The Truth

admired sign over the entrance to his yard, which said: H. King—Taking the Piss Since 1961. Now it read: H. King—Recycling Nature’s Bounty.
    A small door within the large gates was opened by a troll. Harry was very forward-looking when it came to employing the nonhuman races, and had been among the first employers in the city to give a job to a troll. As far as organic substances were concerned, they had no sense of smell.
    “Yus?”
    “I’d like to speak to Mr. King, please.”
    “What abarht?”
    “I want to buy a considerable amount of paper from him. Tell him it’s Mr. de Worde.”
    “Right.”
    The door slammed shut. They waited. After a few minutes the door opened again.
    “Der King will see you now,” the troll announced.
    And so they were led into the yard of a man who, rumor said, was stockpiling used paper hankies against the day somebody found a way of extracting silver from bogeys.
    On either side of the door huge black Rottweilers flung themselves against the bars of their day cages. Everyone knew Harry let them have the run of the yard at night. He made sure that everyone knew. And any nocturnal miscreant would have to be really good with dogs unless they wanted to end up as a few pounds of Tanners Grade 1 (White).
    The King of the Golden River had his office in a two-story shed that overlooked the yard, from where he could survey the steaming mounds and cisterns of his empire.
    Even half-hidden by his big desk, Harry King was an enormous man, pink and shiny-faced, with a few strands of hair teased across his head; it was hard to imagine him not in shirtsleeves and braces, even when he wasn’t, or smoking a huge cigar, which he’d never been seen without. Perhaps it was some kind of defense against the odors which were, in a way, his stock in trade.
    “Evenin’, lads,” he said amiably. “What can I do for you? As if I didn’t know.”
    “Do you remember me, Mr. King?” said William.
    Harry nodded. “You’re Lord de Worde’s son, right? You put a piece in that letter of yourn last year when our Daphne got wed, right? My Effie was that impressed, all those nobs reading about our Daphne.”
    “It’s a rather bigger letter now, Harry.”
    “Yes, I did hear about that,” said the fat man. “Some of ’em’s already turnin’ up in our collections. Useful stuff, I’m getting the lads to store it sep’rate.”
    His cigar shifted from one side of his mouth to the other. Harry could not read or write, a fact which had never stopped him besting those who could. He employed hundreds of workers to sort through the garbage; it was cheap enough to employ a few more who could sort through words.
    “Mr. King—” William began.
    “I ain’t daft, lads,” said Harry. “I know why you’re here. But business is business. You know how it is.”
    “We won’t have a business without paper!” Goodmountain burst out.
    The cigar shifted again.
    “And you’d be—?”
    “This is Mr. Goodmountain,” said William. “My printer.”
    “Dwarf, eh?” said Harry, looking Goodmountain up and down. “Nothing against dwarfs, me, but you ain’t good sorters. Gnolls don’t cost much but the grubby little buggers eat half the rubbish. Trolls are okay. They stop with me ’cos I pays ’em well. Golems is best—they’ll sort stuff all day and all night. Worth their weight in gold, which is bloody near what they want payin’ these days.” The cigar began another journey back across the mouth. “Sorry, lads. A deal’s a deal. Wish I could help you. Sold right out of paper. Can’t.”
    “You’re knocking us back, just like that?” said Goodmountain.
    Harry gave him a narrow-eyed look through the haze.
    “You talking to me about knocking back? Don’t know what a tosheroon is, do you?” he said. The dwarf shrugged.
    “Yes. I do,” said William. “There’s several meanings, but I think you’re referring to a big caked ball of mud and coins, such as you might find in some crevice in an old drain where the water forms an eddy. They can be quite valuable.”
    “What? You’ve got hands on you like a girl,” said Harry, so surprised that the cigar momentarily drooped. “How come you know that? ”
    “I like words, Mr. King.”
    “I started out as a muckraker when I was three,” said Harry, pushing his chair back. “Found me first tosheroon on day one. O’course, one of the big kids nicked it off me right there. And you tell me about being knocked back? But I had a nose for