Making Money

There were bones of old ships, and occasionally the bones of old sailors. There were a couple of coins, one silver, one gold, which were not dull enough and were duly confiscated. There were broken pots and pieces of statue, which were puzzled over, part of an iron cauldron, an anchor with a few links of chain.

It was clear, the dwarfs considered as they sat in the shade, that nothing came here except by boat. But remember: in matters of commerce and gold, never trust anyone who could see over your helmet.

And then there were the golems. They hated golems, because they moved silently, for all their weight, and looked like trolls. They arrived and departed all the time, fetching timbers from who knew where, marching down into the dark …

And then one day golems came pouring out of the hole, there was a lengthy discussion and the smoking woman marched over to the watchers. They watched her nervously, as fighters do when approached by a self-confident civilian they know they’re not allowed to kill.

In broken dwarfish she told them that the tunnel had collapsed, and she was going to leave. All the things they’d dug out, she said, were gifts for the King. And she left, taking the wretched golems with her.[3]

That was last week. Since then the tunnel had completely fallen in and the blowing sand had covered everything.

The money looked after itself. It sailed down the centuries, buried in paperwork, hidden behind lawyers, groomed, invested, diverted, converted, laundered, dried, ironed and polished and kept safe from harm and taxes, and above all kept safe from the Lavishes themselves. They knew their descendants — they’d raised them, after all — and so the money came with bodyguards of trustees, managers and covenants, disgorging only a measured amount of itself to the next generation, enough to maintain the lifestyle for which their name had become synonymous and with a bit left over for them to indulge in the family tradition of fighting amongst themselves over, yes, the money.

Now they were arriving, each family branch and often each individual with their own lawyer and bodyguards, being careful about whom they deigned to notice, just in case they inadvertently smiled at someone they were currently suing. As a family, people said, the Lavishes got along like a bagful of cats. Cosmo had watched them at the funeral, and they spent all their time watching one another, very much like cats, each one waiting for someone else to attack. But even so it would have been a decently dignified occasion, if only that moron nephew the old bitch had allowed to live in the cellar hadn’t turned up in a grubby white coat and a yellow rain hat and kept on blubbing all through the ceremony. He had completely spoiled the occasion for everyone.

But now the funeral was over and the Lavishes were doing what they always did after funerals, which was talk about The Money.

You couldn’t sit Lavishes around a table. Cosmo had set out small tables in a pattern that represented to the best of his knowledge the current state of the alliances and minor fratricidal wars, but there was a lot of shifting and scraping and threats of legal action before people settled down. Behind them the alert ranks of their lawyers paid careful attention, earning a total of a dollar every four seconds.

Apparently the only relative that Vetinari had was an aunt, Cosmo mused. That man had all the luck. When he was Vetinari, there would have to be a cull.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said, when the hissing and name-calling had died away, ‘I am so glad to see so many of you here today—’

‘Liar!’

‘Especially you, Pucci,’ said Cosmo, smiling at his sister. Vetinari didn’t have a sister like Pucci, either. No one did, Cosmo was prepared to bet. She was a fiend in vaguely human shape.

‘You’ve still got something wrong with your eyebrow, you know,’ said Pucci. She had a table by herself, a voice like a saw encountering a nail with a slight additional touch of foghorn, and was always referred to as ‘a society beauty’, which showed just how rich the Lavishes were. Cut in half, she might make two society beauties but not, at that point, very beautiful ones. While it was said that men she had spurned jumped off bridges in despair, the only person known to have said this was Pucci herself.

‘I’m sure you all know—’ Cosmo began.

‘Thanks to your side of the family’s total incompetence you have lost us the bank!’

That came from the far corner of the room, but it triggered a rising chorus of complaint.

‘We are all Lavishes here, Josephine,’ he said sternly. ‘Some of us were even born a Lavish.’

That didn’t work. It ought to have done. It would have done for Vetinari, Cosmo was sure. But for Cosmo, it only upset people. The growls of objection got louder.

‘Some of us make a better job of it!’ snapped Josephine. She was wearing a necklace of emeralds, and they reflected a greenish light on her face. Cosmo was impressed.