Going Postal

are instructed to rebuild the Post Office as soon as possible. The bills will be met and, since the money is effectively a gift from the gods, there will be no drain on our taxes. Well done, Mr. Lipwig. Very well done. Don’t let me detain you.”
    Moist actually had his hand on the door handle when the voice behind him said: “Just one minor thing, Mr. Lipwig.”
    He turned. Lord Vetinari had walked over to his game.
    “Yes, sir?”
    “It occurs to me that the sum which the gods so generously have seen fit to bestow upon us does, by pure happenstance, appear to equal the estimated haul of a notorious criminal, which as far as I know has never been recovered.”
    Moist stared at the woodwork in front of him. Why is this man ruling just one city? he thought. Why isn’t he ruling the world? Is this how he treats other people? It’s like being a puppet. The difference is, he arranges for you to pull your own strings .
    He turned, face carefully deadpan.
    “Really, sir? Who was that, then?” he said.
    “One Alfred Spangler, Mr. Lipwig.”
    “He’s dead, sir,” said Moist.
    “Are you sure?”
    “Yes, sir. I was there when they hanged him.”
    “Well remembered, Mr. Lipwig,” said Vetinari, moving a dwarf all the way across the board.

    D AMN, DAMN, DAMN ! Moist shouted, but only for internal consumption.
    He’d worked hard for that mon—well, the banks and merchants had worked har—well, somewhere down the line someone had worked hard for that money, and now a third of it had been…well, stolen , that was the only word for it.
    Moist experienced a certain amount of unrighteous indignation about this.
    Of course, he would have given most of it to the Post Office, that was the whole point, but you could build a damn good building for a lot less than a hundred thousand dollars, and Moist had been hoping for a little something for himself.
    Still, he felt good. Perhaps this was that “warm and fuzzy wonderful warm feeling” people talked about. And what would he have done with the money? He’d never have time to spend it in any case. After all, what could a master criminal buy? There was a shortage of seaside properties with real lava flows near a reliable source of piranhas, and the world as sure as hell didn’t need another Dark Lord, not with Gilt doing so well. Gilt didn’t need a tower with ten thousand trolls camped outside. He just needed a ledger and a sharp mind. It worked better, cheaper, and he could go out and party at night.
    Handing all that gold over to a copper had been a difficult thing to do, but there really was no choice. He’d got them by the short and curlies, anyway. No one was going to stand up and say the gods didn’t do this sort of thing. True, they’d never done it so far, but you could never tell, with gods. Certainly there were queues outside the three temples, once the Times had put out its afternoon edition.
    This had presented the priesthoods with a philosophical problem. They were officially against people laying up treasures on earth, but, they had to admit, it was always good to get bums on pews, feet in sacred groves, hands rattling drawers, and fingers being trailed in the baby-alligator pool. They settled, therefore, for a kind of twinkle-eyed denial that it could happen again, while hinting that, well, you never know, ineffable are the ways of gods, eh? Besides, petitioners standing in line with their letter asking for a big bag of cash were open to the suggestion that those most likely to receiveth were the ones who had already givethed, and got the message once you tapped them on the head with the collecting plate a few times.
    Even Miss Extremelia Mume, whose small, multipurpose temple over a bookmakers’ office in Cable Street handled the worldly affairs of several dozen minor gods, was doing good business among those prepared to back an outside chance. She’d hung a banner over the door. It read: IT COULD BE YOU.
    It couldn’t happen. It shouldn’t happen. But, you never knew…this time it might.
    Moist recognized that hope. It was how he’d made his living. You knew that the man running the Find the Lady game was going to win, you knew that people in distress didn’t sell diamond rings for a fraction of their value, you knew that life generally handed you the sticky end of the stick, and you knew that the gods didn’t pick some everyday undeserving tit out of the population and hand them a fortune.
    Except that, this time, you might be wrong,