Hogfather Read Free Page A

said.
    We pay. You find the ways and means.
    The cowl began to fade.
    “How can I contact you?” said Downey.
    We will contact you . We know where you are. We know where everyone is.
    The figure vanished. At the same moment the door was flung open to reveal the distraught figure of Mr. Winvoe, the Guild Treasurer.
    “Excuse me, my lord, but I really had to come up!” He flung some disks on the desk. “Look at them!”
    Downey carefully picked up a golden circle. It looked like a small coin, but—
    “No denomination!” said Winvoe. “No heads, no tails, no milling! It’s just a blank disk! They’re all just blank disks!”
    Downey opened his mouth to say, “Valueless?” He realized that he was half hoping that this was the case. If they, whoever they were, had paid in worthless metal then there wasn’t even the glimmering of a contract. But he could see this wasn’t the case. Assassins learned to recognize money early in their careers.
    “Blank disks,” he said, “of pure gold.”
    Winvoe nodded mutely.
    “That,” said Downey, “will do nicely.”
    “It must be magical!” said Winvoe. “And we never accept magical money!”
    Downey bounced the coin on the desk a couple of times. It made a satisfyingly rich thunking noise. It wasn’t magical. Magical money would look real, because its whole purpose was to deceive. But this didn’t need to ape something as human and adulterated as mere currency. This is gold, it told his fingers. Take it or leave it.
    Downey sat and thought, while Winvoe stood and worried.
    “We’ll take it,” he said.
    “But—”
    “Thank you, Mr. Winvoe. That is my decision,” said Downey. He stared into space for a while, and then smiled. “Is Mister Teatime still in the building?”
    Winvoe stood back. “I thought the council had agreed to dismiss him,” he said stiffly. “After that business with—”
    “Mister Teatime does not see the world in quite the same way as other people,” said Downey, picking up the picture from his desk and looking at it thoughtfully.
    “Well, indeed, I think that is certainly true.”
    “Please send him up.”
    The Guild attracted all sorts of people, Downey reflected. He found himself wondering how it had come to attract Winvoe, for one thing. It was hard to imagine him stabbing anyone in the heart in case he got blood on the victim’s wallet. Whereas Mister Teatime…
    The problem was that the Guild took young boys and gave them a splendid education and incidentally taught them how to kill, cleanly and dispassionately, for money and for the good of society, or at least that part of society that had money, and what other kind of society was there?
    But very occasionally you found you’d got someone like Mister Teatime, to whom the money was merely a distraction. Mister Teatime had a truly brilliant mind, but it was brilliant like a fractured mirror, all marvelous facets and rainbows but, ultimately, also something that was broken.
    Mister Teatime enjoyed himself too much. And other people, also.
    Downey had privately decided that some time soon Mister Teatime was going to meet with an accident.Like many people with no actual morals, Lord Downey did have standards, and Teatime repelled him. Assassination was a careful game, usually played against people who knew the rules themselves or at least could afford the services of those who did. There was considerable satisfaction in a clean kill. What there wasn’t supposed to be was pleasure in a messy one. That sort of thing led to talk.
    On the other hand, Teatime’s corkscrew of a mind was exactly the tool to deal with something like this. And if he didn’t…well, that was hardly Downey’s fault, was it?
    He turned his attention to the paperwork for a while. It was amazing how the stuff mounted up. But you had to deal with it. It wasn’t as though they were murderers, after all…
    There was a knock at the door. He pushed the paperwork aside and sat back.
    “Come in, Mister