The Discworld Series (№7) - Pyramids

'Whenever you like Mr Teppic.'

This was it.

This was where they found out if you could kill.

This was what he had been trying to put out of his mind.

He knew he couldn't.

Octeday afternoons was Political Expediency with Lady T'malia, one of the few women to achieve high office in the Guild. In the lands around the Circle Sea it was generally agreed that one way to achieve a long life was not to have a meal with her Ladyship. The jewellery of one hand alone carried enough poison to inhume a small town. She was stunningly beautiful, but with the kind of calculated beauty that is achieved by a team of skilled artists, manicurists, plasterers, corsetiers and dressmakers and three hours' solid work every morning. When she walked there was a faint squeak of whalebone under incredible stress.

The boys were learning. As she talked they didn't watch her figure. They watched her fingers.

'And thus,' she said, 'let us consider the position before the founding of the Guild. In this city, and indeed in many places elsewhere, civilisation is nurtured and progresses by the dynamic interplay of interests among many large and powerful advantage cartels.

'In the days before the founding of the Guild the seeking of advancement among these consortia invariably resulted in regrettable disagreements which were terminated with extreme prejudice. These were extremely deleterious to the common interest of the city. Please understand that where disharmony rules, commerce flags.

'And yet, and yet.' She clasped her hands to her bosom. There was a creak like a galleon beating against a gale.

'Clearly there was a need for an extreme yet responsible means of settling irreconcilable differences,' she went on, 'and thus was laid the groundwork for the Guild. What bliss — ' the sudden peak in her voice guiltily jerked several dozen young men out of their private reveries — 'it must have been to have been present in those early days, when men of stout moral purpose set out to forge the ultimate political tool short of warfare. How fortunate you are now, in training for a guild which demands so much in terms of manners, deportment, bearing and esoteric skills, and yet offers a power once the preserve only of the gods. Truly, the world is the mollusc of your choice . . .

Chidder translated much of this behind the stables during the dinner break.

'I know what Terminate with Extreme Prejudice means,' said Cheesewright loftily. 'It means to inhume with an axe.

'It bloody well doesn't,' said Chidder.

'How do you know, then?'

'My family have been in commerce for years,' said Chidder.

'Huh,' said Cheesewright. 'Commerce.'

Chidder never went into details about what kind of commerce it was. It had something to do with moving items around and supplying needs, but exactly what items and which needs was never made clear.

After hitting Cheesewright he explained carefully that Terminate with Extreme Prejudice did not simply require that the victim was inhumed, preferably in an extremely thorough way, but that his associates and employees were also intimately involved, along with the business premises, the building, and a large part of the surrounding neighbourhood, so that everyone involved would know that the man had been unwise enough to make the kind of enemies who could get very angry and indiscriminate.

'Gosh,' said Arthur.

'Oh, that's nothing,' said Chidder, 'one Hogswatchnight my grandad and his accounts department went and had a high-level business conference with the Hubside people and fifteen bodies were never found. Very bad, that sort of thing. Upsets the business community.'

'All the business community, or just that part of it floating face down in the river?' said Teppic.

'That's the point. Better it should be like this,' said Chidder, shaking his head. 'You know. Clean. That's why my father said I should join the Guild. I mean, you've got to get on with the business these days, you can't spend your whole time on public relations.'

The end of the crossbow trembled.

He liked everything else about the school, the climbing, the music studies, the broad education. It was the fact that you ended up killing people that had been preying on his mind. He'd never killed anyone.

That's the whole point, he told himself. This is where everyone finds out if you can, including you.

If I get it wrong now, I'm dead.

In his corner, Mericet began to hum a discouraging little tune.

There was a price the Guild paid for its licence. It saw to it that there were no careless, half-hearted or, in a manner of speaking, murderously inefficient assassins. You never met anyone who'd failed the test.

People did fail. You just never met them. Maybe there was one under there, maybe it was Chidder, even, or Snoxall or any one of the lads. They were all doing the run this evening. Maybe if he failed he'd be bundled under there.

Teppic tried to sight on the recumbent figure.

'Ahem,' coughed the examiner.

His throat was dry. Panic rose like a drunkard's supper.

