks and furtive expressions. A dwarf is also very good at making use of things other people have thrown away, even if they haven't actually thrown them away yet.
She was turning her attention to a report of the Nap Hill Jolly Pals annual meeting when a crash and some cursing in Uberwaldean, a good cursing language, made her run over to the cellar entrance.
'Are you all right, Mr Chriek? Do you want me to get the dustpan and brush?'
'Bodrozvachski zhaltziet!... oh, sorry, Miss Sacharissa! Zere has been a minor pothole on zer road to progress.'
Sacharissa made her way down the ladder.
Otto was at his makeshift bench. Boxes of demons hung on the wall. Some salamanders dozed in their cages. In a big dark jar, land eels slithered. But a jar next to it was broken.
'I vas clumsy and knocked it over,' said Otto, looking embarrassed. 'And now zer stupid eel 'as gone behind the bench.'