Going Postal

FAILED TO UNDERSTAND MY LAST COMMENT .
    Anghammarad sat down again. Apart from the fact that there was sand rather than ooze underfoot, this place reminded him of the abyssal plain.
    G ENERALLY PEOPLE LIKE TO MOVE ON , Death hinted. T HEY LOOK FORWARD TO AN AFTERLIFE .
    “I Will Stay Here, Please.”
    H ERE ? T HERE’S NOTHING TO DO HERE , said Death.
    “Yes, I Know,” said the ghost of the golem. “It Is Perfect. I Am Free.”

    A T TWO in the morning it began to rain.
    Things could have been worse. It could have rained snakes. It could have rained acid.
    There was still some roof, and some walls. That meant there was still some building.
    Moist and Miss Dearheart sat on some warm rubble outside the locker room, which was more or less the only room that could still be properly described as one. The golems had stamped out the last of the fire, shored things up, and then, without a word, had gone back to not being a hammer until sunset.
    Miss Dearheart held a half-melted bronze band in her hand, and turned it over and over again.
    “Eighteen thousand years,” she whispered.
    “It was the rainwater tank,” mumbled Moist, staring at nothing.
    “Fire and water,” muttered Miss Dearheart. “But not both!”
    “Can’t you…rebake him, or something?” It sounded hopeless even as Moist said it. He’d seen the other golems scrabbling in the rubble.
    “Not enough left. Just dust, mixed up with everything else,” said Miss Dearheart. “All he wanted to do was be useful.”
    Moist looked at the remains of the letters. The flood had washed the black slurry of their ashes into every corner.
    All they wanted to do was be delivered , he thought. At a time like this, sitting on the sea bed for nine thousand years seemed quite attractive.
    “He was going to wait until the universe came around again. Did you know that?”
    “You told me, yes,” said Moist.
    There’s no stink more sorrowful than the stink of wet, burned paper , Moist thought. It means: The end .
    “Vetinari won’t rebuild this place, you know,” Miss Dearheart went on. “Gilt will get people to make a fuss if he tries it. Waste of city funds. He’s got friends. People who owe him money and favors. He’s good at that sort of people.”
    “It was Gilt who had this place torched,” said Moist. “He was shocked to see me back in the restaurant. He thought I’d be here.”
    “You’ll never be able to prove it.”
    Probably not , Moist agreed, in the sour, smoke-addled hollow of his head. The Watch had turned up with more speed than Moist had found usual among city policemen. They had a werewolf with them. Oh, probably most people would have thought it was just a handsome dog, but grow up in Uberwald with a grandfather who bred dogs and you learned to spot the signs. This one had a collar, and snuffled around while the embers were still smoking, and found something extra to scent in the pall of steaming ashes.
    They’d dug down, and there had been an awkward interview. Moist had handled it as well as he could manage, under the circumstances. The key point was never to tell the truth. Coppers never believed what people told them in any case, so there was no point in giving them extra work.
    “A winged skeleton?” Moist had said, with what surely sounded like genuine surprise .
    “ Yes, sir. About the size of a man, but very…damaged. I could even say mangled. I wonder if you know anything about it?” This watchman was a captain. Moist hadn’t been able to make him out. His face gave nothing away that he didn’t want to let go of. Something about him suggested that he already knew the answers but was asking the questions for the look of the thing .
    “ Perhaps it was an extra-large pigeon? They’re real pests in this building,” he’d said .
    “ I doubt it, sir. We believe it to have been a banshee, Mr. Lipwig,” said the captain patiently. “They’re very rare .”
    “I thought they just screamed on the rooftops of people who are going to die,” said Moist .
    “The civilized ones do, sir. The wild ones cut out the middleman. Your young man said he hit something? ”
    “Stanley did say something about, oh, something flying around,” said Moist. “But I thought it was simply—”
    “—an extra-large pigeon. I see. And you’ve no idea how the fire started? I know you use safety lamps in here .”
    “Probably spontaneous combustion in the letter piles, I’m afraid,” said Moist, who’d had time to think about this