His teeth wanted to chatter. His spine was freezing, his clothes a collection of damp rags. The world slowed down. No. He wasn't going to. The sudden decision hit him like a brick in a dark alley, and was nearly as surprising. It wasn't that he hated the Guild, or even particularly disliked Mericet, but this wasn't the way to test anyone. It was just wrong.

He decided to fail. Exactly what could the old man do about it, here?

And he'd fail with flair.

He turned to face Mericet, looked peacefully into the examiner's eyes, extended his crossbow hand in some vague direction to his right, and pulled the trigger.

There was a metallic twang.

There was a click as the bolt ricocheted off a nail in the window sill. Mericet ducked as it whirred over his head. It hit a torch bracket on the wall, and went past Teppic's white face purring like a maddened cat.

There was a thud as it hit the blanket, and then silence.

'Thank you, Mr Teppic. If you could bear with me just one moment.'

The old assassin pored over his clipboard, his lips moving. He took the pencil, which dangled from it by a bit of frayed string, and made a few marks on a piece of pink paper.

'I will not ask you to take it from my hands,' he said, 'what with one thing and another. I shall leave it on the table by the door.'

It wasn't a particularly pleasant smile: it was thin and dried-up, a smile with all the warmth long ago boiled out of it; people normally smiled like that when they had been dead for about two years under the broiling desert sun. But at least you felt he was making the effort.

Teppic hadn't moved. 'I've passed?' he said.

'That would appear to be the case.'

'But-'

'I am sure you know that we are not allowed to discuss the test with pupils. However, I can tell you that I personally do not approve of these modern flashy techniques. Good morning to you.' And Mericet stalked out.

Teppic tottered over to the dusty table by the door and looked down, horrified, at the paper. Sheer habit made him extract a pair of tweezers from his pouch in order to pick it up.

It was genuine enough. There was the seal of the Guild on it, and the crabbed squiggle that was undoubtedly Mericet's signature; he'd seen it often enough, generally at the bottom of test papers alongside comments like 3/10. See me.

He padded over to the figure on the bed and pulled back the blanket.

It was nearly one in the morning. Ankh-Morpork was just beginning to make a night of it.

It had been dark up above the rooftops, in the aerial world of thieves and assassins. But down below the life of the city flowed through the streets like a tide.

Teppic walked through the throng in a daze. Anyone else who tried that in the city was asking for a guided tour of the bottom of the river, but he was wearing assassin's black and the crowd just automatically opened in front of him and closed behind. Even the pickpockets kept away. You never knew what you might find. He wandered aimlessly through the gates of the Guild House and sat down on a black marble seat, with his chin on his knuckles.

The fact was that his life had come to an end. He hadn't thought about what was going to happen next. He hadn't dared to think that there was going to be a next.

Someone tapped him on the shoulder. As he turned, Chidder sat down beside him and wordlessly produced a slip of pink paper.

'Snap,' he said.

'You passed too?' said Teppic.

Chidder grinned. 'No problem,' he said. 'It was Nivor. No problem. He gave me a bit of trouble on the Emergency Drop, though. How about you?'

'Hmm? Oh. No.' Teppic tried to get a grip on himself. 'No trouble,' he said.

'Heard from any of the others?'

'No.'

Chidder leaned back. 'Cheesewright will make it,' he said loftily, 'and young Arthur. I don't think some of the others will. We could give them twenty minutes, what do you say?'

Teppic turned an agonised face towards him.

'Chiddy, I— 'What?'

'When it came to it, I— «What about it?'

Teppic looked at the cobbles. 'Nothing,' he said.

'You're lucky — you just had a good airy run over the rooftops. I had the sewers and then up the garderobe in the Haberdashers' Tower. I had to go in and change when I got here.'

'You had a dummy, did you?' said Teppic.

'Good grief, didn't you?'

'But they let us think it was going to be real!' Teppic wailed.

'It felt real, didn't it?'

'Yes!'

'Well, then. And you passed. So no problem.'

'But didn't you wonder who might be under the blanket, who it was, and why— 'I was worried that I might not do it properly,' Chidder admitted. 'But then I thought, well, it's not up to me.'

'But I— ' Teppic stopped. What could he do? Go and explain? Somehow that didn't seem a terribly good idea.

His friend slapped him on the back.

'Don't worry about it!' he said. 'We've done it!'

