Going Postal

soaring.
    The men dived away. The world was still for a breath, and then Boris sprang from docility into a mad rearing dance, back legs clattering across the flagstones, hooves pawing at the air.
    “Vunderful! Hold it!”
    The world went white. Boris went mad.

CHAPTER 7A
    Post Haste
The nature of Boris the horse • Foreboding tower
• Mr. Lipwig cools off • The lady with buns on her ears
• Invitation accepted • Mr. Robinson’s box
• A mysterious stranger
    H OBSON HAD TRIED Boris as a racehorse, and he would have been a very good one were it not for his unbreakable habit, at the off, of attacking the horse next to him and jumping the railings at the first bend. Moist clapped his hand onto his hat, wedged his toes into the bellyband, and hung onto the reins as Broadway came at him all at once, carts and people blurring past, his eyeballs pressing into his head.
    There was a cart across the street but there was no possibility of steering Boris. Huge muscles bunched, and there was a long, slow, silent moment as he drifted over the cart.
    Hooves slid over the cobbles ahead of a trail of sparks when he landed again, but he recovered by sheer momentum and accelerated .
    The usual crowd around the Hubwards Gate scattered, and then, filling the horizon, there were the plains. They did something to Boris’s mad horse brain. All that space, nice and flat, with only a few easily jumped obstacles, like trees.
    He found extra muscle and speeded up again, bushes and trees and carts flying toward him.
    Moist cursed the bravado with which he’d ordered the saddle taken away. Every part of his body already hated him. But, in truth, Boris—once you got past the pineapple—wasn’t too bad a ride. He’d hit his rhythm, a natural, single-footed gait, and his burning eyes were focused on the blueness. His hatred of everything was for the moment subsumed by the sheer joy of space. Hobson was right, you couldn’t steer him with a mallet, but at least he was headed in the right direction, which was away from his stable. Boris didn’t want to spend the days kicking the bricks out of his wall while waiting to throw the next bumptious idiot. He wanted to bite the horizon. He wanted to run.
    Moist carefully removed his hat and gripped it in his mouth. He didn’t dare imagine what’d happen if he lost it, and he’d need to have it on his head at the end of the journey. It was important. It was all about style.
    One of the towers of the Grand Trunk was ahead and slightly to the left. There were two in the twenty miles between Ankh-Morpork and Sto Lat, because they were taking almost all the traffic of lines that stretched right across the continent. Beyond Sto Lat, the Trunk began to split into tributaries, but here, flashing overhead, the words of the world were flowing—
    —should be flowing. But the shutters were still. As he drew level, Moist saw men working high up on the open wooden tower; by the look of it, a whole section had broken off.
    Ha! So long, suckers! That’d take some repairing! Worth an overnight attempt at a delivery to Pseudopolis, maybe? He’d talk to the coachmen; it was not as if they’d ever paid the Post Office for their damn coaches. And if wouldn’t matter if the clacks got repaired in time, either, because the Post Office would have made the effort . The clacks company was a big bully, sacking people, racking up the charges, demanding lots of money for bad service. The Post Office was the underdog, and an underdog can always find somewhere soft to bite.
    Carefully, he eased more of the blanket under him. Various organs were going numb.
    The towering fumes of Ankh-Morpork were falling far behind. Sto Lat was visible between Boris’s ears, a plume of lesser smokes. The tower disappeared astern, and already Moist could see the next one. He’d ridden more than a third of the way in twenty minutes, and Boris was still eating up the ground.
    About halfway between the cities was an old stone tower, all that remained of a heap of ruins surrounded by woodland. It was almost as high as a clacks tower, and Moist wondered why they hadn’t simply used it as one. It was probably too derelict to survive in a gale under the weight of the shutters, he thought. The area looked bleak, a piece of weedy wilderness in the endless fields.
    If he’d had spurs, Moist would have spurred Boris on at this point, and would probably have been thrown, trampled, and eaten for his pains. * Instead, he lay low over