The Truth

glasslessness, and it had started at a fairly early age when he’d been sent away to school.
    William’s brother, Rupert, being the elder, had gone to the Assassins’ School in Ankh-Morpork, widely regarded as being the best school in the world for the full-glass class. William, as the less important son, had been sent to Hugglestones, a boarding school so bleak and spartan that only the upper glasses would send their sons there.
    Hugglestones was a granite building on a rain-soaked moor, and its stated purpose was to make men from boys. The policy employed involved a certain amount of wastage, and consisted, in William’s recollection at least, of very simple and violent games in the healthy outdoor sleet. The small, slow, fat, or merely unpopular were mown down, as nature intended, but natural selection operates in many ways and William found that he had a certain capacity for survival. A good way to survive on the playing fields of Hugglestones was to run very fast and shout a lot while inexplicably always being a long way from the ball. This had earned him, oddly enough, a reputation for being keen, and keenness was highly prized at Hugglestones, if only because actual achievement was so rare.
    He had been truly keen on anything involving words. At Hugglestones this had not counted for a great deal, since most of its graduates never expected to have to do much more with a pen than sign their names, a feat that most of them could manage after three or four years, but it had meant long mornings peacefully reading anything that took his fancy while the hulking front-row forwards who would one day be at least the deputy-leaders of the land learned how to hold a pen without crushing it.
    William left with a good report, which tends to be the case with pupils that most of the teachers could only vaguely remember. Those who could recall William had a hazy picture of someone always arriving just too late at some huge and painful collision of bodies. A keen boy, they decided. The staff at Hugglestones prized keenness, believing that in sufficient quantities it could take the place of lesser attributes like intelligence, foresight, and training.
    Afterwards, his father had faced the problem of what to do with him.
    He was the younger son in any case, and family tradition sent youngest sons into some church or other, where they couldn’t do much harm on a physical level. But too much reading had taken its toll. William found that he now thought of prayer as a sophisticated way of pleading with thunderstorms.
    Going into land management was just about acceptable, but it seemed to William that land managed itself pretty well, on the whole. He was all in favor of the countryside, provided that it was on the other side of a window.
    A military career somewhere was unlikely. William had a rooted objection to killing people he didn’t know.
    He enjoyed reading and writing. He liked words. Words didn’t shout or make loud noises, which pretty much defined the rest of his family. They didn’t involve getting muddy in the freezing cold. They didn’t hunt inoffensive animals, either. They did what he told them to. So, he’d said, he wanted to write.
    His father had erupted. In his personal world, a scribe was only one step higher than a teacher. Good gods, man, they didn’t even ride a horse! So there had been Words.
    As a result, William had gone off to Ankh-Morpork, the usual destination for the lost and the aimless. There he’d made words his living, in a quiet sort of way, and considered that he’d got off easy compared to brother Rupert, who was big and good-natured and a Hugglestones natural apart from the accident of birth.
    And then there had been the war against Klatch…
    It was an insignificant war, which was over before it started, the kind of war that both sides pretended hadn’t really happened, but one of the things that did happen in the few confused days of wretched turmoil was the death of Rupert de Worde. He had died for his beliefs; chief among them was the very Hugglestonian one that bravery could replace armor, and that Klatchians would turn and run if you shouted loud enough.
    William’s father, during their last meeting, had gone on at some length about the proud and noble traditions of the de Wordes. They had mostly involved unpleasant deaths, preferably of foreigners, but somehow, William gathered, the de Wordes had always considered that it was a decent second prize to die themselves. A de