Sam Vimes sighed when he heard the scream, but he finished shaving before he did anything about it.

Then he put his jacket on and strolled out into the wonderful late spring morning. Birds sang in the trees, bees buzzed in the blossom. The sky was hazy though, and thunderheads on the horizon threatened rain later. But for now, the air was hot and heavy. And in the old cesspit behind the gardener’s shed, a young man was treading water.

Well…treading, anyway.

Vimes stood back a little way and lit a cigar. It probably wouldn’t be a good idea to employ a naked flame any nearer to the pit. The fall from the shed roof had broken the crust.

“Good morning!” he said cheerfully.

“Good morning, Your Grace,” said the industrious treadler.

The voice was higher pitched than Vimes expected and he realized that, most unusually, the young man in the pit was in fact a young woman. It wasn’t entirely unexpected—the Assassins’ Guild was aware that women were at least equal to their brothers when it came to inventive killing—but it nevertheless changed the situation somewhat.

“I don’t believe we’ve met?” said Vimes. “Although I see you know who I am. You are…?”

“Wiggs, sir,” said the swimmer. “Jocasta Wiggs. Honored to meet you, Your Grace.”

“Wiggs, eh?” said Vimes. “Famous family in the Guild. ‘Sir’ will do, by the way. I think I once broke your father’s leg?”

“Yes, sir. He asked to be remembered to you,” said Jocasta.

“You’re a bit young to be sent on this contract, aren’t you?” said Vimes.

“Not a contract, sir,” said Jocasta, still paddling.

“Come now, Miss Wiggs. The price on my head is at least—”

“The Guild council put it in abeyance, sir,” said the patient swimmer. “You’re off the register. They’re not accepting contracts on you at present.”

“Good grief, why not?”

“Couldn’t say, sir,” said Miss Wiggs. Her patient struggles had brought her to the edge of the pit, and now she was finding that the brickwork was in very good repair, quite slippery, and offered no handholds. Vimes knew this, because he’d spent several hours one afternoon carefully arranging that this should be so.

“So why were you sent, then?”

“Miss Band sent me as an exercise,” said Jocasta. “I say, these bricks really are jolly tricky, aren’t they?”

“Yes,” said Vimes, “they are. Have you been rude to Miss Band lately? Upset her in any way?”

“Oh, no, Your Grace. But she did say I was getting overconfident and would benefit from some advanced field work.”

“Ah. I see.” Vimes tried to recall Miss Alice Band, one of the Assassins’ Guild’s stricter teachers. She was, he’d heard, very hot on practical lessons.

“So…she sent you to kill me, then?” he said.

“No, sir! It’s an exercise! I don’t even have any crossbow bolts! I just had to find a spot where I could get you in my sights and then report back!”

“She’d believe you?”

“Of course, sir,” said Jocasta, looking rather hurt. “Guild honor, sir.”

Vimes took a deep breath. “You see, Miss Wiggs, quite a few of your chums have tried to kill me at home in recent years. As you might expect, I take a dim view of this.”

“Easy to see why, sir,” said Jocasta, in the voice of one who knows that their only hope of escaping from their present predicament is reliant on the goodwill of another person, who has no pressing reason to have any.

“And so you’d be amazed at the booby traps there are around the place,” Vimes went on. “Some of them are pretty cunning, even if I say so myself.”

“I certainly never expected the tiles on the shed to shift like that, sir.”

“They’re on greased rails,” said Vimes.

“Well done, sir!”

“And quite a few of the traps drop you into something deadly,” said Vimes.

“Lucky for me that I fell into this one, eh, sir?”

“Oh, that one’s deadly too,” said Vimes. “Eventually deadly.” He sighed. He really wanted to discourage this sort of thing but…they’d put him off the register? It wasn’t that he’d liked being shot at by hooded figures in the temporary employ of his many and varied enemies, but he’d always looked at it as some kind of vote of confidence. It showed that he was annoying the rich and arrogant people who ought to be annoyed.

Besides, the Assassins’ Guild was easy to outwit. They had strict rules, which they followed quite honorably, and this was fine by Vimes, who, in certain practical areas, had no rules whatsoever.

Off the register, eh? The only other person not on it anymore, it was rumored, was Lord Vetinari, the Patrician. The Assassins understood the political game in the city better than anyone, and if they took you off the register it was because they felt your departure would not only spoil the game but also smash the board…

“I’d be jolly grateful if you could pull me out, sir,” said Jocasta.

“What? Oh, yes. Sorry, got clean clothes on,” said Vimes. “But when I get back to the house I’ll tell the butler to come down here with a ladder. How about that?”

“Thank you very much, sir. Nice to have met you, sir.”

Vimes strolled back to the house. Off the register? Was he allowed to appeal? Perhaps they thought—

The scent rolled over him.

He looked up.

Overhead, a lilac tree was in bloom.

He stared.

Damn! Damn! Damn! Every year he forgot. Well, no. He never forgot. He just put the memories away, like old silverware that you didn’t want to tarnish. And every year they came back, sharp and sparkling, and stabbed him in the heart. And today, of all days…

He reached up, and his hand trembled as he grasped a bloom and gently broke the stem. He sniffed at it. He stood for a moment, staring at nothing. And then he carried the sprig of lilac carefully back up to his dressing room.

Willikins had prepared the official uniform for today. Sam Vimes stared at it blankly, and then remembered. Watch Committee. Right. The battered old breastplate wouldn’t do, would it…Not for His Grace the Duke of Ankh, Commander of the City Watch, Sir Samuel Vimes. Lord Vetinari had been very definite about that, blast it.

Blast it all the more because, unfortunately, Sam Vimes could see the point. He hated the official uniform, but he represented a bit more than just himself these days. Sam Vimes had been able to turn up for meetings with grubby armor, and even Sir Samuel Vimes could generally contrive to find a way to stay in street uniform at all times, but a duke…well, a duke needed a bit of polish. A duke couldn’t have the arse hanging out of his trousers when meeting foreign diplomats. Actually, even plain old Sam Vimes never had the arse hanging out of his trousers, either, but no one would have actually started a war if he had.

The plain old Sam Vimes had fought back. He got rid of most of the plumes and the stupid tights, and ended up with a dress uniform that at least looked as though its owner was male. But the helmet had gold decoration, and the bespoke armorers had made a new, gleaming breastplate with useless gold ornamentation on it. Sam Vimes felt like a class traitor every time he wore it. He hated being thought of as one of those people that wore stupid ornamental armor. It was gilt by association.

He twirled the sprig of lilac in his fingers, and smelled again the heady smell. Yes…it hadn’t always been like this…

Someone had just spoken to him. He looked up.

“What?” he barked.

“I enquired if her ladyship is well, Your Grace?” said the butler, looking startled. “Are you feeling all right, Your Grace?”

“What? Oh, yes. No. I’m fine. So is her ladyship, yes, thank you. I popped in before I went outside. Mrs. Content is with her. She says it won’t be for a while.”

“I have advised the kitchen to have plenty of hot water ready, Your Grace, nevertheless,” said Willikins, helping Vimes on with the gilty breastplate.

“Yes. Why do they need all that water, do you think?”

“I couldn’t say, Your Grace,” said Willikins. “Probably best not to inquire.”

Vimes nodded. Sybil had already made it quite clear, with gentle tact, that his services were not required on this particular case. It had been, he had to admit, a bit of a relief.

He handed Willikins the sprig of lilac. The butler took it without comment, inserted it into a little silver tube of water that would keep it fresh for hours, and fixed it onto one of the breastplate straps.

“Time moves on, doesn’t it, Your Grace,” he said, dusting Vimes down with a small brush.

Vimes took out his watch. “It certainly does. Look, I’ll drop in at the Yard on my way to the palace, sign what needs signing, and I’ll be back as soon as possible, all right?”

Willikins gave him a look of almost unbutlerly concern.

“I’m sure her ladyship will be fine, Your Grace,” he said. “Of course she is not, not—”

“—young,” said Vimes.

“I would say she is richer in years than many other primagravida,” said Willikins smoothly. “But she is a well-built lady, if you don’t mind me saying so, and her family have traditionally had very little trouble in the childbirth department—”

“Prima what?”

“New mothers, Your Grace. I’m sure her ladyship would much rather know that you were running after miscreants than wearing a hole in the library carpet.”

“I expect you’re right, Willikins. Er…oh, yes, there’s a young lady dogpaddling in the old cesspit, Willikins.”

“Very good, Your Grace. I shall send the kitchen boy down there with a ladder directly. And a message to the Assassins’ Guild?”

“Good idea. She’ll need clean clothes and a bath.”

“I think, perhaps, the hose in the old scullery might be more appropriate, Your Grace? To start with, at least?”

“Good point. See to it. And now I must be off.”

 

In the crowded main office of the Pseudopolis Yard Watch House, Sergeant Colon absentmindedly adjusted the sprig of lilac that he’d stuck into his helmet like a plume.

“They go very strange, Nobby,” he said, leafing listlessly through the morning’s paperwork. “It’s a copper thing. Happened to me when I had kids. You get tough.”

“What do you mean, tough?” said Corporal Nobbs, possibly the best living demonstration that there was some smooth evolution between humans and animals.

“We-ell,” said Colon, leaning back in his chair. “It’s like…well, when you’re our age…” he looked at Nobby and hesitated. Nobby had been giving his age as “probably thirty-four” for years; the Nobbs family were not good at keeping count.

“I mean, when a man reaches…a certain age,” he tried again, “he knows the world is never going to be perfect. He’s got used to it being a bit, a bit…”

“Manky?” Nobby suggested. Tucked behind his ear, in the place usually reserved for his cigarette, was another wilting lilac flower.

“Exactly,” said Colon. “Like, it’s never going to be perfect, so you just do the best you can, right? But when there’s a kid on the way, well, suddenly a man sees it different. He thinks: my kid’s going to have to grow up in this mess. Time to clean it up. Time to make it a Better World. He gets a bit…keen. Full of ginger. When he hears about Stronginthearm it’s going to be very hot around here for—morning, Mister Vimes!”

“Talking about me, eh?” said Vimes, striding past them as they jerked to attention. He had not, in fact, heard any of the conversation, but Sergeant Colon’s face could be read like a book and Vimes had learned it by heart years ago.

“Just wondering if the happy event—” Colon began, trailing after Vimes as he took the stairs two at a time.

“It hasn’t,” said Vimes shortly. He pushed open the door to his office. “Morning, Carrot!”

Captain Carrot sprang to his feet and saluted.

“Morning, sir! Has Lady—”

“No, Carrot. She has not. What’s been happening overnight?”

Carrot’s gaze went to the sprig of lilac and back to Vimes’s face.

“Nothing good, sir,” he said. “Another officer killed.”

Vimes stopped.

“Who?” he demanded.

“Sergeant Stronginthearm, sir. Killed in Treacle Mine Road. Carcer again.”

Vimes glanced at his watch. They had ten minutes to get to the Palace. But time suddenly wasn’t important anymore.

He sat down at his desk.

“Witnesses?”

“Three this time, sir.”

“That many?”

“All dwarfs. Stronginthearm wasn’t even on duty, sir. He’d signed off and was picking up a rat pie and chips from a shop and walked out straight into Carcer. The devil stabbed him in the neck and ran for it. He must’ve thought we’d found him.”

“We’ve been looking for the man for weeks! And he bumped into poor old Stronginthearm when all the dwarf was thinking of was his breakfast? Is Angua on the trail?”

“Up to a point, sir,” said Carrot awkwardly.

“Why only up to a point?”

“He…well, we assume it was Carcer…dropped an aniseed bomb in Sator Square. Almost pure oil.”

Vimes sighed. It was amazing how people adapted. The Watch had a werewolf. That news had got around, in an underground kind of way. And so the criminals had mutated, to survive in a society where the law had a very sensitive nose. Scent bombs were the solution. They didn’t have to be that dramatic. You just poured pure peppermint or aniseed in the street where a lot of people would walk over it, and suddenly Sergeant Angua was facing a hundred, a thousand crisscrossing trails, and went to bed with a nasty headache.

He listened glumly as Carrot reported on men brought off leave or put on double shift, on informers pumped, pigeons stooled, grasses rustled, fingers held to the wind, ears put on the street. And he knew how little it all added up to. They still had fewer than a hundred men in the Watch, and that was including the canteen lady. There were a million people in the city, and a billion places to hide. Ankh-Morpork was built of bolt-holes. Besides, Carcer was a nightmare.

Vimes was used to the other kinds of nut jobs, the ones that acted quite normally right up to the point where they hauled off and smashed someone with a poker for blowing their nose noisily. But Carcer was different. He was of two minds, but instead of being in conflict, they were in competition. He had demons on both shoulders, urging one another on.

And yet…he smiled all the time, in a cheerful chirpy sort of way, and he acted like the kind of rascal who made a dodgy living selling gold watches that go green after a week. And he appeared to be convinced, utterly convinced, that he never did anything really wrong. He’d stand there amid the carnage, blood on his hands and stolen jewelry in his pocket, and, with an expression of injured innocence, declare: “Me? What did I do?”

And it was believable right up until you looked into those cheeky, smiling eyes, and saw, deep down, the demons looking back…

…but don’t spend too much time looking at those eyes, because that’d mean you’ve taken your eyes off his hands, and by now one of them would hold a knife.

It was hard for the average copper to deal with people like that. They expected people, when heavily outnumbered, to give in, or try to deal, or at least just stop moving. They didn’t expect people to kill for a five-dollar watch (a hundred-dollar watch, now, that’d be different. This was Ankh-Morpork, after all).

“Was Stronginthearm married?” Vimes said.

“No, sir. Lived in New Cobblers with his parents.”

Parents, thought Vimes. That made it worse.

“Anyone been to tell them?” he asked. “And don’t say it was Nobby. We don’t want any repeat of that bet-you-a-dollar-you’re-the-widow-Jackson nonsense.”

“I went, sir. As soon as we got the news.”

“Thank you. They took it badly?”

“They took it…solemnly, sir.”

Vimes groaned. He could imagine the expressions.

“I’ll write them the official letter,” he said, pulling open his desk drawers. “Get someone to take it round, will you? And say I’ll be over later. Perhaps this isn’t the time to—” No, hold on, they were dwarfs, dwarfs weren’t bashful about money “—forget that…say we’ll have all the details of his pension and so on. Died on duty, too. That’s extra. It all adds up. That’ll be theirs.” He rummaged in his desk. “Where’s his file?”

“Here, sir,” said Carrot, handing it over smoothly. “We are due at the Palace at ten, sir. Watch Committee. But I’m sure they’ll understand,” he added, seeing Vimes’s face. “I’ll go and clean out Stronginthearm’s locker, sir, and I expect the lads’ll have a whip-round for flowers and everything…”

Vimes pondered over a sheet of headed paper after the captain had gone. A file, he had to refer to a damn file. But there were so many coppers these days…

A whip-round for flowers. And a coffin. You look after your own. Sergeant Dickins had said that, a long time ago…

He wasn’t good with words, least of all ones written down, but after a few glances at the file to refresh his memory, he wrote down the best he could think of.

And they were all good words and, more or less, they were the right ones. Yet, in truth, Stronginthearm was just a decent dwarf who was paid to be a copper. He’d joined up because, these days, joining the Watch was quite a good career choice. The pay was good, there was a decent pension, there was a wonderful medical plan if you had the nerve to submit to Igor’s ministrations in the cellar, and, after a year or so, an Ankh-Morpork–trained copper could leave the city and get a job in the Watches of the other cities on the plain with instant promotion. That was happening all the time. Sammies, they were called, even in towns that had never heard of Sam Vimes. He was just a little proud of that. “They” meant watchmen who could think without moving their lips, who didn’t take bribes—much, and then only at the level of beer and doughnuts, which even Vimes recognized as the grease that helps the wheels run smoothly—and were, on the whole, trustworthy. For a given value of “trust,” at least.

The sound of running feet indicated that Sergeant Detritus was bringing some of the latest trainees back from their morning run. He could hear the jody Detritus had taught them. Somehow, you could tell it was made up by a troll:

It still irked Vimes that the little training school in the old lemonade factory was turning out so many coppers who quit the city the moment their probation was up. But it had its advantages. There were Sammies almost as far as Uberwald now, all speeding up the local promotion ladder. It helped, knowing names and knowing that those names had been taught to salute him. The ebb and flow of politics often meant that the local rulers weren’t talking to one another, but, via the semaphore towers, the Sammies talked all the time.

He realized he was humming a different song under his breath. It was a tune he’d forgotten for years. It went with the lilac, scent and song together. He stopped, feeling guilty.

He was finishing the letter when there was a knock at the door.

“Nearly done!” he shouted.

“It’th me, thur,” said Constable Igor, pushing his head around the door, and then he added, “Igor, sir.”

“Yes, Igor?” said Vimes, wondering not for the first time why anyone with stitches all around his head needed to tell anyone who he was.*

“I would just like to thay, sir, that I could have got young Thronginthearm back on his feet, thur,” said Igor, a shade reproachfully.

Vimes sighed. Igor’s face was full of concern tinged with disappointment. He had been prevented from plying his…craft. He was naturally disappointed.

“We’ve been through this, Igor. It’s not like sewing a leg back on. And dwarfs are dead set against that sort of thing.”

“There’s nothing thupernatural about it, thur. I am a man of Natural Philothophy! And he was still warm when they brought him in—”

“Those are the rules, Igor. Thanks all the same. We know your heart is in the right place—”

“They are in the right places, sir,” said Igor reproachfully.

“That’s what I meant,” Vimes said without missing a beat, just as Igor never did.

“Oh, very well, sir,” said Igor, giving up. He paused, and then said: “How is her ladyship, sir?”

Vimes had been expecting this. It was a terrible thing for a mind to do, but his had already presented him with the idea of Igor and Sybil in the same sentence. Not that he disliked Igor. Quite the reverse. There were watchmen walking around the streets right now who wouldn’t have legs if it wasn’t for Igor’s genius with a needle. But—

“Fine. She’s fine,” he said abruptly.

“Only I heard that Mrs. Content was a bit worr—”

“Igor, there are some areas where…look, do you know anything about…women and babies?”

“Not in so many wordth, sir, but I find that once I’ve got someone on the slab and had a good, you know, rummage around, I can thort out most thingth—”

Vimes’s imagination actually shut down at this point.

“Thank you, Igor,” he managed without his voice trembling, “but Mrs. Content is a very experienced midwife.”

