Hogfather - Terry Pratchett [10]
Medium Dave Lilywhite, the last of the five, looked around. There were indeed a number of solitary figures in the low, dark room. Most of them wore cloaks with big hoods. They sat alone, in corners, hidden by the hoods. None of them looked very friendly.
“Don’t be daft, Peachy,” Catseye murmured.
“That’s the sort of thing they do,” Peachy insisted. “They’re masters of disguise!”
“With that eye of his?”
“That guy sitting by the fire has got an eye patch,” said Medium Dave. Medium Dave didn’t speak much. He watched a lot.
The others turned to stare.
“He’ll wait till we’re off our guard then go ahahaha,” said Peachy.
“They can’t kill you unless it’s for money,” said Catseye. But now there was a soupçon of doubt in his voice.
They kept their eyes on the hooded man. He kept his eye on them.
If asked to describe what they did for a living, the five men around the table would have said something like “This and that” or “The best I can,” although in Banjo’s case he’d have probably said “Dur?” They were, by the standards of an uncaring society, criminals, although they wouldn’t have thought of themselves as such and couldn’t even spell words like “nefarious.” What they generally did was move things around. Sometimes the things were on the wrong side of a steel door, say, or in the wrong house. Sometimes the things were in fact people who were far too unimportant to trouble the Assassins’ Guild with, but who were nevertheless inconveniently positioned where they were and could much better be located on, for example, a sea bed somewhere.* None of the five belonged to any formal guild and they generally found their clients among those people who, for their own dark reasons, didn’t want to put the guilds to any trouble, sometimes because they were guild members themselves. They had plenty of work. There was always something that needed transferring from A to B or, of course, to the bottom of the C.
“Any minute now,” said Peachy, as the waiter brought their beers.
Banjo cleared his throat. This was a sign that another thought had arrived.
“What I don’ unnerstan,” he said, “is…”
“Yes?” said his brother.†
“What I don’ unnerstan is, how longaz diz place had waiters?”
“Good evening,” said Teatime, putting down the tray.
They stared at him in silence.
He gave them a friendly smile.
Peachy’s huge hand slapped the table.
“You crept up on us, you little—” he began.
Men in their line of business develop a certain prescience. Medium Dave and Catseye, who were sitting on either side of Peachy, leaned away nonchalantly.
“Hi!” said Teatime. There was a blur, and a knife shuddered in the table between Peachy’s thumb and index finger.
He looked down at it in horror.
“My name’s Teatime,” said Teatime. “Which one are you?”
“’m…Peachy,” said Peachy, still staring at the vibrating knife.
“That’s an interesting name,” said Teatime. “Why are you called Peachy, Peachy?”
Medium Dave coughed.
Peachy looked up into Teatime’s face. The glass eye was a mere ball of faintly glowing gray. The other eye was a little dot in a sea of white. Peachy’s only contact with intelligence had been to beat it up and rob it whenever possible, but a sudden sense of self-preservation glued him to his chair.
“’cos I don’t shave,” he said.
“Peachy don’t like blades, mister,” said Catseye.
“And do you have a lot of friends, Peachy?” said Teatime.
“Got a few, yeah…”
With a sudden whirl of movement that made the men start, Teatime spun away, grabbed a chair, swung it up to the table and sat down on it. Three of them had already got their hands on their swords.
“I don’t have many,” he said, apologetically. “Don’t seem to have the knack. On the other hand…I don’t seem to have any enemies at all. Not one. Isn’t that nice?”
Teatime had been thinking, in the cracking, buzzing fireworks display that was his head. What he had been thinking about was immortality.
He might have been quite, quite insane, but he was no fool. There were, in