The pots began arriving on the Wednesday.

They came in by train, which would have been remarkable enough a few years earlier, when the only things goblins were permitted to bring into Ankh-Morpork were grievances, and those only in small amounts. They came on the morning service from Uberwald, three carriages of goblins sitting bolt upright with baskets on their knees, declining all offers to stow them in the luggage van with a politeness that could have etched glass. They came from the Chalk and the Shires and the deep delvings under Copperhead; they came carried by hand, by clan elders who had not in four hundred years travelled further than the next valley, because word had gone out along the smell-roads and the clacks alike, and the word was this:

The big city is opening a ledger. A true one. They are asking what is owed. Bring the pots.

For these were not the everyday unggue, the pots of fingernails and teeth and small personal accountancy. These were the deep pots, the clan pots, the pots of that-which-is-owed going back past the founding of cities, past the naming of rivers, each bead a debt the world had declined to write down, each pot sealed and passed and remembered through ten thousand years of nobody asking. The goblins had kept the books through every age that called them vermin. They had merely been waiting, with the patience of stone, for someone to request the audit.1

Mr Sideways stood in the doorway of the Office of the Collector-General, watching them come up Pseudopolis Yard in the rain, hundreds of them, baskets held high, and had to take off his spectacles and polish them for quite a long time, on account of the weather.

'Fifty-three years, Mr Lipwig,' he managed at last. 'Fifty-three years I kept the books for a city that never asked. I thought I was the only one.'

'Mr Sideways,' said Moist, 'I'd like you to meet everyone else.'

The attic could not hold it, so the work spread down through the building, floor by floor, the dust sheets coming off desks that had not seen use since the Century of the Fruitbat. Goblin archivists sat cross-legged in rows, opening pots in strict order of seniority, and chanting the entries — for every bead had a name, and the name had a smell, and the smell had a story, and the story had a sum — while clerks borrowed from the bank and the Post Office took dictation into the swelling volumes of the General Ledger of Everything Actually Owed.

It was slow. It was painstaking. It was, Mr Sideways declared, proper work, and he moved through the floors with his cuff-guards gleaming like a bishop at the consecration of a cathedral, resolving disputes of categorization with rulings that the goblin elders, connoisseurs of ten millennia of pedantry, received with deep professional respect.2

And the city, watching, did what Ankh-Morpork always does when history is being made: it formed a queue and looked for the angle.

Because Harry King had paid his taxes. He had paid them on Monday, in public, on the steps of the Office, in his good coat, with Effie on his arm and the Times iconographer in attendance, and he had held up the receipt — Series One: Lord Vetinari, Faintly Disappointed — and declared, in a voice that carried to the docks, 'Forty years I've paid this city under the table. Today I paid it over the table, and I got this, and it's going in the front hall in a gold frame, and any man who wants to imply Harry King don't pay his way can come round and read it.'

By Tuesday, the receipt was being reproduced in the Times. By Wednesday, Cripslock's the engravers reported that persons unknown were attempting to forge receipts for taxes they had not paid, which Moist considered the highest compliment his career had ever received. By Thursday, the queue outside the Office went round the corner into Pseudopolis Yard proper, and it was not entirely about the collecting craze, or the rumoured Smiling Vetinari misprint,3 or even about being seen to be square, although all of these were doing brisk work in the city's soul.

It was the other thing. The thing nobody in the queue said aloud, though everyone in it had read about the house on Scoone Avenue, and everyone had seen the grey gentlemen counting, and everyone had begun, in the small hours, to wonder what their own file said.

Because the word had gone round, in the way that the important words do, ahead of and beneath the official announcements: if you pay, you're entered. Entered in the new ledger. The true one. The one backed ten thousand years deep. Name, household, trade, kin — written down as really existing, witnessed, attested, smelled and sealed.

The people of Ankh-Morpork, who had spent four centuries evading the tax rolls with skill, cunning, and outright artillery, queued in the rain for the privilege of being on one. Moist stood at the window watching them, and felt the thing he always felt at the heart of every successful scheme, the vertigo of the trick that works because it is true: he had told Vetinari he would make people want to pay taxes.

He had merely needed the end of the world to do it.

'No,' said Commander Vimes.

