[4] After years of undertaking confidence tricks, Moist von Lipwig is caught by the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, and is sentenced to death under his current alias, Albert Spangler.

Moist learns that the post office has been superseded by optical telegraph towers known as the "Clacks" which send messages using light signals and owned by the unscrupulous Reacher Gilt.

While staying in the post office Moist begins to have visions which show him that some of his confidence tricks led to tragedies for those he conned, which cause him to experience feelings of remorse for the first time.

These feelings are heightened when he discovers that Adora Belle's father Robert Dearheart was indirectly a victim of one of his cons, and as a result lost ownership of his invention, the Clacks.

Moist and Adora employ a disused Clack tower to intercept and secretly change the message from the biography to the content of Gilt's ledgers, providing evidence of the hired murders, which is witnessed in Ankh-Morpork.

In a post-credits sequence, Groat and Stanley are sore and exhausted after making the round-trip to Überwald with a mail coach, but excited because they bet on Moist to win the race at odds of 50-1.