It wasn’t quite as bad as all that, but it was near enough these days, he told himself, as he looked over at the assembled members of his council in which, according to the rules, he was the first among equals. He had read somewhere in the scrolls that they owed him fealty, whatever that was. It sounded like a kind of porridge.

When his secretary, Aeron, had returned from a recent visit to Ankh-Morpork, he had described a foot-the-ball game he witnessed, which had, at its centre, a referee. Right now, Rhys was feeling something of what the referee had to go through since all the balls were kicked right at him. How could you be the Low King in a realm where even the factions had factions and those factions had microscopic factions? He envied, oh how he envied, Diamond King of Trolls who, apparently, gave instruction and advice to his myriad subjects. After which they said thank you, something that the Low King didn’t hear very often. Diamond King spoke for all trolls everywhere. The dwarfish race, however, had fractured now almost to the point of disarray and all of this ended up as a problem the Low King had to deal with.

There was today, obviously, an agenda or, rather, a regrettably large number of agendas, one for every faction. Glumly, Rhys wondered what the word was for a large number of agendas, and decided that the term should be a living death of agendaritis. It was the deep-down grags that gave him nightmares because, well, there was something offensive about those thick leather clothes and conical hats. After all, he thought, we’re all dwarfs together, are we not? Tak never mentioned that dwarfs should cover their faces in the society of their friends. It struck Rhys that this practice was deliberately provocative and, of course, disdainful.

Now, on the everlasting agenda, dwarfs from every mine were grumbling about the exodus of the young to the big cities. And, of course, they all had reasons for why this might be the case, all of them wrong. Anyone who wasn’t a dwarf who preferred to live in darkness, in every meaning of the word, knew that the reason the younger generation was now overwhelming Ankh-Morpork, for example, was simply down to those very same grumblers and their activities. On the other hand, those he thought of as progressive dwarfs, the type who would quite happily have a troll as a friend, were bearing down on him, the King, about their race’s tendency to drive itself into a kind of purdah.

There was a great cloud of misunderstanding in the Low King’s hall, which on every side appeared almost wilful, as if any dispute, however insignificant, had to be thrashed through to the bitter end. It was something in the dwarf psyche. We spend too much time indoors, Rhys thought. He sighed when he realized that Ardent, whose voice had become unbearably loud, now had the floor.

Ardent was a dwarf that the King would have liked to see present at a mine disaster, preferably underneath it. However, Ardent had followers, stupid followers, and he also had powerful friends. And that was it. Politics. Politics was like those little wooden sliding-picture games for children: you had to move all of the pieces in the hope of finding a place where the whole picture slotted together.