'Commander —'

'No, sir. With respect. Which is doing some heavy lifting in that sentence.' Vimes stood in front of the Patrician's desk in the manner of a man who had been standing in front of that desk for thirty years and had worn a groove. On the desk lay Albright Slope's confession: forty pages, itemized, cross-referenced, in fine copperplate, the most beautifully prepared document ever to pass across Vimes's career, nine murders presented like a company prospectus. 'He's confessed. I have nine bodies, nine families, and a signed account that reads like he's proud of the bookkeeping. And you're telling me he walks around free until some grey clipboard says the audit's done.'

'I am telling you,' said Vetinari, 'that Mr Slope is presently the single most cooperative witness in the history of the city, that the vault beneath Wixon's Alley is being copied into the General Ledger at this hour by your own wife's clacks-clerks among others, and that if you arrest him today, the Guild's lawyers will have the confession ruled inadmissible by Friday on the grounds that the deceased cannot legally confess to anything.' He let that sit. 'On paper, Commander, the man has been dead for forty-seven years. Until Mr Lipwig's ledger is established as authoritative, your prisoner does not exist. You cannot hang a clerical error. I am given to understand that certain parties below Wixon's Alley intend to demonstrate precisely that principle upon him, and upon two thousand golems, and ultimately upon every soul in this city whose life has wandered from its paperwork. Which is, I need hardly tell you—'

'Everyone,' said Vimes. He stared at the confession. 'Everyone in the world.' He was quiet for a moment, and when he spoke again it was not really to Vetinari. 'You know what the worst of it is, sir? He came to my office. Voluntarily. Sat in the chair, hat on his knees, and asked me — asked me — to promise he'd be tried. Tried proper, he said, evidence and a judge and the drop at the end if it comes to it. He said,' and Vimes's jaw worked, 'he said I was the only man in the city he trusted to make sure he gets punished. Forty years I've dreamed of the day the big ones come to my office. In the dream it never felt like this.'

'Like what, Commander?'

'Like agreeing with him about something.' Vimes picked up the confession, squared its edges, and tucked it under his arm with the care of a man carrying a baby made of evidence. 'The law's for people. That's the whole of it, sir, that's everything I know. It's for people — even him. Especially him, or it isn't law, it's just the biggest gang. So I'll wait for your audit. And the day it ends, I will be on his doorstep at one minute past, with a warrant and two witnesses, and he will have his trial, and his judge, and every last inch of due process, whether the universe thinks he exists or not.' He put on his helmet. 'Because if those grey buggers get to decide who's real, sir, then nobody is. And I'm not having it. Not on my Watch.'

He was at the door when Vetinari said, mildly, 'Commander. You are aware that is precisely the argument Mr Lipwig is constructing, in ledger form.'

'Yes, sir,' said Vimes, with loathing. 'Don't think it doesn't keep me up at night, agreeing with two of them.'

The grey gentlemen finished counting on the last day of Sektober.

The city knew the moment it happened, because they stopped. All over Ankh-Morpork, on every corner, at the same instant, the clipboards came down, and the grey figures stood motionless, like clocks between ticks, and a great accidental silence rolled across the city as a million people noticed something they could not name had ended.

The Notice appeared at dawn. It was not posted; posting implies an interval during which a thing is not yet posted. It was simply on every door in the city, every door at once, from the Palace gates to the lean-tos of the Shades, one sheet of fog-grey paper per household, and it read, in full:

NOTICE OF FINAL RECONCILIATION.

The enumeration of the entity ANKH-MORPORK is complete. Discrepancies between record and fact have been identified in the number of 1,142,718. In accordance with the first rule of records, reconciliation will be effected to the authoritative entry in each case.

Reconciliation commences at midnight, 32nd December, upon the conclusion of the year's accounts.

Residents are advised that no action is required. No action is, in the general case, recommended.

— BUREAU OF UNIVERSAL COMPLIANCE

Hogswatch Eve. The city read it on a million doorsteps in the grey morning light, and then, because it was Ankh-Morpork, a million people looked at the number — 1,142,718 discrepancies, in a city of a million souls — and performed the same arithmetic, and arrived at the same conclusion, which the Times put into words above its largest type since the dragon:

IT'S ALL OF US.

And the queue outside the Office of the Collector-General, by noon, was four miles long.