News travels fast in Ankh-Morpork, gossip travels faster, and the news that somebody intended to collect taxes properly travelled at the speed of panic, which is the fastest thing on the Disc apart from the dark, which is always there first, and Mrs Cake.1

By Thursday, three Guild presidents had requested urgent meetings with the Patrician and been given appointments in the spring. By Friday, an anonymous gentleman had offered Moist ten thousand dollars to take a long holiday, and been genuinely hurt when Moist explained that he'd been offered twelve not to, by a different anonymous gentleman, and was now soliciting further bids as a public auction with proceeds to the Treasury. By Saturday, the Times had run the headline THE TAXMAN COMETH above a Wm. de Worde editorial cautiously in favour and an Otto Chriek iconograph of Moist looking trustworthy, which had taken eleven attempts, because looking trustworthy was Moist's factory setting and Otto kept complaining it came out too trustworthy and frightened the readers.

And on Sunday, Moist went to see Harry King, because if you wanted to know how money really moved through Ankh-Morpork, you asked the man who moved everything else.

Sir Harold King — Lord King now, of the Palace of Effluent,2 king of muck, master of the night-soil carts, owner of everything the city threw away and quite a lot it hadn't noticed was missing yet — received Moist in his office overlooking the great steaming acreage of his empire, poured him a brandy the size of a civic project, and listened to the pitch with his eyes half-closed, like an old crocodile listening to splashing.

'Taxes,' he said, when Moist had finished.

'Taxes,' Moist agreed.

'You come to Harry King,' said Harry, with rising wonder, 'to ask him to help you collect taxes.' He shook his head slowly. 'Forty years ago I'd have had the lads drop you in Number Three settling pond for that, and Mr Lipwig, Number Three is the one we don't talk about at dinner.'

'And now?'

Harry was silent for a while. He got up, with the grunt of a big man whose knees had filed for separation, and stood at the window, looking out over the carts and the chimneys and the lads, hundreds of them, goblins and dwarfs and trolls and men, hauling the city's tide.

'I'll tell you something I never told the Times,' he said. 'I have paid, in my life, bribes to seventeen guilds, twelve magistrates, every harbourmaster on the Circle Sea, and one man whose entire job, far as I could ever make out, was standing on a particular bridge being expensive. I have paid for permissions, exemptions, indulgences, considerations, facilitations, and once, gods help me, a disambiguation fee. You know what none of it ever bought me?' He turned round. 'A receipt. Nothing I could show Effie. Nothing I could put in a frame. Forty years of paying through the nose, Mr Lipwig, and at the end of it the quality still held theirs when I walked past.' He came back and sat down, and the crocodile eyes opened all the way. 'Now you tell me your scheme. One rate, wrote down in public where everyone can read it. Pay it and you're square — square as a Vimes, square as the bleedin' Patrician. And it comes with a receipt.'

'A collectible receipt,' said Moist. 'First series features Lord Vetinari looking faintly disappointed. We're holding back a misprint where he appears to be smiling. Strictly limited. The Assessors' system, Harry — you want to know what Slope's lads assessed this place at, last year?'

'I know what I paid,' growled Harry.

'You paid four hundred dollars to the Guild,' said Moist, who had spent three evenings in Mr Sideways' attic and now carried the blue ledgers around in his head like a loaded weapon, 'of which eleven dollars and forty pence reached the Treasury. The rest went into a holding company called Amalgamated Civic Holdings (Holdings), about which I expect to know a great deal more by Friday, because my chief accountant has been following its smell across the city like a bloodhound with a grudge.'

Harry King looked at him for a long moment. Then he began to laugh, the deep tarry laugh of a man hearing the punchline of a forty-year joke, and stuck out a hand like a shovel.

'Lord King,' he said, 'would be honoured to be the first man in Ankh-Morpork to pay the new tax. In full. In public. On the front page of the Times, in me good coat, holding up the receipt.' He gripped Moist's hand and leaned in, and his voice dropped to the register he'd used back when the settling ponds were doing brisker business. 'And a word in your ear, free, from a man who's survived in this town longer than you've been alive: Albright Slope has buried nine of you, son, and he never once used anything so traceable as a knife. You watch where you stand, you watch what you sign, and above all you watch anything heavy that's got a rope on it. Accidents in this city,' said Harry King, patting Moist's hand like an uncle, 'is the one industry nobody assesses.'

The grey gentlemen, meanwhile, had begun to count.

They appeared on street corners, in grey suits, with clipboards that no one ever saw them acquire, and they counted. They counted pigeons. They counted cobblestones, and were observed to frown and count them again. One of them stood for nine hours in Sator Square counting the rain, and the rain, which in Ankh-Morpork falls with a certain swagger, grew self-conscious under the scrutiny and moved off to fall somewhere less judgemental.

They were unfailingly polite, in the way of a guillotine that says mind your head. A beggar on Attic Bee Street who asked one of them for a copper was informed that begging constituted an unlicensed extraction of value from ambient sympathy, that sympathy reserves were already overdrawn citywide, and that he should be advised his existence had been noted, pending review. The beggar, a man who had withstood the Watch, the weather, and the Beggars' Guild membership committee, found himself unable to sleep for three nights, haunted by the special horror of being a line in a file.

Commander Vimes received reports of the grey gentlemen with the special expression he kept for things that were not yet technically crimes.

