Night Watch

show that they had completely sworn off the sticky stuff, my vord yes, and much preferred a good singsong and a healthy game of table tennis.

* Old Tom, the University’s venerable clock, tolled not sounds but silences. Not simply ordinary silences, but intervals of noise-absorbing nonsound, which filled the world with loud soundlessness.

* Who was an orangutan, changed from his former human shape as a result of a long-forgotten magical accident. It was so forgotten, in fact, that now people were forgetting he was an orangutan. This might seem quite hard to do, given that even a small orangutan is quite capable of filling all immediately available space, but to the wizards and most of the citizens he was now just the Librarian, and that was that. In fact, if somebody ever reported that there was an orangutan in the Library, the wizards would probably go and ask the Librarian if he’d seen it.

* Named after Wallace Sonky, a man without whose experiments with thin rubber the housing pressure in Ankh-Morpork would have been a good deal more pressing.

* In the same way that ancient forests become coal, ancient swathes of natural sugar cane can become, under the pressure of millennia, what in various parts of the Disc is known as hokey-pokey, pig treacle, or rock molasses. But much boiling and purification was necessary to create the thick golden syrup that was the city dweller’s honey, and these days Ankh-Morpork’s supplies come from the more accessible toffee beds near Quirm.

* Like creamed, but it goes on for a long longer.

* And this was true. Don’t bother with the boots, would have been Trooper Gabitass’s advice, had he been inclined to part with it. You need to bribe someone on the baggage carts to build up stock, and when all’s said and done you’ll only have made a few dollars. Stick to jewelry. It’s portable. Trooper Gabitass had seen too many battlefields up close to use the word “glory” without wincing.

* The Selachiis and the Venturis made a point, on occasions like this, to talk only about things on which there was no possibility of disagreement. Given the history of the two families, this had become a very small number of things.

* Sometimes, admittedly, for a given value of “never.”