“Jutht as you say, sir,” said Igor, but doubt rode on the words.

“And now I’ve got to go,” said Vimes. “It’s going to be a long day.”

He ran down the stairs, tossed the letter to Sergeant Colon, nodded to Carrot, and set off at a fast walk for the Palace.

After the door had shut one of the watchmen looked up from the desk where he’d been wrestling with a report and the effort of writing down, as policemen do, what ought to have happened.

“Sarge?”

“Yes, Corporal Ping?”

“Why’re some of you wearing purple flowers, Sarge?”

There was a subtle change in the atmosphere, a suction of sound caused by many pairs of ears listening intently. All the officers in the room had stopped writing.

“I mean, I saw you and Reg and Nobby wearing ’em this time last year, and I wondered if we were all supposed to…” Ping faltered. Sergeant Colon’s normally amiable eyes had narrowed and the message they were sending was: you’re on thin ice, lad, and it’s starting to creak…

“I mean, my landlady’s got a garden and I could easily go and cut a—” Ping went on in an uncharacteristic attempt at suicide.

“You’d wear the lilac today, would you?” said Colon quietly.

“I just meant that if you wanted me to I could go and—”

“Were you there?” said Colon, getting to his feet so fast that his chair fell over.

“Steady, Fred,” murmured Nobby.

“I didn’t mean…” Ping began. “I mean…was I where, Sarge?”

Colon leaned on the desk, bringing his round red face an inch away from Ping’s nose.

“If you don’t know where there was, you weren’t there,” he said in the same quiet voice.

He stood up straight again.

“Now me an’ Nobby has got a job to do,” he said. “At ease, Ping. We are going out.”

“Er…”

This was not being a good day for Corporal Ping.

“Yes?” said Colon.

“Er…standing orders, Sarge…you’re the ranking officer, you see, and I’m orderly officer for the day, I wouldn’t ask otherwise but…if you’re going out, Sarge, you’ve got to tell me where you’re going. Just in case anyone has to contact you, see? I got to write it down in the book. In pen and everything,” he added.

“You know what day it is, Ping?” said Colon.

“Er…25th of May, Sarge.”

“And you know what that means, Ping?”

“Er…”

“It means,” said Nobby, “that anyone important enough to ask where we’re going—”

“—knows where we’ve gone,” said Fred Colon.

The door slammed behind them.

 

This cemetery of Small Gods was for the people who didn’t know what happened next. They didn’t know what they believed in or if there was life after death and, often, they didn’t know what hit them. They’d gone through life being amiably uncertain, until the ultimate certainty had claimed them at the last. Among the city’s bone orchards, the cemetery was the equivalent of the drawer marked MISC, where people were interred in the glorious expectation of nothing very much.

Most of the Watch got buried there. Policemen, after a few years, found it hard enough to believe in people, let alone anyone they couldn’t see.

For once, it wasn’t raining. The breeze shook the sooty poplars around the wall, making them rustle.

“We ought to have brought some flowers,” said Colon, as they made their way through the long grass.

“I could nick a few off some of the fresh graves, Sarge,” Nobby volunteered.

“Not the kind of thing I want to hear you saying at this time, Nobby,” said Colon severely.

“Sorry, Sarge.”

“At a time like this a man ought to be thinking of his immortal soul viz ah viz the endless mighty river that is History. I should do that if I was you, Nobby.”

Up against one wall, lilac trees were growing. That is, at some point in the past a lilac had been planted there, and had given rise, as lilac will, to hundreds of whippy suckers, so that what had once been one stem was now a thicket. Every branch was covered in pale mauve blooms.

The graves were still just visible in the tangled vegetation. In front of them stood Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler, Ankh-Morpork’s least successful businessman, with a sprig of lilac in his hat.

He caught sight of the watchmen and nodded to them. They nodded back. All three stood looking down at the seven graves. Only one had been maintained. The marble headstone on that one was shiny and moss-free, the turf was clipped, the stone border was sparkling.

Moss had grown over the wooden markers of the other six, but it had been scraped off the central one, revealing the name:

John Keel

And carved underneath, by someone who had taken some pains, was:

How Do They Rise Up

A huge wreath of lilac flowers, bound with purple ribbon, had been placed on the grave. On top of it, tied around with another piece of purple ribbon, was an egg.

“Mrs. Palm and Mrs. Battye and some of the girls were up here earlier,” said Dibbler. “And, of course, Madam always makes sure there’s the egg.”

“It’s nice, the way they always remember,” said Sergeant Colon.

The three stood in silence. They were not, on the whole, men with a vocabulary designed for times like this. After a while, though, Nobby felt moved to speak.

“He gave me a spoon once,” he said to the air in general.

“Yeah, I know,” said Colon.

“My dad pinched it off me when he come out of prison, but it was my spoon,” said Nobby persistently. “That means a lot to a kid, your own spoon.”

“Come to that, he was the first person to make me a sergeant,” said Colon. “Got busted again, of course, but I knew I could do it again then. He was a good copper.”

“He bought a pie off me, first week I was starting out,” said Dibbler. “Ate it all. Didn’t spit out anything.”

There was more silence.

After a while Sergeant Colon cleared his throat, a general signal to indicate that some sort of appropriate moment was now over. There was a relaxation of muscles all around.

“Y’know, we ought to come up here one day with a billhook and clear this lot up a bit,” said the sergeant.

“You always say that, Sarge, every year,” said Nobby as they walked away. “And we never do.”

“If I had a dollar for every copper’s funeral I’ve attended up here,” said Colon, “I’d have…nineteen dollars and fifty pence.”

“Fifty pence?” said Nobby.

“That was when Corporal Hildebiddle woke up just in time and banged on the lid,” said Colon. “That was before your time, o’course. Everyone said it was an amazin’ recovery.”

“Mr. Sergeant?”

The three men turned. Coming toward them in a high-speed sidle was the black-clad, skinny figure of Legitimate First, the cemetery’s resident gravedigger.

Colon sighed. “Yes, Leggie?” he said.

“Good morrow, sweet—” the gravedigger began, but Sergeant Colon waved a finger at him.

“Stop that right now,” he said. “You know you’ve been warned before. None of that ‘comic gravedigger’ stuff. It’s not funny and it’s not clever. Just say what you’ve got to say. No silly bits.”

Leggie looked crestfallen.

“Well, good sirs—”

“Leggie, I’ve known you for years,” said Colon wearily. “Just try, will you?”

“The deacon wants them graves dug up, Fred,” said Leggie, in a sulky voice. “It’s more’n been thirty years. Long past time they was in the crypts—”

“No,” said Fred Colon.

“But I’ve got a nice shelf for ’em down there, Fred,” Leggie pleaded. “Right up near the front. We need the space, Fred! It’s standing room only in here, and that’s the truth! Even the worms have to go in single file! Right up near the front, Fred, where I can chat to ’em when I’m having my tea. How about that?”

The Watchmen and Dibbler shared a glance. Most people in the city had been into Leggie’s crypts, if only for a dare. And it had come as a shock to most of them to realize that solemn burial was not for eternity but only for a handful of years, so that, in Leggie’s words, “my little wriggly helpers” could do their work. After that, the last last resting place was the crypts and an entry in the huge ledgers.

Leggie lived down there in the crypts. As he said, he was the only one who did, and he liked the company.

Leggie was generally considered weird, but conscientiously so.

“This isn’t your idea, right?” said Fred Colon.

Leggie looked down at his feet.

“The new deacon’s a bit, well, new,” he said. “You know…keen. Making changes.”

“You told him why they’re not being dug up?” said Nobby.

“He said that’s just ancient history,” said Leggie. “He says we all have to put the past behind us.”

“An’ did you tell him he should take it up with Vetinari?” said Nobby.

“Yes, and he said he was sure his lordship was a forward-thinking man who wouldn’t cling to relics of the past,” said Leggie.

“Sounds like he is new,” said Dibbler.

“Yeah,” said Nobby. “An’ not likely to get old. It’s okay, Leggie, you can say you’ve asked us.”

The gravedigger looked relieved.

“Thanks, Nobby,” he said. “And I’d just like to say that when your time comes, gents, you’ll be on a good shelf with a view. I’ve put your names down in my ledger for them as comes after me.”

“Well, that’s, er, very kind of you, Leggie,” said Colon, wondering if it was. Because of pressures of space, bones in the crypt were stored by size, not by owner. There were rooms of ribs. There were avenues of femurs. And shelf after shelf of skulls up near the entrance, of course, because a crypt without a lot of skulls wasn’t a proper crypt at all. If some of the religions were right and there really was bodily resurrection one day, Fred mused, there was going to be an awful lot of confusion and general milling about.

“I’ve got just the spot—” Leggie began, and then stopped. He pointed angrily toward the entrance. “You know what I said about him coming up here!”

They turned. Corporal Reg Shoe, a whole bouquet of lilac tied to his helmet, was walking solemnly up the gravel path. He had a long-handled shovel over his shoulder.

“It’s only Reg,” said Fred. “He’s got a right to be here, Leggie. You know that.”

“He’s a dead man! I’m not havin’ a dead man in my cemetery!”

“It’s full of ’em, Leggie,” said Dibbler, trying to calm the man down.

“Yeah, but the rest of ’em don’t walk in and out!”

“Come on, Leggie, you act like this every year,” said Fred Colon. “He can’t help the way he was killed. Just because you’re a zombie doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. He’s a useful lad, Reg. Plus it’d be a lot neater up here if everyone looked after their plots like he does. Morning, Reg.”

Reg Shoe, gray-faced but smiling, nodded at the four of them and strolled on.

“And bringing his own shovel, too,” muttered Leggie. “It’s disgustin’!”

“I’ve always thought it was rather, you know, nice of him to do what he does,” said Fred. “You let him alone, Leggie. If you start throwing stones at him like you did the year before last, Commander Vimes’ll get to hear about it and there’ll be trouble. Be told. You’re a good man with a, a—”

“—cadaver,” said Nobby.

“—but…well, Leggie, you weren’t there,” said Colon. “That’s the start and finish of it. Reg was. That’s all there is to it, Leggie. If you weren’t there, you don’t understand. Now you just run along and count the skulls again, I know you like that. Cheerio, Leggie.”

Legitimate First watched them go as they walked away. Sergeant Colon felt he was being measured up.

“I’ve always wondered about his name,” said Nobby, turning and waving. “I mean…Legitimate?”

“Can’t blame a mother for being proud, Nobby,” said Colon.

 

“What else should I know today?” said Vimes, as he and Carrot shouldered their way through the streets.

“We’ve had a letter from the Black Ribboners,* sir, suggesting that it would be a great step forward for species’ harmony in the city if you’d see your way clear to—”

“They want a vampire in the Watch?”

“Yes, sir. I believe many members of the Watch Committee think that despite your stated reservations it would be a good—”

“Does it look to you as if my body is dead?”

“No, sir.”

“Then the answer’s no. What else?”

Carrot riffled through a stuffed clipboard as he half-ran to keep up.

“The Times says Borogravia has invaded Mouldavia,” he announced.

“Is that good? I can’t remember where it is.”

“Both formerly part of the Dark Empire, sir. Right next door to Uberwald.”

“Whose side are we on?”

“The Times said we should be supporting little Mouldavia against the aggressor, sir.”

“I like Borogravia already,” snapped Vimes. The Times had printed a particularly unflattering, in his opinion, cartoon of him the previous week, and to make matters worse, Sybil had requested the original and had it framed. “And what does this all mean to us?”

“Probably more refugees, sir.”

“Ye gods, we’ve got no more room! Why do they keep coming here?”

“In search of a better life, sir, I think.”

“A better life?” said Vimes. “Here?”

“I think things are worse where they come from, sir,” said Carrot.

“What kind of refugees are we talking about here?”

“Mostly human, sir.”

“Do you mean that most of them will be human, or that each individual will be mostly human?” said Vimes. After a while in Ankh-Morpork, you learned to phrase that kind of question.

“Er, apart from humans the only species I’d heard of there in any numbers are the kvetch, sir. They live in the deep woods and are covered in hair.”

“Really? Well, we’ll probably find out more about them when we’re asked to employ one in the Watch,” said Vimes sourly. “What else?”

“Rather hopeful news, sir,” said Carrot, smiling. “You know the Hooms? The street gang?”

“What about them?”

“They initiated their first troll member.”

“What? I thought they went around beating up trolls! I thought that was the whole point!”

“Well, apparently young Calcite likes beating up trolls, too.”

“And that’s good?”

“In a way, sir, I suppose it’s a step forward.”

“United in hatred, you mean?”

“I suppose so, sir,” said Carrot. He flicked papers back and forth on his clipboard. “Now, what else have I got? Oh, yes, the river-patrol boat has sunk again—”

Where did I go wrong? thought Vimes as the litany went on. I was a copper once. A real copper. I chased people. I was a hunter. It was what I did best. I knew where I was anywhere in the city by the feel of the street under my boots. And now look at me! A duke! Commander of the Watch! A political animal! I have to know about who’s fighting who a thousand miles away, just in case that’s going to mean riots here!

When did I last go on patrol? Last week? Last month? And it’s never a proper point patrol, ’cos the sergeants make damn sure everyone knows I’ve left the building and every damn constable reeks of armor polish and has had a shave by the time I get there, even if I nip down the back streets (and that thought, at least, was freighted with a little pride, because it showed he didn’t employ stupid sergeants). I never stand all night in the rain, or fight for my life rolling in the gutter with some thug, and I never move above a walk. That’s all been taken away. And for what?

Comfort, power, money, and a wonderful wife……er……which was a good thing, of course, but…even so…

Damn. But I’m not a copper anymore, I’m a, a manager. I have to talk to the damn committee as if they’re children. I go to receptions and wear damn stupid toy armor. It’s all politics and paperwork. It’s all got too big.

What had happened to the days when it was all so simple?

Faded like the lilac, he thought.

They entered the Palace and went up the main stairs to the Oblong Office.

The Patrician of Ankh-Morpork was standing looking out of the window when they entered. The room was otherwise deserted.

“Ah, Vimes,” he said without turning around. “I thought you might be late. In the circumstances, I dismissed the committee. They were sorry, as indeed was I, sorry to hear about Stronginthearm. No doubt you have been writing the official letter.”

Vimes flashed a questioning expression at Carrot, who rolled his eyes and shrugged. Vetinari found out things very quickly.

“Yes, that’s right,” said Vimes.

“And on such a beautiful day as this, too,” said Vetinari. “Although there’s a storm heading our way, I see.” He turned. He had a sprig of lilac pinned to his robe.

“Lady Sybil is doing well?” he said, sitting down.

“You tell me,” said Vimes.

“Some things can’t be hurried, no doubt,” said Vetinari smoothly, shuffling the papers. “Let me see now, let me see, there were just a few points that I should deal with…ah, the regular letter from our religious friends at the Temple of Small Gods.” He carefully removed it from the pile and set it to one side. “I think I shall invite the new deacon to tea and explain matters to him. Now, where was I…ah, the political situation in—yes?”

The door opened. Drumknot, the chief clerk, came in.

“Message for His Grace,” he said, although he handed it to Lord Vetinari. The Patrician passed it, very politely, across the desk. Vimes unfolded it.

“It’s off the clacks!” he yelled. “We’ve got Carcer cornered in New Hall! I’ve got to get down there now!”

“How exciting,” said Lord Vetinari, standing up suddenly. “The call to the chase. But is it necessary for you to attend personally, Your Grace?”

Vimes gave him a gray look. “Yes,” he said. “Because if I don’t, y’see, some poor sod who’s been trained by me to do the right thing is going to try to arrest the bugger.” He turned to Carrot. “Captain, get on it right now! Clacks, pigeons, runners, whatever. I want everyone answering this shout, okay? But no one, I repeat, no one is to try to tackle him without a lot of backup! Understood? And get Swires airborne! Oh, damn…”

“What’s wrong, sir?” said Carrot.

“This message is from Littlebottom. She sent it straight here. What’s she doing there? She’s Forensic. She’s not Street! She’ll do it by the book!”

“Shouldn’t she?” said Vetinari.

“No. Carcer needs an arrow in his leg just to get his attention. You shoot first—”

“—and ask questions later?” said Vetinari.

Vimes paused at the door and said: “There’s nothing I want to ask him.”

 

Vimes had to slow down for breath in Sator Square, and that was disgusting. A few years ago he’d only really be getting into his stride by now! But the storm rolling over the plains was driving the heat before it, and it wouldn’t do for the commander to turn up wheezing. As it was, even after pausing behind a street-market stall for a few gulps of air, he doubted if he had enough wind left for a lengthy sentence.

To his tremendous relief, an entirely unwounded Corporal Cheery Littlebottom was waiting by the University walls. She saluted.

“Reporting, sir,” she said.

“Mm,” murmured Vimes.

“I spotted a couple of trolls on traffic duty, sir,” said Cheery, “so I’ve sent them around to the Water Bridge. Then Sergeant Detritus turned up and I told—I advised him to go into the University via the main gate and get up high. Sergeant Colon and Nobby arrived and I sent them along to the Bridge of Size—”

“Why?” said Vimes.

“Because I doubt if he’s really going to try going that way,” said Cheery, her face a picture of innocence. Vimes had to stop himself from nodding. “And then as more people come along I’m putting them around the perimeter. But I think he’s gone up and he’s staying high.”

“Why?”

“Because how’s he going to fight his way out through a lot of wizards, sir? His best chance is to sneak around on the roofs and drop down somewhere quiet. There’s lots of hiding places and he can get all the way to Peach Pie Street without coming down.”

Forensic, thought Vimes. Hah. And with any luck he doesn’t know about Buggy.

“Well thought out,” he said.

“Thank you, sir. Would you mind standing a bit closer to this wall, sir?”

“What for?”

Something shattered on the cobbles. Vimes was suddenly flat against the wall.

“He’s got a crossbow, sir,” said Cheery. “We think he stole it from Stronginthearm. But he’s not very good with it.”

“Well done, Corporal,” said Vimes weakly. “Good job.” He glanced around the square behind him. The wind was whipping at the awnings of the market stalls and the traders, with occasional looks at the sky, were covering their wares.

“But we can’t just let him hang around up there,” he went on. “He’ll start taking potshots and he’s bound to hit someone.”

“Why would he do that, sir?”

“Carcer doesn’t need a reason,” said Vimes. “He just needs an excuse.” A movement far above caught his eye, and he grinned.