And Chidder held up his thumb pressed against the first two fingers of his right hand, in the ancient salute of the assassins.

A thumb pressed against two fingers, and the lean figure of Dr Cruces, head tutor, looming over the startled boys. 'We do not murder,' he said. It was a soft voice; the doctor never raised his voice, but he had a way of giving it the pitch and spin that could make it be heard through a hurricane. 'We do not execute. We do not massacre. We never, you may be very certain, we never torture. We have no truck with crimes of passion or hatred or pointless gain. We do not do it for a delight in inhumation, or to feed some secret inner need, or for petty advantage or for some cause or belief; I tell you, gentlemen, that all these reasons are in the highest degree suspect. Look into the face of a man who will kill you for a belief and your nostrils will snuff up the scent of abomination. Hear a speech declaring a holy war and, I assure you, your ears should catch the click of evil's scales and the dragging of its monstrous tail over the purity of the language.

'No, we do it for the money.

'And, because we above all must know the value of a human life, we do it for the a great deal of money.

'There can be few cleaner motives, so shorn of all pretence.

'Nil mortifi, sine lucre. Remember. No killing without payment.'

He paused for a moment.

'And always give a reciept,' he added.

'So it's all okay,' said Chidder. Teppic nodded gloomily. That was what was so likeable about Chidder. He had this enviable ability to avoid thinking seriously about anything he did.

A figure approached cautiously through the open gates7. The light from the torch in the porters' lodge glinted off blond curly hair.

'You two made it, then,' said Arthur, nonchalantly flourishing the slip.

Arthur had changed quite a lot in seven years. The continuing failure of the Great Orm to wreak organic revenge for lack of piety had cured him of his tendency to run everywhere with his coat over his head. His small size gave him a natural advantage in those areas of the craft involving narrow spaces. His innate aptitude for channelled violence had been revealed on the day when Fliemoe and some cronies had decided it would be fun to toss the new boys in a blanket, and picked Arthur first; ten seconds later it had taken the combined efforts of every boy in the dormitory to hold Arthur back and prise the remains of the chair from his fingers. It had transpired that he was the son of the late Johan Ludorum, one of the greatest assasins in the history of the Guild. Sons of dead assasins always got a free scholarship. Yes, it could be a caring profession at times.

There hadn't been any doubt about Arthur passing. He'd been given extra tuition and was allowed to use really complicated poisons. He was probably going to stay on for post-graduate work.

They waited until the gongs of the city struck two. Clock work was not a precise technology in Ankh-Morpork, and many of the city's variuos communities had their own ideas of what constituted an hour in any case, so the chimes went on bouncing around the rooftops for five minutes.

When it was obvious that the city's consensus was in favour of it being well past two the three of them stopped looking silently at their shoes.

'Well, that's it,' said Chidder.

'Poor old Cheesewright,' said Arthur. 'It's tragic, when you think about it.'

'Yes, he owed me fourpence,' agreed Chidder. 'Come on. I've arranged something for us.'

King Teppicymon XXVII got out of bed and clapped his hands over his ears to shut out the roar of the sea. It was strong tonight.

It was always louder when he was feeling out of sorts. He needed something to distract himself. He could send for Ptraci, his favourite handmaiden. She was special. Her singing always cheered him up. Life seemed so much brighter when she stopped.

Or there was the sunrise. That was always comforting. It was pleasant to sit wrapped in a blanket on the topmost roof of the palace, watching the mists lift from the river as the golden flood poured over the land. You got that warm, contented feeling of another job well done. Even if you didn't actually know how you'd done it . . .

He got up, shuffled on his slippers, and padded out of his bedroom and down the wide corridor that led to the huge spiral stairs and the roof. A few rushlights illuminated the statues of the other local gods, painting the walls with shifting shadow pictures of things dog-headed, fish-bodied, spider-armed. He'd known them since childhood. His juvenile nightmares would have been quite formless without them.

The sea. He'd only seen it once, when he was a boy. He couldn't recall a lot about it, except the size. And the noise. And the seagulls.

They'd preyed on his mind. They seemed to have it far better worked out, seagulls. He wished he could come back as one, one day, but of course that wasn't an option if you were a pharaoh. You never came back. You didn't exactly go away, in fact.

