Raising Steam (43 page)

Choosing his moment carefully, Moist waylaid Aeron in a place where they could talk privately.

‘Mister Secretary, I have to ask whether all is quite as it seems with the Low King.’

Aeron’s eyes narrowed and his hand went to the hilt of his sword. ‘Of course it is. What a ridiculous question. Treacherous, too!’

Moist put his hand out placatingly. ‘Look, you know I’m on your side! I have to ask because of something I saw at Mrs Simnel’s house.’

Aeron looked startled and said, ‘I believe the side you’re on is your own, sir, and whatever you think you saw it’s certainly no business of yours.’

‘Indeed it is, my friend,’ Moist replied. ‘The gods, for my sins, gave me a nose for scenting when the metaphorical shit is about to hit the windmill, and I want to be prepared.’

Aeron stood frozen, and without looking directly at Moist he said, ‘Your perspicacity does you credit, Mister Lipwig. Your silence even more!’

‘Oh, come on. There’s something going on here and I’m not in on it. Don’t force me to draw my own conclusions. I do have a very big pencil.’

But Aeron clearly had nothing further to say. The appearance of a couple of engineers at the end of the carriage provided the excuse he needed for bringing the conversation to an abrupt close. He turned on his heel and marched smartly off down the corridor, leaving Moist with every suspicious nerve in his body jangling.

An hour or so later, a knock at the entrance to the guard’s van heralded the King’s secretary, who this time smiled strangely and said, ‘The King would like to grant you an audience, Mister Lipwig.’ And he smiled again and said, ‘And that, I’m sure you’re aware, means at once.’

The King was sitting at a little table doing paperwork when Moist arrived, and beckoned him towards another chair in the carriage, saying, ‘Mister Lipwig, I understand that following our visit to Mister Simnel’s mother, you appear to be under the impression that I may be … hiding something. Is that the case, boyo?’

The King looked at Moist with a stern glare, almost as if daring him to utter what he was thinking.

‘Well, she does have a lot of … feminine insight …’ Moist let the rest of the sentence tail away and watched carefully.

The King sighed and looked at Aeron, who was standing on guard by the door. Rhys nodded and then turned back to Moist.

‘Mister Lipwig, I’m sure you are aware that the sex of dwarfs is often a well-kept secret and there have been times when even to enquire about the sex of another dwarf was considered a terrible thing. I am the Low King of the Dwarfs, but if I can get to what I might call the bottom line, I am also female.’

And there it was. This was the thing that had been niggling at the back of his mind ever since Mrs Simnel had started making the sleeping King –
Queen
now, he reminded himself – comfortable back in Sto Lat. He coughed and said, ‘Well, nobody’s perfect, your majesty. And to tell you the truth, I think I’ve known for some time. I’m good at putting rumours, suspicions and instinct together and getting the right result, because I’m a scoundrel. I expect Lord Vetinari has warned you about me. You could say that I’m Lord Vetinari’s scoundrel.’

‘As if
he
needs one!’

‘Scoundrels take a different look at people, just to get the measure of them: the way they walk, the way they talk, the way they sit. All the little details left unsaid in the wrong place.’

The Queen was silent for a moment and said, ‘A
real
scoundrel?’

‘Yes, m’lady, I would say one of the best, possibly
the
best,’ said Moist. ‘But these days you might say that I’m tamed and at heel, which means I’m a very trustworthy scoundrel.’

‘At Vetinari’s heel? You poor boy.’

And now the Queen looked as if something worrying had been chased away and she said, ‘You must know, Mister Lipwig, there are only very few people who are aware of my secret and they are trusted. One of them is Lady Margolotta and another, of course, is Lord Vetinari.

‘It has always seemed to me that the attitude of dwarfs when it comes to gender is curdling us. Dwarfs, we keep insisting, must be
seen
to be male – and what does it say about a species if they can’t look their own mothers in the face? We live a stupid lie and play a stupid game and I don’t want this state of affairs to continue. I am indeed the Low Queen, Mister Lipwig, and I thank you for your silence at this time.’

The Queen appeared as innocent as one of those mountains which year after year do nothing very much but smoke a little, and then one day end up causing a whole civilization to become an art installation.

