The Truth

say a lie can run around the world before the truth has got its boots on?” he said.
    “But this is the truth .”
    “So? Where’s its boots?”
    Goodmountain nodded to the other dwarfs, who were yawning.
    “You get back to bed, lads. I’ll pull it all together.”
    He watched them disappear down the ladder to the cellar. Then he sat down, took out a small silver box, and opened it.
    “Snuff?” he said, offering the box to William. “Best thing you humans ever invented. Watson’s Red Roasted. Clears the mind a treat. No?”
    William shook his head.
    “What are you doing all this for, Mr. de Worde?” said Goodmountain, taking a monstrous suction of snuff up each nostril.
    “What do you mean?”
    “I’m not saying we don’t appreciate it, mark you,” said Goodmountain. “It’s keeping the money coming in. The jobbing stuff is drying up more every day. Seems like every engraving shop was poised to go over to printing. All we did was give the young rips an opening. They’ll get us in the end, though. They’ve got money behind them. I don’t mind saying some of the lads are talking about selling up and going back to the lead mines.”
    “You can’t do that!”
    “Ah, well,” said Goodmountain. “You mean you don’t want us to. I understand that. But we’ve been putting money by. We should be all right. I daresay we can flog the press to someone. We might have a spot of cash to take back home. That’s what this was all about, money. What were you doing it for?”
    “Me? Because—” William stopped. The truth was that he’d never decided to do anything. He’d never really made that kind of decision in his whole life. One thing had just gently led to another, and then the press had to be fed. It was waiting there now. You worked hard, you fed it, and it was still just as hungry an hour later, and out in the world all your work was heading for Bin Six in Piss Harry’s and that was only the start of its troubles. Suddenly he had a proper job, with working hours, and yet everything he did was only as real as a sand castle, on a beach where the tide forever came in.
    “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I suppose it’s because I’m no good at anything else. Now I can’t imagine doing anything else.”
    “But I heard your family’s got pots of money.”
    “Look, Mr. Goodmountain, I’m useless. I was educated to be useless. What we’ve always been supposed to do is hang around until there’s a war and do something really stupidly brave and then get killed. What we’ve mainly done is hang on to things. Ideas, mostly.”
    “You don’t get on with them, then.”
    “Look, I don’t need a heart-to-heart about this, can you understand? My father is not a nice man. Do I have to draw you a picture? He doesn’t much like me, and I don’t like him. If it comes to that, he doesn’t like anyone very much. Especially dwarfs and trolls.”
    “No law says you have to like dwarfs and trolls,” said Goodmountain.
    “Yes, but there ought to be a law against disliking them the way he does.”
    “Ah. Now you’ve drawn me a picture.”
    “Maybe you’ve heard the term ‘lesser races’?”
    “And now you’ve colored it in.”
    “He won’t even live in Ankh-Morpork anymore. Says it’s polluted.”
    “That’s observant of him.”
    “No, I mean—”
    “Oh, I know what you mean,” said Goodmountain. “I’ve met humans like him.”
    “You said this was all about money?” said William. “Is that true?”
    The dwarf nodded at the ingots of lead stacked up neatly by the press.
    “We wanted to turn lead into gold,” he said. “We’d got a lot of lead. But we need gold.”
    William sighed. “My father used to say that gold is all dwarfs think about.”
    “Pretty much.” The dwarf took another pinch of snuff. “But where people go wrong is…see, if all a human thinks about is gold, well, he’s a miser. If a dwarf thinks about gold, he’s just being a dwarf. It’s diff’rent. What do you call them black humans that live in Howondaland?”
    “I know what my father calls them,” said William. “But I call them ‘people who live in Howondaland.’”
    “Do you really? Well, I hear tell where there’s one tribe where, before he can get married, a man has to kill a leopard and give the skin to the woman? It’s the same as that. A dwarf needs gold to get married.”
    “What…like a dowry? But I thought dwarfs didn’t differentiate between—”
    “No, no, the two dwarfs