'Well, what is it?' said Teppic.

'Try it,' said Chidder, 'just try it. You'll never have the chance again.'

'Seems a shame to spoil it,' said Arthur gallantly looking down at the delicate pattern on his plate. 'What are all the little red things?'

'They're just radishes,' said Chidder dismissively. 'They're not the important part. Go on.'

Teppic reached over with the little wooden fork and skewered a paper-thin sliver of white fish. The squishi chef was scrutinising him with the air of one watching a toddler on his first birthday. So, he realised, was the rest of the restaurant.

He chewed it carefully. It was salty and faintly rubbery, with a hint of sewage outfall.

'Nice?' said Chidder anxiously. Several nearby diners started to clap.

'Different,' Teppic conceded, chewing. 'What is it?'

'Deep sea blowfish,' said Chidder.

'It's all right,' he said hastily as Teppic laid down his fork meaningfully, 'it's perfectly safe provided every bit of stomach, liver and digestive tract is removed, that's why it cost so much, there's no such thing as a second-best blowfish chef, it's the most expensive food in the world, people write poems about it-'

'Could be a taste explosion,' muttered Teppic, getting a grip on himself. Still, it must have been done properly, otherwise the place would now be wearing him as wallpaper. He poked carefully at the sliced roots which occupied the rest of the plate.

'What do these do to you?' he said.

'Well, unless they're prepared in exactly the right way over a six-week period they react catastrophically with your stomach acids,' said Chidder. 'Sorry. I thought we should celebrate with the most expensive meal we could afford.'

'I see. Fish and chips for Men,' said Teppic.

'Do they have any vinegar in this place?' said Arthur, his mouth full. 'And some mushy peas would go down a treat.'

But the wine was good. Not incredibly good, though. Not one of the great vintages. But it did explain why Teppic had gone through the whole of the day with a headache.

It had been the hangunder. His friend had bought four bottles of otherwise quite ordinary white wine. The reason it was so expensive was that the grapes it was made from hadn't actually been planted yet8.

Light moves slowly, lazily on the Disc. It's in no hurry to get anywhere. Why bother? At lightspeed, everywhere is the same place.

King Teppicymon XXVII watched the golden disc float over the edge of the world. A flight of cranes took off from the mist— covered river.

He'd been conscientious, he told himself. No-one had ever explained to him how one made the sun come up and the river flood and the corn grow. How could they? He was the god, after all. He should know. But he didn't, so he'd just gone through life hoping like hell that it would all work properly, and that seemed to have done the trick. The trouble was, though, that if it didn't work, he wouldn't know why not. A recurrent nightmare was of Dios the high priest shaking him awake one morning, only it wouldn't be a morning, of course, and of every light in the palace burning and an angry crowd muttering in the star-lit darkness outside and everyone looking expectantly at him..

And all he'd be able to say was, 'Sorry'.

It terrified him. How easy to imagine the ice forming on the river, the eternal frost riming the palm trees and snapping off the leaves (which would smash when they hit the frozen ground) and the birds dropping lifeless from the sky Shadow swept over him. He looked up through eyes misted with tears at a grey and empty horizon, his mouth dropping open in horror.

He stood up, flinging aside the blanket, and raised both hands in supplication. But the sun had gone. He was the god, this was his job, it was the only thing he was here to do, and he had failed the people.

Now he could hear in his mind's ear the anger of the crowd, a booming roar that began to fill his ears until the rhythm became insistent and familiar, until it reached the point where it pressed in no longer but drew him out, into that salty blue desert where the sun always shone and sleek shapes wheeled across the sky.

The pharaoh raised himself on his toes, threw back his head, spread his wings. And leapt.

As he soared into the sky he was surprised to hear a thump behind him. And the sun came out from behind the clouds.

Later on, the pharaoh felt awfully embarrassed about it.

The three new assassins staggered slowly along the street, constantly on the point of falling over but never quite reaching it, trying to sing 'A Wizard's Staff Has A Knob On The End' in harmony or at least in the same key.

'Tis big an' i'ss round an' weighs three to the-' sang Chidder. 'Blast, what've I stepped in?'

'Anyone know where we are?' said Arthur.

'We — we were headed for the Guildhouse,' said Teppic, 'only must of took the wrong way, that's the river up ahead. Can smell it.'