A large bird was gaining height over the city.

 

The heron, mumbling complaints, fought for altitude in big, sweeping circles. The city whirled around Corporal Buggy Swires as he gripped even harder with his knees, and he swung the bird downwind and it landed with a staggering run on the top of the Tower of Art, the highest building in the city.

With a practiced movement, the gnome sliced through the string holding the portable semaphore in place, and leaped down after it into the compost of ivy leaves and old ravens’ nests that carpeted the top of the tower.

The heron watched him with round-eyed stupidity. Buggy had tamed it in the usual gnome way: you painted yourself green like a frog and hung out in the marshes, croaking, and then, when a heron tried to eat you, you ran up its beak and beaned it. By the time it came around you’d blown the special oil up its nostrils—that had taken all day to make, and the stink of it had emptied the Watch House—and it took one look at you and thought you were its mum.

A heron was useful. It could carry equipment. But Buggy preferred a sparrowhawk for traffic patrol. It was better for hovering.

He slotted the portable semaphore arms onto the post he’d secretly installed weeks ago. Then he unshipped a tiny telescope from the heron’s saddlebags and strapped it onto the edge of the stone, looking almost straight down. Buggy liked moments like this. It was the only time that everyone else was smaller than him.

“Now…let’s see what we can see,” he muttered.

There were the University buildings. There was the clock tower of Old Tom, and the unmistakable bulk of Sergeant Detritus climbing among the nearby chimneys. The yellow light of the gathering storm glinted off the helmets of watchmen who were hurrying through the streets. And there, creeping along behind the parapet…

“Gotcha,” he said quietly, and reached for the handles of the semaphore.

 

“D…T…R…T…S space H…D…N…G space O…L space T…M,” said Cheery.

Vimes nodded. Detritus was on the roof near the tower of Old Tom. And Detritus carried a siege crossbow that three men couldn’t lift, and had converted it to fire a thick sheaf of arrows all at once. Mostly they shattered in the air because of the forces involved, and the target was hit by an expanding cloud of burning splinters. Vimes had banned him from using it on people, but it was a damn good way of getting into buildings. It could open the front door and the back door at the same time.

“Tell him to fire a warning shot,” he said. “If he hits Carcer with that thing we won’t even find a corpse.” Though I’d quite like to find a corpse, he added to himself.

“Yes, sir.” Cheery pulled a couple of white-painted paddles out of her belt, sighted on the top of the tower, and sent a brief signal. There was an answering signal from the distant Buggy.

“D…T…R…T…S space W…R…N…G space S…H…T,” Cheery muttered to herself as she waved the rest of the message.

There was another answering dip from above. A moment later a red flare shot up from the top of the tower and exploded. It was an efficient way of getting everyone to pay attention. Then Vimes saw the message relayed.

Around the University buildings, watchmen who’d also seen the order ducked into doorways. They knew about the bow.

There were a few seconds for the troll to work out the spelling, a distant heavy thud, a sound like a swarm of hellish bees, and then a crash of tiles and masonry. Pieces of tile rained down into the square. An entire chimney, still with a wisp of smoke coming from it, smashed down a few yards from where Vimes was standing.

Then there was the patter of dust and small bits of wood, and a gentle shower of pigeon feathers.

Vimes shook some flakes of mortar off his helmet.

“Yes, well, I think he’s been warned,” he said.

Half a weathercock landed next to the chimney.

Cheery blew some feathers off her telescope and sighted on the top of the tower again.

“Buggy says he’s stopped moving, sir,” she reported.

“Really? You surprise me.” Vimes adjusted his belt. “And now you can give me your crossbow. I’m going up.”

“Sir, you said no one was to try to arrest him! That’s why I sent the signal to you!”

“That’s right. I’m going to arrest him. Right now. While he’s counting all his bits to check that he’s still got ’em. Tell Detritus what I’m doing, ’cos I don’t want to end up as a hundred and sixty pounds of cocktail delicacies. No, don’t keep opening your mouth like that. By the time we’ve sorted out backup and armor and got everyone lined up he’ll have dug in somewhere else.”

The last words were delivered at a run.

Vimes reached a door and darted inside. New Hall was student accommodation, but it was still only half past ten, so most of them would be in bed. A few faces looked around doors and Vimes trotted along the corridor and reached the stairwell at the far end. That took him—walking now, and rather less sure of his future—to the top floor. Let’s see, he’d been here before…yes, there was a door ajar, and a glimpse of mops and buckets suggested that this was a janitor’s closet.

With, at the far end, a ladder leading up to the roof.

Vimes carefully cocked the crossbow.

So Carcer had a Watch crossbow, too. They were good classic single-shot models, but they took a while to reload. If he fired at Vimes and missed, then that was the only shot he’d get. After that…you couldn’t plan.

Vimes climbed the ladder, and an old song came back.

“They rise feet up, feet up, feet up…” he hissed under his breath.

He stopped just below the edge of the open trapdoor onto the leads. Carcer wouldn’t fall for the old helmet-on-stick trick, not with just one shot available. He’d just have to risk it.

Vimes thrust his head up, turned it quickly, ducked out of sight for a moment and then came through the opening in a rush. He rolled clumsily when he hit the leads, and rose into a crouch. There was no one else there. He was still alive. He breathed out.

A sloping, gabled roof rose up beside him. Vimes crept along, wedged himself against a chimney stack peppered with splinters of wood, and glanced up at the tower.

The sky above it was livid blue-black. Storms picked up a lot of personality as they rolled across the plains, and this one looked like a record breaker. But brilliant sunlight picked out the Tower of Art and, at the top, the tiny dots of Buggy’s frantic signal…

O…O…O…

Officer In Trouble. A brother is hurtin’.

Vimes spun around. There was no one creeping up on him. He eased himself around the chimneys and there, tucked between another couple of stacks and out of sight of everyone except Vimes and the celestial Buggy, was Carcer.

He was taking aim.

Vimes turned his head to spot the target.

Fifty yards away, Carrot was picking his way across the top of the University’s High Energy Magic Building.

The bloody fool was never any good at concealment. Oh, he ducked and crept, and, against all logic, that made him more noticeable. He didn’t understand the art of thinking himself invisible. And there he was, furtively shlepping through the debris on the roof and looking as inconspicuous as a big duck in a small bathtub. And he’d come without backup.

The fool…

Carcer was aiming carefully. The roof of the HEMB was a maze of abandoned equipment and Carrot was moving along behind the raised platform that held the huge bronze spheres known throughout the city as the Wizards’ Balls, which discharged surplus magic if—or, more usually, when—experiments in the hall below fouled up. Carrot, screened by all that, was not making such a good target, after all.

Vimes raised his crossbow.

Thunder…rolled. It was the roll of a giant iron cube down the stairways of the gods, a crackling, thudding crash that tore the sky in half and shook the building.

Carcer glanced up and saw Vimes.

 

“Wotcha doin’, mifter?”

Buggy didn’t budge from the telescope. A crowbar wouldn’t have separated him at this point.

“Shut up, ye daft corbies!” he muttered.

Both men below had fired, and both men had missed because they were trying to fire and dodge at the same time.

Something hard prodded Buggy’s shoulder.

“Wot’s happ’nin’, mifter?” said the insistent voice.

He turned. There were a dozen bedraggled ravens behind him, looking like little old men in ill-fitting black cloaks. They were Tower of Art birds. Hundreds of generations of living in a highly charged magical environment had raised the intelligence level of what had been bright creatures to begin with. But, although the ravens were intelligent, these weren’t hugely clever. They just had a more persistent kind of stupidity, as befitted birds for whom the exciting panorama of the city below was a kind of daytime TV.

“Push off!” shouted Buggy and turned back to the telescope. There was Carcer, running, and Vimes running after him, and here came the hail…

It turned the world white. It thudded around him and made his helmet ring. Hailstones as big as his head bounced on the stone and hit Buggy from underneath. Cursing and shielding his face with his arms, hammered all the time by shattering crystal balls, each one predicting a future of pain, he skidded and slid across the rolling ice. He reached an ivy-hung arch between two lesser turrets, where the heron had already taken refuge, and fell inside. Frozen shrapnel still ricocheted in and stung him, but at least he could see and breathe.

A beak prodded him sharply in the back.

“Wot’s happ’nin’ now, mifter?”

 

Carcer landed heavily on the arch between the student hall and the main buildings, almost lost his footing on the tiles, and hesitated. An arrow from a watchman below grazed his leg.

Vimes dropped down behind him, just as the hail hit.

Cursing and slipping, one man followed the other across the arch. Carcer reached a mass of ivy that led up onto the roof of the Library and scrambled up it, scattering ice below.

Vimes grabbed the ivy just as Carcer disappeared onto the flat roof. He looked around at a crash behind him, and saw Carrot trying to make his way along the wall from the High Energy Magic Building. The hail was forming a halo of ice fragments around him.

“Stay there!” Vimes bellowed.

Carrot’s reply was lost in the noise.

Vimes waved his arms and then grabbed at the ivy as his foot slipped.

“Bloody stay there!” he yelled. “That is an order! You’ll go over!”

He turned and started up the wet, cold vines.

The wind dropped, and the last few hailstones bounced off the roof.

Vimes stopped a few feet from the top of the ivy, worked his feet into firm footholds in the ancient, knotted stems, and reached up for a decent hold.

Then he thrust himself up, left hand ready, caught the boot that swung toward him, and carried on rising, pushing Carcer off balance. The man sprawled backward on the slippery hail, tried to get on his feet, and slipped again. Vimes tugged himself onto the roof, stepped forward, and found his legs skidding away beneath him. Both he and Carcer got up, tried to move, and fell over again.

From a prone position the man landed a kick on Vimes’s shoulder, sending both of them sliding away in opposite directions, and then turned over and scuttled on all fours around the Library’s big glass and metal dome. He grabbed the rusty frame, hauled himself upright, and pulled out a knife.

“Come and get me, then,” he said. There was another roll of thunder.

“I don’t have to,” said Vimes. “I just have to wait.” At least until I get my breath back, he thought.

“Why’re you picking on me? What’m I supposed to have done?”

“Couple of murders ring a bell?” said Vimes.

If injured innocence was money, Carcer’s face was his fortune.

“I don’t know anything about—”

“I’m not up here to play games, Carcer. Knock it off.”

“You going to take me alive, Your Grace?”

“You know, I don’t want to. But people think it’s neater all round if I do.”

There was a clattering of tiles away on the left, and a thud as a huge siege bow was rested on the ridge of a nearby roof. The head of Detritus arose behind it.

“Sorry about dat, Mister Vimes, hard to climb up in dat hail. Jus’ stand back.”

“You’re going to let it shoot me?” said Carcer. He tossed the knife away. “An unarmed man?”

“Trying to escape,” said Vimes. But this was starting to go bad. He could feel it.

“Me? I’m just standing here, haha.”

And there it was. That bloody laugh, on top of that damn grin. It was never far away. “Haha” didn’t come close to doing it the injustice it deserved. It was more a sort of modulation to the voice, an irritatingly patronizing chortle that suggested that all this was somehow funny and you hadn’t got the joke.

Trouble was, you couldn’t shoot someone for having an annoying laugh. And he was just standing there. If he ran, you could shoot him. Admittedly, it would be Detritus doing the shooting, and while with that bow it was technically possible to shoot to wound, the people you were wounding would probably be in the building next door.

But Carcer was just waiting there, insulting the world by his existence.

In fact he wasn’t merely standing there now. In one movement, he’d swung himself onto the lower slopes of the Library’s dome. The glass panes—at least, the glass panes that had survived the freak hail—creaked in the iron framework.

“Stop right there!” Vimes bellowed. “And come down!”

“Now where could I go?” said Carcer, grinning at him. “I’m just waiting for you to arrest me, right? Hey, I can see your house from up here!”

What’s under the dome? thought Vimes. How high are the bookcases? There’s other floors in the Library, aren’t there? Like galleries? But you can definitely look up at the dome from the ground floor, right? If you were careful, could you swing onto a gallery from the edge of the dome? It’d be risky, but if a man knew he was going to swing anyway…

Picking his way with care, he reached the edge of the dome. Carcer climbed up a little further.

“I warn you, Carcer—”

“Only high spirits, Mister Grace, haha! Can’t blame a man for trying to enjoy his last few minutes of freedom, can you?”

I can see your house from up here…

Vimes hauled himself onto the dome. Carcer cheered.

“Well done, Your Vimes!” he said, easing himself toward the top.

“Don’t mess me about, Carcer. It’ll go badly for you!”

“Badder than it’s going to go anyway?” Carcer glanced down through a smashed pane.

“Long way down, Mister Vimes. I reckon a man’d die instantly falling all that way, wouldn’t he?”

Vimes glanced down, and Carcer leaped.

It didn’t go the way he’d planned. Vimes had been tensed for something like this. After a complicated moment, Carcer was lying on the iron latticework, one arm under him, the other outflung and being banged heavily on the metal by Vimes. The knife it had held skidded away down the dome.

“Gods, you must think I’m stupid,” Vimes growled. “You wouldn’t throw away a knife, Carcer, if you didn’t have another one!”

Vimes’s face was close to the man’s now, close enough to look into the eyes above that chirpy grin and watch the demons waving.

“You’re hurting me, and that’s not allowed!”

“Oh, I wouldn’t want anything to happen to you, Carcer,” said Vimes. “I want to see you in front of his lordship. I just want to hear you admit something for once. I just want to see that bloody cheeky grin wiped off your face. Sergeant Detritus!”

“Sah!” shouted the troll from his distant ridge.

“Make a signal. I want people up here now. Me and Carcer are just going to stay nice and quiet here, so’s he doesn’t try any tricks.”

“Right, sir.” With another distant clatter of doomed tiles, the troll disappeared from view.

“You shouldn’t have sent Captain Carrot away,” muttered Carcer. “He doesn’t like watchmen bullying innocent civilians…”

“It is true that he has yet to master some of the finer details of de facto street policing,” said Vimes, maintaining his grip. “Anyway, I’m not hurting you, I’m protecting you. Wouldn’t like you to fall all that way.”

Thunder rumbled again. The sky wasn’t just storm-black now. There were pinks and purples in the clouds, as though the sky was bruised. Vimes could see the clouds moving like snakes in a sack, to an endless sullen rumbling. He wondered if the wizards had been messing about with the weather.

Something was happening to the air. It tasted of burned metal and flints. A weathercock on top of the dome began to spin round and round.

“I didn’t think you was stupid, Mister Vimes…”

“What?” said Vimes, looking down suddenly. Carcer was smiling cheerfully.

“I said I didn’t think you was stupid, Mister Vimes. I know a clever copper like you’d think I’d got two knives.”

“Yeah, right,” said Vimes. He could feel his hair trying to stand on end. Little blue caterpillars of light were crackling over the ironwork of the dome, and even over his armor.

“Mister Vimes?”

“What?” Vimes snapped. Smoke was rising from the weathercock’s bearings.

“I got three knives, Mister Vimes,” said Carcer, bringing his arm up.

The lightning struck.

 

Windows blew out and iron gutters melted. Roofs lifted into the air and settled again. Buildings shook.

But this storm had been blowing in from far across the plains, pushing the natural background magic ahead of it. It dumped it now, all in one go.

They said afterward that the bolt of lightning hit a clockmaker’s shop in the Street of Cunning Artificers, stopping all the clocks at that instant. But that was nothing. In Baker Street, a couple who had never met before became electrically attracted to one another and were forced to get married after two days for the sake of public decency. In the Assassins’ Guild, the chief armorer became hugely, and, since he was in the armory at the time, tragically, attractive to metal. Eggs fried in their baskets, apples roasted on the greengrocers’ shelves. Candles lit themselves. Cartwheels exploded. And the ornate tin bath of the Archchancellor of Unseen University was lifted neatly off the floor, sizzled across his study, and then flew off the balcony and onto the lawn in the octangle several stories below, without spilling more than a cupful of suds.

Archchancellor Mustrum Ridcully paused with his long-handled scrubbing brush hovering halfway down his back, and stared.

Tiles smashed to the ground. Water boiled in the ornamental fountain nearby.

Ridcully ducked, as a stuffed badger, the origin of which was never ascertained, flew across the lawn and smashed through a window.

He winced, as he was hit by a brief and inexplicable shower of small cogwheels, which pattered down all around him.

He stared, as half a dozen watchmen dashed into the octangle and headed up the steps to the Library.

Then, gripping the sides of the bath, the Archchancellor stood up. Foaming water cascaded off him, as it would off some ancient leviathan erupting from the abyssal sea.

“Mister Stibbons!” he bellowed, his voice bouncing off the imposing walls. “Where the is my hat?”

He sat down again and waited.

There was a few minutes of silence, and then Ponder Stibbons, Head of Inadvisably Applied Magic and Pra-elector of Unseen University, came running out of the main door carrying Ridcully’s pointy hat.

The Archchancellor snatched at it and rammed it on his head.

“Very well,” he said, standing up again. “Now, will care to tell m at the is going on? And why Old Toming repeatedly?”

“been a of magic, sir! I someone up the mechanism!” Ponder shouted above the sound-destroying silences.*

There was a dying metallic noise from the big clock tower. Ponder and Ridcully waited a few moments, but the city stayed full of normal noise, like the collapse of masonry and distant screams.

“Right,” said Ridcully, as if grudgingly awarding the world a mark for trying. “What was all that about, Stibbons? And why are there policemen in the Library?”

“Big magical storm, sir. Several thousand gigathaums. I believe the Watch is chasing a criminal.”

“Well, they can’t just run in here without askin’,” said Ridcully, stepping out of the bath and striding forward. “What do we pay our taxes for, after all?”

“Er, we don’t actually pay taxes, sir,” said Ponder, running after him. “The system is that we promise to pay taxes if the city ever asks us to, provided the city promises never to ask us, sir. We make a voluntary—”

“Well, at least we have an arrangement, Stibbons.”

“Yes, sir. May I point out that you—”

“And that means they have to ask permission. The essential decencies must be maintained,” said Ridcully firmly. “And I am the Master of this college!”

“On the subject of, er, decencies, sir, you are not, in fact, wearing—”

Ridcully strode through the open doors of the Library.

“What is going on here?” he demanded.

The watchmen turned and stared. A large blob of foam, which up until that point had been performing sterling service in the cause of the essential decencies, slipped slowly to the floor.

“Well?” he snapped. “Haven’t you lot seen a wizard before?”

