Going Postal

independent. You’ve no idea.”
    She admires them , Moist thought. Whoo-ee. And…angels?
    “Well, thank you,” said Moist. “I’d better be going. I’ll definitely…well, thank you, anyway.”
    “What are you doing at the Post Office, Mr. von Lipwig?” said the woman as he opened the door.
    “Call me Moist,” said Moist, and a bit of his inner self shuddered. “I’m the new postmaster.”
    “No kidding?” said Miss Dearheart. “Then I’m glad you’ve got Pump 19 with you. The last few postmasters didn’t last long, I gather.”
    “I think I heard something about that,” said Moist cheerfully. “It sounds as though things were pretty bad in the olden days.”
    Miss Dearheart’s brow wrinkled. “Olden days?” she said. “Last month was olden days ?”

    L ORD V ETINARI stood looking out of his window. His office once had a wonderful view of the city and, technically, it still did, although now the roofline was a forest of clacks towers, winking and twinkling in the sunlight. On the Tump, the old castle mound across the river, the big tower—one end of the Grand Trunk that wound more than two thousand miles across the continent to Genua—glittered with semaphore.
    It was good to see the lifeblood of trade and commerce and diplomacy pumping so steadily, especially when you employed clerks who were exceptionally good at decryption. White and black by day, light and dark by night, the shutters stopped only for fog and snow.
    At least, until the last few months. He sighed and went back to his desk.
    There was a file open. It contained a report from Commander Vimes of the City Watch, with a lot of exclamation marks. It contained a more measured report from Clerk Alfred, and Lord Vetinari had circled the section titled “The Smoking Gnu.”
    There was a gentle knock at the door and the clerk Drumknott came in like a ghost.
    “The gentlemen from the Grand Trunk semaphore company are all here now, sir,” he said. He laid down several sheets of paper covered in tiny, intricate lines. Vetinari gave the shorthand a cursory glance.
    “Idle chitchat?” he said.
    “Yes, my lord. One might say excessively so. But I am certain that the mouth of the speaking tube is quite invisible in the plaster work, my lord. It’s hidden in a gilt cherub most cunningly, sir. Clerk Brian has built it into its cornucopia, which apparently collects more sounds and can be swiveled to face whoever—”
    “One does not have to see something to know that it is there, Drumknott.” Vetinari tapped the paper. “These are not stupid men. Well, some of them, at least. You have the files?”
    Drumknott’s pale face bore for a moment the pained expression of a man forced to betray the high principles of filing.
    “In a manner of speaking, my lord. We really have nothing substantial about any of the allegations, we really haven’t. We’re running a Concludium in the Long Gallery, but it’s all hearsay, sir, it really is. There’s…hints, here and there, but really we need something more solid…”
    “There will be an opportunity,” said Vetinari. Being an absolute ruler today was not as simple as people thought. At least, it was not simple if your ambitions included being an absolute ruler tomorrow. There were subtleties. Oh, you could order men to smash down doors and drag people off to dungeons without trial, but too much of that sort of thing was bad for business, habit-forming, style-lacking, and very, very dangerous for your health. A thinking tyrant, it seemed to Vetinari, had a much harder job than a ruler raised to power by some idiot vote-yourself-rich system like democracy. At least he could tell the people he was their fault.
    “—we would not normally have started individual folders at this time,” Drumknott was agonizing. “You see, I’d merely have referenced them on the daily—”
    “Your concern is, as ever, exemplary,” said Vetinari. “I see, however, that you have prepared some folders.”
    “Yes, my lord. I have bulked some of them out with copies of Clerk Harold’s analysis of pig production in Genua, sir.” Drumknott looked unhappy as he handed over the cardboard folders. Deliberate misfiling ran fingernails down the blackboard of his very soul.
    “Very good,” said Vetinari. He placed them on his desk, pulled another folder out of a desk drawer to place on top of them, and moved some other papers to cover the small pile. “Now please show our visitors in.”
    “Mr. Slant is