‘Mrs Simnel is a nice lady,’ she continued, ‘although perhaps not as discreet as she thought … Of course, I know I can depend on you to treat my secret as if it were your own. I’m sure Lord Vetinari would be upset if you didn’t do so.’

Moist polished his best reassuring smile to sparkling. ‘As I told you, ma’am, I’m a born scoundrel, so I’ve learned to be very, very discreet for the sake of keeping my own neck safe from people who take a dim view of scoundrelhood. And as for Mrs Simnel, she knew all about the secret of steam and never told anyone about it.’

The Queen stroked her beard and said, ‘For a proud mother that must have been testing indeed … Very well, Mister Scoundrel, I will have faith in you both. And now I can see that Aeron is becoming restive, so I’d better return to my paperwork.’ She sent what Moist would swear was a teasing glance in her secretary’s direction.

Moist, for whom it was second nature to watch and listen carefully – most particularly to what was not said – now felt he knew another secret, a secret as yet unacknowledged. The Queen and her secretary were, without doubt, lovers. Possibly you had to be married to notice this fact, but their body language shone through.

A meaning cough from Aeron recalled his attention. The secretary was holding the door open for him, in a clear signal that the audience was over. As Moist stepped out past him Aeron said, ‘Thank you, Mister Lipwig … From both of us.’

Before he set off back to the guard’s van, Moist stood for a while letting the revelations settle. The King being a Queen was looming in his mind. Oh yes, everybody knew that dwarf women looked very much like the dwarf men, beards and all, even Cheery Littlebottom – an Ankh-Morpork dwarf if ever there was one and a strict feminist; although she was adamant that beyond the beards dwarf females were not the same as dwarf men. And since she was now very big, as it were, in the Watch, her insistence on chainmail skirts and subtly altered breastplates didn’t matter too much, but
the Queen—? What would happen if the Queen declared it! It would be
iacta alea est
in spades! And there would be no going back from that.

Aeron had now disappeared back into the Queen’s armoured coach, and Moist was left listening to the rattling of the train. The future, he thought, was going to be … incredibly interesting.

The everlasting fog that filled the vertiginous gorge created deep swirling shadows in the fading light as they approached the final bridge before the Wilinus Pass. And the fog itself seemed to be alive as it moved and twisted, leaving the watchers with the feeling that they were teetering at the edge of the world.

The far side of the bridge was barely visible as Simnel stood in earnest conversation with the head engineer in charge of the bridge works. A bit of darkness in the fog near Moist turned out to be Commander Vimes, grinning.

‘A rickety bridge, a heavy train, a terrifying drop to certain death below, with a pressing deadline and no back-up plan?’ said Vimes. ‘You must be in your element, Mister Lipwig. I’m told the engineers say it can’t be done. Are you really planning to risk the Low King and the future peace of this region on one throw of the dice?’

Behind them an engineer said, ‘I wouldn’t travel over that for a pension.’

As Rhys and Aeron joined them, the creaks and groans of the ancient bridge structure intensified, and seemed almost alive, like some demon daring them to chance their fate. The less fanciful of the engineers might talk of natural movement caused by the drop in temperature as night approached, but it was hard to ignore the ominous atmosphere of the place which was almost … eldritch.

Then Iron Girder snorted steam, panting like a dog ready to be unleashed. Moist took a deep breath, stuck his fingers into his jacket and smiled with a confidence which had blossomed just a
second before when he had finally heard the subtle sound he had been waiting for.

‘It’s a little-known fact, my friends, that these fogs have remarkable solidity. Allow me to demonstrate.’

He stepped off the edge of the cliff beside the track and stood there with the fog swirling around his ankles. He heard gasps from behind. He turned and faced his fellow travellers with a huge grin and a silent sigh of relief before stepping back on to what might be called solid ground.

‘You see. Would you like me to run to the other side and back again while this mystical phenomenon continues, as I believe it will, or shall we all go over now, while the time is ripe?’

‘D’you mind if I try?’ said Vimes.

There was a
twinkle
and Moist said, ‘By all means, commander.’

