The headquarters of the Most Ancient and Honourable Guild of Assessors stood on Wixon's Alley, and had been carefully designed, several centuries ago, to be impossible to assess.

It was four storeys tall from the front, three from the back, and five from the side, an arrangement which had defeated every surveyor ever sent to measure it. It had either eleven windows or none, depending on whether you counted windows that had been bricked up, painted on, or declared by Guild ruling to be "decorative apertures in a state of permanent administrative review." Its roofline had been the subject of litigation for the better part of two centuries. The building paid, in its own taxes, one peppercorn a year, which it disputed.1

Moist stood across the alley and admired it the way one craftsman admires another's work. Then he went home to break the news to his wife, on the principle that of the two dangerous conversations awaiting him that morning, it was better to start with the one involving someone who loved him. Probably.

Adora Belle Dearheart received the announcement that her husband was now the Collector-General of Taxes for the city of Ankh-Morpork in the manner in which she received most things: motionless, narrow-eyed, behind a cigarette that was burning down like a fuse.

'Taxes,' she said.

'Yes.'

'You.'

'Yes.'

'The man who once sold a dwarf a hat that I happen to know was a repainted bucket.'

'It was a very good repaint. He came back for a second one,' said Moist. 'Anyway, that's exactly the point. Vetinari says the city needs someone who understands how money hides. You can't catch a liar with an honest man. Honest men keep expecting the truth to turn up and give evidence. It never does. It's far too busy being suppressed.'

Adora Belle blew a thoughtful jet of smoke at the ceiling, where it joined the permanent reserve.

'The Golem Trust got a letter from the Guild of Assessors last month,' she said, in the voice of a woman taking a knife out of a drawer in case it should be needed later. 'They've reclassified golems. Two thousand free golems, Moist, working, earning, saving — and the Guild has ruled that they're property. Taxable property. Category: industrial plant, ambulatory. Dorfl got an assessment addressed to "the Owner." He stood in my office holding it for two hours. You know what it sounds like when a golem grinds his teeth? Like continents having an argument.'

'That's monstrous,' said Moist, and meant it, and then the other part of his brain — the part he kept in a locked drawer and fed occasionally — added: and useful. An outrage on day one. A flag to nail to the mast. He hated that part of his brain. It was right far too often.

'Fix it,' said Adora Belle, stubbing out the cigarette with the air of a woman signing a treaty, 'or I'll fix it, and my way involves the Trust's lawyers and a golem standing very politely in Mister Slope's office doorway for as long as it takes. They don't sleep, Moist. They can wait forever. It's amazing how negotiable people become around hour ninety.'

'I married you for your diplomacy,' said Moist.

'You married me because I can tell when you're lying.'

'That too,' said Moist, who couldn't tell, at this distance, whether he was.

The interior of the Guild of Assessors was brown. Not painted brown — accumulated brown, the deep nicotine-and-varnish brown of a place where time itself had been filed under T and forgotten. Clerks moved between towering shelves with the silence of deep-sea creatures. Somewhere in the building's depths, a single abacus clicked, slowly, like a deathwatch beetle that had gone into accountancy.

Moist was shown up through the Hall of Files, where the city's entire fiscal history was stored in forty thousand drawers,2 and into an office at the top of the building where an old man sat behind a desk the size of a tomb and considerably more cheerful.

Albright Slope did not look like a monster. This, Moist knew, was the first thing to understand about him, because nothing dangerous ever does; the world's most successful predators look like a quiet pool, a fallen log, a kindly grandfather in half-moon spectacles with a watch-chain across a comfortable waistcoat. Slope was somewhere in his eighties and had the pink, scrubbed, gently amused face of a man at peace with his ledgers. When he rose to shake hands, he creaked. It might have been the chair. Moist would not have bet on it.

'Mister Lipwig! The hero of the hour. Of several hours,' said Slope. His voice was soft and dry, like dust settling. 'The Post Office. The bank. The railway. And now they have given you us. I confess, when I read the announcement, I said to Mrs Cake's girl who does the teas, "Mark me, that young man will bring his famous energy to the office," I said. Do sit down. We are all terribly excited.'

Moist sat, noting that the visitor's chair was two inches lower than Slope's, angled toward the window's glare, and had one leg fractionally shorter than the others, so that the sitter rocked very slightly and forever felt, without knowing why, like a man on uncertain ground. It was beautiful work. Moist resolved to steal the idea.

