‘Making very good progress, sir, but there is a shortfall … as it were. We were expecting to drive the golden spike halfway through next month. There’s a lot of work still to do and we’re driving the train underground around the Gruffies. We’re tunnelling hard, but there are already a lot of cave formations up there.’
And there’s the bridges, he thought. You haven’t told him about the bridges. ‘And, of course, once we get to Uberwald we’ll eventually continue on to Genua.’
‘Not good enough, Mister Lipwig, not good enough at all. You must speed up. The balance of the world could be at stake.’
‘Er … with all due respect, my lord, why?’
Vetinari frowned. ‘Mister Lipwig. I have given you your orders; how you execute those orders is up to you, but they must be obeyed!’
Moist’s mood was not helped by finding the golem horse had been clamped, apparently by the Watch since he could see a watchman close by, laughing. The horse looked at him, embarrassed, and said, ‘I regret this inconvenience, sir, but I must obey the law.’
Seething, Moist said, ‘As a golem horse, are you as strong as any other golem?’
‘Oh, yes, sir.’
‘Very well,’ said Moist. ‘Then get yourself out of the clamp.’
The clamp cracked and split and the watchman ran towards Moist just as he leapt on to the back of the horse, yelling after him, ‘Oi! That’s public property, that is!’
And Moist shouted over his shoulder, ‘Send the bill to Sir Harry King, if you dare! Tell him it’s from Moist von Lipwig!’
Looking back as the horse galloped away down Lower Broadway, to his glee he saw the watchman picking up the pieces of the yellow clamp and he shouted, ‘No one interferes with the progress of the Hygienic Railway!’
Moist always preferred to move fast — after all, in his previous businesses a turn of speed was essential — and he arrived at Harry’s compound with the horse panting like a celestial runner.[61] Stepping down and, for nothing more than effect, tying up the horse, he said, ‘Why were you panting? Golems don’t pant. You don’t breathe!’
‘Sorry, sir. You wanted me to be a more horse-like horse, so I am doing my best, sir … neigh, whinny, whinny.’
Moist burst out laughing and said, ‘That’ll do, Dobbin … No, not Dobbin! How do you fancy Flash?’
Reflectively the horse said, ‘I’ve never had a name before. I’ve always been “horse”. But it’s a very nice feeling to know who you are. I wonder how I did without it for these past nine hundred and three years. Thank you, Mister Lipwig.’
Moist made his way to Harry’s office and made certain that he spoke directly and in private to Harry, who stared at Moist for an eternity before saying, ‘Surely you know that they’ve hardly started reinforcing the first of the bridges on the Uberwald line? No train can run on thin air!’
‘Yes, Harry, I know. Gods bless me, I speak to the surveyors and inspectors all the time. But it’s only the beds of the bridges that need lots of work. The uprights have stood the test of time.’
And while Sir Harry was drawing breath to protest, Moist told him what he had in mind if Simnel’s engineers weren’t ready in time for whatever Vetinari was cooking up.
It took some time for Harry to get to grips with Moist’s plan, but finally when he’d heard it all he said, ‘You’re breaking all the rules, my lad, and you can only do that once to Vetinari. I’m pretty sure about that.’
It took all of Moist’s guile and self-control in the face of an angry Harry King, but he held his ground and said, ‘Harry, in all my time working for Lord Vetinari I’ve learned to understand the words “plausible deniability”.’
‘Eh? What does that mean, smart boy?’ said Harry.
‘It means his lordship chooses to have little idea of what I do and certainly doesn’t give me clear instructions, and it also means I have to guess a lot, but I’ve always been very good at that. Got a lot to do, Sir Harry, or shall I say my lord Harry or should I even dare to say Baron King of Ankh-Morpork … you can fill in that bit for yourself … and, if I remember correctly, when Vetinari makes you the first railway baron you’ll be entitled to six silver balls on your coronet. A knighthood? Pah! You could be a Baron overnight. I imagine Lady King would be most impressed by a man with six balls.’
Harry snorted. ‘That’d give the missus a surprise!’ He considered the picture Moist had painted of the future and said, ‘Actually, I reckon she’d be swanking like a … Duchess!’ He sobered up a little and continued, ‘Believe me, I thought I was the King of the Shit, but you are full of the stuff! Would you damn well tell me how much trouble it’s going to get us both into? Baron, my arse. All right, mister, how do we get this thing done, scoundrels that we are?’
Even with the added pressure from the Patrician and with every lad, troll and goblin that Harry could provide, it still took time to build a railway. ‘Tsort was not built in a day,’ was the mantra when anyone got impatient. Still, day by day the great new railway line to Uberwald got closer to its destination.
If building the railway was one thing, maintaining it was quite another. The railway was out there in the wind and the weather, and, in many cases, far from civilization. Moist looked every week at the complaints, breakdowns and miscellaneous problems book, his instinct always being to start with the miscellaneous and sometimes humorous: intoxicated troll on line, harpies nesting in coal bunker, woman in labour.[62] And then, of course, there were also the landslides, which played havoc with the schedules. People also didn’t appreciate that to leave a huge truck full of pigs on a level crossing was actively to prevent any movement on the railway, and as for the people who believed that if they held out their palm to the oncoming locomotive it would stop for them immediately! As, in fact, it might, but a skidding locomotive was a matter of filling up a large number of forms afterwards.
As Moist was all too aware, ever since the maiden voyage the newspaper editors of the Sto Plains had been waiting for the first true railway disaster, which, for preference, would include at least one horrible death.
And they got one, although not on the Hygienic Railway Company’s line. Instead, the first casualty happened in the back country of Quirm, where three entrepreneurs, Monsieur Lavasse the winemaker, Monsieur Croque the cheesemonger and Monsieur Lestripe, a purveyor of decorative onion-wreaths, had invested in their own small single-track line between their vineyards and farms.
They had called on Simnel for expert advice, in particular how to avoid a head-on crash between their two locomotives on the single track, a conundrum that Dick had solved with classic Simnel simplicity by providing them with signals that could not be changed without a special brass token, carried by whichever driver had right of way on the line.
Amid press headlines claiming SIMNEL SYSTEM FAILS and ARE PASSENGER LIVES AT RISK? Simnel and Moist were summoned to Quirm to investigate, where they discovered the terrible truth. A middle manager at Chateau Lavasse had looked to speed things up and had duplicated the safety token and explained to the drivers and the signalmen that they just needed to be sensible. Trusting them to get it right had worked well for a while and so everyone relaxed, and then one day Signalman Hugo was pre occupied and forgot a vital safety step, and there were two trains heading for each other at some speed along the single track, with each driver thinking he had the right of way. And they did indeed meet halfway. One driver died, the other was seriously scalded by runaway cheeses which flowed like lava when they reached the heat of the footplate, and there was a great disturbance of foie gras.
61
It is well known that it is possible to climb Cori Celesti. Many athletes have attempted to climb to the summit and most of them have failed, although history
62
Miss Daisy Snapes was officially the first person to be born on a moving train, thanks to a midwife who rushed the mother to the guard’s van. Young Daisy was born at thirty miles an hour and her doting parents named her Locomotion Snapes, until Moist got to hear about it and gave her and her parents a free season ticket on the railway, along with the suggestion that Locomotion might sound better as a middle name.