Caution penetrated Arthur's armour of alcohol.

'Could be dangerous pep — plep — people around, this time o' night,' he hazarded.

'Yep,' said Chidder, with satisfaction, 'us. Got ticket to prove it. Got test and everything. Like to see anyone try anything with us.'

'Right,' agreed Teppic, leaning against him for support of a sort. 'We'll slit them from wossname to thingy.'

'Right!'

They lurched uncertainly out on to the Brass Bridge.

In fact there were dangerous people around in the pre-dawn shadows, and currently these were some twenty paces behind them.

The complex system of criminal Guilds had not actually made Ankh-Morpork a safer place, it just rationalised its dangers and put them on a regular and reliable footing. The major Guilds policed the city with more thoroughness and certainly more success than the old Watch had ever managed, and it was true that any freelance and unlicensed thief caught by the Thieves' Guild would soon find himself remanded in custody by social inquiry reports plus having his knees nailed together9.

However, there were always a few spirits who would venture a precarious living outside the lawless, and the five men of this description were closing cautiously on the trio to introduce them to this week's special offer, a cut throat plus theft and burial in the river mud of your choice.

People normally keep out of the way of assassins because of an instinctive feeling that killing people for very large sums of money is disapproved of by the gods (who generally prefer people to be killed for very small sums of money or for free) and could result in hubris, which is the judgement of the gods. The gods are great believers in justice, at least as far as it extends to humans, and have been known to dispense it so enthusiastically that people miles away are turned into cruet.

However, assassin's black doesn't frighten everyone, and in certain sections of society there is a distinct cachet in killing an assassin. It's rather like smashing a sixer in conkers.

Broadly, therefore, the three even now lurching across the deserted planks of the Brass Bridge were dead drunk assassins and the men behind them were bent on inserting the significant comma.

Chidder wandered into one of the heraldic wooden hippopotami10 — that lined the seaward edge of the bridge, bounced off and flopped over the parapet.

'Feel sick,' he announced.

'Feel free,' said Arthur, 'that's what the river's for.'

Teppic sighed. He was attached to rivers, which he felt were designed to have water lilies on top and crocodiles underneath, and the Ankh always depressed him because if you put a water lily in it, it would dissolve. It drained the huge silty plains all the way to the Ramtop mountains, and by the time it had passed through Ankh-Morpork, pop. One million, it could only be called a liquid because it moved faster than the land around it; actually being sick in it would probably make it, on average, marginally cleaner.

He stared down at the thin trickle that oozed between the central pillars, and then raised his gaze to the grey horizon.

'Sun's coming up,' he announced.

'Don't remember eating that,' muttered Chidder.

Teppic stepped back, and a knife ripped past his nose and buried itself in the buttocks of the hippo next to him.

Five figures stepped out of the mists. The three assassins instinctively drew together.

'You come near me, you'll really regret it,' moaned Chidder, clutching his stomach. 'The cleaning bill will be horrible.'

'Well now, what have we here?' said the leading thief. This is the sort of thing that gets said in these circumstances.

'Thieves' Guild, are you?' said Arthur.

'No,' said the leader, 'we're the small and unrepresentative minority that gets the rest a bad name. Give us your valuables and weapons, please. This won't make any difference to the outcome, you understand. It's just that corpse robbing is unpleasant and degrading.'

'We could rush them,' said Teppic, uncertainly.

'Don't look at me,' said Arthur, 'I couldn't find my arse with an atlas.'

'You'll really be sorry when I'm sick,' said Chidder. Teppic was aware of the throwing knives stuffed up either sleeve, and that the chances of him being able to get hold of one in time still to be alive to throw it were likely to be very small.

At times like this religious solace is very important. He turned and looked towards the sun, just as it withdrew from the cloudbanks of the dawn.

There was a tiny dot in the centre of it.

The late King Teppicymon XXVII opened his eyes.

'I was flying,' he whispered, 'I remember the feeling of wings. What am I doing here?'

He tried to stand up. There was a temporary feeling of heaviness, which suddenly dropped away so that he rose to his feet almost without any effort. He looked down to see what had caused it.

'Oh dear,' he said.