A watchman snapped to attention and saluted. “Captain Carrot, sir. We’ve, er, never seen so much of a wizard, sir.”

Ridcully gave him the slow blank stare used by those with acute uptake-grasping deficiency.

“What’s he talkin’ about, Stibbons?” he said out of the corner of his mouth.

“You’re, er, insufficiently dressed, sir.”

“What? I’ve got my hat on, haven’t I?”

“Yes, sir—”

“Hat = wizard, wizard = hat. Everything else is frippery. Anyway, I’m sure we’re all men of the world,” Ridcully added, looking around. For the first time, he took in other details about the watchmen. “And dwarfs of the world…ah…trolls of the world, too, I see…and…women of the world, too, I note…er…” The Archchancellor lapsed into a moment’s silence, and then said, “Mr. Stibbons?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Would you be so kind as to run up to my rooms and fetch my robe?”

“Of course, sir.”

“And, in the meantime, please be so good as to lend me your hat…”

“But you do actually have your hat on, sir,” said Ponder.

“Quite so, quite so,” said Ridcully slowly and carefully through his fixed grin. “And now, Mister Stibbons, in addition, right now, I wish you, in fact, to lend, to me, your hat, please.”

“Oh,” said Ponder. “Er…yes…”

A few minutes later a thoroughly clean and decent and clothed Archchancellor was standing in the very center of the Library, staring up at the damaged dome, while beside him Ponder Stibbons—who, for some reason, had elected to continue to remain hatless even though his hat had been handed back to him—stared glumly at some magical instruments.

“Nothing at all?” said Ridcully.

“Ook,” said the Librarian.*

“You’ve searched everywhere?”

“He can’t search everywhere in this library, sir,” said Ponder. “That would take more time than actually could possibly exist. But all the mundane shelves, certainly. Um.”

Carrot turned to Ponder. “What was the ‘um’ for, please, sir?”

“You understand that this is a magical library? And that means that even in normal circumstances there is an area of high magical potential above the bookshelves?”

“I have been in here before,” said Carrot.

“Then you know that time with libraries is…somewhat more flexible?” said Ponder. “Given the additional power of the storm, it might just be possible that—”

“Are you going to tell me he’s been moved in time?” said the watchman.

Ponder was impressed. He hadn’t been brought up to believe that watchmen were clever. However, he took care not to show it.

“Would that it were that simple,” he said. “However, um, the lightning appears to have added a random lateral component…”

“A what?” said Ridcully.

“You mean in time and space?” said Carrot. Ponder felt himself getting rattled. Nonwizards shouldn’t be that quick.

“Not…exactly,” he said and gave up. “I’m really going to have to work on this, Archchancellor. Some of the readings I’m getting can’t possibly be real.”

 

Vimes knew that he had woken up. There had been darkness and rain and a terrible pain in his face.

Then there had been another flowering of pain in the back of his neck, and a feeling of being pulled this way and that.

And now there was light.

He could see it through his eyelids. His left eyelid, anyway. Nothing but pain was happening on the other side of his face. He kept the eye shut, and strained his hearing instead.

Someone was moving about. There was a clink of metal. A woman’s voice said, “He’s awake.”

“Are you sure?” said a man’s voice. “How can you tell?”

“Because I’m good at telling if a man is asleep,” said the woman.

Vimes opened his eye. He was lying on a bench or table of some sort. A young woman was leaning against the wall next to him, and her dress and bearing and the way she leaned filed her immediately in Vimes’s policemen brain as: seamstress, but one of the bright ones. The man had a long black robe and a silly floppy hat, and got filed under: help, I’m in the hands of a doctor!

He sat bolt upright.

“You lay one hand on me and I’ll thump you!” he yelled, trying to swing his legs off the table. Half his head burst into flame.

“I should take it easy, if I was you,” said the doctor, gently pushing him back. “That was a very nasty cut. And don’t touch the eyepatch!”

“Cut?” said Vimes, his hand brushing the stiff cloth of an eyepatch. Memories interlocked. “Carcer! Did anyone get him?”

“Whoever attacked you got away,” said the doctor.

“After that fall?” said Vimes. “He must’ve been limping, at least! Look, I’ve got to get—”

And then he noticed all the other things. He’d been picking them up all the time, but only now did the subconscious present the list.

He wasn’t wearing his own clothes…

“What happened to my uniform?” he said, and he noticed the I-told-you-so expression the woman gave the doctor.

“Whoever attacked you stripped you down to your drawers and left you lying in the street,” she said. “I found you some spare clothes at my place. It’s amazing what people leave behind.”

“Who took my armor?”

“I never know names,” said the woman. “I saw a bunch of men running off carrying stuff, though.”

“Ordinary thieves? Didn’t they leave a receipt?”

“No!” she said, laughing. “Why should they?”

“And are we allowed to ask questions?” said the doctor, tidying his tools.

None of this was right…

“Well, I mean…thank you, yes,” said Vimes.

“What’s your name?”

Vimes’s hand stopped halfway to his face again.

“You mean you don’t know me?” he said.

“Should we?” said the doctor.

None of this was right…

“This is Ankh-Morpork, isn’t it?” said Vimes.

“Er, yes,” said the doctor, and turned to the woman. “There was a blow to the head,” he said, “but I wouldn’t have thought it was that bad…”

“Look, I’m wasting time,” said the woman. “Who are you, mister?”

Everyone in the city knew Vimes, surely? The Guild of Seamstresses certainly did. And the doctor didn’t look stupid. Perhaps this was not the right time to be totally truthful. He might just be somewhere where being a copper wasn’t a good thing to be. It might be dangerous to be Vimes and, right now, he wasn’t well enough to deal with it.

“Keel,” he said. The name just dropped into his mind; it had been bubbling just under the surface of his thoughts all day, ever since the lilac.

“Yeah, right,” said the woman, smiling. “Want to make up a first name?”

“John,” said Vimes.

“Appropriate. Well…John, it’s like this. Men lying flat out and naked around here aren’t that uncommon. And, it’s a funny thing, but they don’t usually want anyone to know their real name, or where they live. You won’t be the first one Dr. Lawn here has patched up. My name’s Rosie. And now there’s a little fee, you understand? For both of us.”

“All right, all right, I know how this goes,” said Vimes, holding up his hands. “This is The Shades, right?” They both nodded. “Okay, then. Thank you. I haven’t got any money, obviously, but once I’ve got home—”

“I’ll escort you, shall I?” said the woman, handing him a badly styled coat and a pair of antique boots. “I wouldn’t like you to be attacked by anything. A sudden loss of memory, for example.”

Vimes snapped, but very gently. His face hurt and there were plenty of other bruises everywhere, and he was dressed in a suit that smelled like a privy. He’d go up to the Watch House, get cleaned and changed and make a quick report, and head on home. And this young lady could spend a night in the cells and then be handed over to the Seamstresses’ Guild. They came down heavily on extortion like this. It was bad for the trade.

“All right,” he said. And pulled the boots on. The soles were paper-thin, and they were too tight.

Dr. Lawn waved his hands in a general gesture of dismissal. “He’s all yours, Rosie. You leave that patch on for a few days, Mr. Keel, and with any luck you’ll have a working eye. Someone took a slash at you with a sharp knife. I’ve done the best I can, and the stitching is good, but you’re going to have a nasty scar.”

Vimes raised his hand to his cheek yet again.

“And don’t pick at it!” Lawn snapped.

“Come on…John,” said Rosie. “Let’s get you home where you belong.”

They stepped out. Water was dripping from the eaves, but the rain had eased.

“I live up past Pseudopolis Yard,” said Vimes.

“Lead on,” said Rosie.

They hadn’t reached the end of the street before Vimes was aware that a couple of dark figures had fallen in behind them. He was about to turn, but Rosie clamped a hand on his arm.

“Don’t bother them and they won’t bother you,” she said. “They’re just coming with us for protection.”

“Whose? Yours or mine?”

Rosie laughed. “Both,” she said.

“Yes, you just keep on walking, kind sir, and we’ll be as quiet as little mice,” said a shrill voice behind him. A slightly deeper one said, “That’s right, dearie. Just be a good boy and Aunty Dotsie won’t have to open her handbag.”

“That’s Dotsie and Sadie!” said Vimes. “The Agony Aunts! Well, they bloody well know who I am!”

He turned.

The dark figures, both wearing old-fashioned black straw hoods, stepped back. In the gloom there were a number of metallic noises, and Vimes forced himself to relax a little. Even though they were, more or less, on the same side as the Watch, you never quite knew where you were with the Agony Aunts. Of course, that’s what made them so useful. Any customer disturbing the peace in one of the local houses of good repute feared the threat of the Aunts far more than he did the Watch. The Watch had rules. And the Watch didn’t have Dotsie’s handbag. And Sadie could do terrible things with a parrot-headed umbrella.

“Come on,” he said. “Dotsie? Sadie? Let’s not mess about, eh?”

Something prodded him in the chest. He looked down. The thing had a carved parrot head on it.

“You must keep walking, kind sir,” said a voice.

“While you’ve still got toes, dearie,” said another voice.

“Probably a good idea,” said Rosie, tugging Vimes’s arm. “But I can tell you’ve impressed them.”

“How?”

“You’re not bent double and making bubbling noises. Come along, mystery man.”

Vimes stared ahead, looking out for the blue light of Pseudopolis Yard. Somehow, it’d all make sense there.

But when he got there, there was no blue light over the archway. There were just a few lights upstairs.

Vimes hammered on the door until it opened a crack.

“What the hell’s going on here?” he demanded of the nose and one eye that was the visible totality of the occupant. “And get out of the way!”

He pushed the door back and strode in.

It wasn’t the Watch House, not inside. There were the familiar stairs, right enough, but there was a wall right across the charge room, and carpets on the floor, and tapestries on the wall…and a housemaid holding a tray, and staring, and dropping the tray, and screaming.

“Where are all my officers?” Vimes yelled.

“You leave this minute, d’you hear? You can’t just come in like that! You get out of here!”

Vimes turned and confronted the old man who’d opened the door. He looked like a butler, and had picked up a cudgel. Perhaps because of nerves, or maybe just because of general elderly tremors, the tip of the cudgel waved and weaved under his nose. Vimes snatched it and threw it on the floor.

“What is going on?” he demanded. The old man looked as bewildered as he was.

Vimes felt an odd, hollow terror welling up inside him. He darted back through the open door and into the wet night. Rosie and the Aunts had melted away in the darkness, as night people do when trouble looms, but Vimes ran on and into Kings Way, pushing aside other pedestrians and dodging the occasional carriage.

He was getting a second wind when he reached Scoone Avenue and turned into the driveway of Number One. He wasn’t sure what he’d find, but the place looked normal and there were torches burning on either side of the door. Familiar gravel crunched under his feet.

He went to hammer on the door, but steeled himself not to, and rang the bell instead.

After a moment the door was opened by a butler.

“Thank goodness!” said Vimes. “It’s me, man. Been in a fight. Nothing to worry about. How is—”

“What do you want?” said the butler coldly. He took a step back, which brought him more fully into the light of the hall lamps. Vimes had never seen him before.

“What’s happened to Willikins?” said Vimes.

“The scullery boy?” Now the butler’s tone was icy. “If you are a relative, I suggest you enquire around at the tradesmen’s entrance. You ought to know better than to come to the front door.”

Vimes tried to think how to deal with this, but his fist didn’t bother to wait. It laid the man out quite cleanly.

“No time for this,” said Vimes, stepping over him. He stood in the middle of the big hall and cupped his hands.

“Mrs. Content? Sybil?” he yelled, feeling the terror twist and knot inside him.

“Yes?” said a voice from what Vimes had always called The Ghastly Pink Drawing Room, and Sybil stepped out.

It was Sybil. The voice was right, and the eyes were right, and the way she stood was right. But the age wasn’t right. This was a girl, far too young to be Sybil…

She looked from him to the prone butler.

“Did you do that to Forsythe?” she said.

“I…er…I…it’s…. there’s been a mistake…” Vimes murmured, backing away. But Sybil was already pulling a sword off the wall. It wasn’t there for show. Vimes couldn’t remember if his wife had ever learned to fence, but several feet of edged weapon is quite threatening enough when wielded by an angry amateur. Amateurs sometimes get lucky.

He backed away hurriedly.

“It’s been a mistake…wrong house…mistaken identity…” He almost tripped over the fallen butler but managed to turn this into a staggering run through the doorway and down the steps.

Wet leaves brushed against him as he blundered through the shrubbery to the gateway, where he leaned against the wall and gulped for air.

That bloody Library! Hadn’t he heard something once, about how you could walk through time or something there? All those magical books pressed together did something strange.

Sybil had been so young. She’d looked sixteen! No wonder there wasn’t a Watch House in Pseudopolis Yard! They’d only moved in there a few years go!

The water was soaking through the cheap clothes. Back home…somewhere…was his huge leather greatcoat, heavy with oil, warm as toast…

Think, think, don’t let the terror take control—

Perhaps he could go and explain things to Sybil. After all, she was still Sybil, wasn’t she? Kind to bedraggled creatures? But even the softest heart would be inclined to harden when a rough, desperate man with a fresh scar and bad clothes barged into the house and said he was going to be your husband. A young woman could get quite the wrong idea, and he wouldn’t want that, not while she was holding a sword. Besides, Lord Ramkin was probably still alive and he’d been a blood-thirsty old devil, as far as Vimes could recall.

He slumped against the wall and reached for a cigar, and the terror twisted him again.

There was nothing in his pocket. Nothing at all. No Pantweed’s Slim Panatellas and, more important, no cigar case…

It had been made specially. It had a slight curve. It had always nestled in his pocket since the day Sybil had given it to him. It was as near part of him as any thing could be.

“We are here, and this is now.” Constable Visit, a strict believer in the Omnian religion, occasionally quoted from their holy book. Vimes understood it to mean, in less exalted copperspeak, that you have to do the job that is in front of you.

I am here, Vimes thought, and this is then. And less conscious parts of his brain added: you have no friends here. No home here. No purpose here. You are alone here.

No…not alone, said a part that was much, much deeper even than the terror, and was always on watch.

Someone was watching him.

A figure detached itself from the damp shadows of the street, and walked toward him. Vimes couldn’t make out the face, but that didn’t matter. He knew it would be smiling that special smile of the predator who knows he has the prey under his paw, and knows that the prey knows this, too, and also knows that the prey is desperately going to act as if they’re having a perfectly friendly conversation, because the prey wants so much for this to be the case…

You don’t want to die here, said the deep dark part of Vimes’s soul.

“Got a light, mister?” said the predator. He didn’t even bother to wave an unlit cigarette.

“Why, yes, of course,” said Vimes. He went as if to pat his pocket but swung around, arm outstretched, and caught a man creeping up behind him right across the ear. Then he leaped for the light-seeker in front of him and bore him to the ground with an arm across his throat.

It would have worked. He knew, afterward, that it really would have worked. If there hadn’t been two more men in the shadows, it would have worked. As it was, he managed to kick one of them in the kneecap before he felt the garrote go round his neck.

He was pulled upright, the scar screaming in pain as he tried to clutch at the rope.

“You hold him right there,” said a voice. “Look what he did to Jez. Damn! I’m gonna kick him in—”

The shadows moved. Vimes, struggling for breath, his one good eye watering, was only vaguely aware of what was happening. But there were some grunts, and some soft, strange noises, and the pressure on his neck was abruptly released.

He fell forward, and then, reeling a little, struggled to his feet. A couple of men were lying on the ground. One was bent double, making little bubbling noises. And, far off and getting further, there were running footsteps.

“Lucky we found you in time, kind sir,” said a voice right behind him.

“Not lucky for some, dearie,” said one right next to it.

Rosie stepped forward, out of the gloom.

“I think you ought to come back with us,” she said. “You’re going to get hurt, running around like this. Come on. Obviously I’m not taking you back to my place—”

“—obviously,” murmured Vimes.

“—but Mossy’ll find you somewhere to lay your head, I expect. He’s got a spare room.”

“Mossy Lawn!” said Vimes, suddenly light-headed. “That’s him! The pox doctor! I remember!” He tried to focus one tired eye on the young woman. Yes, the bone structure was right. That chin. That was a no-nonsense chin. It was a chin that took people somewhere. “Rosie…you’re Mrs. Palm!”

“Mrs.?” she said coldly, while the Agony Aunts giggled their high-pitched giggle. “I think not.”

“Well, I mean—” Vimes floundered. Of course, only the senior members of the profession adopted “Mrs.”

“And I’ve never seen you before,” said Rosie. “And neither have Dotsie and Sadie, and they have an amazing memory for faces. But you act as if you own the place, John Keel.”

“Do I?”

“You do. It’s the way you stand. Officers stand like that. You eat well. Maybe a bit too well. You could lose a few pounds. And then there’s the scars all over you. I saw ’em in Mossy’s place. Your legs are tanned from the knees down, and that says ‘watchman’ to me, because they go bare-legged. But I know every watchman in the city and you’re not one of them, so maybe you’re a military man. You fight by instinct, and dirty, too. That means you’re used to fighting for your life in a melee, and that’s odd, because that says to me ‘foot soldier,’ not officer. The word is that the lads took some fine armor off you. That’s officer. But you don’t wear rings. That’s foot soldier—rings catch in things, can pull your finger off if you’re not careful. And you’re married.”

“How can you tell that?”

“Any woman could tell that,” said Rosie Palm smoothly. “Now, step sharp. We’re out after curfew as it is. The Watch won’t bother much about us, but they will about you.”

Curfew, thought Vimes. That was a long time ago. Vetinari never ordered curfews. They interfered with business.

“I think perhaps I lost my memory when I was attacked,” he said. That sounded good, he thought. What he really needed now was somewhere quiet, to think.

“Really? I think perhaps I’m the Queen of Hersheba,” said Rosie. “Just remember, kind sir. I’m not doing this because I’m interested in you, although I’d admit to a macabre fascination about how long you’re going to survive. If it hadn’t been a cold wet night I’d have left you in the road. I’m a working girl, and I don’t need trouble. But you look like a man who can lay his hands on a few dollars, and there will be a bill.”

“I’ll leave the money on the dressing table,” said Vimes.

The slap in the face knocked him against the wall.

“Consider that a sign of my complete lack of a sense of humor, will you?” said Rosie, shaking some life back into her hand.

“I’m…sorry,” said Vimes. “I didn’t mean to…I mean…look, thank you for everything. I mean it. But this is not being a good night.”

