There was another sound syncopating with Madame’s virtuoso performance. It musthave been that which woke him. By groping, he located his shorts and after onlythree tries managed to get them the right way up and the right way round. Theywere a little chilly. That was the problem with micromail; it was, after all,metal. On the other hand, it did not chafe and you never had to wash it. Fiveminutes on the fire and it was as hygienic as anything. Besides, Pepe’s versionof the shorts held a surprise all of their own.

Thus feeling that he could face the world, or at least the part of it thatwould need to see only the top of him, he shuffled and stubbed his way to theshop’s door, checking every bottle along the way for evidence of liquidcontent. Remarkably, a bottle of port had survived with fifty per centremaining capacity. Any port in a storm, he thought, and drank his breakfast.

The shop’s door was rattling. It had a small sliding aperture by which thestaff could determine whether they wanted to let a prospective customer in,because when you are a posh shop like Shatta, you don’t sell things to justanyone. Pairs of eyeballs zigzagged back and forth across his vision as peopleclustered on the other side of the door and fought for attention. Somebodysaid, ‘We’re here to see Jewels.’

‘She’s resting,’ said Pepe. That was always a good line and could meananything.

‘Have you seen the picture in the Times?’ said a voice. Then, ‘Look,’ as avision of Juliet was held up in front of the door.

Blimey, he said to himself. ‘She had a very tiring day,’ he said.

‘The public wants to know all about her,’ said a sterner voice.

And a rather less aggressive female voice said, ‘She seems to be ratheramazing.’

‘She is. She is,’ said Pepe, inventing desperately, ‘but a very private personand a bit artistic too, if you know what I mean.’

‘Well, I’ve got a big order to place,’ said yet another voice as the ownermanaged to shuffle for slot space.

‘Oh, well, we don’t have to wake her up for that. Just give me a moment andI’ll be right with you.’ He took another swig of the port. When he turnedaround, Madame, in a nightshirt that could have accommodated a platoon, atleast if they were very friendly, was bearing down on him with a glass in onehand and the champagne bottle in the other.

‘This stuff’s gone horribly flat,’ she said.

‘I’ll go and find some fresh,’ he replied, snatching it from her quickly.‘We’ve got newspaper people and customers out there and they all want Jools.Can you remember where she lives?’

‘I’m sure she told me,’ said Madame, ‘but it all seems a long time ago. Thatother one, Glenda I think, works at some big place in the city, as a cook.Anyway, why do they want to see her?’

‘There’s a wonderful picture in the Times,’ said Pepe. ‘You know when you saidyou thought we’d get rich? Well, it looks like you weren’t thinking bigenough.’

‘What do you suggest, dear?’

‘Me?’ said Pepe. ‘Take the order, because that’s good business, and tell theothers that Jools will see them later.’

‘Do you think they’ll go for that?’

‘They’ll have to, because we don’t know where the hell she is. There’s amillion dollars walking around this city on legs.’

Rhys, Low King of the Dwarfs, paid particular attention to the picture of thewonderful girl. The definition wasn’t too bad at all. The technique oftranslating the clacks semaphore signal into a black-and-white picture wasquite well advanced these days. Even so, his people in Ankh-Morpork must havethought this particularly interesting to merit the expense of the bandwidthrequired. Certainly, it was exercising a lot of other dwarfs, but in the LowKing’s experience, it was possible to find someone, somewhere, who objected toanything. He looked at the grags in front of him. So simple for people likeVetinari, he thought. He just has religions to deal with. We don’t havereligions. Being a dwarf is a religion in itself, and no two priests everagree, and sometimes it seems that every other dwarf is a priest. ‘I seenothing here to disturb me,’ he said.

‘We believe the beard to be a false one,’ said one of the grags.

‘That is perfectly acceptable,’ said the King. ‘There is absolutely nothing inany precedent that bans false beards. They are a great salvation to those whofind beards hard to grow.’

‘But she looks, well, alluring,’ said one of the other grags. They wereindistinguishable under their tall, pointed leather cowls.

‘Attractive, certainly,’ said the King. ‘Gentlemen, is this going to takelong?’

‘It must be stopped. It’s not dwarfish.’

‘Oh, but it manifestly is, is it not?’ said the King. ‘Micromail is one hundredper cent mail and you don’t get any more dwarfish than that. She is smiling andwhile I would agree that dwarfs do not appear to smile very much, certainly notwhen they come to see me, I think we could profit from her example.’

‘It’s positively an offence against morality.’

‘How? Where? Only in your heads, I feel.’

The tallest grag said, ‘So you intend to do nothing?’

The King paused for a moment, staring at the ceiling. ‘No, I intend to dosomething,’ he said. ‘First of all, I shall see to it that my staff find outjust how many orders there have been for micromail originating from here inBonk today. I’m sure Shatta would not object to them seeing their records,especially since I intend to tell Madame Sharn that she can come back andestablish her premises here.’

‘You would do that?’ said a grag.

‘Yes, of course. We have nearly concluded the Koom Valley Accord, a peace withthe trolls that no one ever thought they would see. And I am fed up, gentlemen,with your whining, moaning and endless, endless attempts to re-fight battlesthat you have already lost. As far as I am concerned, this young lady isshowing us a better future and now, if you are not out of my office in tenseconds, I will charge you rent.’

‘There will be trouble over this.’

‘Gentlemen, there is always trouble! But this time I will be making it foryou.’

As the door slammed shut behind them, the King sat back in his chair.

‘Well done, sir,’ said his secretary.

‘They’ll keep on. I can’t imagine what being a dwarf would be like if we didn’targue all the time.’ He squirmed a little in his chair. ‘You know, they’reright when they say it doesn’t chafe and it’s not as cold as you would imagine.Do ask our agent to express my thanks to Madame Sharn for her generous gift,will you?’

Even this early in the day, the Great Hall of the University was a generalthoroughfare. Most of the tables were pushed back against the walls or, ifsomeone felt like showing off, levitated to the ceiling, and the hugeblack-and-white slabs of the floor, worn smooth by the footfalls of millennia,were polished still further as today’s faculty and students took a short cut tovarious concerns, destinations and, very occasionally, when no viable excusepresented itself, to lectures.

The Great Chandelier had been swung down and off to one side for its dailyreplenishing of candles, but there was, fortunately for Mustrum Ridcully’spurposes, a large expanse of clear floor.

He saw the figure he was waiting for hurrying towards him. ‘How did it go,Mister Stibbons?’

‘Extremely well, I have to say, sir,’ said Ponder. He opened the sack he wascarrying. ‘One of these is our original ball and one of them is the ball thatNutt and Trevor Likely had made last night.’

‘Ah, spot the ball,’ said Ridcully. He picked them both up in his enormoushands and dropped them on the flagstones.

Gloing! Gloing!

‘Perfectly identical,’ he said.

‘Trevor Likely said they had it made by a dwarf for twenty dollars,’ saidPonder.

‘Did he really?’