Guild charter (Excerpt)¶

Founded in the year that no one quite remembers, though most agree it was after the Patrician finally stopped pretending he understood the clacks, the Scarlet Semaphore is the guild for those who prefer their mischief in code rather than cudgel. Membership is open to anyone with nimble fingers, a fondness for secrecy, and an alarming tendency to press buttons marked Do Not Press.

Our objectives are simple, in theory: observe, intercept, and occasionally rearrange the affairs of Ankh-Morpork so as to reveal the city’s latent absurdities. In practice, this involves complex rituals of blinking lights, cryptic symbols, and entirely unnecessary diagrams on tea-stained parchment.

Guild hall policies include:

• All members must learn the ancient art of sneaky typing and furtive pointing.

• Secrets are to be kept as zealously as the City Watch keeps paperwork (which is to say, inconsistently).

• The Patrician’s approval is neither required nor advisable to seek (but we suspect we are infiltrated).

Notable achievements include the temporary relocation of the Patrician’s favourite carriage, the convincing of the Guild of Merchants to accept imaginary coinage, and the invention of several entirely new ways to make the Ankh water level inexplicably rise.

In short: we are the invisible hand that occasionally pokes the other nearly invisible one, all in the name of something vaguely ethical.