The culture of the river kingdom had a lot to say about death and what happened afterwards. In fact it had very little to say about life, regarding it as a sort of inconvenient prelude to the main event and something to be hurried through as politely as possible, and therefore the pharaoh reached the conclusion that he was dead very quickly. The sight of his mangled body on the sand below him played a major part in this.

There was a greyness about everything. The landscape had a ghostly look, as though he could walk straight through it. Of course, he thought, I probably can.

He rubbed the analogue of his hands. Well, this is it. This is where it gets interesting; this is where I start to really live.

Behind him a voice said, GOOD MORNING.

The king turned.

'Hallo,' he said. 'You'd be-'

DEATH, said Death.

The king looked surprised.

'I understood that Death came as a three-headed giant scarab beetle,' he said.

Death shrugged. WELL. NOW YOU KNOW.

'What's that thing in your hand?'

THIS? IT'S A SCYTHE.

'Strange-looking object, isn't it?' said the pharaoh. 'I thought Death carried the Flail of Mercy and the Reaping Hook of Justice.'

Death appeared to think about this.

WHAT IN? he said.

'Pardon?'

ARE WE STILL TALKING ABOUT A GIANT BEETLE?

'Ah. In his mandibles, I suppose. But I think he's got arms in one of the frescoes in the palace.' The king hesitated. 'Seems a bit silly, really, now I come to tell someone. I mean, a giant beetle with arms. And the head of an ibis, I seem to recall.'

Death sighed. He was not a creature of Time, and therefore past and future were all one to him, but there had been a period when he'd made an effort to appear in whatever form the client expected. This foundered because it was usually impossible to know what the client was expecting until after they were dead. And then he'd decided that, since no-one ever really expected to die anyway, he might as well please himself and he'd henceforth stuck to the familiar black-cowled robe, which was neat and very familiar and acceptable everywhere, like the best credit cards.

'Anyway,' said the pharaoh, 'I expect we'd better be going.'

WHERE TO?

'Don't you know?'

I AM HERE ONLY TO SEE THAT YOU DIE AT THE APPOINTED TIME. WHAT HAPPENS NEXT IS UP TO YOU.

'Well . . .' The king automatically scratched his chin. 'I suppose I have to wait until they've done all the preparations and so forth. Mummified me. And built a bloody pyramid. Um. Do I have to hang around here to wait for all that?'

I ASSUME SO. Death clicked his fingers and a magnificent white horse ceased its grazing on some of the garden greenery and trotted towards him.

'Oh. Well, I think I shall look away. They take all the squishy inside bits out first, you know.' A look of faint worry crossed his face. Things that had seemed perfectly sensible when he was alive seemed a little suspect now that he was dead.

'It's to preserve the body so that it may begin life anew in the Netherworld,' he added, in a slightly perplexed voice. 'And then they wrap you in bandages. At least that seems logical.'

He rubbed his nose. 'But then they put all this food and drink in the pyramid with you. Bit weird, really.'

WHERE ARE ONE'S INTERNAL ORGANS AT THIS POINT?

'That's the funny thing, isn't it? They're in a jar in the next room,' said the king, his voice edged with doubt. 'We even put a damn great model cart in dad's pyramid.'

His frown deepened. 'Solid wood, it was,' he said, half to himself, 'with gold leaf all over it. And four wooden bullocks to pull it. Then we whacked a damn great stone over the door . . .'

He tried to think, and found that it was surprisingly easy. New ideas were pouring into his mind in a cold, clear stream. They had to do with the play of light on the rocks, the deep blue of the sky, the manifold possibilities of the world that stretched away on every side of him. Now that he didn't have a body to importune him with its insistent demands the world seemed full of astonishments, but unfortunately among the first of them was the fact that much of what you thought was true now seemed as solid and reliable as marsh gas. And also that, just as he was fully equipped to enjoy the world, he was going to be buried inside a pyramid.

When you die, the first thing you lose is your life. The next thing is your illusions.

I CAN SEE YOU HAVE GOT A LOT TO THINK ABOUT, said Death, mounting up. AND NOW, IF YOU'LL EXCUSE ME— 'Hang on a moment-'

YES?

'When I . . . fell, I could have sworn that I was flying.'

THAT PART OF YOU THAT WAS DIVINE DID FLY, NATURALLY. YOU ARE NOW FULLY MORTAL.