Going Postal - Terry Pratchett [82]
He could see her smile as she wrote this down. Then she said: “I did hear you correctly, did I? You are offering to carry clacks messages?”
“Certainly. Ongoing messages can be put on the Trunk in Sto Lat. Helpfulness is our middle name.”
“Are you sure it’s not ‘cheekiness’?” said Sacharissa, to laughter from the crowd.
“I don’t understand you, I’m sure,” said Moist. “Now, if you will—”
“You’re cocking a snook at the clacks people again, aren’t you?” said the journalist.
“Ah, that must be a journalistic term,” said Moist. “I’ve never owned a snook, and even if I did, I wouldn’t know how to cock it. And now, if you will excuse me, I have the mail to deliver and ought to leave before Boris eats somebody. Again.”
“Can I ask you just one last thing? Will your soul be unduly diminished if Otto takes a picture of you departing?”
“I suppose I can’t stop you out here, provided my face isn’t very clear,” said Moist, as Mr. Pump cupped his pottery hands to make a step. “The priest is very hot on that, you know.”
“Yes, I expect ‘the priest’ is,” said Miss Cripslock, making sure the inverted commas clanged with irony. “Besides, by the look of that creature, it may be the last chance we get. It looks like death on four legs, Mr. Lipwig.”
The crowd fell silent as Moist mounted. Boris merely shifted his weight a little.
Look at it like this, Moist thought, what have you got to lose? Your life? You’ve already been hanged. You’re into angel time. And you’re impressing the hell out of everybody. Why are they buying stamps? Because you’re giving them a show—
“Just say the word, mister,” said one of Hobson’s men, hauling on the end of a rope. “When we let him go, we ain’t hanging around!”
“Wait a moment—” said Moist quickly.
He’d seen a figure at the front of the crowd. It was wearing a figure-hugging gray dress, and as he watched, it blew a neurotic cloud of smoke at the sky, gave him a look, and shrugged.
“Dinner tonight, Miss Dearheart?” he shouted.
Heads turned. There was a ripple of laughter, and a few cheers. For a moment she flashed him a look that should have left his shadow on the smoking remains of the wall opposite, and then she gave a curt nod.
Who knows, it could be peaches underneath…
“Let him go, boys!” said Moist, his heart soaring.
The men dived away. The world was still for a breath, and then Boris sprang from docility into a mad rearing dance, back legs clattering across the flagstones, hooves pawing at the air.
“Vunderful! Hold it!”
The world went white. Boris went mad.
CHAPTER 7A
Post Haste
The nature of Boris the horse • Foreboding tower
• Mr. Lipwig cools off • The lady with buns on her ears
• Invitation accepted • Mr. Robinson’s box
• A mysterious stranger
HOBSON HAD TRIED Boris as a racehorse, and he would have been a very good one were it not for his unbreakable habit, at the off, of attacking the horse next to him and jumping the railings at the first bend. Moist clapped his hand onto his hat, wedged his toes into the bellyband, and hung onto the reins as Broadway came at him all at once, carts and people blurring past, his eyeballs pressing into his head.
There was a cart across the street but there was no possibility of steering Boris. Huge muscles bunched, and there was a long, slow, silent moment as he drifted over the cart.
Hooves slid over the cobbles ahead of a trail of sparks when he landed again, but he recovered by sheer momentum and accelerated.
The usual crowd around the Hubwards Gate scattered, and then, filling the horizon, there were the plains. They did something to Boris’s mad horse brain. All that space, nice and flat, with only a few easily jumped obstacles, like trees.
He found extra muscle and speeded up again, bushes and trees and carts flying toward him.
Moist cursed the bravado