Going Postal

settled with words. We’ll tell the world what happened to the Trunk.”
    “You’ve been talking to Killer about that?” said Alex.
    “Yes,” said Moist.
    “But you can’t prove anything,” said Alex. “We heard it was all legal.”
    “I doubt it,” said Moist. “But that doesn’t matter. I don’t have to prove anything. I said this is about words, and how you can twist them, and how you can spin them in people’s heads so that they think the way you want them to. We’ll send a message of our own, and do you know what? The boys in the towers will want to send it, and when people know what it says they’ll want to believe it, because they’ll want to live in a world where it’s true. It’s my words against Gilt’s, and I’m better at them than he is. I can take him down with a sentence, Mr. Mad, and leave every tower standing. And no one will ever know how it was done—”
    There was a brief exclamation behind them, and the sound of canvas unrolling quite fast.
    “Trust me,” said Moist.
    “We’ll never get another chance like this,” said Mad Al.
    “Exactly!” said Moist.
    “One man has died for every three towers standing,” said Mad Al. “Did you know that?”
    “You know they’ll never really die while the Trunk is alive,” said Moist. It was a wild shot, but it hit something, he sensed it. He rushed on: “It lives while the code is shifted, and they live with it, always Going Home. Will you stop that? You can’t stop it! I won’t stop it! But I can stop Gilt! Trust me!”
    The canvas hung like a sail, as if someone intended to launch the tower. It was eighty feet high and thirty feet wide and moved a little in the wind.
    “Where’s Adrian?” said Moist.
    They looked at the sail. They rushed to the edge of the tower. They looked down into darkness.
    “Adrian?” said Mad Al uncertainly.
    A voice from below said: “Yes?”
    “What are you doing?”
    “Just, you know…hanging around? And an owl has just landed on my head.”
    There was a small tearing noise beside Moist. Sane Alex had cut a hole in the canvas.
    “Here it comes!” he reported.
    “What?” said Moist.
    “The message! They’re sending from Tower 2! Take a look—” Alex said, backing away.
    Moist peered through the slit, back toward the city. In the distance, a tower was sparkling.
    Mad Al strode over to the half-sized clacks array and grabbed the handles.
    “All right, Mr. Lipwig, let’s hear your plan!” he said. “Alex, give me a hand! Adrian, just…hang on, all right?”
    “It’s trying to push a dead mouse in my ear,” said a reproachful voice from below.
    Moist shut his eyes, lined up the thoughts that had been buzzing for hours, and began to speak.
    Behind and above him, the huge expanse of canvas was just enough to block the line of sight between the two distant towers. In front of him, the Smoking Gnu’s half-sized tower was just the right size to look, to the next tower in line, like a bigger tower a long way off. At night all you could see were the lights.
    The clacks in front of him shook as the shutters rattled. And now a new message was dropping across the sky…
    It was only a few hundred words. When Moist had finished, the clacks rattled out the last few letters and then fell silent.
    After a while, Moist said: “Will they pass it along?”
    “Oh, yes,” said Mad Al, in a flat voice. “They’ll send it. You’re sitting up in the tower in the mountains and you get a signal like that? You’ll get it away and out of your tower as fast as you can.”
    “I don’t know if we ought to shake your hand or throw you off the tower,” said Sane Alex sullenly. “That was evil. What sort of person could dream up something like that?”
    “Me. Now let’s pull Adrian up, shall we?” said Moist quickly. “And then I’d better get back to the city…”

    A N OMNISCOPE is one of the most powerful instruments known to magic, and therefore one of the most useless.
    It can see everything, with ease. Getting it to see anything is where wonders have to be performed, because there is so much everything—which is to say, everything that can, will, has, should, or might happen in all possible universes—that anything, any previously specified thing , is very hard to find. Before Hex had evolved the control thaumarhythms, completing in a day a task that would have taken five hundred wizards at least ten years, omniscopes were used purely as mirrors, because of the wonderful blackness