“Yes, I can see that.”

“It’s worse than you think. Believe me.”

“We all have our troubles. Believe me,” said Rosie.

Vimes was glad of the Agony Aunts behind them as they walked back to The Shades. This was the old Shades, and Lawn lived a street’s width away from it. The Watch never set foot here. In truth, the new Shades wasn’t a lot better, but people had at least learned what happened if anyone attacked a watchman. The Aunts were a different matter. No one attacked the Aunts.

A night’s sleep, thought Vimes. Maybe, in the morning, this won’t have happened.

“She wasn’t there, was she,” said Rosie after a while. “Your wife? That was Lord Ramkin’s house. Are you in trouble with him?”

“Never met the man,” said Vimes absently.

“You were lucky someone told us where you’d gone. Those men were probably in the pay of someone up there. They’re a law unto themselves, over in Ankh. Some rough man walking around with no tradesman’s tools…well, he’s to be turned off the patch, and if they rob you blind while they’re doing it who’s going to care?”

Yes, thought Vimes. That’s the way it was. Privilege, which just means “private law.” Two types of people laugh at the law; those that break it and those that make it. Well, it’s not like that now…

…but I’m not in “now” now. Damn those wizards…

The wizards. Right! In the morning I’ll go and explain! Easy! They’ll understand! I’ll bet they can send me right back to when I left! There’s a whole university full of people to deal with this! It’s not my problem anymore!

Relief filled his body like warm pink mist. All he had to do was get through the night…

But why wait? They were open all night, weren’t they? Magic didn’t shut. Vimes remembered late-night patrols when he could practically see by the glow coming from some of the windows. He could simply—

Hold on, hold on. A policeman’s thought had been stirring in his mind. The Aunts didn’t run. They famously didn’t run. They caught up with you slowly. Anyone who’d been, as they called it, “a very naughty boy” would sleep extremely badly knowing that the Aunts on his tail were slowly getting nearer, pausing only for a cream tea somewhere or to visit an interesting jumble sale. But Vimes had run, run all the way up to Scoone Avenue, in the dark, through coach traffic and crowds of people swarming home before curfew. No one had paid him any attention, would surely not have seen his face if they did. And he certainly didn’t know anyone here. He amended the thought: no one who knew him.

“So,” he said casually, “who told you where I’d gone?”

“Oh, one of those old monks,” said Rosie.

“Which old monks?”

“Who knows? A little bald man with a robe and a broom. There’s always monks begging and chanting somewhere. He was in Phedre Road.”

“And you asked him where I’d gone?”

“What? No. He just looked around and said ‘Mr. Keel ran up to Scoone Avenue,’ and then he went on sweeping.”

“Sweeping?”

“Oh, it’s the kind of holy thing they do. So they don’t tread on ants, I think. Or they sweep sins away. Or maybe they just like the place clean. Who cares what monks do?”

“And nothing about that struck you as odd?”

“Why? I thought perhaps you were naturally kind to beggars!” snapped Rosie. “It doesn’t bother me. Dotsie said she put something in his begging bowl, though.”

“What?”

“Would you ask?”

The majority of Vimes thought: who does care about what monks do? They’re monks. That’s why they’re weird. Maybe one had a moment of revelation or something, they like that kind of thing. So what? Find the wizards, explain what’s happened, and leave it to them.

But the policeman part thought: how do little monks know I’m called Keel? I smell a rat.

The majority said: it’s a thirty-year-old rat, then.

And the policeman said: yes, that’s why it smells.

“Look, I’m going to have to go and check something,” he said. “I’ll…probably be back.”

“Well, I can’t chain you up,” said Rosie. She smiled a grim little smile and went on: “That costs extra. But if you don’t come back yet have any intention of staying in this city, then the Aunts—”

“I promise you, the last thing I want to do is leave Ankh-Morpork,” said Vimes.

“That actually sounded convincing,” said Rosie. “Off you go, then. We’re past curfew now. But why don’t I think you’ll be bothered by that?”

As he disappeared in the gloom, Dotsie sidled up to Rosie.

“You want we should follow him, dearie?”

“Don’t bother.”

“You should have let Sadie give him a little prod, dear. That slows them down.”

“I think it takes quite a lot to slow that man down. And we don’t want trouble. Not at a time like this. We’re too close.”

 

“You don’t want to be out at a time like this, mister.”

Vimes turned. He’d been hammering on the closed gates of the University.

There were three watchmen behind him. One of them was holding a torch. Another was holding a bow. A third had clearly decided that activities for tonight would not include heavy lifting.

Vimes raised his hands slowly.

“I expect he wants to be in a nice cold cell for the night,” said the one with the torch.

Oh dear, thought Vimes. It’s the Comedian of the Year contest. Coppers really oughtn’t to try this, but they still did.

“I was just visiting the University,” he said.

“Oh, yes?” said the one without either torch or bow. He was portly, and Vimes could make out the tarnished gleam of a sergeant’s stripes. “Where d’you live?”

“Nowhere,” said Vimes. “I’ve just arrived. And shall we move right along? I don’t have a job and I don’t have any money. And neither of those is a crime.”

“Out after curfew? No visible means of support?” said the sergeant.

“I got my legs,” said Vimes.

“At the moment, hur, hur,” said one of the men. He stopped when Vimes looked at him.

“I want to make a complaint, sergeant,” said Vimes.

“What about?”

“You,” said Vimes. “And the Brothers Grin here. You’re not doing it right. If you’re going to arrest someone, you take charge right away. You’ve got a badge and a weapon, yes? And he’s got his hands up, and a guilty conscience. Everyone’s got a guilty conscience. So he’s wondering what you know and what you’re going to do, and what you do is fire off the questions, sharply. You don’t make silly jokes, ’cos that makes you too human, and you keep him off balance so he can’t quite think a clear sentence, and, above all, you don’t let him move like this and grab your arm and pull it up so it almost breaks like this and grab your sword and hold it to your throat like this. Tell your man to lower that sword, will you? The way he’s waving it around, he could hurt someone.”

The sergeant gurgled.

“Right,” said Vimes. “Oh, sergeant…this is a sword? Ever sharpen it? What do you use it for, bludgeoning people to death? Now, what you’re going to do is, you’re all going to put your weapons on the ground over there, and then I’m going to let the Sarge go and I’ll leg it up that alley, okay? And by the time you’ve got your weapons, and believe me I’d advise you to get hold of weapons before coming after me, I’ll be well away. End of problem all round. Any questions?”

All three watchmen were silent. Then Vimes heard a very faint, very close noise. It was the sound of the hairs in his ears rustling as, with great care, the tip of a crossbow bolt gently entered his ear.

“Yes, sir, I have a question,” said a voice behind him. “Do you ever listen to your own advice?”

Vimes felt the pressure of the crossbow against his skull, and wondered how far the arrow would go if the trigger was pulled. An inch would be far too far.

Sometimes you just had to take the lumps. He dropped the sword with great and exaggerated care, released his grip on the sergeant, and stepped away meekly while the fourth watchman maintained his aim.

“I’ll just stand with my legs apart, shall I?” he said.

“Yeah,” growled the sergeant, turning around, “yeah, that’ll save us a bit of time. Although for you, mister, we’ve got all night. Well done, Lance Constable. We’ll make a watchman of you yet.”

“Yeah, well done,” said Vimes, staring at the young man with the bow. But the sergeant was already taking his run-up.

 

It was later. Pain had happened.

Vimes lay on the hard cell-bed and tried to make it go away. It hadn’t been as bad as it might be. That mob hadn’t even been able to organize a good seeing-to. They didn’t understand how a man could roll with the punches, and half the time they were getting in their own way.

Was he enjoying this? Not the pain. He’d pass on the pain. In fact he’d passed out on the pain. But there was that small part of him he’d heard sometimes during strenuous arrests after long chases, the part that wanted to punch and punch long after punching had already achieved its effect. There was a joy to it. He called it The Beast. It stayed hidden until you needed it and then, when you needed it, out it came. Pain brought it out, and fear. He’d killed werewolves with his bare hands, mad with anger and terror and tasting, deep inside, the blood of The Beast…and it was sniffing the air.

“’Ullo, Mister Vimes, haha. I was wondering when you’d wake up.”

He sat up sharply. The cells were barred on the corridor side, but also between cells as well, on the basis that those caged ought to know they were in a cage. And in the next cell, lying with his hands behind his head, was Carcer.

“Go on,” said Carcer cheerfully. “Make a grab for me through the bars, eh? Want to see how long it takes before the guards arrive?”

“At least they got you, too,” said Vimes.

“Not for long, not for long. I smell of roses, me, haha. Visitor to the city, got lost, very helpful to the Watch, so sorry to have bothered them, here’s a little something for their trouble…You shouldn’t of stopped the Watch taking bribes, Mister Vimes. It means an easier life all round, haha.”

“Then I’ll nail you some other way, Carcer.”

Carcer inserted a finger in his nose, wiggled it around, withdrew it, inspected its contents critically, and flicked them toward the ceiling.

“Well, that’s where it all goes runny, Mister Vimes. You see, I wasn’t dragged in by four coppers. I didn’t go around assaulting watchmen or trying to break into the University…”

“I was knocking on the door!”

“I believe you, Mister Vimes. But you know what coppers are like. You look at ’em in a funny way, and the buggers’ll fit you up for every crime in the book. Terrible, what they can pin on an honest man, haha.”

Vimes knew it.

“So you got some money,” he said.

“O’course, Mister Vimes. I’m a crook. And the best part is, it’s even easier to be a crook when no one knows you’re a crook, haha. But coppering depends on people believing you’re a copper. A turn up for the books, eh? You know we’re back in the good old days, haha?”

“It seems that way,” Vimes admitted. He didn’t like talking to Carcer, but right now he seemed to be the only real person around.

“Where did you land, if I may ask?”

“In The Shades.”

“Me too. Couple of blokes tried to mug me where I lay. Me! I ask you, Mister Vimes! Still, they had some money on them, so that worked out all right. Yes, I think I’m going to be very happy here. Ah, here comes one of our brave lads…”

A watchman walked along the passage, swinging his keys. He was elderly, the kind of copper who gets given the jobs where swinging keys is more likely than swinging a truncheon, and his most distinguishing feature was a nose twice the width and half the length of the average nose. He stared at Vimes for a moment, and then passed on to Carcer’s cell. He unlocked the door.

“You. Hop it,” he said.

“Yessir. Thank you, sir,” said Carcer, hurrying out. He pointed to Vimes. “You wanna watch that one, sir. He’s a animal. Decent people shouldn’t be locked up in the same cells, sir.”

“Hop it, I said.”

“Hopping it, sir. Thank you, sir.” And Carcer, with a leery wink at Vimes, hopped it.

The jailer turned to Vimes.

“And what’s your name, hnah, mister?”

“John Keel,” said Vimes.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, and I’ve had my kicking. Fair’s fair. I’d like to go now.”

“Oh, you’d like to go, would you? Hnah! You’d like me to hand over these keys, hnah, and give you five pence from the poor box for your, hnah, trouble, eh?”

The man was standing very close to the bars, with the grin of one who mistakenly thinks he’s a wit when he’s only half a one. And if Vimes’s reflexes were quicker, and he’d bet they were, even now, it’d be the work of a second to pull the old fool forcibly into the bars and spread his nose even further across his face. No doubt about it, the psychopaths had it the easy way.

“Just freedom would do,” he said, resisting temptation.

“You ain’t going anywhere, hnah, ’cept to see the captain,” said the jailer.

“That’d be Captain Tilden?” said Vimes. “Have I got that right? Smokes like a bonfire? Got a brass ear and a wooden leg?”

“Yeah, an’ he can have you shot, hnah, how d’you like them bananas?”

The cluttered desk of Vimes’s memory finally unearthed the inadvertent saucer of recollection from under the teacup of forgetfulness.

“You’re Snouty,” he said. “Right? Some bloke broke your nose and it never got set properly! And your eyes water all the time, which is why they gave you permanent jail duty—”

“Do I know you, mister?” said Snouty, peering at Vimes through suspicious, running eyes.

“Me? No. No!” said Vimes hastily. “But I’ve heard people talk about you. Practically runs the Watch House, they said. Very fair man, they said. Firm but fair. Never spits in the gruel, never widdles in the tea. And never confuses his fruit, either.”

The visible parts of Snouty’s face contorted into the resentful scowl of someone who can’t quite keep up with the script.

“Oh yeah?” he managed. “Well, hnah, I’ve always kept a clean cell, that’s very true.” He looked a little nonplussed at the development, but managed another scowl. “You stay there, mister, and I’ll go an’ tell the captain you woke up.”

Vimes went back and lay on the bunk, staring at the badly spelled and anatomically incorrect graffiti on the ceiling. For a while there was a raised voice from upstairs, with an occasional intrusive “hnah!” from Snouty.

Then he heard the jailer’s footsteps on the stairs again.

“Well, well, well,” he said in the tone of someone looking forward to seeing a third party get what was coming to them. “Turns out the captain wants to see you right away. Now, are you gonna let me shackle you, hnah, or do I call the lads down?”

Gods protect you, Vimes thought. Maybe it was true that the blow that had spread Snouty’s nose across his face had scrambled his brain. You had to be a special kind of idiot to try to handcuff a dangerous prisoner all by yourself. If he’d tried it with Carcer, for example, he’d have been a dead idiot five minutes ago.

The jailer opened the door. Vimes stood up and presented his wrists. After a second’s hesitation, Snouty handcuffed him. It always paid to be nice to a jailer; you might not get handcuffed behind your back. But a man with both hands in front of him had quite a lot of freedom.

“You go up the stairs first,” said Snouty and reached down and picked up a rather more-efficient-looking crossbow than Vimes had seen last night. “And if you even try to walk fast, mister, I’ll shoot you, hnah, where you die slow.”

“Very fair,” said Vimes. “Very fair.”

He walked up the steps very carefully, hearing Snouty’s heavy breathing right behind him. Like many people of limited intellectual scope, Snouty did take what he could do very seriously. He’d shown a refreshing lack of compunction about pulling that trigger, for one thing.

Vimes reached the top of the stairs and remembered to hesitate.

“Hnah, turn left, you,” said Snouty behind him. Vimes nodded to himself. And then first on the right. It was all coming back to him, in a great wave. This was Treacle Mine Road. This was his first Watch House. This was where it all began.

The captain’s door was open. The tired-looking old man behind the desk glanced up.

“Be seated,” said Tilden coldly. “Thank you, Snouty.”

Vimes had mixed memories of Captain Tilden. He had been a military man before being given this job as a kind of pension, and that was a bad thing in a senior copper. It meant he looked to Authority for orders, and obeyed them, whereas Vimes found it better to look to Authority for orders and then filter those orders through a fine mesh of common sense, adding a generous scoop of creative misunderstanding and maybe even incipient deafness if circumstances demanded, because Authority rarely descended to street level. Tilden set too great a store by shiny breastplates and smartness on parade. You had to have some of that stuff, that was true enough. You couldn’t let people slob around. But although he’d never voice the view in public, Vimes liked to see a bit of battered armor around the place. It showed that someone had been battering it. Besides, when you were lurking in the shadows you didn’t want to gleam…

There was an Ankh-Morpork flag pinned to one wall, the red faded to threadbare orange. Rumor had it that Tilden saluted it every day. There was also a very large silver inkstand with a gilt regimental crest on it, which occupied quite a lot of the desk; Snouty polished it every morning and it shone. Tilden had never quite left the army behind.

Still, Vimes retained a soft spot for the old man. He’d been a successful soldier, as these things went; he’d generally been on the winning side, and had killed more of the enemy by good if dull tactics than of his own men by bad but exciting ones. He’d been, in his own way, kind and reasonably fair; the men of the Watch had run rings around him, without him ever noticing.

Now Tilden was giving him the Long Stare With Associated Paperwork. It was supposed to mean: we know all about you, so why don’t you tell us all about yourself? But he really wasn’t any good at it.

Vimes returned the stare blankly.

“What is your name again?” said Tilden, becoming aware that Vimes was the better starer.

“Keel,” said Vimes. “John Keel.” And…what the hell…“Look,” he said, “you’ve only got one piece of paper there that means anything, and that’s the report from that sergeant, assuming he can write.”

“As a matter of fact, I have two pieces of paper,” said the captain. “The other one concerns the death of John Keel, what?”

“What? For a scrap with the Watch?”

“In the current emergency, that would be quite sufficient for the death penalty,” said Tilden, leaning forward. “But, ha, perhaps it won’t be necessary in this case, because John Keel died yesterday. You beat him up and robbed him, what? You took his money but you didn’t bother with the letters, because your sort can’t read, what? So you wouldn’t have known that John Keel was a policeman, what?”

“What?”

Vimes stared at the skinny face with its triumphantly bristling mustache and the small, faded, blue eyes.

And then there was the sound of someone industriously sweeping the floor in the corridor outside. The captain looked past him, growled, and hurled a pen.

“Get him out of here!” he barked. “What’s the little devil doing here at this time of night, anyway?”

Vimes turned his head. There was a skinny, wizened-looking man standing in the doorway, bearded and as bald as a baby. He was grinning stupidly and holding a broom.

“He’s cheap, sir, hnah, and it’s best if he comes in when it’s, hnah, quiet,” Snouty murmured, grabbing the little man by a stick-thin elbow. “C’mon, out you get, Mister Lousy—”

So now the crossbow wasn’t pointing at Vimes. And he had several pounds of metal on his wrists or, to put it another way, his arms were a hammer. He went to stand up…

 

Vimes woke up and stared at the ceiling. There was a deep rumbling somewhere nearby. Treadmill? Watermill?

It was going to be a corny line, but some things you had to know.

“Where am I?” he said. And then he added: “This time?”

“Well done,” said a voice somewhere behind him. “Consciousness to sarcasm in five seconds!”

The room was large, by the feel of the air, and the play of light on the walls suggested there were candles alight behind Vimes.

The voice said: “I’d like you to think of me as a friend.”

“A friend? Why?” said Vimes. There was a smell of cigarette smoke in the air.

“Everyone ought to have a friend,” said the voice. “Ah, I see you’ve noticed you’re still handcuffed—”

The voice said this because in one movement Vimes had swung himself off the table and plunged forward—

Vimes woke up and stared at the ceiling. There was a deep rumbling somewhere nearby. Treadmill? Watermill?

