Pyramids

habit made him extract a pair of tweezers from his pouch in order to pick it up.
    It was genuine enough. There was the seal of the Guild on it, and the crabbed squiggle that was undoubtedly Mericet’s signature; he’d seen it often enough, generally at the bottom of test papers alongside comments like 3/10. See me .
    He padded over to the figure on the bed and pulled back the blanket.

    It was nearly one in the morning. Ankh-Morpork was just beginning to make a night of it.
    It had been dark up above the rooftops, in the aerial world of thieves and assassins. But down below the life of the city flowed through the streets like a tide.
    Teppic walked through the throng in a daze. Anyone else who tried that in the city was asking for a guided tour of the bottom of the river, but he was wearing assassin’s black and the crowd just automatically opened in front of him and closed behind. Even the pickpockets kept away. You never knew what you might find. He wandered aimlessly through the gates of the Guild House and sat down on a black marble seat, with his chin on his knuckles.
    The fact was that his life had come to an end. He hadn’t thought about what was going to happen next. He hadn’t dared to think that there was going to be a next.
    Someone tapped him on the shoulder. As he turned, Chidder sat down beside him and wordlessly produced a slip of pink paper.
    “Snap,” he said.
    “You passed too?” said Teppic.
    Chidder grinned. “No problem,” he said. “It was Nivor. No problem. He gave me a bit of trouble on the Emergency Drop, though. How about you?”
    “Hmm? Oh. No.” Teppic tried to get a grip on himself. “No trouble,” he said.
    “Heard from any of the others?”
    “No.”
    Chidder leaned back. “Cheesewright will make it,” he said loftily, “and young Arthur. I don’t think some of the others will. We could give them twenty minutes, what do you say?”
    Teppic turned an agonized face toward him.
    “Chiddy, I—”
    “What?”
    “When it came to it, I—”
    “What about it?”
    Teppic looked at the cobbles. “Nothing,” he said.
    “You’re lucky—you just had a good airy run over the rooftops. I had the sewers and then up the garderobe in the Haberdashers’ Tower. I had to go in and change when I got here.”
    “You had a dummy, did you?” said Teppic.
    “Good grief, didn’t you?”
    “But they let us think it was going to be real!” Teppic wailed.
    “It felt real, didn’t it?”
    “Yes!”
    “Well, then. And you passed. So no problem.”
    “But didn’t you wonder who might be under the blanket, who it was, and why—?”
    “I was worried that I might not do it properly,” Chidder admitted. “But then I thought, well, it’s not up to me.”
    “But I—” Teppic stopped. What could he do? Go and explain? Somehow that didn’t seem a terribly good idea.
    His friend slapped him on the back.
    “Don’t worry about it!” he said. “We’ve done it!”
    And Chidder held up his thumb pressed against the first two fingers of his right hand, in the ancient salute of the assassins.

    A thumb pressed against two fingers, and the lean figure of Dr. Cruces, head tutor, looming over the startled boys.
    “We do not murder ” he said. It was a soft voice; the doctor never raised his voice, but he had a way of giving it the pitch and spin that could make it be heard through a hurricane.
    “We do not execute . We do not massacre . We never, you may be very certain, we never torture . We have no truck with crimes of passion or hatred or pointless gain. We do not do it for a delight in inhumation, or to feed some secret inner need, or for petty advantage, or for some cause or belief; I tell you, gentlemen, that all these reasons are in the highest degree suspect. Look into the face of a man who will kill you for a belief and your nostrils will snuff up the scent of abomination. Hear a speech declaring a holy war and, I assure you, your ears should catch the clink of evil’s scales and the dragging of its monstrous tail over the purity of the language.
    “No, we do it for the money.
    “And, because we above all must know the value of a human life, we do it for a great deal of money.
    “There can be few cleaner motives, so shorn of all pretense.
    “ Nil mortifi, sine lucre . Remember. No killing without payment.”
    He paused for a moment.
    “And always give a receipt,” he added.

    “So it’s all OK,” said Chidder. Teppic nodded gloomily. That was what was so