Making Money

was three stories high, and picked up some gray daylight from the rows of barred windows. And, in terms of primary architecture, that was it. Everything else was sheds.
    Sheds were built onto the walls and even hung like swallows’ nests up near the ceiling, accessed by unsafe-looking wooden stairs. The uneven floor itself was a small village of sheds, placed any old how, no two alike, each one carefully roofed against the nonexistent prospect of rain. Wisps of smoke spiraled gently through the thick air. Against one wall a forge glowed, providing the dark orange glow that gave the place the right stygian atmosphere. The place looked like the after-death destination for people who had committed small and rather dull sins.
    This was, however, just the background. What dominated the hall was the Bad Penny. The treadmill was…strange.
    Moist had seen treadmills before. There had been one in the Tanty, wherein inmates could invigorate their cardiovascular systems whether they wanted to or not. Moist had taken a turn or two before he worked out how to play the system. It had been a brute of a thing, cramped, heavy, and depressing. The Bad Penny was much larger but hardly seemed to be there at all. There was a metal rim that, from here, looked frighteningly thin. It was hard to see the spokes, until Moist realized that there were no spokes, just hundreds of thin wires.
    “All right, I can see it must work, but—” he began, staring up at the huge gearbox.
    “It works very well, I gather,” said Bent. “They have a golem to power it when needed.”
    “But surely it should fall to bits!”
    “Should it? I am not in a position to say, sir. Ah, here comes everyone…”
    Figures were heading toward them from various sheds and from the door at the far end of the building. They walked slowly and deliberately and with one purpose, rather like the living dead.
    In the end, Moist kept thinking of them as the Men of the Sheds. They weren’t, all of them, that old, but even the young ones, most of them, appeared to have donned the mantle of middle age very early. Apparently, to get a job in the Mint, you had to wait until someone died; it was a case of Dead Men’s Sheds. Illuminating the bright side, however, was the fact that when your prospective vacancy became available you got the job even if you were only slightly less dead than the previous incumbent.
    The Men of the Sheds ran the linishing shed, the milling shed, the finishing shed, the foundry (two sheds), the security (one shed, but quite a big one), and the storage shed, which had a lock Moist could have opened with a sneeze. The other sheds were a mystery, but presumably had been built in case someone needed a shed in a hurry.
    The Men of the Sheds had what passed within the sheds as names: Alf, Young Alf, Gobber, Boy Charlie, King Henry…but the one who was, as it were, the designated speaker to the world beyond the sheds, had a whole name.
    “This is Mr. Shady the Eighteenth, Mr. Lipwig,” said Bent. “Mr. Lipwig is…just visiting.”
    “The Eighteenth?” said Moist. “There are another seventeen of you?”
    “Not anymore, sir,” said Shady, grinning.
    “Mr. Shady is the hereditary foreman, sir,” Bent supplied.
    “Hereditary foreman…” Moist repeated blankly.
    “That’s right, sir,” said Shady. “Does Mr. Lipwig want to know the history, sir?”
    “No,” said Bent firmly.
    “Yes,” said Moist, seeing his firmly and raising him an emphatically.
    “Oh it appears that he does,” sighed Bent. Mr. Shady smiled.
    It was a very full history, and took some telling. At one point Moist was sure it was time for an ice age. Words streamed past him like sleet but, like sleet, some stuck. The post of hereditary foreman had been created hundreds of years before, when the post of master of the Mint was a sinecure handed to a drinking pal of the current king or patrician, who used it as a piggy bank and did nothing more than turn up now and again with a big sack, a hangover, and a meaningful look. The foremanship was instituted because it was dimly realized that someone ought to be in charge and, if possible, sober.
    “So you actually run it all?” said Moist quickly, to stem the flow of really interesting facts about money.
    “That’s right, sir. Pro tem. There hasn’t been a master for a hundred years.”
    “So how do you get paid?”
    There was a moment’s silence, and then Mr. Shady said, like a man talking to a child: “This is a mint,