The Truth

hammered on the door of the Times shed until a dwarf opened up. The dwarf was amazed to see a frantic William de Worde rushing past and dropping the scales and weights on a desk.
    “Please get Mr. Goodmountain up. We’ve got to get out another edition! And can I have ten dollars, please?”
    It took Goodmountain to sort things out as, nightshirted but still firmly helmeted, he clambered out of the cellar.
    “No, ten dollars, ” William explained to the bewildered dwarfs. “Ten dollar coins . Not ten dollars worth of money.”
    “Why?”
    “To see how much seventy thousand dollars weighs!”
    “We haven’t got seventy thousand dollars!”
    “Look, even one dollar coin would do,” said William patiently. “Ten dollars would just be more accurate, that’s all. I can work it out from there.”
    Ten assorted coins were eventually procured from the dwarfs’ cash box and were duly weighed. Then William turned to a fresh page in his notebook, and bent his head in ferocious calculation. The dwarfs watched him solemnly, as if he were conducting an alchemical experiment. Finally he looked up from his figures, the light of revelation in his eyes.
    “That’s almost a third of a ton,” he said. “That’s how much seventy thousand dollar coins weigh. I suppose a really good horse could carry that and a rider, but…Vetinari walks with a stick, you saw him. It’d take him forever to load the horse up, and even if he got away he could hardly travel fast. Vimes must have worked it out…he said the facts were stupid facts!”
    Goodmountain had stationed himself before the rows of cases.
    “Ready when you are, chief,” he said.
    “All right…” William hesitated. He knew the facts, but what did the facts suggest?
    “Er…make the heading ‘Who Framed Lord Vetinari?’ and then the story starts…er…” William watched the hand pounce and grab among the little boxes of type. “A…er…Ankh-Morpork City Watch now believe that at least one other person was involved in the…the…”
    “Fracas?” suggested Goodmountain.
    “No…”
    “Rumpus?”
    “…in the attack at the Palace on Monday night.” William waited until the dwarf had caught up. It was getting easier and easier to read the words forming in Goodmountain’s hands as the fingers jumped from box to box…m-ig-h-t…“You got an M for an N there,” he said.
    “Oh, yes. Sorry. Carry on.”
    “Er…Evidence suggests that far from attacking his clerk as believed, Lord Vetinari may have discovered a crime in progress.”
    The hand flew across the type. C-r-i-m-e-space-i-n…
    It stopped.
    “Are you sure about this?” said Goodmountain.
    “No, but it’s as good a theory as any other,” said William. “That horse hadn’t been loaded to escape, it had been loaded to be discovered . Someone had some plan and it went wrong. I’m sure of that at least. Right…new paragraph. A horse in the stables had been loaded with a third of a ton of coins, but in his current state of health the Patrician—”
    One of the dwarfs had lit the stove. Another was stripping out the forms that contained the last edition. The room was coming alive again.
    “That’s about eight inches plus the heading,” said Goodmountain, when William had finished. “That should rattle people. You want to add any more stuff? Miss Sacharissa did something about Lady Selachii’s ball, and there’s a few small things.”
    William yawned. He didn’t seem to be getting enough sleep these days.
    “Put them in,” he said.
    “And there’s this clacks from Lancre that came in when you’d gone home,” said the dwarf. “That’ll cost us another fifty pence for the messenger. You remember you sent a clacks this afternoon? About snakes?” he added, in the face of William’s blank expression.
    William read the flimsy sheet of paper. The message had been carefully transcribed in the neat handwriting of the semaphore operator. It was probably the strangest message yet sent on the new technology.
    King Verence of Lancre had also mastered the idea that the clacks charged by the word.
WOMEN OF LANCRE NOT RPT NOT IN HABIT
BEARING SNAKES STOP CHILDREN BORN THIS
MONTH WILLIAM WEAVER CONSTANCE THATCHER
CATASTROPHE CARTER ALL PLUS ARMS LEGS
MINUS SCALES FANGS
    “Hah! We have them!” said William. “Give me five minutes and I’ll put together a story on this. We shall soon see if the sword of truth can’t beat the dragon of lies.”
    Boddony gave him a kind look. “Didn’t you