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By Root 355 0

and prehensile toes made getting around the higher shelves a whole lot easier, and being an ape meant you didn’t have to bother with all this angst business. He had also been rather pleased to find that his new body, although looking deceptively like a rubber sack full of water, gave him three times the strength and twice the reach of his old one.

*The Shades is an ancient part of Ankh-Morpork considered considerably more unpleasant and disreputable than the rest of the city. This always amazes visitors.

*Ankh-Morpork’s enviable system of licensed criminals owes much to the current Patrician, Lord Vetinari. He reasoned that the only way to police a city of a million inhabitants was to recognize the various gangs and robber guilds, give them professional status, invite the leaders to large dinners, allow an acceptable level of street crime and then make the guild leaders responsible for enforcing it, on pain of being stripped of their new civic honors along with large areas of their skins. It worked. Criminals, it turned out, made a very good police force; unauthorized robbers soon found, for example, that instead of a night in the cells they could now expect an eternity at the bottom of the river.

However, there was the problem of apportioning the crime statistics, and so there arose a complex system of annual budgeting, chits and allowances to see that a) the members could make a reasonable living and b) no citizen was robbed or assaulted more than an agreed number of times. Many foresighted citizens in fact arranged to get an acceptable minimum of theft, assault, etc, over at the beginning of the financial year, often in the privacy and comfort of their own homes, and thus be able to walk the streets quite safely for the rest of the year. It all ticked over extremely peacefully and efficiently, demonstrating once again that compared to the Patrician of Ankh, Machiavelli could not have run a whelk stall.

*Because of the way time was recorded among the various states, kingdoms and cities. After all, when over an area of a hundred square miles the same year is variously the Year of the Small Bat, and Anticipated Monkey, the Hunting Cloud, Fat Cows, Three Bright Stallions and at least nine numbers recording the time since** assorted kings, prophets, and strange events were either crowned, born or happened, and each year has a different number of months, and some of them don’t have weeks, and one of them refuses to accept the day as a measure of time, the only thing it is possible to be sure of is that good sex doesn’t last long enough.***

**The calendar of the Theocracy of Muntab counts down, not up. No one knows why, but it might not be a good idea to hang around and find out.

***Except for the Zabingo tribe of the Great Nef, of course.

*The observant will realize that this was because the king was already seated there. It was not because the man had used the phrase “commence to start” in cold blood. But it ought to have been.

*Like Bognor.

*At least, of supervising the loading. Actual physical assistance was a little difficult because he had, the day before, slipped on something and broken his leg.

*There is a school of thought that says that witches and wizards can never go home. They went, though, just the same.

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Contents

Begin Reading

About the Author

Praise

Other Books by Terry Pratchett

Copyright

About the Publisher