The Truth

Worde was always to the fore when the city called. That was why they existed. Wasn’t the family motto Le Mot Juste ? The Right Word in the Right Place, said Lord de Worde. He simply could not understand why William did not want to embrace this fine tradition and he dealt with it, in the manner of his kind, by not dealing with it.
    And now a great frigid silence had descended between the de Wordes, which made the winter chill seem like a sauna.
    In this gloomy frame of mind, it was positively cheering to wander into the print room to find the Bursar arguing the theory of words with Goodmountain.
    “Hold on, hold on,” said the Bursar. “Yes, indeed, figuratively a word is made up of individual letters but they have only a—” he waved his long fingers gracefully “ — theoretical existence, if I may put it that way. They are, as it were, words partis in potentia, and it is, I am afraid, unsophisticated in the extreme to imagine that they have any real existence unis et separato. Indeed, the very concept of letters having their own physical existence is, philosophically, extremely worrying. Indeed, it would be like noses and fingers running around the world all by themselves—”
    That’s three “indeeds,” thought William, who noticed things like this. Three “indeeds” used by a person in one brief speech generally meant an internal spring was about to break.
    “We got whole boxes of letters,” said Goodmountain flatly. “We can make any words you want.”
    “That’s the trouble, you see,” said the Bursar. “Supposing the metal remembers the words it has printed? At least engravers melt down their plates, and the cleansing effect of fire will—”
    “’Scuse me, Your Reverence,” said Goodmountain. One of the dwarfs had tapped him gently on the shoulder and handed him a square of paper. He passed it up to the Bursar.
    “Young Caslong here thought you might like this as a souvenir,” he said. “He took it down directly from the case and pulled it off on the stone. He’s very quick like that.”
    The Bursar tried to look the young dwarf sternly up and down, although this was a pretty pointless intimidatory tactic to use on dwarfs, since they had very little up to look down from.
    “Really?” he said. “How very…” His eyes scanned the paper.
    And then bulged.
    “But these are…when I said…I only just said…how did you know I was going to say…I mean, my actual words…” he stuttered.
    “Of course they’re not properly justified,” said Goodmountain.
    “Now just a moment —” the Bursar began.
    William left them to it. The stone he could work out—even the engravers used a big flat stone as a workbench. And he’d seen dwarfs pulling paper sheets off the metal letters, so that made sense too. And what the Bursar said had been unjustified. It wasn’t as if metal had a soul.
    He looked over the head of a dwarf who was busily assembling letters in a little metal hod, the stubby fingers darting from box to box in the big tray of type in front of him. Capital letters all in the top, small letters all in the bottom. It was even possible to get an idea of what the dwarf was assembling, just by watching the movements of his hands across the tray.
    “M-a-k-e-$-$-$-I-n-n-Y-o-u-r-e-S-p-a-r-e-T-y-m—” he murmured.
    A certainty formed. He glanced down at the sheets of grubby paper beside the tray.
    They were covered with the dense spiky handwriting that identified its owner as an anal retentive with a poor grip.
    There were no flies on C.M.O.T. Dibbler. He would have charged them rent.
    With barely a conscious thought, William pulled out his notebook, licked his pencil, and wrote, very carefully, in his private shorthand:
    “Amzg scenes hv ocrd in the Ct with the Openg o t Prntg Engn at the Sgn o t Bucket by G. Goodmountain, Dwf, which hs causd mch intereƒt amng all prts inc. chfs of comerƒe.”
    He paused. The conversation at the other end of the room was definitely taking a more conciliatory turn.
    “ How much a thousand?” said the Bursar.
    “Even cheaper for bulk rates,” said Goodmountain. “Small runs no problem.”
    The Bursar’s face had that warm glaze of someone who deals in numbers and can see one huge and inconvenient number getting smaller in the very near future, and in those circumstances philosophy doesn’t stand much of a chance. And what was visible of Goodmountain’s face had the cheerful scowl of someone who’s worked out how to turn lead into