At one minute past midnight on Hogswatch morning, with the bells still rolling and the snow coming down on Wixon's Alley like the universe issuing receipts, Commander Sam Vimes knocked on the door of the Most Ancient and Honourable Guild of Assessors.

It opened at once. Albright Slope stood in the doorway in his good coat, hat on, a small valise packed at his feet, and behind him on the hall table a tea tray with two cups, one of them already poured and going cold, because he had estimated the Commander's arrival to within ninety seconds and had erred, characteristically, on the side of the books.

'Albright Slope,' said Vimes, 'I am arresting you on nine counts of murder, and I'm obliged to inform you that you have the right to remain silent, though from what I hear it's about forty years too late to start.'

'Quite so, Commander.' Slope picked up the valise. 'You'll find a folder in the side pocket — the procedural requirements for arrests effected on a public holiday. There's a form your sergeant should have brought. He hasn't. I took the liberty of completing it for him. It only wants your signature, and the date, which is now, I'm pleased to confirm, officially the date.' And Albright Slope stepped out into the snow and the lamplight and the first hour of his existence, and held out his wrists for the handcuffs with the air of a man at long last submitting an account for settlement.

Vimes cuffed him. It was, he would tell Sybil later, the most satisfying click of his entire career, and also somehow the saddest, and he had given up trying to get the two feelings to balance, on the grounds that he wasn't a bloody accountant.

They walked to Pseudopolis Yard through the falling snow, the Commander and the prisoner, past windows full of Hogswatch candles, and neither of them said anything for some way, until Slope remarked, conversationally:

'Nine to two, Commander. Cripslock's book had Mister Lipwig dead by Hogswatch.'

'I had a dollar on him living,' said Vimes. 'Don't tell my wife. Or him.'

'A sound position. I myself,' said Slope, 'never gamble. In my experience the house always wins, and I have spent my whole life being the house, so I can confirm the experience from both — ' he paused, delicately, on the threshold of the Watch house, ' — sides of the ledger.'

'In you go, sunshine,' said Vimes, not unkindly, and the law of Ankh-Morpork, which is for people, took Albright Slope inside, where it kept him warm, and fed him, and tried him in the spring.

The trial of Albright Slope lasted eleven days, and is still studied, and was decided, as everyone had known it would be, by the reading of the ledgers.

The Guild's lawyers — retained by certain anonymous parties who featured prominently in those ledgers and were therefore, it might be thought, not entirely disinterested — had built their entire defence on time. The books ran to four centuries. The relevant entries numbered in the hundreds of thousands. A human clerk reading them into the court record, they calculated, would die of old age somewhere around volume sixty, the jury having predeceased him around volume forty; the court would be obliged to accept summaries, and summaries can be argued with, and arguing was the one expense their clients could still afford.

The prosecution called one witness.

Dorfl took the stand on the third morning, was sworn in on the truth of his own chem, picked up Volume One of the Guild's true ledgers in hands that could crush granite and held it like a hymnal, and began to read. He read in a voice like the patience of brick, clear to the back of the public gallery, never hurrying, never tiring, never once losing his place. He read through the lunch recess, the court having discovered no statute requiring a golem to stop. He read through the night, by arrangement, to an empty courtroom and a single stenographer working in shifts, and the record shows that when the judge returned each morning Dorfl would announce the page number, for the convenience of the court, in a tone that the Times described as 'the politest sound ever made by the inevitable.'

He read for eight days. Somewhere around the fourth, the city understood that it was watching the punchline of a very old joke: the creature the Guild had classified as industrial plant, ambulatory was the engine of its destruction, and the property was reading the property rolls, and there was nothing in all the marble of the law that could make him stop, because he was doing the one thing no one in that courtroom had ever managed before.

He was entering the whole truth into the record.

On the eleventh day the jury was out for forty minutes, which the foreman later explained was thirty-five minutes of tea and five of voting. Guilty, on all counts. The judge, in the hush, asked the prisoner if he had anything to say before sentence.

Albright Slope rose, creaking, in the dock. He looked smaller than he had; existence, the gallery agreed, took it out of a man. He was silent for a moment, the great copperplate mind composing its final entry, and then he said:

'Only this, my lord. Everything I did, I did because I learned, very young, that the world runs on its records, and that whoever holds the pen holds the world. I was right. I wish it noted that I was right — the gentlemen in grey were good enough to confirm it. My error was narrower, and I commend it to the court, and to every clerk in this city, and they know who they are.' The old eyes found, in the gallery, a small man in mended cuffs, and held him. 'I thought that because the records run the world, the records were the point. Mister Sideways knew better. The records are a promise, my lord. They are the promise that the world makes to the people in it: you happened, you mattered, you are owed. I spent forty-one years forging that promise.' He straightened, and squared his edges, like a document presenting itself for filing. 'The figure is nine lives, my lord. I have totalled the column every morning since. I am ready to settle.'

They hanged him on a grey morning in May, and he went, as promised, cooperatively; the hangman, Mr Trooper's successor, reported that the gentleman had checked the paperwork on the scaffold, found a date transposed, corrected it in pencil, initialled the margin, and thanked everyone for their professionalism.1

There were nine wreaths at the graves of nine reformers that morning, ordered years in advance through a holding company, paid in full, very good wreaths, with a card on each that read only: In settlement. And at the tenth grave, the new one, there was a single wreath that Slope had ordered for himself in '85 and kept current through forty-one years of subscription renewals — he had, after all, priced it long ago — and beside it, placed at dawn by a small figure who did not stay, a goblin pot, closed, the bead inside it rattling once in the wind, the account of Albright Slope carried, in the way of his people, not forgiven, never forgiven, but forward, which is all the mercy goblins believe in, and more, they would point out, than he extended to anyone.