The Truth

and Mr. Tulip, all that need be known about them at this point is that they are the kind of people who call you “friend.” People like that aren’t friendly.

    William opened his eyes. I’ve gone blind, he thought.
    Then he moved the blanket.
    And then the pain hit him.
    It was a sharp and insistent sort of pain, centered right over the eyes. He reached up gingerly. There seemed to be some bruising and what felt like a dent in the flesh, if not the bone.
    He sat up. He was in a sloping-ceilinged room. A bit of grubby snow crusted the bottom of a small window. Apart from the bed, which was just a mattress and blanket, the room was unfurnished.
    A thump shook the building. Dust drifted down from the ceiling.
    He got up, clutching at his forehead, and staggered to the door. It opened into a much larger room or, more accurately, a workshop.
    Another thump rattled his teeth.
    William tried to focus.
    The room was full of dwarfs, toiling over a couple of long benches. But at the far end several of them were clustered around something like a complex piece of weaving machinery.
    It went thump again.
    William winced.
    “What’s happening?” he said.
    The nearest dwarf looked up at him and nudged a colleague urgently. The nudge passed itself along the rows, and the room was suddenly filled wall to wall with a cautious silence. A dozen solemn dwarf faces looked hard to William.
    No one can look harder than a dwarf. Perhaps it’s because there is only quite a small amount of face between the statutory round iron helmet and the beard. Dwarf expressions are more concentrated .
    “Um,” he said. “Hello?”
    One of the dwarfs in front of the big machine was the first to unfreeze.
    “Back to work, lads,” he said, and came and looked William sternly in the groin.
    “You all right, Your Lordship?” he said.
    William rubbed his forehead.
    “Um…what happened?” he said. “I, uh, remember seeing a cart, and then something hit…”
    “It ran away from us,” said the dwarf. “Load slipped, too. Sorry about that.”
    “What happened to Mr. Dibbler?”
    The dwarf put his head on one side.
    “Was he the skinny man with the sausages?” he said.
    “That’s right. Was he hurt?”
    “I don’t think so,” said the dwarf carefully. “He sold young Thunderaxe a sausage in a bun, I do know that.”
    William thought about this. Ankh-Morpork had many traps for the unwary newcomer.
    “Well, then is Mr. Thunderaxe all right?” he said.
    “Probably. He shouted under the door just now that he was feeling a lot better but would stay where he was for the time being,” said the dwarf. He reached under a bench and solemnly handed William a rectangle wrapped in grubby paper.
    “Yours, I think.”
    William unwrapped his wooden block. It was split right across where a wheel of the cart had run over it, and the writing had been smudged. He sighed.
    “’Scuse me,” said the dwarf, “but what was it meant to be?”
    “It’s a block prepared for a woodcut,” said William. He wondered how he could possibly explain the idea to a dwarf from outside the city. “You know? Engraving? A…a sort of very nearly magical way of getting lots of copies of writing? I’m afraid I shall have to go and make another one now.”
    The dwarf gave him an odd look, and then took the block from him and turned it over and over in his hands.
    “You see,” said William, “the engraver cuts away bits of—”
    “Have you still got the original?” said the dwarf.
    “Pardon?”
    “The original,” said the dwarf patiently.
    “Oh, yes.” William reached inside his jacket and produced it.
    “Can I borrow it for a moment?”
    “Well, all right, but I shall need it again to—”
    The dwarf scanned the letter a while, and then turned and hit the nearest dwarf a resounding boing on the helmet.
    “Ten point across three,” he said. The struck dwarf nodded, and then its right hand moved quickly across the rack of little boxes, selecting things.
    “I ought to be getting back so I can—” William began.
    “This won’t take long,” said the head dwarf. “Just you step along this way, will you? This might be of interest to a man of letters such as yourself.”
    William followed him along the avenue of busy dwarfs to the machine, which had been thumping away steadily.
    “Oh. It’s an engraving press,” said William vaguely.
    “This one’s a bit different,” said the dwarf. “We’ve…modified it.” He took a large sheet of paper