And Vimes disappeared into the swirling fog, lighting his cigar, saying, ‘Just like standing on a pavement. Amazing. I suggest you make steam, Mister Simnel! I’m in some doubt about how long such a, as you say, mystical phenomenon will last. So I think alacrity is our motto here, gentlemen.’

Simnel, resisting the natural temptation of a scientist to examine the phenomenon more closely, looked around and said, ‘Oh aye. All aboard, everybody!’ And after a moment, he added, ‘Quickly … please.’

Moist looked at Simnel and said, ‘Do you now believe, Dick?’

‘Yes, Mister Lipwig.’

‘But do you
really
believe?’

‘I surely do, Mister Lipwig! I believe in the sliding rule, the cosine and the tangent and even when the quaderatics give me gyp, yes, I still believe. Iron Girder is my machine, I built ’er, every last rivet carefully forged by ’and. And I reckon if I could bolt rails on to the sky, Iron Girder would take us to t’moon.’

Moist whistled and heard a signal from below. He raised his voice and said, ‘Forward, please, Mister Simnel!’ And immediately
there was the familiar chugging sound of a train anxious to be travelling and getting up steam. Moist loved the moment as the power built up slowly and by degrees until there was a rolling thunder, taking charge of the universe, and they were moving into the villainous fog and on to the bridge.

It was difficult to see anything from the footplate, but Moist could just make out Simnel’s white face as the vibrations and swaying intensified. Despite Moist’s dramatic demonstration earlier, he could tell that Simnel and his crew were terrified and even he began to doubt whether the bridge would in fact hold under the pressure. And then the vibrations suddenly ceased and there was a strange sensation as Iron Girder left the rails and she flew.

Down below, the fog curled into even stranger shapes, spiralling vortices, stirred up by the passage of the train, and after a strangled few minutes there was a thump of wheels on rails as Iron Girder consented to exchange flight for the sensible permanent way once more and then Dick blew the whistle and kept blowing, and she was bowling along again as if nothing uncanny, mystic or even eldritch had happened.

It wasn’t until Moist found time to himself after all the backslapping he had received that the enormity of what he had done hit him like a jack-hammer: a whole train under steam, full of passengers! And a king apparently flying through thin air! And he sweated again as the next thought said, ‘So many things could have gone wrong.’ In fact so many things
could
have gone wrong and he began to feel certain that history might just slam backwards to ensure that they did. And the sweat ran down his whole body but he wouldn’t have been Moist if he couldn’t recover from this sort of thing. Just as long as Vetinari
never
got to hear about it.

The thought of Vetinari was still proving hard to banish later that evening when Moist finally bunked down in the guard’s van. As the
motion of the train lulled him into a tired and relieved doze, an image of the Patrician swam into Moist’s mind. He shuddered at the recollection of his recent encounter. Vetinari had been at his desk reading reports of what looked suspiciously to Moist like other people’s clacks messages.
^fn77
He had frowned when he saw Moist and said, ‘Well now, Mister Lipwig, is the train already cleared for Uberwald, by any chance?’

Moist had assumed an expression that would not have deceived a child, which was, of course, part of the game. ‘Not
quite
yet, my lord, but I think the prospects are getting rosier by the hour.’

‘Long-winded. Very long-winded indeed. Come to the point, if such a thing exists, please? After all, I
do
have matters of state to deal with.’

‘Well, sir, I’m sure you recall, we have buried within the city limits a number of very ancient golems, and you vowed that they would only be deployed in the event of a threat to national security, and right now I think I could use several dozen of them, sir, that is of course if you don’t mind?’

‘Mister Lipwig, you surely try my patience. I’m quite well aware that both you and your wife have the tools that would allow you to enter said vault and, indeed, give said golems instructions, but nevertheless I strictly forbid you to try anything of the sort. This has to do with the railway, I am assuming.’

‘Yes, my lord, a minor little problem on the train to success, as it were.’

‘Let me make myself entirely clear. If I find any evidence that you have removed city golems from their proper place and moreover have taken them outside the city limits, you will be thrown to the kittens. Is that understood?’

Vetinari’s expression was as flat and impenetrable and as placid
as a sea of pitch, and Moist had bowed and said, ‘I assure you, sir, no such evidence will ever be found.’ While overhead, the words ‘If I find’ floated like a sly invitation.