Moist looked around the fiery hellhole that was the ironworks. In the satanic air he could just about tell the golems from the human workers in their leather overalls, because the golems were the ones walking around holding pieces of red-hot iron in their bare hands. The furnaces illuminated the grey sky, and always and forever the clanging went on. And the pile of fresh new rails got bigger and bigger.

He nodded, since normal speech was clearly out of the question among the clanging and the banging. Indeed, he knew how it was. In short, the citizens of Ankh-Morpork who might be expected to fill the heavy-lifting trades, such as the golems and the trolls, were increasingly realizing that just because they were big and tough did not mean they had to do a big tough job if they didn’t want to. This was, after all, Ankh-Morpork, where a man walked free even if he was not, strictly speaking, a man.

The problem, if you could call it that, had been building up for some time. Moist had first noticed what was happening when Adora Belle said that her new hair stylist was a troll, Mr Teasy-Weasy Fornacite[25], and, as it turned out, a pretty good hairdresser, according to Adora Belle and her friends. And there it was: the new reality. If all sapient species were equal, that’s what you got: golem housekeepers and goblin maids and, he thought, troll lawyers.

Harry King was rumbling on as they emerged back into the open: ‘It’s a bugger! Now they’re free, you can’t get the golems! Ask your missus! They’re all off doing landscape gardening and suchlike daisy rubbish, and I reckon I’m paying every human ironworker in the damn city double the odds, and only twenty-one of them heavy boys. It’s such a shame, such a shame.’

‘I don’t know, Harry, you seem to be moving phenomenally fast.’