Then his thoughts knotted themselves most unpleasantly.

“What,” he said, “just happened?”

“I thought you might like to try that again, lad,” said the invisible friend. “We have little tricks here, as you will learn. Just sit up. I know you’ve been through a lot, but we don’t have time for messing about. This is sooner than I’d like, but I thought I’d better get you out of there before it went really runny…Mister Vimes.”

Vimes froze.

“Who are you?” he said.

“It’s Lu-Tze officially, Mister Vimes. But you can call me Sweeper, since we’re friends.”

Vimes sat up carefully and looked around.

The shadowy walls were covered with…writing, it must be writing, he thought, but the Hubland type of writing, which is only one step away from being little pictures.

The candle was standing on a saucer. Some way behind it, just visible in the shadows, were two cylinders, each as wide as a man and twice as long, set in massive horizontal bearings, one above the other. Both were turning slowly, and both gave the impression of being a lot bigger than their mere dimensions suggested. Their rumble filled the room. There was a strange violet haze around them.

Two yellow-robed figures tended the cylinders, but Vimes’s eye was drawn to the skinny little bald man sitting on an upturned crate by the candle. He was smoking a foul roll-up of the sort favored by Nobby. He looked like a foreign monk. In fact, he looked exactly the kind Vimes occasionally saw with begging bowls in the street.

“You’re looking fit, Mister Vimes,” said Sweeper.

“You were in the Watch House, right?” said Vimes. “Snouty called you Lousy!”

“Yes, Mister Vimes. Lu-Tze. I’ve been sweeping up there every night for the past ten days. All for two pence and all the kicks I can’t dodge. Just waiting for you.”

“And you told Rosie Palm where I’d gone, too? You were the monk on the bridge?”

“Right again. Couldn’t be sure she’d catch up.”

“How do you know who I am?”

“Don’t get excited, Mister Vimes,” said Sweeper calmly. “I’m here to help you…Your Grace. And I’m your friend, because right now I’m the only person in the world who will probably believe anything you tell me about, oh, thunderstorms and falls, that sort of thing. At least,” he added, “the only sane person.”

He watched Vimes as the man sat quite still for half a minute.

“Good, Mister Vimes,” said Sweeper. “Thinking. I like that in a man.”

“This is magic, right?” said Vimes at last.

“Something like that, yes,” said Sweeper. “F’rinstance, just now we moved you back in time. Just a few seconds. Just so you wouldn’t do anything you’d regret. Can’t say I blame you for wanting to have a go at someone after all you’ve been through, but we don’t want any harm to come to you, do we…”

“Hah? I almost had my hands round your throat!”

Sweeper smiled. It was a disarmingly little smile.

“Smoke?” he said. He fumbled in his robe and produced a ragged hand-rolled cigarette.

“Thanks, but I’ve got my own—” Vimes began automatically. His hand stopped halfway to his pocket.

“Oh, yes,” said Sweeper. “The silver cigar case. Sybil gave it to you as a wedding present, right? Shame about that.”

“I want to go home,” said Vimes. It came out as whisper. He hadn’t been sleeping in the past twelve hours, merely recovering.

This time it was Sweeper who sat in silence, apart from the rumble of the cylinders.

“You’re a policeman, Mister Vimes,” he said eventually. “Well, I’d like you to believe for a while that I’m a sort of policeman too, all right? Me and my colleagues, we see that…things happen. Or don’t happen. Don’t ask questions right now. Just nod.”

Vimes shrugged instead.

“Good. And let’s say on our patrol we’ve found you, as it might be, in a metaphorical kind of way, lying in the gutter on a Saturday night singing a rude song about wheelbarrows—”

“I don’t know a rude song about wheelbarrows!”

Sweeper sighed. “Hedgehogs? Custard? One-string fiddles? It really doesn’t matter. Now, we’ve found you a long way from where you should be, and we’d like to get you home, but it’s not as easy as you might think.”

“I’ve gone back in time, haven’t I? It was that bloody Library! Everyone knows the magic in there makes strange things happen!”

“Well, yes. It was mainly that, yes. It’s more true to say that you, er, got caught up in a major event.”

“Can anyone get me back? Can you get me back?”

“We-ll…” said Sweeper, looking awkward.

“Wizards can if you can’t,” said Vimes. “I’ll go and see them in the morning!”

“Oh, you will, will you? I’d like to be there when you do,” said Sweeper. “These ain’t the wizards under decent old Ridcully, you know. And you’re not His Grace Commander Sir Samuel Vimes, neither. You’re a rough-looking devil who’ll be burbling a story about thunderstorms and flying through time, to a bunch of rather devious and unpleasant men. You’ll be lucky if they only laugh at you. Anyway, even if they wanted to be helpful, they’d hit the same problem.”

“And what’s that?”

“It can’t be done. Not yet.” For the first time in the conversation, Sweeper looked ill at ease. “The big problem I’m facing, Mister Vimes, is that I ought to tell you a few things that I’m not, in any circumstances, allowed to tell you. But you’re a man who isn’t happy until he knows the facts. I respect that. Unless you’re satisfied, you won’t help us. I know I can’t expect you to believe me—”

The noise of the big cylinders changed for a moment, and Vimes felt a very slight shock, a suggestion that his whole body had just gone plib.

“So here’s someone you might believe—”

“Hold it,” said Vimes, still staring at him. “What happened to your cigarette?”

“Hmm?”

“You were holding half a roll-up and now it’s gone!”

“I finished it ten minutes ago,” said the Sweeper. “Roll ’em, boys.”

The tone of the spinning cylinders changed slightly.

Sam Vimes saw himself standing in the middle of the room.

“That’s me!”

“Yeah, right,” said Sweeper. “Now listen to the man.”

“Hello, Sam,” said the other Vimes, staring not quite at him. “I can’t see you but they say you can see me. Remember the smell of lilac? You thought about those who died. And then you told Willikins to hose down that kid. And, uh…you’ve got a pain in your chest you’re a bit worried about but you haven’t told anyone…That’s about enough, I think. You know I’m you. Now, there’s some things I can’t tell you. I can know ’em because I’m in a—” the speaker stopped and looked away, as if he was taking instruction from someone offstage “—a closed loop. Er…you could say I’m twenty minutes of your life you don’t recall. Remember when you had…”

 

…a sensation that his whole body had just gone plib.

Sweeper stood up. “I hate to do this,” he said, “but we’re in the temple and we can pretty much dampen out the paradoxes. On your feet, Mister Vimes. I’m going to tell you everything.”

“You just said you couldn’t!”

Sweeper smiled. “Need any help with those handcuffs?”

“What, these old Capstick Mk. Ones? No, just give me a nail and a couple of minutes. How come I’m in a temple?”

“I brought you here.”

“You carried me?”

“No. You walked with me. Blindfolded, of course. And then, when you were here, I gave you a little drink…”

“I don’t remember that!”

“Of course not. That was the purpose of the drink. Not very mystical, but it does the job. We don’t want you coming back here, now, do we? This place is supposed to be a secret—”

“You messed up my memory? Now you see here—” Vimes half stood, but Sweeper held up his hands placatingly.

“Don’t worry, don’t worry, it just…made you forget a few minutes,” he said.

“How many minutes?”

“Just a few, just a few. And it had herbs in it. Good for you, herbs. And then we let you sleep. Don’t worry, no one is after us. They’ll never know you’ve gone. See these things here?”

Sweeper picked up an open-work box that lay beside his chair. It had a strap like a knapsack, and Vimes could just see a cylinder inside the box.

“This is called a Procrastinator,” said the monk, “and it’s a tiny version of the ones over there, the ones that look like your granny’s mangle. I’m not going to get technical, but when it’s spinning it moves Time around you. Did you understand what I just said?”

“No!”

“All right, it’s a magic box. Happier?”

“Go on,” said Vimes grimly.

“You wore one of these and I led you here from the Watch House. Because you were wearing it, you were, shall we say, outside time. And after we’ve had this little talk, I’ll take you back to the Watch House and the old captain won’t know any difference. No time is passing in the outside world while we’re in the temple. The Procrastinators take care of that. Like I said, they move time around. Actually, what’s really happening is that they are moving us back in time at the same time that time moves us forward. We’ve got others around the place. Good for keeping food fresh. What else can I tell you…oh, yeah. It helps keep track if you just think of things happening one after another. Believe me.”

“This is like a dream,” said Vimes. There was a clink as the handcuffs sprang open.

“Yes, it is, isn’t it,” said Sweeper calmly.

“And can your magic box take me home? Move me in time all the way to where I ought to be?”

“This? Hah. No, this is strictly for small-scale stuff—”

“Look, Mr. Sweeper, I’ve spent the last day fighting a right bastard on a roof and getting beaten up twice and sewn up once and hah, stitched up, too. I’ve got the impression I should be thanking you for something but I’m damned if I know what it is. What I want is straight answers, mister. I’m the commander of the Watch in this city!”

“Don’t you mean will be?” said Sweeper.

“No! You told me it helps if I think of things happening one after another! Well, yesterday, my yesterday, I was commander of the Watch and I bloody well still am the commander of the Watch. I don’t care what anyone else thinks. They are not in possession of all the facts!”

“Hold on to that thought,” said Sweeper, standing up. “All right, Commander. You want some facts. Let’s take a walk in the garden, shall we?”

“Can you get me home?”

“Not yet. It’s my professional opinion that you’re here for a reason.”

“A reason? I fell through the bloody dome!”

“That helped, yes. Calm down, Mister Vimes. It’s all been a great strain, I can see.”

Sweeper led the way out of the hall. There was a big office outside, a hubbub of quiet but purposeful activity. Here and there, among the worn and scratched desks, there were more cylinders like the ones Vimes had seen in the other chamber. Some of them were turning slowly.

“Very busy, our Ankh-Morpork section,” said Sweeper. “We had to buy the shops on either side.” He picked up a scroll from a basket by one desk, glanced at the contents, and tossed it back with a sigh. “And everyone’s overworked,” he added. “We’re here at all hours. And when we say ‘all hours,’ we know what we’re talking about.”

“But what is it you do?” said Vimes.

“We see that things happen.”

“Don’t things happen anyway?”

“Depends what things you want. We’re the Monks of History, Mister Vimes. We see that it happens.”

“I’ve never heard of you, and I know this city like the back of my hand.”

“Right. And how often do you really look at the back of your hand, Mister Vimes? We’re in Clay Lane, to stop you wondering.”

“What? Those loony monks in the funny foreign building between the pawnbrokers and the shonky shop? The ones who go dancing round the street banging drums and shouting?”

“Well done, Mister Vimes. It’s funny how secretly you can move when you’re a loony monk dancing through the streets banging a drum.”

“When I was a kid, most of my clothes came from the shonky shop in Clay Lane,” said Vimes. “Everyone we knew got their clothes from the shonky shop. Used to be run by a foreign guy with a funny name…”

“Brother Soon Shine Sun,” said Sweeper. “Not a hugely enlightened operative, but a genius when it comes to pricing fourth-hand schmutter.”

“Shirts so worn you could see daylight through ’em and trousers as shiny as glass,” said Vimes. “And by the end of the week half the stuff was in the pawn shop.”

“That’s right,” said Sweeper. “You’d pawn your clothes in the pawn shop, but you’d never buy clothes from the pawn shop, ’cos there were Standards, right?”

Vimes nodded. When you got right down to the bottom of the ladder, the rungs were very close together and, oh my, weren’t the women careful about them. In their own way, they were as haughty as any duchess. You might not have much, but you could have Standards. Clothes might be cheap and old, but at least they could be scrubbed. There might be nothing behind the front door worth stealing but at least the doorstep could be clean enough to eat your dinner off, if you could’ve afforded dinner. And no one ever bought their clothes from the pawn shop. You’d hit bottom when you did that. No, you bought them from Mr. Sun at the shonky shop, and you never asked where he got them from.

“I went off to my first proper job in a suit from the shonky shop,” he said. “Seems like centuries ago now.”

“No,” said Sweeper. “It was only last week.”

Silence ballooned. The only sound was the purr of the cylinders dotted around the room.

Then Sweeper added: “It must have occurred to you.”

“Why? I’ve spent most of the time here being beaten up or unconscious or trying to get home! You mean I’m out there somewhere?”

“Oh, yes. In fact, last night you saved the day for your squad by aiming a crossbow at a dangerous miscreant who was attacking your sergeant.”

The silence ballooned larger this time. It seemed to fill the universe.

Eventually, Vimes said: “No. That’s not right. That never happened. I would have remembered that. And I can remember a lot about my first weeks in the job.”

“Interesting, isn’t it,” said Sweeper. “But is it not written, ‘There’s a lot goes on we don’t get told’? Mister Vimes, you need a short spell in the Garden of Inner-City Tranquility.”

 

It was indeed a garden, like a lot of other gardens you got in areas like Clay Lane. The gray soil was nothing more than old brick dust, elderly cat mess, and generalized, semirotted dross. At the far end was a three-hole privy. It was built handily by the gate to the back lane so the night-soil men didn’t have far to go, but this one had a small stone cylinder turning gently beside it.

The garden didn’t get much proper light. Gardens like this never did. You got secondhand light once the richer folk in the taller buildings had finished with it. Some people kept pigeons or rabbits or pigs on their plots, or planted, against all experience, a few vegetables. But it’d take magic beans to reach the real sunlight in gardens like this.

Nevertheless, someone had made an effort. Most of the spare ground had been covered with gravel of different sizes, and this had been carefully raked into swirls and curves. Here and there, some individual larger stones had been positioned, apparently with great thought.

Vimes stared at the garden of rocks, desperate for anything to occupy his attention.

He could see what the designer had in mind, he thought, but the effect had been spoiled. This was the big city, after all. Garbage got everywhere. The main disposal method was throwing it over a wall. Sooner or later someone would sell it or, possibly, eat it.

A young monk was carefully raking the gravel. He gave a respectful bow as Sweeper approached.

The old man sat down on a stone bench.

“Push off and get us two cups of tea, lad, will you?” he said. “One green with yak butter, and Mister Vimes will have it boiled orange in a builder’s boot with two sugars and yesterday’s milk, right?”

“That’s how I like it,” said Vimes weakly, sitting down.

Sweeper took a deep, long breath. “And I like building gardens,” he said. “Life should be a garden.”

Vimes stared blankly at what was in front of them.

“Okay,” he said. “The gravel and rocks, yes, I can see that. Shame about all the rubbish. It always turns up, doesn’t it…”

“Yes,” said Lu-Tze. “It’s part of the pattern.”

“What? The old cigarette packet?”

“Certainly. That invokes the element of air,” said Sweeper.

“And the cat doings?”

“To remind us that disharmony, like a cat, gets everywhere.”

“The cabbage stalks? The used sonkie?*”

“At our peril we forget the role of the organic in the total harmony. What arrives seemingly by chance in the pattern is part of a higher organization that we can only dimly comprehend. This is a very important fact, and has a bearing on your case.”

“And the beer bottle?”

For the first time since Vimes had met him, the monk frowned.

“Y’know, some bugger always tosses one over the wall on his way back from the pub on Friday nights. If it wasn’t forbidden to do that kind of thing, he’d feel the flat to my hand and no mistake.”

“It’s not part of the higher organization?”

“Possibly. Who cares? That sort of thing gets on my thungas, it really does,” said Sweeper. He sat back with his hands on his knees. Serenity flowed once more. “Well now, Mister Vimes…you know the universe is made up of very small items?”

“Huh?”

“We’ve got to work up to things gradually, Mister Vimes. You’re a bright man. I can’t keep telling you everything is done by magic.”

“Am I really here, too? In the city? I mean, a younger me?”

“Of course. Why not? Where was I? Oh, yes. Made up of very small items, and—”

“This is not a good time to be in the Watch. I remember! There’s the curfew. And that was only the start!”

“Small items, Mister Vimes,” said Sweeper sharply. “You need to know this.”

“Oh, all right. How small?”

“Very, very small. So tiny that they have some very strange ways indeed.”

Vimes sighed. “And I ask you: what ways are these, yeah?”

“I’m glad you asked that question. For one thing, they can be in many places at once. Try to think, Mister Vimes.”

Vimes tried to concentrate on what was probably the Discarded Fish-And-Chip Wrapper of Infinity. Oddly enough, with so many horrible thoughts crowding his head, it was almost a relief to put them on one side in order to consider this. The brain did things like that. He remembered how once, when he’d been stabbed and would’ve bled to death if Sergeant Angua hadn’t caught up with him, as he lay there, he’d found himself taking a very intense interest in the pattern of the carpet. The senses say: we’ve only got a few minutes, let’s record everything, in every detail…

“That can’t be right,” he said. “If this seat is made up of lots of tiny things that can be in lots of places at once, why is it standing still?”

“Give the man a small cigar!” said Sweeper jubilantly. “That’s the big problem, Mister Vimes. And the answer, our Abbott tells us, is that it is in lots of places at once. Ah, here’s the tea. And in order for it to be in lots of places at once, the multiverse is made up of a vast number of alternative universes. An oodleplex of oodleplexes. That’s like the biggest number anyone can think of, ever. Just so’s it can accommodate all the quantum. Am I going too fast for you?”

“Oh, that,” said Vimes. “I know about that. Like, you make a decision in this universe and you made a different decision in another one. I heard the wizards talking about that at a posh reception once. They were…arguing about the Glorious 25th of May.”

“And what were they saying?”

“Oh, all the old stuff…that it would have turned out different if the rebels had properly guarded the gates and the bridges, that you can’t break a siege by a frontal attack. But they were saying that, in a way, everything happens somewhere…”

“And you believed them?”

“It sounds like complete thungas. But sometimes you can’t help wondering: what would have happened if I’d done something different—”

“Like when you killed your wife?”

Sweeper was impressed at Vimes’s lack of reaction.

“This is a test, right?”

“You’re a quick study, Mister Vimes.”

“But in some other universe, believe me, I hauled off and punched you one.”

Again, Sweeper smiled the annoying little smile that suggested he didn’t believe him.

“You haven’t killed your wife,” he said. “Anywhere. There is nowhere, however huge the multiverse is, where Sam Vimes as he is now has murdered Lady Sybil. But the theory is quite clear. It says that if anything can happen without breaking any physical laws, it must happen. But it hasn’t. And yet the ‘multiverse’ theory works. Without it, no one would ever be able to make a decision at all.”

“So?”

