Grag Bashfullsson lodged in a subdivided cellar in Cheap Street. The rent wasn’t much, but he had to admit that neither was the accommodation: he could lie on his very narrow bed and touch all four walls or, rather, three walls and a heavy curtain that separated his little space from that of the family of nineteen dwarfs that occupied the rest of the cellar. But meals were included, and they respected his privacy. It was something, to have a grag as a lodger, even if this one seemed rather young and showed his face. It still impressed the neighbors.

On the other side of the curtain, children were squabbling, a baby was crying, and there was the smell of rat-and-cabbage casserole. Someone was sharpening an axe. And someone else was snoring. For a dwarf in Ankh-Morpork, solitude was something that you had to cultivate on the inside.

Books and papers filled the space that wasn’t bed. Bashfullsson’s desk was a board laid across his knees. He was reading a battered book, its cover cracked and moldy, and the runes passing under his eye said: “It has no strength in this world. To fulfill any purpose, the Dark must find a champion, a living creature it can bend to its will…”

Bashfullsson sighed. He’d read the phrase a dozen times, hoping he could make it mean something other than the obvious. He copied the words into his notebook anyway. Then he put the notebook in his satchel, swung the satchel onto his back, went and paid Toin Footstamper two weeks’ rent in advance, and stepped out into the rain.