Carrying on from yesterday’s tale….

~~~~

“And, for the ‘hard of thinking’, what that means,” said the Arch-chancellor during lunch the next day, “is: No Messing With Stamps!”

Horace, naturally, read the new directive. He read it twice. Then he tried reading it backwards, on the off chance that some hidden clause had slipped in, permitting exactly what he wanted to do. It did not.

The wording was clear, exhaustive, and impressively hostile to altering stamps in all forms. Even the phrase ‘stamp duty’ had been carefully scratched out from an old copy of the city’s legal code and replaced with “Taxation (General).” And the Arch-chancellor’s clarification could not have been any clearer.

But here was the difficulty: Horace’s fingers itched. His mind twitched. His dreams, never previously the sort one would pay much attention to, now contained sheets and sheets of gleaming stamps, fluttering like a billion butterflies, bursting with colour and, more worryingly, unspent feeling. And every morning he awoke with the unshakeable conviction that he absolutely must try again.

He resisted this temptation, of course. He resisted staunchly. But apprentice wizards, as a group, are poorly endowed with staunchness.

On the second evening, while sweeping up shards of glass from some other apprentice’s exploding alembic, Horace’s hand strayed to the drawer where he had hidden a single scrap of his experimentally impregnated paper. It hummed faintly, like a cat trying to disguise the fact it had swallowed something important.

“I’ll just… tidy this away,” he muttered to himself.

And by “tidy” he, of course, meant “improve.”

This time, he tried moderation. No tincture of optimism. Just the merest pinch of distilled curiosity, a sprinkle of wonder, and the barest whisper of nostalgia. ‘I mean’, he thought to himself, ‘how can making the sum total of happiness greater be anything other than a good thing?’.

The stamp shimmered. It glowed faintly blue. When Horace tested it on himself he felt a sudden rush of memories: summer afternoons in fields that might never have existed, the smell of warm bread, the laughter of a grandmother who probably wasn’t his, but who seemed to be able to put up with him anyway. He found tears in his eyes. Some even streamed down his cheeks.

This, he decided, was better. Harmless, even. Definitely a good thing.

Unfortunately, and unsurprisingly, the effect spread. Not merely to the reader, but to anyone within about thirty feet. Which was why, the next morning, the Guild awoke to a peculiar atmosphere: professors leaning on brooms, or lurking in cupboards, sighing happily; apprentices exchanging heartfelt compliments; and one notoriously short-tempered troll bursting into a song about music, flower-patterned frocks and, strangely, a vast range of Alps.

Word got out. As it always did. And this time, it wasn’t the Thieves’ Guild who came knocking, but the Postmaster General himself, who had been forced to walk to work past a street full of strangers hugging lampposts and telling them they were beautiful.

Horace was summoned. He was, unsurprisingly, a little nervous. The last person Horace knew to have been summoned had mysteriously never been seen again. The Patrician was not famous for his laissez-faireism.

The Patrician listened gravely while Drumknott read out the complaint, pausing only to dab his eyes… apparently from the residual effects of handling the evidence envelope.

“Do you see the problem, Horace?” said the Patrician at last.

“Yes, sir,” Horace stammered. “It… it spreads too far.”

“No,” said the Patrician, softly, whilst massaging his temples, “the problem is that it works too well.”

There was a silence. Drumknott sniffed, sniffily.

“Now,” the Patrician continued, “a city powered by compulsory happiness is a dangerous and uncontrollable place… But a city reminded, very briefly, of warmth and happiness? That… could have uses.” His eyes narrowed. “In the right circumstances.”

And so began Horace’s peculiar journey. He was not exactly promoted, let’s face it, no one wanted him too close to anything even vaguely resembling official business. But neither was he banished or otherwise eviscerated. Instead, he found himself in a discreet laboratory beneath the Post Office, tasked with producing stamps in tiny, careful batches.

The first run was used on diplomatic letters to a neighbouring barony. The baron, upon opening his post, was so moved that he promptly signed the enclosed draft peace treaty rather than the (also enclosed) draft declaration of war. Another run was slipped quietly into tax demands, ensuring citizens paid while muttering fondly about their childhood memories (entirely false memories, obviously) of things actually working in society.

There were mishaps, of course. A batch steeped in melancholy accidentally caused half the Murkstone-Snatchly dockside staff to take the day off work, sit on barrels and stare longingly at the horizon. Another, slight unpleasantness led to three watchmen, infected with misplaced confidence, attempting to arrest the entire Assassin’s Guild.

But on balance, taken in the round and ignoring any assassin-based statistical bias, it worked.

Horace, was exhausted, frequently traumatised and occasionally on fire. But he’d remained alive and had discovered something remarkable: Almost anything could be quietly ignored.

Providing the Patrician was on-side.

And so, although he never admitted it aloud, every so often, Horace would tuck away a single, unmarked envelope with a shimmering square in the corner. Because he firmly believed, based on no evidence whatsoever, that somewhere in Murkstone-Snatchly, there was bound to be someone, of a young, preferably female, apprentice-wizardess persuasion, who needed a little wonder in the post.