Vimes never seemed to leave the guard’s van, except for occasional journeys down the train to talk to the King and his bodyguards, and it was into the guard’s van that the clacks flimsies were delivered.

There were always goblins in the guard’s van, of course, but it didn’t stop at that. You found them everywhere, adjusting screws, oiling, greasing and, well, tinkering and tapping. Moist had asked Simnel about that early on and had been told they greased everything that needed greasing and tapped what needed tapping, and generally stopped things getting out of kilter.

Of course, there was still the smell, but once you got used to it, as Adora Belle had long ago, you never even thought about it. And they ran errands when the train stopped at out-of-the-way places, and collected clacks flimsies for news of everything that might pertain to the journey.

The good old clacks, people called it nowadays. They used to call it unsightly, but now, quite likely, you would ask the clacks what the weather was like ahead of your journey. A little comfort but not necessarily necessary. Nevertheless, once you were bereft of the clacks you thought of yourself as a second-class citizen. Spike was always telling him how enraged clients got about their clacks bills, which were, he considered, not bad in the circumstances; but a kind of ratchet formed in people’s minds: here is the new thing and here it is. And yesterday you never thought about it and after today you don’t know what you would do without it. That was what the technology was doing. It was your slave but, in a sense, it might be the other way round.

After the excitement of the water crane, Moist was at a loose end and now, by habit, if he felt himself at a loose end he went to the guard’s van. Detritus lay asleep on a pile of packing cases near by, snoring, surrounded by all the necessary debris of the place. It seemed that all the travellers who were not passengers treated the guard’s van as their home. Possibly the coffee maker was the reason for that. And here was Of the Twilight the Darkness, who made very special coffee. Moist thought about that for a moment, as the grinning goblin handed him a bubbling mug.

‘I’ve got it. You’re a shaman, aren’t you?’

The goblin’s grin was wider. ‘Sorry, mister. You is not on the money here. You could call me a shamegog. Unfortunately, dissonance, but can’t have everything.’

Moist looked into his coffee and said, ‘It smells lovely, but what’ll it make me do?’

The shamegog thought for a moment and said, ‘It make you wide awake, busy man! Maybe puts hair on chest. Slight tendency to make you piss more often.’ Now he gave Moist a sideways look that really only a goblin can achieve and said, ‘Guaranteed not to make you killer of dwarfs.’ It was really very good coffee. Moist had to give the goblin that.