Interesting Times

palace! We should assassinate the Emperor!”
    “More luck!” said Twoflower. “But look, you know, I’m sure if we talked to him—”
    “Haven’t you been listening? We are not going to see the Emperor!” hissed Rincewind. “Does it occur to you that guards don’t stab themselves? Cells don’t suddenly become unlocked? You don’t find swords lying around so conveniently and you don’t, you really don’t find maps saying ‘This Way, Folks’! And anyway, you can’t talk to someone who’s a plate of prawn crackers short of a Set Meal A for Two!”
    “No,” said Butterfly. “We must make the most of this opportunity.”
    “There will be lots of guards!”
    “Well, Great Wizard, you’ll have a lot of wishing to do.”
    “You think I can snap my fingers like this , and all the guards would drop dead? Hah! I wish they would!”
    “These two out here have,” Lotus Blossom reported, from the entrance to the dungeons. She was already in awe of Rincewind. Now she looked positively terrified.
    “Coincidence!”
    “Let’s be serious,” said Butterfly. “We have a sympathizer in the palace. Perhaps it is someone risking their lives every moment! We know some of the eunuchs are on our side.”
    “They’ve got nothing left to lose, I suppose.”
    “You have a better idea, Great Wizard?”
    “Yes. Back into the cells.”
    “What?”
    “This smells wrong. Would you really kill the Emperor? I mean, really? ”
    Butterfly hesitated.
    “We’ve often talked about it. Two Fire Herb said that if we could assassinate the Emperor we would light the torch of freedom…”
    “Yes. It’d be you, burning. Look, get back in the cells. It’s the safest place. I’ll lock you in and…scout.”
    “That’s a very brave suggestion,” said Twoflower. “And typical of the man,” he added proudly.
    Butterfly gave Rincewind a look he’d come to dread.
    “It is a good idea,” she said. “And I will accompany you.”
    “Oh, but it’s bound to be…very dangerous,” said Rincewind quickly.
    “No harm can possibly come to me when I’m with the Great Wizard,” said Butterfly.
    “Very true. Very true,” said Twoflower. “No harm ever came to me, I know that.”
    “Besides,” his daughter went on, “I have the map. And it would be dreadful if you lost your way and accidentally strayed out of the Forbidden City, wouldn’t it?”
    Rincewind gave in. It struck him that Twoflower’s late wife must have been a remarkably intelligent woman.
    “Oh, all right,” he said. “But you’re not to get in the way. And you’re to do what I tell you, okay?”
    Butterfly bowed.
    “Lead on, o Great Wizard,” she said.

    “I knew it!” said Truckle. “Poison!”
    “No, no. You don’t eat it. You rub it on your body,” said Mr. Saveloy. “Watch. And you get what we in civilization call clean .”
    Most of the Horde stood waist-deep in the warm water, every man with his hands chastely wrapped around his body. Hamish had refused to relinquish his wheelchair, so only his head was above the surface.
    “It’s all prickly,” said Cohen. “And my skin’s peeling off and dissolving.”
    “That’s not skin,” said Mr. Saveloy. “Haven’t any of you seen a bath before?”
    “Oh, I seen one,” said Boy Willie. “I killed the Mad Bishop of Pseudopolis in one. You get”—he furrowed his brow—“bubbles and stuff. And fifteen naked maidens.”
    “Whut?”
    “Definitely. Fifteen. Remember it well.”
    “That’s more like it,” said Caleb.
    “All we’ve got to rub is this soap stuff.”
    “The Emperor is ritually bathed by twenty-two bath women,” said Six Beneficent Winds. “I could go and check with the harem eunuchs and wake them up, if you like. It’s probably allowable under Entertaining.”
    The taxman was warming to his new job. He’d worked out that although the Horde, as individuals, had acquired mountains of cash in their careers as barbarian heroes they’d lost almost all of it engaging in the other activities (he mentally catalogued these as Public Relations) necessary to the profession, and therefore were entitled to quite a considerable rebate.
    The fact that they were registered with no revenue collecting authority anywhere * was entirely a secondary point. It was the principle that counted. And the interest, too, of course.
    “No, no young women, I insist,” said Mr. Saveloy. “You’re having a bath to get clean. Plenty of time for young women later.”
    “Gotta date