“So what people do matters!” said Sweeper. “People invent other laws. What they do is important! The Abbott’s very excited about this. He nearly swallowed his biscuit. It means the multiverse isn’t infinite, and people’s choices are far more vital than they think. They can, by what they do, change the universe.”

Sweeper gave Vimes a long look.

“Mister Vimes, you’re thinking: I’m back in time, and damn me, I’m probably going to end up being the sergeant that teaches me all I know, right?”

“I’ve been wondering. The Watch would offer any gutter trash a job in those days, because of the curfew and all the spying,” said Vimes. “But look, I remember Keel, and yes, he did have a scar and an eyepatch, but I’m sure as hell that he wasn’t me.”

“Right. The universe doesn’t work like that. You were indeed taken under the wing of one John Keel, a watchman from Pseudopolis who came to Ankh-Morpork because the pay was better. He was a real person. He was not you. But do you remember if he ever mentioned to you that he was attacked by two men not long after he got off the coach?”

“Hell, yes,” said Vimes. “The muggers. He got this—he got his scar that way. A good old Ankh-Morpork welcome. But he was a tough man. Took ’em both down, no problem.”

“This time, there were three,” said Sweeper.

“Well, three’s trickier, of course, but—”

“You’re the policeman. You guess the name of the third man, Mister Vimes.”

Vimes hardly had to think. The answer erupted from the depths of darkest suspicion.

“Carcer?”

“He soon settled in, yes.”

“The bastard was in the next cell! He even told me he’d grabbed some money.”

“And you’re both stuck here, Mister Vimes. This isn’t your past anymore. Not exactly. It’s a past. And up there is a future. It might be your future. But it might not be. You want to go home now, leaving Carcer here and the real John Keel dead? But there’ll be no home to go to, if you could do that. Because if you do, young Sam Vimes won’t get a swift course in basic policing from a decent man. He’ll learn it from people like Sergeant Knock and Corporal Quirke and Constable Colon. And that might not be the worst of it, by a long way.”

Vimes shut his eyes. He remembered how wet behind the ears he’d been. And Fred…well, Fred Colon hadn’t been too bad under the halfhearted timorousness and lack of imagination, but Quirke had been an evil little sod in his way, and as for Knock, well, Knock had been Fred’s teacher and the pupil wasn’t a patch on the master. What had Sam Vimes learned from Keel? To stay alert, to think for himself, to keep a place in his head free from the Quirkes and Knocks of the world, and not to hesitate about fighting dirty today if that was what it took to fight again tomorrow.

He’s often thought he’d have been dead long ago if it wasn’t for—

He looked up sharply at the monk.

“Can’t tell you that, Mister Vimes,” said Lu-Tze. “Nothing’s certain, ’cos of quantum.”

“But, look, I know my future happened, because I was there!”

“No. What we’ve got here, friend, is quantum interference. Mean anything? No. Well…let me put it this way. There’s one past and one future. But there are two presents. One where you and your evil friend turned up, and one where you didn’t. We can keep these two presents going side by side for a few days. It takes a lot of run time, but we can do it. And then they’ll snap back together. The future that happens depends on you. We want the future where Vimes is a good copper. Not the other one.”

“But it must’ve happened!” snapped Vimes. “I told you, I can remember it! I was there yesterday!”

“Nice try, but that doesn’t mean anything anymore,” said the monk. “Trust me. Yes, it’s happened to you, but even though it has, it might not. ’Cos of quantum. Right now, there isn’t a Commander Vimes–shaped hole in the future to drop you into. It’s officially Uncertain. But might not be, if you do it right. You owe it to yourself, Commander. Right now, out there, Sam Vimes is learning to be a very bad copper indeed. And he learns fast.”

The little monk stood up. “I’ll let you think about that,” he said.

Vimes nodded, staring at the gravel garden.

Sweeper crept away quietly and went back into the temple. He walked to the other side of the office. He removed a strange key from around his neck and inserted it into a small door. The door opened. Brilliant sunlight burst ahead of him.

He walked on, his sandals leaving the cold flagstones and walking onto well-trodden earth in broad, hot daylight.

The river had a different course this far back in the past, and present-day residents of Ankh-Morpork would have been surprised at how pleasant it looked seven hundred thousand years ago. Hippos sunbathed on a sandbank out in midstream and, according to Qu, were getting troublesome lately—he’d had to set up a little temporal fence around the camp at night, so that any hippos trying to wander in among the tents found themselves back in the water with a headache.

Qu himself, his straw hat protecting his head from the hot sun, was supervising his assistants in a vined-off area. Lu-Tze sighed as he walked toward it.

There were going to be explosions, he knew it.

It wasn’t that he disliked Qu, the order’s Master of Devices. The man was a sort of engineering equivalent of the Abbott. The Abbott had taken thousand-year-old ideas and put them through his mind in a new way, and, as a result, the multiverse had opened for him like a flower. Qu, on the other hand, had taken the ancient technology of the Procrastinators, which could save and restore time, and had harnessed it to practical, everyday purposes, such as, yes, blowing people’s heads off. It was something that Lu-Tze tried to avoid. There were better things to do with people’s heads.

As Lu-Tze approached, a line of joyful, dancing Monks wove their way along a bamboo replica of a street, letting off firecrackers and banging gongs.

As they reached a corner, the last monk turned and lightly tossed a little drum into the outstretched arms of a straw dummy.

The air shimmered, and the figure disappeared with a small thunderclap.

“Nice to see something not blowing anyone’s head off,” said Lu-Tze, leaning on the vine rope.

“Oh, hello, Sweeper,” said Qu. “Yes. I wonder what went wrong. You see, the body should have moved forward by a microsecond and left the head where it was.” He picked up a megaphone. “Thank you, everyone! Places for another run! Soto, take over, please!”

He turned to Lu-Tze. “Well?”

“He’s thinking about it,” said Sweeper.

“Oh, for heavens’ sake, Lu-Tze! This is completely unauthorized, you know! We’re supposed to prune out rogue history loops, not expend vast amounts of time keeping them going!”

“This one’s important. We owe it to the man. It wasn’t his fault we had the major temporal shattering just as he fell through the dome.”

“Two timelines running side by side,” moaned Qu. “That’s quite unacceptable, you know. I’m having to use techniques that are completely untried.”

“Yes, but it’s only a few days.”

“What about Vimes? Is he strong enough? He’s got no training for this!”

“He defaults to being a copper. A copper’s a copper, wherever he is.”

“I really don’t know why I listen to you, Lu-Tze, I really don’t,” said Qu. He glanced at the arena and hurriedly raised his megaphone to his lips. “Don’t hold it that way up! I said don’t hold—”

There was a thunderclap. Lu-Tze didn’t bother to turn around.

Qu lifted the megaphone again and said wearily, “All right, someone please go and fetch Brother Kai, will you? Start looking around, oh, two centuries ago. You don’t even use these very useful devices I, er, devise,” he added to Lu-Tze.

“Don’t need to,” said Lu-Tze. “Got a brain. Anyway, I use the temporal toilet, don’t I?”

“A privy that discharges ten million years into the past was not a good idea, Sweeper. I’m sorry I let you persuade me.”

“It’s saving us fourpence a week to Harry King’s bucket boys, Qu, and that’s not to be sneezed at. Is it not written, ‘A penny saved is a penny earned?’ Besides, it all lands in a volcano anyway. Perfectly hygienic.”

There was another explosion. Qu turned and raised his megaphone.

“Do not bang the tambourine more than twice!” he bellowed. “It’s tap-tap-throw-duck! Please pay attention!”

He turned to Sweeper.

“Four more days at most, Lu-Tze,” he said. “I’m sorry, but after that I can’t hide it in the paperwork. And I’ll be amazed if your man can stand it. It’ll affect his mind sooner or later, however tough you think he is. He’s not in his right time.”

“We’re learning a lot, though,” Lu-Tze insisted. “For a perfectly logical chain of reasons Vimes ended up back in time even looking rather like Keel! Eyepatch and scar! Is that Narrative Causality, or Historical Imperative, or Just Plain Weird? Are we back to the old theory of the self-correcting history? Is there no such thing as an accident, as the Abbott says? Is every accident just a higher-order design? I’d love to find out!”

“Four days,” Qu insisted. “Any longer than that and this little exercise will show up, and the Abbot will be very, very annoyed with us.”

“Right you are, Qu,” said the Sweeper meekly.

He’ll be annoyed if he has to find out, certainly, he thought as he walked back to the door in the air. He’d been very specific. The Abbott of the History Monks (the Men In Saffron, No Such Monastery…they had many names) couldn’t allow this sort of thing, and he’d taken pains to forbid Lu-Tze from this course of action. He had added, “but when you do, I expect Historical Imperative will win.”

 

Sweeper went back to the garden and found Vimes still staring at the empty Baked-Bean Tin of Universal Oneness.

“Well, Commander?” he said.

“Are you really like…policemen, for Time?” said Vimes.

“Well, in a way,” said Sweeper.

“So…you make sure the good stuff happens?”

“No, not the good stuff. The right stuff,” said Sweeper. “But frankly, these days, we have our work cut out for us making sure anything happens. We used to think time was like a river, you could row up and down and come back to the same place. Then we found it acted like a sea, so you could go from side to side as well. Then it turned out to be like a ball of water; you could go up and down, too. Currently we think it’s like…oh, lots of spaces, all rolled up. And then there are time jumps, and time slips, and humans mess it up, too, wasting it and gaining it. And then there’s quantum, of course.” The monk sighed. “There’s always bloody quantum. So what with one thing and another, we think we’re doing well if yesterday happens before tomorrow, quite frankly. You, Mister Vimes, got caught up in a bit of…an event. We can’t put it right, not properly. You can.”

Vimes sat back. “I’ve got no choice, have I?” he said. “As my old sergeant used to say…you do the job that’s in front of you.” He hesitated. “And that’s going to be me, isn’t it? I taught me all I know…”

“No. I explained.”

“I didn’t understand it. But perhaps I don’t have to.”

Sweeper sat down.

“Good. And now, Mister Vimes, I’ll take you back inside and we’ll work out what you need to know from all this, and Qu’ll set up the spinners and we’ll just…bounce you in time a little so that you give yourself the message. You know you did it, because you saw it. We can’t have you running around knowing all about us.”

“I’ll get suspicious.”

“You’ll have to make it convincing.”

“I’ll still be suspicious.”

“You won’t trust even yourself?”

“I’m a devious character. I could be hiding something. How are you going to get me back to the Watch House? Don’t even think about giving me some kind of potion.”

“No. We’ll blindfold you, twirl you round, take you the long way, and walk you back. I promise.”

“Any other advice?” said Vimes, gloomily.

“Just be yourself,” said Sweeper. “See it through. There’ll come a time when you’ll look back and see how it all made sense.”

“Really?”

“I wouldn’t lie. It’ll be a perfect moment. Believe me.”

“But…” Vimes hesitated.

“Yes?”

“You must know there’s another little problem if I’m going to be Sergeant Keel. I’ve remembered what day this is. And I know what’s going to happen.”

“Yes,” said Sweeper. “I know, too. Shall we talk about that?”

 

Captain Tilden blinked.

“What happened there?” he said.

“Where?” said Vimes, trying to fight down nausea. Time coming back had felt like being squeezed just for a moment in a giant vise.

“You blurred, man.”

“Perhaps I’m a bit tired of this,” said Vimes. “Listen, captain, I am John Keel. I can prove it, okay? Ask me some questions. You’ve got my papers there, haven’t you?”

Tilden hesitated for a moment. He was a man whose mind was ponderous enough to have momentum; it was quite hard for his thoughts to change direction.

“Who is commander of the Pseudopolis Watch, then?” he said.

“Sheriff Macklewheet,” said Vimes.

“Aha! Wrong! Fallen at the very first fence, what? In fact, you fool, it’s Sheriff Pearlie—”

“Hnah, excuse me, sir…” said Snouty nervously.

“Yes? What?”

“Hnah, it is Macklewheet, sir. Pearlie died last week. Heard it in the, hnah, pub.”

“Fell into the river when drunk,” said Vimes helpfully.

“That’s what I heard, hnah, sir,” said Snouty.

Tilden looked furious.

“You could’ve known that, what?” he said. “It doesn’t prove anything!”

“Ask me something else, then,” said Vimes. “Ask me what Macklewheet said about me.” And I just hope I’ve got the answers right, he added to himself.

“Well?”

“Said I was the best officer on his force and he was sorry to see me go,” said Vimes. “Said I was of good character. Said he wished he could pay me the twenty-five dollars a month I was going to get here—”

“I never offered you—”

“No, you offered me twenty dollars and now that I’ve seen the mess here I’m not taking it!” Vimes rejoiced. Tilden hadn’t even learned how to control a conversation. “If you pay Knock twenty dollars, he owes you nineteen dollars change! The man couldn’t talk and chew gum at the same time. And look at this, will you?”

Vimes dumped his handcuffs on the desk. The gaze of Snouty and Tilden swung to them as if magnetic.

Oh dear, thought Vimes and stood up and lifted the crossbow out of Snouty’s hands. It was all in the movement. If you moved with authority, you got a second or two extra. Authority was everything.

He fired the bow at the floor, then handed it back.

“A kid could open those cuffs and while Snouty here keeps a very clean jail he’s completely drawers at being a guard,” said Vimes. “This place needs shaking up.” He leaned forward, knuckles on the captain’s desk, with his face a few inches from the trembling mustache and the milky eyes.

“Twenty-five dollars or I walk out that door,” he said. It was probably a phrase never ever said before by any prisoner anywhere on any world.

“Twenty-five dollars,” murmured Tilden, hypnotized.

“And the rank will be sergeant-at-arms,” said Vimes. “Not sergeant. I’m not going to be given orders by the likes of Knock.”

“Sergeant-at-arms,” said Tilden distantly, but Vimes saw the hint of approval. It was a good military-sounding title, and it was still on the books. In fact, it was a pretty ancient pre-coppering term, back in the days when a court employed a big man with a stick to drag miscreants in front of it. Vimes had always admired the simplicity of that arrangement.

“Well, er, Sheriff Macklewheet, er, certainly gave you a most glowing reference,” said the captain, shuffling the paper. “Very glowing. Things have been a little difficult since we lost Sergeant Wi—”

“And I’ll be paid my first month in advance, please. I need clothes and a decent meal and somewhere to sleep.”

Tilden cleared his throat. “Many of the unmarried men stay in the barracks in Cheapside—”

“Not me,” said Vimes. “I’ll be lodging with Doctor Lawn in Twinkle Street.” Well, Rosie Palm did suggest he had a spare room…

“The pox, hnah, doctor?” said Snouty.

“Yeah, I’m particular about the company I keep,” said Vimes. “It’s also just around the corner.”

He took his hands off the desk, stood back, and whipped off a salute of almost parodic efficiency, the sort that Tilden had always loved.

“I’ll report for duty at three o’clock tomo—this afternoon, sir,” he said. “Thank you, sir.”

Tilden sat mesmerized.

“It was twenty-five dollars, sir, I believe,” said Vimes, still maintaining the salute.

He watched the captain get up and go to the old green safe in the corner. The man was careful not to let Vimes see him turn the dial, but Vimes was pretty certain he didn’t need to. The safe had still been there when he made captain, and by then everyone knew the combination was 4-4-7-8, and no one seemed to know how to change it. The only thing worth keeping in it had been the tea and sugar and anything you particularly wanted Nobby to read.

Tilden came back with a small leather bag and slowly counted out the money, and was so cowed that he didn’t ask Vimes to sign anything.

Vimes took it, saluted again, and held out his other hand.

“Badge, sir,” he said.

“Ah? Oh, yes, of course…”

The captain, entirely unnerved, fumbled in the top drawer of the desk and pulled out a dull copper shield. If he’d been more observant, he’d have noticed how hungrily Vimes’s eyes watched it.

The new sergeant-at-arms picked up his badge with care and saluted yet again.

“Oath, sir,” he said.

“Oh, er, that thing? Er, I believe I’ve got it written down somewh—”

Vimes took a deep breath. This probably wasn’t a good idea, but he was flying now.

“I comma square bracket recruit’s name square bracket comma do solemnly swear by square bracket recruit’s deity of choice square bracket to uphold the Laws and Ordinances of the city of Ankh-Morpork, serve the public truƒt comma and defend the ƒubjects of His ƒtroke Her bracket delete whichever is inappropriate bracket Majeƒty bracket name of reigning monarch bracket without fear comma favor comma or thought of perƒonal ƒafety semicolon to purƒue evildoers and protect the innocent comma laying down my life if necceƒsary in the cauƒe of said duty comma so help me bracket aforeƒaid deity bracket full stop Gods Save the King stroke Queen bracket delete whichever is inappropriate bracket full stop.”

“My word, well done,” said Tilden. “You have come well-prepared, sergeant.”

“And now it’s the King’s Shilling, sir,” said Vimes insistently, soaring on wings of audacity.

“What?”

“I have to take the King’s Shilling, sir.”

“Er…do we have a—”

“It’s, hnah, in the bottom drawer, sir,” said Snouty helpfully. “On the bit of string.”

“Oh yes,” said Tilden, beaming. “It’s a long time since we used that, what?”

“Is it?” said Vimes.

After some rummaging, Tilden produced the coin. It was a genuine old shilling, probably worth half a dollar now just for its silver, and thus, coppers being coppers, it had always been dropped into the new copper’s hand and then tugged away before it was pinched.

Vimes had taken the oath once. He wondered if taking it twice canceled it out. But it needed to be done and you had to at least touch the shilling. He felt the weight in his palm and took a small shameful pleasure in closing his fingers on it before the captain had time to drag it back. Then, point made, he released the grip.

With a final salute, he turned and tapped Snouty on the shoulder.

“With the captain’s permission, I’d like a chat with you outside, please.”

And Vimes strode out.

Snouty looked at Tilden, who was still sitting as though hypnotized, the shilling dangling from his fist. The captain managed to say, “Good man, that. Ver’ good…got backbone…”

“Hnah, I’ll just go an’ see what he wants, sir,” said Snouty and scuttled out.

He reached the end of the corridor when a hand came out of the shadows and pulled him close.

“You’re a useful man to know, Snouty,” hissed Vimes. “I can tell.”

“Yessir,” said Snouty, held half on tiptoe.

“You’ve got your ear to the ground, eh?”

“Yessir!”

“There’s someone in every nick who knows all that’s going on and can lay his hands on just about anything, Snouty, and I think you are that man.”

