'Yes, and we must hurry, young man,' said the shade of Flead, still rising.
'But I banished you! I used the Ninefold Erasure! It banishes everything.'
'I wrote it,' said Flead, looking smug. 'Oh, don't worry, I'm the only one it doesn't work on. Ha, I'd be a damn fool to design a spell to work on myself, eh?'
Hicks pointed a shaking finger. 'You put in a hidden portal, didn't you?'
'Of course. A bloody good one. Don't worry, I'm the only one who knows where it is, too.' The whole of Flead was floating above the circle now. And don't try to look for it; a man of your limited talent will never find the hidden runes.'
Flead looked around the room. 'Isn't that wonderful young lady here?' he said hopefully. 'Well, never mind. You must get me out of this place, Hicks. I want to see the fun!'
'Fun? What fun?' said Hicks, a man planning to look through the Ninefold Erasure spell very, very carefully.
'I know what kind of golems are coming!'
When he was a child Moist had prayed every night before going to bed. His family were very active in the Plain Potato Church, which shunned the excesses of the Ancient and Orthodox Potato Church. Its followers were retiring, industrious and inventive, and their strict adherence to oil lamps and home-made furniture made them stand out in the region, where most people used candles and sat on sheep.
He'd hated praying. It felt as though he was opening a big black hole into space, and at any moment something might reach through and grab him. This may have been because the standard bedtime prayer included the line 'If I die before I wake', which on bad nights caused him to try to sit up until morning.
He'd also been instructed to use the hours before sleep to count his blessings.
Lying here now, in the darkness of the bank, rather cold and significantly alone, he sought for some.
His teeth were good and he wasn't suffering from premature hair loss. There! That wasn't so hard, was it?
And the Watch hadn't actually arrested him, as such. But there was a troll guarding the vault, which had ominous black and yellow ropes strung around it.
No gold in the vault. Well, even that wasn't entirely true. There was five pounds of it, at least, coating the lead ingots. Someone had done a pretty good job there. That was a silver lining, right? At least it was some gold. It wasn't as if there was no gold at all, right?
He was alone because Adora Belle was spending a night in the cells for assaulting an officer of the Watch. Moist considered that this was unfair. Of course, depending on what kind of day a copper has had there is no action, short of being physically somewhere else, that may not be construed as assault, but Adora Belle hadn't actually assaulted Sergeant Detritus, she'd merely attempted to stab his huge foot with her shoe, resulting in a broken heel and a twisted ankle. Captain Carrot said this had been taken into consideration.
The clocks of the city chimed four, and Moist considered his future, specifically in terms of length.
Look on the bright side. He might just be hanged.
He should have gone down to the vaults on Day 1, with an alchemist and a lawyer in tow. Didn't they ever audit the vaults? Was it done by a bunch of jolly decent chaps who'd poke their heads into some other chaps' vault and sign it off quickly so's not to miss lunch? Can't go doubting a chap's word, eh? Especially when you didn't want him to doubt yours.
Maybe the late Sir Joshua had blown it all on exotic leather goods and young ladies. How many nights in the arms of beautiful women were worth a sack of gold? The price of a good woman was proverbially above rubies, so a skilfully bad one was presumably worth a lot more.
He sat up and lit the candle, and his eye fell on Sir Joshua's journal, on the bedside table.
Thirty-nine years ago... well, it was the right year, and since at the moment he had nothing else to do...
The luck that had been draining from his boots all day came back to him. Even though he wasn't certain what he was looking for, he found it on the sixth random page:
A pair of funny-looking people came to the bank today, asking for the boy Bent. I bade the staff send them away. He is doing exceedingly well. One wonders what he must have suffered.
Quite a lot of the journal seemed to be in some sort of code, but the nature of the secret symbols suggested that Sir Joshua painstakingly recorded every amorous affair. You had to admire his directness, at least. He'd worked out what he wanted to get from life, and had set out to get as much of it as he could. Moist had to take his hat off to the man.
And what had he wanted? He'd never sat down to think about it. But mostly, he wanted tomorrow to be different from today.
He looked at his watch. Four-fifteen, and no one about but the guards. There were watchmen on the main doors. He was indeed not under arrest, but this was one of those civilized little arrangements: he was not under arrest provided that he didn't try to act like a man who was not under arrest.
Ah, he thought, as he pulled on his trousers, there was another small blessing: he had been there when Mr Fusspot proposed to the werewolf -
- which was, by then, balancing on one of the huge ornamental urns that grew like toadstools in the bank's corridors. It was rocking. So was Corporal Nobbs, who was laughing himself sick at -
- Mr Fusspot, who was bouncing up and down with wonderfully optimistic enthusiasm. But he was holding in his mouth his new toy, which appeared to have been mysteriously wound up, and beneficent fate had decreed that at the top of each jump its unbalancing action would cause the little dog to do one slow cartwheel in the air.