Making Money (Discworld, #36; Industrial Revolution, #5; Moist von Lipwig, #2)

by Terry Pratchett

Hurry up, Mr. Lipwig, I am not going to eat you. I have just had an acceptable cheese sandwich.”

Look out of the window and tell me what you see.” “Um . . . a small, scruffy dog watching a man taking a piss in an alley,” said Moist. “Sorry, but you chose the wrong time.” “Had I been taken less literally,” said Lord Vetinari, giving him a Look, “you would have seen a large, bustling city, full of ingenious people spinning wealth out of the common clay of the world.

It would be hard to imagine an uglier building that hadn’t won a major architectural award.

It was the smallest and ugliest dog Moist had ever seen. It resembled those goldfish with the huge bulging eyes that looked as though they were about to explode. Its nose, on the other hand, looked stoved in. It wheezed, and its legs were so bandy that it must sometimes trip over its own feet.

They were indeed what was known as “old money,” which meant that it had been made so long ago that the black deeds which had originally filled the coffers were now historically irrelevant.

As a family, people said, the Lavishes got along like a bagful of cats.

There was a gulp from Mr. Fusspot as the last of the sticky toffee pudding went down. He then turned the bowl over hopefully, in case there was any more. There never had been, but Mr. Fusspot was not a dog to bow down to the laws of causality.

The golems were all over the front page, and a lot of the inner pages were full of Vox Pops, which meant people in the street who didn’t know anything told other people what they knew, and lengthy articles by people who also didn’t know anything but could say it very elegantly in 2,500 words.

“Indeed,” said Vetinari. “A copy of something that does not exist. One can only assume that it is authentic in every respect.”