Going Postal

Trunk. There was a lot of money coming in, every city wanted to be in on it, everyone was going to be rich. We had stables. I had a horse. Admittedly, I didn’t like it much. But I used to feed it and watch it run about or whatever it is they do. Everything was going fine, and suddenly he got this letter and there were meetings and they said he was lucky not to go to prison for, oh, I don’t know, something complicated and legal. But the clacks was still making huge amounts. Can you understand that? Reacher Gilt and his gang acted, oh yes, friendly, but were buying up the mortgages and controlling banks and moving numbers around and they pulled the Grand Trunk out from under us like thieves . All they want to do is make money. They don’t care about the Trunk. They’ll run it into the ground and make more money by selling it. When Dad was in charge, people were proud of what they did. And because they were engineers, they made sure that the towers worked properly, all the time. They even had what they called ‘walking towers,’ prefabricated ones that packed onto a couple of big carts so that if a tower was having serious trouble they could set this one up alongside and start it up and take over the traffic without dropping a single code. They were proud of it, everyone was, they were proud to be a part of it!”
    “ You should’ve been there. You should’ve seen it! ” Moist said to himself. He hadn’t meant to say it out loud.
    Across the room, a man hit another man with his own leg and picked up seven points.
    “Yes,” said Miss Dearheart. “You should have. And three months ago my brother John raised enough to start a rival to the Trunk. That took some doing. Gilt has got tentacles everywhere. Well, John ended up dead in a field. They said he hadn’t clipped his safety rope on. He always did. And now my father just sits and stares at the wall. He even lost his workshop when everything got taken away. We lost our house, of course. Now we live with my aunt in Dolly Sisters. That’s what we’ve come to. When Reacher Gilt talks about freedom he means his, not anyone else’s. And now you pop up, Mr. Moist von Lipwig, all shiny and new, running around doing everything at once. Why?”
    “Vetinari offered me the job, that’s all,” said Moist.
    “Why did you take it?”
    “It was a job for life.”
    She stared at Moist so hard that he began to feel uncomfortable.
    “Well, you’ve managed to get a table at Le Foie Heureux at a few hours’ notice,” she conceded, as a knife struck a beam behind her. “Are you still going to lie if I ask you how?”
    “Yes, I think so.”
    “Good. Shall we go?”

    A LITTLE PRESSURE LAMP burned in the stuffy snugness of the locker room, its glow a globe of unusual brilliance. In the center of it, magnifying glass in hand, Stanley examined his stamps.
    This was…heaven. Peas are known for their thoroughness, and Stanley was conscientious in the extreme. Mr. Spools, slightly unnerved by his smile, had given him all the test sheets and faulty pages, and Stanley was carefully cataloguing them—how many of each, what the errors were, everything.
    A little tendril of guilt was curling through his mind: This was better than pins, it really was. There could be no end to stamps. You could put anything on them. They were amazing. They could move letters around and then you could stick them in a book, all neat. You wouldn’t get “pinhead’s thumb,” either.
    He’d read about this feeling in the pin magazines. They said you could come unpinned. Girls and marriage were sometimes mentioned in this context. Sometimes an ex-head would sell off his whole collection, just like that. Or at some pin-meet someone would suddenly throw all their pins in the air and run out, shouting, “Aargh, they’re just pins!” Up until now, such a thing had been unthinkable to Stanley.
    He picked up his little sack of unsorted pins, and stared at it. A few days ago, the mere thought of an evening with his pins would have given him a lovely, warm, comfortable feeling inside. But now it was time to put away childish pins.
    Something screamed.
    It was harsh, guttural, it was malice and hunger given a voice. Small, huddling, shrewlike creatures had once heard sounds like that, circling over the swamps.
    After a moment of ancient terror had subsided, Stanley crept over and opened the door.
    “H-hello?” he called in the cavernous darkness of the hall. “Is there anyone there?”
    There