Discworld - 33 - Going Postal by Terry Pratchett

Discworld - 33 - Going Postal by Terry Pratchett

Author:Terry Pratchett
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Fantasy
ISBN: 9780060502935
Publisher: HarperTorch
Published: 2005-02-14T02:00:00+00:00


CHAPTER 7A

Post Haste

The nature of Boris the horse • Foreboding tower

• Mr. Lipwig cools off • The lady with buns on her ears

• Invitation accepted • Mr. Robinson’s box

• A mysterious stranger

HOBSON HAD TRIED Boris as a racehorse, and he would have been a very good one were it not for his unbreakable habit, at the off, of attacking the horse next to him and jumping the railings at the first bend. Moist clapped his hand onto his hat, wedged his toes into the bellyband, and hung onto the reins as Broadway came at him all at once, carts and people blurring past, his eyeballs pressing into his head.

There was a cart across the street but there was no possibility of steering Boris. Huge muscles bunched, and there was a long, slow, silent moment as he drifted over the cart.

Hooves slid over the cobbles ahead of a trail of sparks when he landed again, but he recovered by sheer momentum and accelerated.

The usual crowd around the Hubwards Gate scattered, and then, filling the horizon, there were the plains. They did something to Boris’s mad horse brain. All that space, nice and flat, with only a few easily jumped obstacles, like trees.

He found extra muscle and speeded up again, bushes and trees and carts flying toward him.

Moist cursed the bravado with which he’d ordered the saddle taken away. Every part of his body already hated him. But, in truth, Boris—once you got past the pineapple—wasn’t too bad a ride. He’d hit his rhythm, a natural, single-footed gait, and his burning eyes were focused on the blueness. His hatred of everything was for the moment subsumed by the sheer joy of space. Hobson was right, you couldn’t steer him with a mallet, but at least he was headed in the right direction, which was away from his stable. Boris didn’t want to spend the days kicking the bricks out of his wall while waiting to throw the next bumptious idiot. He wanted to bite the horizon. He wanted to run.

Moist carefully removed his hat and gripped it in his mouth. He didn’t dare imagine what’d happen if he lost it, and he’d need to have it on his head at the end of the journey. It was important. It was all about style.

One of the towers of the Grand Trunk was ahead and slightly to the left. There were two in the twenty miles between Ankh-Morpork and Sto Lat, because they were taking almost all the traffic of lines that stretched right across the continent. Beyond Sto Lat, the Trunk began to split into tributaries, but here, flashing overhead, the words of the world were flowing—

—should be flowing. But the shutters were still. As he drew level, Moist saw men working high up on the open wooden tower; by the look of it, a whole section had broken off.

Ha! So long, suckers! That’d take some repairing! Worth an overnight attempt at a delivery to Pseudopolis, maybe? He’d talk to the coachmen; it was not as if they’d ever paid the Post Office for their damn coaches.



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