'Mister Slope,' he said. 'The Vortin residence. One hundred and eighty-two windows. Assessed as a hovel.'

'Ah,' said Slope, beaming. 'You've been reading the files. How refreshing. Your predecessor, Mister Spindle, read the files too. A thorough man. Drowned, you know. In August.' He shook his head sadly. 'In a drought, of all the luck. The water was only ever found in his lungs. The Watch were baffled.' He took off his spectacles and polished them. 'The Vortin assessment is quite correct, Mister Lipwig, under Guild Ruling 3,041, which holds that a property's value is fixed at the moment of its first assessment. The Vortin residence was first assessed four centuries ago, when it was, indeed, a hovel. We are not responsible for what people build, Mister Lipwig. We are responsible for what we have agreed exists. That is the whole art of assessment. The map is not the territory — and thank goodness, because the territory pays terribly.'

'And what would it take,' said Moist, 'to reassess?'

'Form AV-100,' said Slope promptly. 'Application for Variance. Submitted in triplicate to the Committee of Review, which convenes,' he consulted, unnecessarily, a calendar whose topmost page said SEKTOBER and, beneath that, a year Moist didn't like the look of, 'upon the retirement of its current business. The current business was submitted one hundred and fifty-three years ago. It concerns a chicken.3 We expect a ruling any decade now. The wheels of the Guild grind slowly, Mister Lipwig, but they grind exceedingly —'

'Profitably,' said Moist.

The polishing stopped. Just for a moment, behind the half-moon spectacles, something looked out at Moist — something old and patient that had watched nine reformers come through that door, sat them in the rocking chair, given them tea, and sent flowers afterwards. Then it withdrew, and there was only a grandfather again, smiling.

'Finely,' said Slope, 'is the word I generally use. Will you take tea? We have a girl who does it.'

'Thank you,' said Moist, standing up, 'but I make it a rule never to drink anything in a building I can't value. Good day, Mister Slope. I'll see myself out. I'll count the stairs on the way down — somebody should.'

It was, he reflected in the brown silence of the landing, a good exit line, and it had been worth it just to deliver, and his legs wanted very much to break into a run, and he didn't let them, all the way down, past the deep-sea clerks and the deathwatch abacus and out into the blessed, filthy, honest air of Wixon's Alley.

Behind him, at the top of the building, Albright Slope sat quite still for some time. Then he drew a sheet of black-bordered notepaper toward him, dipped his pen, and wrote, in a fine copperplate hand, the single word: Wreath?

He did not write a name after it. There was, after all, no hurry. There never had been.

At the Royal Bank of Ankh-Morpork, in the office of the chief accountant, Of-the-Twilight-the-Darkness sat surrounded by the week's deposits and frowned, insofar as a goblin can be said to do anything else.

Goblins, it is now widely known, perceive the world chiefly through smell, and a goblin accountant smells money the way a conductor hears an orchestra: not as a noise, but as a hundred voices that had better all be playing the same tune. Gold from the cattle markets smelled of honest dung and fear. Clacks money smelled of ozone and ambition. The Watch payroll smelled of Sergeant Colon, which was regrettable but consistent.

The deposit in front of him — routine, modest, made weekly by a holding company with a name so boring it had clearly been chosen by an expert4 — smelled of dust, and varnish, and old brown rooms, and underneath that, faint as a signature under nine coats of paint, of windows that had never been counted.

Of-the-Twilight-the-Darkness laid one long finger on the ledger and said, in the dark fluting voice of his people:

'Hang. On.'

And in the Oblong Office, Drumknott coughed his quietest cough, the one reserved for matters that had got past him, which were few, and troubled him, which was worse.

'A gentleman to see you, my lord. He has no appointment. He was simply — in the anteroom. The guards don't remember admitting him. He says he is from the Bureau of Universal Compliance.'

Vetinari did not look up. 'There is no such bureau.'

'Yes, my lord. I informed him of that. He said,' Drumknott consulted his notebook, and his hand, Vetinari observed, was not quite steady, '"There is now. There always has been now."'

Vetinari laid down his pen.

'Grey, is he?' he said quietly. 'Grey suit, grey face, a mouth that moves a half-second after the words arrive?'

'You know the gentleman, my lord?'

'No,' said Lord Vetinari, rising. 'And it is everyone's misfortune that he intends to correct that. Show it in.'