The Truth

tree.
    “That’d be something to see,” said Harry. He took out his cigar, stared reflectively at the end, and put it back in his mouth. Through the smoke, he watched William carefully.
    William felt the distinct unease of a well-educated man who has to confront the fact that the illiterate man watching him could probably outthink him three times over.
    “Mr. King, we really need that paper,” he said, to break the thoughtful silence.
    “There’s something about you, Mr. de Worde,” said the King. “I buy and sell clerks when I need them, and you don’t smell like a clerk to me. You’ve got the air about you of a man who’d scrabble through a ton o’ shit to find a farthin’, and I’m wonderin’ why that is.”
    “Look, Mr. King, will you please sell us some paper at the old price?” said William.
    “Couldn’t do that. I told you. A deal’s a deal. The Engravers’ve paid me,” said Harry shortly.
    William opened his mouth, but Goodmountain laid a hand on his arm. The King was clearly working his way to the end of a line of thought.
    Harry went over to the window again, and stared pensively at the yard with its steaming piles. Then…
    “Oh, will you look at that,” said Harry, stepping back from the window in tremendous astonishment. “See that cart at the other gate down there?”
    They saw the cart.
    “I must’ve told the lads a hundred times, don’t leave a cart all laden up and ready to go right by an open gate like that. Someone’ll nick it, I told ’em.”
    William wondered who would steal anything from the King of the Golden River, a man with all those red-hot compost heaps.
    “That’s the last quarter of the order for the Engravers’ Guild,” said Harry, to the world in general. “I’d have to repay ’em if it got half-inched right out of my yard. I’ll have to tell the foreman. He’s getting forgetful these days.”
    “We should be leaving , William,” said Goodmountain, grabbing William’s arm.
    “Why? We haven’t—”
    “However can we repay you, Mr. King?” said the dwarf, dragging William towards the door.
    “The bridesmaids’ll be wearing oh-de-nill, whatever that is,” said the King of the Golden River. “Oh, and if I don’t get eighty dollars from you by the end of the month, you lads will be in deep”—the cigar did a double length of the mouth—“trouble. Head downwards.”
    Two minutes later the cart was creaking out of the yard, under the curiously uninterested eyes of the troll foreman.
    “No, it’s not stealing,” said Goodmountain emphatically, shaking the reins. “The King pays the bastards back their money and we pay him the old price. So we’re all happy except for the Inquirer, and who cares about them?”
    “I didn’t like the bit about the deep pause trouble,” said William. “Head downwards.”
    “I’m shorter’n you so I lose out either way up,” said the dwarf.
    After watching the cart disappear, the King yelled downstairs for one of his clerks and told him to fetch a copy of the Times from Bin Six. He sat impassively, except for the oscillating cigar, while the stained and crumpled paper was read to him.
    After a while his smile broadened, and he asked the clerk to read a few extracts again.
    “Ah,” he said, when the man had finished. “I reckoned that was it. The boy’s a born muckraker. Shame for him he was born a long way from honest muck.”
    “Shall I do a credit note for the Engravers, Mr. King?”
    “Aye.”
    “You reckon you’ll get your money back, Mr. King?”
    Harry King usually didn’t take this sort of thing from clerks. They were there to do the adding-up, not discuss policy. On the other hand, Harry had made a fortune seeing the sparkle in the mire, and sometimes you had to recognize expertise when you saw it.
    “What color’s oh-de-nill?” he said.
    “Oh, one of those difficult colors, Mr. King. A sort of light blue with a hint of green.”
    “Could you get ink that color?”
    “I could find out. It’d be expensive.”
    The cigar made its traverse from one side of Harry King to the other. He was known to dote on his daughters, who he felt had rather suffered from having a father who needed to take two baths just to get dirty.
    “We shall just have to keep an eye on our little writing man,” he said. “Tip off the lads, will you? I wouldn’t like to see our Effie disappointed.”

    The dwarfs were working on the press again, Sacharissa noticed. It seldom stayed the same shape for