Making Money

this: one barely competent Postmortem Communicator and two people from Central Groaning!”
    “Necromancy is a fine art?” said Moist.
    “None finer, young man. Get things just a tiny bit wrong and the spirits of the vengeful dead may enter your head via your ears and blow your brains out down your nose.”
    The eyes of Moist and Adora Belle focused on Dr. Hicks like those of an archer on his target. He waved his hands frantically and mouthed “Not very often!”
    “What is a pretty young woman like you doing here, hmm?” said Flead, trying to grab Adora Belle’s hand again.
    “I’m trying to translate a phrase from Umnian,” she said, giving him a wooden smile and absentmindedly wiping her hand on her dress.
    “Are women allowed to do that sort of thing these days? What fun! One of my greatest regrets, you know, is that when I was in possession of a body I didn’t let it spend enough time in the company of young ladies…”
    Moist looked around to see if there was any kind of emergency lever. There had to be something, if only in the event of nasal brain explosion.
    He sidled up to Hicks.
    “It’s going to go really bad in a moment!” he hissed.
    “It’s all right, I can banish him to the Undead Zone in a moment,” Hicks whispered.
    “That won’t be far enough if she loses her temper! I once saw her put a stiletto heel right through a man’s foot while she was smoking a cigarette. She hasn’t had a cigarette for more than fifteen minutes, so there’s no telling what she’ll do!”
    But Adora Belle had pulled the golem’s arm out of her bag, and the late Professor Flead’s eyes twinkled with something more compelling than romance. Lust comes in many varieties.
    He picked up the arm. That was the second surprising thing. And then Moist realized that the arm was still there, by Flead’s feet, and what he was lifting was a pearly, tenuous ghost.
    “Ah, part of an Umnian golem,” he said. “Bad condition. Immensely rare. Probably dug up on the site of Um, yes?”
    “Possibly,” said Adora Belle.
    “Hmm. Possibly, eh?” said Flead, turning the spectral arm around. “Look at the wafer-thinness! Light as a feather but strong as steel while the fires burned within! There has been nothing like them since!”
    “I might know where such fires still burn,” said Adora Belle.
    “After sixty thousand years? I think not, madam!”
    “I think otherwise.”
    She could say things in that tone of voice and turn heads. She projected absolute certainty. Moist had worked hard for years to get a voice like that.
    “Are you saying an Umnian golem has survived?”
    “Yes. Four of them, I think,” said Adora Belle.
    “Can they sing?”
    “At least one can.”
    “I’d give anything to see one before I die,” said Flead.
    “Er…” Moist began.
    “Figure of speech, figure of speech,” said Flead, waving a hand irritably.
    “I think that could be arranged,” said Adora Belle. “In the meantime, we’ve transcribed their song into Boddely’s Phonetic Runes.” She dipped into her bag and produced a small scroll. Flead reached out, and once again an iridescent ghost of the scroll was now in his hands.
    “It appears to be gibberish,” he said, glancing at it, “although I have to say that Umnian always does at first glance. I shall need some time to work it out. Umnian is entirely a contextual language. Have you seen these golems?”
    “No, our tunnel collapsed. We can’t even talk to the golems who were digging anymore. Song doesn’t travel well under salt water. But we think they are…unusual golems.”
    “Golden, probably,” said Flead, the words leaving a thoughtful silence in their wake.
    Then Adora Belle said: “Oh.” Moist shut his eyes; on the inside of the lids, the gold reserves of Ankh-Morpork walked up and down, gleaming.
    “Anyone who researches Um finds the golden golem legend,” said Flead. “Sixty thousand years ago some witch doctor sitting by a fire made a clay figure and worked out how to make it live and that was the only invention they ever needed, do you understand? Even had horse golems, did you know that? No one has ever been able to create one since. Yet the Umnians never worked iron! They never invented the spade or the wheel! Golems herded their animals and spun their cloth! The Umnians did make their own jewelry, though, which largely consisted of scenes of human sacrifice, badly executed in every sense of the word. They were incredibly inventive in