Going Postal

surf.
    Pray, she’d said. And, in a way, the gods owed him a favor. Well, didn’t they? They’d got a handsome offering and a lot of celestial cred for not, in fact, doing anything at all.
    Get down on your knees, she’d said. It hadn’t been a joke.
    He knelt, pressed his hands together, and said, “I address this prayer to any god who—”
    With a silence that was frightening, the clacks tower across the street lit up. The big squares glowed into life one after the other. For a moment, Moist saw the shape of the lamplighter in front of one of the shutters.
    As he disappeared into the dark, the tower started to flicker. It was close enough to illuminate the roof of the Post Office.
    There were three dark figures at the other end of the roof, watching Moist. Their shadows danced as the pattern of lights changed, twice every second. They revealed that the figures were human, or at least humanoid. And they were walking toward him.
    Gods, now, gods could be humanoid. And they didn’t like to be messed about.
    Moist cleared his throat. “I’m certainly glad to see you—” he croaked.
    “Are you Moist?” said one of the figures.
    “Look, I—”
    “She said you’d be kneeling down,” said another member of the celestial trio. “Fancy a cup of tea?”
    Moist got up slowly. This was not godly behavior.
    “Who are you?” he said. Emboldened by the lack of thunderbolts, he added: “And what are you doing on my building?”
    “We pay rent,” said a figure. “To Mr. Groat.”
    “He never told me about you!”
    “Can’t help you there,” said the shadow in the center. “Anyway, we’ve only come back to get the rest of our stuff. Sorry about your fire. It wasn’t us.”
    “You being—?” said Moist.
    “I’m Mad Al, he’s Sane Alex, and that’s Adrian, who says he’s not mad but can’t prove it.”
    “Why do you rent the roof?”
    The trio looked at one another.
    “Pigeons?” suggested Adrian.
    “That’s right, we’re pigeon fanciers,” said the shadowy figure of Sane Alex.
    “But it’s dark,” said Moist. This information was considered.
    “Bats,” said Mad Al. “We’re trying to breed homing bats.”
    “I don’t believe bats have that kind of homing instinct,” said Moist.
    “Yes, it’s tragic, isn’t it,” said Alex.
    “I come up here at night and see those empty little perches and it’s all I can do not to cry,” said Undecided Adrian.
    Moist looked up at the little tower. It was about five times the height of a man, with the control levers on a polished panel near the bottom. It looked…professional, and well used. And portable.
    “I don’t think you breed any kind of birds up here,” he said.
    “Bats are mammals,” said Sane Alex. Moist shook his head.
    “Lurking on rooftops, your own clacks…you’re the Smoking Gnu, aren’t you…”
    “Ah, with a mind like that I can see why you’re Mr. Groat’s boss,” said Sane Alex. “How about that cup of tea?”

    M AD AL picked a pigeon feather out of his mug. The pigeon loft was full of the flat, choking smell of old guano.
    “You have to like birds to like it up here,” he said, flicking the feather into Sane Alex’s beard.
    “Good job you do, eh?” said Moist.
    “I didn’t say I did, did I? And we don’t live up here. It’s just that you’ve got a good rooftop.”
    It was cramped in the pigeon loft, from which pigeons had, in fact, been barred. But there’s always one pigeon that can bite through wire netting. It watched them from the corner with mad little eyes, its genes remembering the time it had been a giant reptile that could have taken these sons of monkeys to the cleaners in one mouthful. Bits of dismantled mechanisms were everywhere.
    “Miss Dearheart told you about me, did she?” said Moist.
    “She said you weren’t a complete arse,” said Undecided Adrian.
    “Which is praise coming from her,” said Sane Alex.
    “And she said you were so crooked you could walk through a corkscrew sideways,” said Undecided Adrian. “But she was smiling when she said it.”
    “That’s not necessarily a good thing,” said Moist. “How do you know her?”
    “We used to work with her brother,” said Mad Al. “On the Mark 2 tower.”
    Moist listened. It was a whole new world.
    Sane Alex and Mad Al were old men in the clacks business; they’d been in it for almost four years. Then the consortium had taken over, and they’d been fired from the Grand Trunk on the same day that Undecided