'They're counting people now,' said Captain Carrot. 'Constable Visit reports one of them followed him for an hour, making a mark every time he breathed. When Visit asked him to stop, the gentleman said breathing was a consumption of common resources and the mark-making was, quote, provisional, unquote.'

'And there's no law against counting,' said Vimes.

'No, sir.'

'There's no law against standing on a corner in a grey suit making a city of a million people feel like it's behind on the rent.'

'No, sir. Though Sergeant Colon has proposed one.'

'Tell Fred if we arrested people for being ominous I'd have to start with the mirror.' Vimes stared out the window. Down on the corner of Pseudopolis Yard, a grey figure stood, clipboard raised, counting the Watch House windows. Vimes had the strangest feeling it was also, somehow, counting him — and worse, that somewhere in the tally there was a column where everything he'd ever got away with was still adding up. 'Carrot,' he said quietly, 'find out who they report to. Everything reports to something. And when you find it, I want to know what it's afraid of.'

'Do you think they're afraid of anything, sir?'

'Everything that keeps books is afraid of something, Captain. That's why it keeps books.'

Moist walked home that evening along Lower Broadway, with Harry King's brandy keeping the chill off and Harry King's warning entirely failing to keep off the thing it had warned about, because at the corner of Moon Pond Lane, a piano fell on him.3

Or rather, it fell where he had been. Afterwards, he could never properly explain the half-second that saved his life: a smell of dust and varnish on the wrong street, a flicker of copperplate handwriting across his mind's eye, the conman's deep instinct for the moment when the mark is you. He was three feet clear when the pavement detonated into mahogany shrapnel and a discord that frightened every dog in the parish, and the rope — he looked up; there is always a rope — swung gently from the crane of a removals firm whose crew had, witnesses agreed, knocked off early, to a man, ten minutes before.

The street rang with the silence after a chord that big. And in that silence, sitting on the wreckage of the keyboard, entirely unbothered by the splinters, was a tall figure in a black robe, idly picking out a one-fingered tune on the three keys that still worked.

GOOD EVENING, said Death. DO EXCUSE ME. I WAS GIVEN TO UNDERSTAND THERE WOULD BE AN APPOINTMENT HERE, BUT THE PAPERWORK APPEARS TO HAVE BEEN... AMENDED. He consulted an hourglass, in which sand fell upward for a moment, sheepishly, before remembering itself. AT THE LAST INSTANT. THAT IS UNUSUAL. YOU ARE AN UNUSUAL MAN, MISTER LIPWIG. THIS IS, I BELIEVE, THE FOURTH TIME YOU HAVE BEEN PENCILLED IN.

'I'd say I'm sorry to keep missing you,' said Moist, with the gallows cheer of a man who had, after all, been formally hanged once and considered every day since to be embezzled from the universe, 'but you'd know I was lying.'

I WOULD. I ALWAYS DO. IT IS ONE OF THE GREAT DISAPPOINTMENTS OF MY WORK — EVERYONE LIES TO ME, AND NO ONE HAS EVER ONCE GOT AWAY WITH IT. Death rose, dusting off piano. YOU ARE THE TAX MAN NOW, I HEAR. WE ARE COLLEAGUES OF A KIND. THE TWO CERTAINTIES. He looked down at Moist, and in the blue fires of those eye sockets there was something that might, in anything else, have been called wry. ALTHOUGH I CONFESS I HAVE NEVER UNDERSTOOD YOUR SIDE OF THE TRADE. HUMANS AMAZE ME. THEY WILL DUEL, SMUGGLE, PERJURE, EMIGRATE, AND ON SEVERAL OCCASIONS IN MY DIRECT PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE DIE, TO AVOID PAYING FOR THE PRIVILEGE OF BEING ALIVE. He paused. WHICH REMINDS ME. A WORD TO THE WISE, MISTER LIPWIG, FROM ONE COLLECTOR TO ANOTHER: THERE ARE PERSONS IN YOUR CITY AT PRESENT WHO INTEND TO QUERY THAT PRIVILEGE ENTIRELY. THEY ARE NOT MY COLLEAGUES. THEY ARE NOT YOURS. THEY DO NOT COLLECT, MISTER LIPWIG. THEY CANCEL. I SHOULD TAKE IT PERSONALLY, EXCEPT THAT TAKING THINGS PERSONALLY IS PRECISELY WHAT THEY OBJECT TO.

'The grey gentlemen,' said Moist. 'What are they?'

WHAT IS LEFT, said Death, WHEN YOU TAKE EVERYTHING PERSONAL AWAY. He stepped over the wreckage, and paused, in the manner of one observing the small courtesies. MY REGARDS TO YOUR WIFE. AND MISTER LIPWIG — He gestured at the splintered ruin of the piano, the empty crane, the rope. DO LOOK INTO WHO AMENDED THE PAPERWORK. IT WAS NOT ME, AND IT WAS NOT YOU, AND IN MY EXPERIENCE THAT MEANS SOMEBODY, SOMEWHERE, IS KEEPING A THIRD SET OF BOOKS.

And then there was only the street, and the rain coming back now the counting gentleman had gone, and Moist von Lipwig standing in the wreckage of his own appointment, suddenly very sober, thinking about copperplate handwriting, and black-bordered notepaper, and the word Wreath? — and about who, or what, had crossed his name out.