“Hnah, yessir!”

“Then listen here,” said Vimes. “Size eight boots, size seven-and-a-quarter helmet, a good leather cape. The boots should be a good make but secondhand. Got that?”

“Secondhand?”

“Yes. Soles pretty nearly worn through.”

“Soles pretty nearly worn through, hnah, check,” said Snouty.

“Breastplate not to have any rust on it but a few dents will be okay. A good sword, Snouty, and believe me I know a good sword when I hold one. As for all the rest of the stuff, well, I know a man like you can get hold of the very best and have it delivered to Dr. Lawn’s place on Twinkle Street by ten tomorrow. And there’ll be something in it for you, Snouty.”

“What’ll that be, sir?” said Snouty, who was finding the grip uncomfortable.

“My undying friendship, Snouty,” said Vimes. “Which is going to be an extremely rare coin in these parts, let me tell you.”

“Right you are, Sarge,” said Snouty. “And a bell, sir?”

“A bell?”

“For ringing and shouting, hnah, ‘All’s well!’ with, Sarge.”

Vimes considered this. A bell. Well, every copper still got a bell, it was down there in the regulations, but Vimes had banned its use on anything but ceremonial occasions…

“No bell for me, Snouty,” said Vimes. “Do you think things are well?”

Snouty swallowed.

“Could go either way, Sarge,” he managed.

“Good man. See you tomorrow.”

There was a glow of dawn in the sky when Vimes strode out, but the city was still a pattern of shadows.

In his pocket was the reassuring heaviness of the badge. And in his mind the huge, huge freedom of the oath. Ruler after ruler had failed to notice what a devious oath it was…

He walked as steadily as he could down to Twinkle Street. A couple of watchmen tried to waylay him, but he showed them the badge and, more important, he had the voice now, it had come back to him. It was night and he was walking the streets and he owned the damn streets and somehow that came out in the way he spoke. They’ve hurried off. He wasn’t sure they’d believed him, but at least they’d pretended to; the voice had told them he could be the kind of trouble they weren’t paid enough to deal with.

At one point he had to step aside as a very thin horse dragged a huge and familiar four-wheeled wagon over the cobbles. Frightened faces looked out at him from between the wide metal strips that covered most of it, and then it disappeared into the gloom. Curfew was claiming its nightly harvest.

These were not good times. Everyone knew Lord Winder was insane. And then some kid who was equally mad had tried to knock him off and would have done, too, if the man hadn’t moved at the wrong moment. His lordship had taken the arrow in the arm, and they said—they being the nameless people of the kind that everyone meets in the pub—that the wound had poisoned him and made him worse. He suspected everyone and everything, he saw dark assassins on every corner. The rumor was that he woke up sweating every night because they even got into his dreams.

And he saw plots and spies everywhere throughout his waking hours, and had men root them out, and the thing about rooting out plots and spies everywhere is that, even if there are no real plots to begin with, there are plots and spies galore very soon.

At least the Night Watch didn’t have to do much of the actual rooting. They just arrested the pieces. It was the special office in Cable Street that was the long hand of his lordship’s paranoia. The Particulars, they were officially, but as far as Vimes could remember they’d reveled in their nickname of the Unmentionables. They were the ones that listened in every shadow and watched at every window. That was how it seemed, anyway. They certainly were the ones who knocked on doors in the middle of the night.

Vimes stopped in the dark. The cheap clothes were soaked through, the boots were flooded, and rain was trickling off his chin, and he was a long, long way from home. Yet, in a treacherous kind of way, this was home. He’d spent most of his days working nights. Walking through the wet streets of a sleeping city was his life.

The nature of the night changed, but the nature of The Beast remained the same.

He reached into the ragged pocket and touched the badge again.

In the darkness where lamps were few and far between, Vimes knocked on a door. A light was burning in one of the lower windows, so Lawn was presumably still awake.

After a while, a very small panel slid back, and he heard a voice say: “Oh…it’s you.”

There was a pause, followed by the sound of bolts being released.

The doctor opened the door. In one hand he held a very long syringe. Vimes found his gaze inexorably drawn to it. A bead of something purple dripped off the end and splashed onto the floor.

“What would you have done, inject me to death?” he said.

“This?” Lawn looked at the instrument as if unaware that he’d been holding it. “Oh…just sorting out a little problem for someone. Patients turn up at all hours.”

“I’ll bet they do. Er…Rosie said you had a spare room,” said Vimes. “I can pay,” he added quickly. “I’ve got a job. Five dollars a month? I won’t be needing it for long.”

“Upstairs on the left,” said Lawn, nodding. “We can talk about it in the morning.”

“I’m not a criminal madman,” said Vimes. He wondered why he said it, and then wondered who he was trying to reassure.

“Never mind, you’ll soon fit in,” said Lawn. There was a whimper from the door leading to the surgery.

“The bed’s not aired but I doubt that you’ll care,” he said. “And now, if you’ll excuse me…”

It wasn’t aired, and Vimes didn’t care. He didn’t even remember getting into it.

He woke up once, in darkness and panic, and heard the sound of the big black wagon rattling down the street. And then it just, quite seamlessly, became part of the nightmare.

 

At ten o’clock in the morning Vimes found a cold cup of tea by his bed, and a pile of clothes and armor on the floor outside the door. He drank the tea while he inspected the pile.

He’d read Snouty right. The man survived because he was a weathercock and kept an eye on which way the wind was blowing, and right now the wind was blowing due Vimes. He’d even included fresh socks and drawers, which hadn’t been in the specifications. It was a thoughtful touch. They probably hadn’t been paid for, of course. They had been “obtained.” This was the old Night Watch.

But, glory be, the breathy little crawler had scrounged something else, too. The three stripes for a sergeant had a little gold crown above them. Vimes instinctively disliked crowns, but this was one he was prepared to treasure.

He went downstairs, doing up his belt, and bumped into Lawn coming out of his surgery, wiping his hands on a cloth. The doctor smiled absently, then focused on the uniform. The smile did not so much fade as drain.

“Shocked?” said Vimes.

“Surprised,” said the doctor. “Rosie won’t be, I expect. I don’t do anything illegal, you know.”

“Then you’ve got nothing to fear,” said Vimes.

“Really? That proves you’re not from round here,” said Lawn. “Want some breakfast? There’s kidneys.” This time it was Vimes’s smile that drained. “Lamb,” the doctor added.

In the tiny kitchen he prized the lid off a tall stone jar and pulled out a can. Vapor poured off it.

“Ice,” he said. “Get it from over the road. Keeps food fresh.”

Vimes’s brow wrinkled. “Over the road? You mean the mortuary?”

“Don’t worry, it’s not been used,” said Lawn, putting a pan on the stove. “Mr. Garnish drops off a lump a few times a week, in payment for being cured of a rather similar medical condition.”

“But mostly you work for the ladies of, shall we say, negotiable affection?” said Vimes. Lawn gave him a sharp look to see if he was joking, but Vimes’s expression hadn’t changed.

“Not just them,” he said. “There are others.”

“People who come in by the back door,” said Vimes, looking around the little room. “People who for one reason or another don’t want to go to the…better known doctors?”

“Or can’t afford them,” said Lawn. “People who turn up with no identity. And you had a point…John?”

“No, no, just asking,” said Vimes, cursing himself for walking right into it. “I just wondered where you trained.”

“Why?”

“The kind of people who come in by the back door are the kind of people who want results, I imagine.”

“Hah. Well, I trained in Klatch. They have some novel ideas about medicine over there. They think it’s a good idea to get patients better, for one thing.” He turned the kidneys over with a fork. “Frankly, Sergeant, I’m pretty much like you. We do what needs doing, we work in, er, unpopular areas, and I suspect we both draw the line somewhere. I’m no butcher. Rosie says you aren’t. But you do the job that’s in front of you, or people die.”

“I’ll remember that,” said Vimes.

“And when all’s said and done,” said Lawn, “there are worse things to do in the world than take the pulse of women.”

After breakfast, Sergeant-at-Arms John Keel stepped out into the first day of the rest of his life.

He stood still for a moment, shut his eyes, and swiveled both feet like a man trying to stub out two cigarettes at once. A slow, broad smile spread across his face. Snouty had found just the right kind of boots. Willikins and Sybil between them conspired to prevent him wearing old, well-worn boots these da—those days, and stole them away in the night to have the soles repaired. It was good to feel the streets with dry feet again. And after a lifetime of walking them, he did feel the streets. There were the cobblestones: catheads, trollheads, loaves, short and long setts, rounders, Morpork Sixes, and the eighty-seven types of paving brick, and the fourteen types of stone slab, and the twelve types of stone never intended for street slabs but which had got used anyway and had their own patterns of wear, and the rubbles, and the gravels, and the repairs, and the thirteen different types of cellar covers, and twenty types of drain lids—

He bounced a little, like a man testing the hardness of something. “Elm Street,” he said. He bounced again. “Junction with Twinkle. Yeah.”

He was back.

It wasn’t many steps to Treacle Mine Road, and as he turned toward the Watch House, a flash of color caught his eye.

And there it was, overhanging a garden wall. Lilac was common in the city. It was vigorous and hard to kill, and had to be.

The flower buds were noticeably swelling.

He stood and stared, as a man might stare at an old battlefield.

…they rise hands up, hands up, hands up….

How did it go, now? Think of things happening one after the other. Don’t assume that you know what’s going to happen, because it might not. Be yourself.

And, because he was himself, he made a few little purchases in little shops in dark alleys, and went to work.

The Treacle Mine Road Night Watch House was generally deserted around midday, but Vimes knew that Snouty, at least, would be there. He was a Persistent Floater, just like Nobby and Colon and Carrot and, when you got down to it, Vimes as well. Being on duty was their default state of being. They hung around the Watch House even when off duty, because that’s where their lives took place. Being a copper wasn’t something you left hanging by the door when you went home.

But I promise I’ll learn how, thought Vimes. When I get back, it’ll all be different.

He went around the back and let himself in by the stable entrance. It wasn’t even locked. Black mark right there, lads.

The iron bulk of the hurry-up wagon stood empty on the cobbles.

Behind it was what they called, now, the stables. In fact, the stables were only the bottom floor of what would have been part of Ankh-Morpork’s industrial heritage, if anyone had ever thought of it like that. In fact they thought of it as junk that was too heavy to cart away. It was part of the winding gear from one of the original treacle mines, long since abandoned. One of the original lifting buckets was still up there, glued to the floor by its last load of the heavy, sticky, unrefined treacle, which, once set, was tougher than cement and more waterproof than tar. Vimes remembered, as a kid, begging chippings of pig treacle off the miners; one lump of that, oozing the sweetness of prehistoric sugar cane, could keep a boy’s mouth happily shut for a week.*

Inside the treacle-roofed stable level, chewing a bit of bad hay, was the horse. Vimes knew it was a horse because it checked out as one: four hooves, tail, head with mane, seedy brown coat. Considered from another angle, it was half a ton of bones held together with horsehair.

He patted it gingerly; as one of nature’s pedestrians, he’d never been at home around horses. He unhooked a greasy clipboard from a nail nearby and flicked through its pages. Then he had another look around the yard. Tilden never did that. He looked at the pigsty in the corner where Knock kept his pig, and then at the chicken run, and the pigeon loft, and the badly made rabbit hutches, and he did a few calculations.

The old Watch House! It was all there, just like the day he first arrived. It had been two houses once, and one of them had been the treacle mine office. Everywhere in the city had been something else once. And so the place was a maze of blocked-in doorways and ancient windows and poky rooms.

He wandered around like a man in a museum. See the old helmet on a stick for archery practice! See Sergeant Knock’s broken-springed armchair, where he used to sit out on sunny afternoons!

And, inside, the smell: floor wax, stale sweat, armor polish, unwashed clothes, ink, a hint of fried fish, and always, here, a taint of treacle.

The Night Watch. He was back.

When the first members of the Night Watch came in, they found a man perfectly at ease, leaning back in a chair with his feet on a desk and leafing through paperwork. The man had sergeant’s stripes and an air of an unsprung trap. He was also giving absolutely no attention to the newcomers. He particularly paid no heed to one gangly lance constable who was still new enough to have tried to put a shine on his breastplate…

They fanned out among the desks, with muttered conversations.

Vimes knew them in his soul. They were in the Night Watch because they were too scruffy, ugly, incompetent, awkwardly shaped, or bloody-minded for the Day Watch. They were honest, in that special policeman sense of the word. That is, they didn’t steal things too heavy to carry. And they had the morale of damp gingerbread.

He’d wondered last night about giving them some kind of pep talk by way of introduction, and decided against it. They might be very bad at it but they were coppers, and coppers did not respond well to the Happy Families approach: “Hello, chaps, call me Christopher, my door is always open, I’m sure if we all pull together we shall get along splendidly, like one big happy family.” They’d seen too many families to fall for that rubbish.

Someone cleared his throat with malice aforethought. Vimes glanced up and into the face of Sergeant “Knocker” Knock and, for a fraction of a second, had to suppress the urge to salute. Then he remembered what Knock was.

“Well?” he said.

“That’s my desk you’re sitting at, Sergeant,” said Knock.

Vimes sighed and pointed to the little crown on his sleeve.

“See this, Sergeant?” he said. “It’s what they used to call the Hat of Authority.”

Knock’s little weasely eyes focused on the crown. And then they went back to Vimes’s face and widened in the shock of recognition.

“Bloody hell,” breathed Knock.

“That’s ‘bloody hell, sir,’” said Vimes. “But ‘Sarge’ will do. Most of the time. And this is your mob, is it? Oh dear. Well, let’s make a start.”

He swung his feet off the desk and stood up.

“I’ve been looking at the feed bills for Marilyn,” he said. “Interesting reading, ladies. According to my rough calculations, a horse eating that much ought to be approximately spherical. Instead, she’s so thin that with two sticks and some sheet music I could give you a tune.”

Vimes put the papers down.

“Don’t think I don’t know where the feed goes. I bet I know who’s got the chickens and rabbits and pigeons,” he said. “And the pig. I bet the captain thinks they get fat on leftovers.”

“Yeah, but—” a voice began.

Vimes’s hand slammed on the desk.

“You even starve the damn horse!” he said. “That stops right now! So will a lot of other things. I know how it works, see? Mumping free beer and a doughnut, well, that’s part of being a copper. And who knows, there might even be a few greasy spoons in this town so happy to see a copper that they will spontaneously offer him a free nosh. Stranger things have happened. But nicking the oats from Marilyn, that stops now. And another thing. Says here that last night the hurry-up wagon had eight passengers,” he said. “Two of them I know about, ’cos one of them must’ve been me, and I met the other man. The cells are empty this morning. What happened to the other six? Sergeant Knock?”

The sergeant licked his lips nervously.

“Dropped ’em off in Cable Street for questioning, o’course,” he said. “As per instructions.”

“Did you get a receipt?”

“A what?”

“Your men hauled in six people who were staying out late and you handed them over to the Unmentionables,” said Vimes with the calm that comes before a storm. “Did they sign for them? Do you even know their names?”

“Orders is just to hand ’em over,” said Knock, trying a little defiance. “Hand ’em over and come away.”

Vimes filed that for future reference and said: “Now, I didn’t get taken there ’cos we had a bit of a…misunderstanding. And, as you can see, it was a bigger misunderstanding than you thought, because I’m not down in the Tanty counting cockroaches, Knock. No, indeed.” He took a few steps forward. “I am standing in front of you, Knock. Isn’t that what I’m doing?”

“Yes, Sarge,” Knock muttered, pale with fear and fury.

“Yes, Sarge,” said Vimes. “But there was another man in the cells, and he’s gone, too. All I want to know is: how much, and who to? I don’t want any looks of cherubic innocence, I don’t want any ‘don’t know what you’re talking about, sir,’ I just want to know: how much, and who to?”

A cloud of red, resentful solidarity settled over the faces in front of him. But he didn’t need telling. He could remember. Corporal Quirke always had a private income from bribes; he’d been like Nobby Nobbs without the latter’s amiable incompetence. An efficient Nobby, in fact, and you could throw into the mix bullying and brownnosing and a delight in small evils.

Vimes’s gaze fell on Quirke and stayed there.

“I know you were on the wagon last night, Corporal,” he said. “You and lance constable, er, Vimes, it says here.”

“Not worth worrying anyone if they look a decent sort,” Quirke said.

And he’d said: “How can we tell they’re a decent sort, Corp?”

“Well, see how much they can afford.”

“You mean we let ’em go if they’re rich?”

“Way of the world, lad, way of the world. No reason why we shouldn’t get our share, eh? Did you see his moneybag? Five dollars should do it. Four for me and one for you, ’cos you’re learning. That’s nearly three days’ pay, it’ll cheer up your ol’ mum no end, and where’s the loser?”

“But suppose he’s nicked the money, Corp?”

“Suppose the moon was made of cheese? Would you like a slice?”

“I think it was five dollars, Corporal,” said Vimes and watched the man’s lizard eyes flash toward the young lance constable.

“No, the man in the cell talked,” lied Vimes. “Told me I was an idiot not to buy my way out. So, Mister Quirke, it’s like this. They’re crying out for good men in the Day Watch, but if you don’t stand too close to the light you might pass. Get along there right now!”

“Everybody does it!” Quirke burst out. “It’s perks!”

“Everybody?” said Vimes. He looked around at the squad. “Anyone else here take bribes?”

His glare ran from face to face, causing most of the squad to do an immediate impression of the Floorboard and Ceiling Inspectors Synchronized Observation Team. Only three members met his gaze. There was Constable Colon, who could be a little slow. There was a certain lance constable, whose face was a mask of terror. And there was a dark-haired, round-faced constable who seemed to be puzzled, as if he was trying to remember something, but who nevertheless stared back with the firm steady gaze of the true liar.

“Apparently not,” said Vimes.

Quirke’s finger shot out and vibrated in the direction of the young Sam Vimes.

“He shared it! He shared it!” he said. “You ask him!”

Vimes felt the shock run round the squad. Quirke had just committed suicide. You hung together against officers, fair enough, but when the jig was up You Did Not Drop Someone In The Cacky. They’d laugh at the idea of a watchman’s honor, but it did exist in a blackened, twisty way. You Did Not Drop Your Mates In The Cacky. And especially you did not do it to a wet-behind-the-ears rookie who didn’t know any better.

Vimes turned, for the first time, to the young man whose gaze he’d been avoiding.