“He was a killer!”
“Yes, but that’s a nasty way to die.”
“Decapitation? With a very sharp sword, by the look of it. I can think of worse.”
“Yes, but I can’t help thinking that if only the chap had better hair or had found the right shampoo at an early age he’d have led a different life…”
“Well, at least he won’t have to worry about dandruff any more.”
“That was a little tasteless.”
“Sorry, but you know how blood makes me tense.”
“
Your
hair always looks amazing,” said Carrot, changing the subject with, Angua thought, unusual tact. “I don’t know what you use, but it’s a shame he never tried it.”
“I doubt if he went to the right shop,” said Angua. “It says ‘For a Glossy Coat’ on the bottles I usually buy—What’s the matter?”
“Can you smell smoke?” said Carrot.
“Carrot, it’s going to be five minutes before I can smell
anything
except—”
But he was staring past her, at the big red glow in the sky.
Vimes coughed. And then coughed some more. And eventually opened his streaming eyes in the confident expectation of seeing his own lungs in front of him.
“Glass of water, Mr. Vimes?”
Vimes peered through the tears at the shifting shape of Fred Colon.
“Thanks, Fred. What’s the horrible burning smell?”
“It’s you, sir.”
Vimes was sitting on a low wall outside the wreck of the embassy. Cool air washed around him. He felt like underdone beef. The heat was
radiating
off him.
“You was passed on for a while there, sir,” said Sergeant Colon helpfully. “But everyone saw you swing in that window, sir!
And
you threw that woman out for Detritus to catch! That’ll be a feather in your cap and no mistake, sir! I bet the ragh—I bet the Klatchians’ll be giving you the Order of the Camel or something for
this
night’s work, sir!” Colon beamed, bursting with pride by association.
“A feather in my cap…” murmured Vimes. He undid his helmet and with a certain amount of exhausted delight saw that every single plume had been burned to a stub.
He blinked slowly.
“What about the man, Fred? Did he get out?”
“What man?”
“There was…” Vimes blinked again. Various parts of his body, aware that he hadn’t been taking calls, were ringing in to complain.
There had been…
some man? Vimes had landed on a bed or something, and there was a woman clutching at him, and he had smashed out what was left of the window, seen the big, broad and above all strong arms of Detritus down below, and had thrown her out as politely as the circumstances allowed. Then the man from the roof had come out of the smoke again, carrying another figure over his shoulder, screamed something at him and beckoned him to follow and
…
…
then the floor had given way
…
“There were…two other people in there,” he said, coughing again.
“They didn’t get out the front way, then,” said Colon.
“How did
I
get out?” said Vimes.
“Oh, Dorfl was stamping on the fire down below, sir. Very handy, a ceramic constable. You landed right on him, so of course he stopped what he was doing and brought you out. ’s gonna be handshakes and buns all round in the morning, sir!”
There weren’t any right now, Vimes noted. There were still plenty of people around, carrying bundles, putting out small fires, arguing with one another…but there was a big hole where congratulating-the-hero-of-the-hour should have been.
“Oh, everyone’s always a bit preoccupied after something like this, sir,” said Colon, as if reading his thoughts.
“I think I’ll have a nice cold bath,” said Vimes, to the world in general. “And then some sleep. Sybil’s got some wonderful ointment for burns…Ah, hello, you two.”
“We saw the fire—” Carrot began, running up. “Is it all over?”
“Mr. Vimes saved the day!” said Sergeant Colon excitedly. “Just went straight in and saved everyone, in the finest tradition of the Watch!”
“Fred?” said Vimes, wearily.
“Yessir?”
“Fred, the finest tradition of the Watch is having a quiet smoke somewhere out of the wind at three a.m. Let’s not get carried away, eh?”
Colon looked crestfallen. “Well—” he began.
Vimes staggered to his feet and patted his sergeant on the back.
“Oh, all right, it’s a tradition,” he conceded. “You can do the next one, Fred. And now,” he steadied himself as he stood up, “I’m going down to the Yard to write my report.”
“You’re covered in ash and you’re swaying,” said Carrot. “I should just get on home, sir.”
“Oh no,” said Vimes. “Got to do the paperwork. Anyone know the time?”
“Bingeley-bingeley beep!” said a cheerful voice from his pocket.
“Damn!” said Vimes, but it was too late.
“It is,” said the voice, which had the squeaky friendly quality that begs to be strangled, “about…nineish.”
“Nineish?”
“Yep. Nineish. Precisely about nineish.”
Vimes rolled his eyes. “
Precisely
about nineish?” he said, pulling a small box out of his pocket and opening the lid. The demon inside gave him an angry look.
“Yesterday you
said
,” it said, “that if I, and I quote, Didn’t Stop all that Eight Fifty-Six and Six Seconds Precisely business I Would Be Looking at a Hammer From Below. And when I said, Mr. Insert Name Here, that this would invalidate my warranty, you said that I could take my warranty and—”
“I thought you’d lost that thing,” said Carrot.
“Hah,” said the Dis-organizer, “really? You thought he did? I don’t call putting something in your trouser pockets just before they go into the wash
losing
it.”
“That was an accident,” muttered Vimes.
“Oh? Oh? And dropping me in the dragon’s feeding bowl, that was accidental, too, was it?” The demon mumbled to itself for a moment and then said, “Anyway, do you want to know your appointments for this evening?”
Vimes looked at the smoldering wreckage of the embassy.
“Do tell,” he said.
“You don’t have any,” said the demon sulkily. “You haven’t told me any.”
“You see?” said Vimes. “
That’s
what drives me livid! Why should I have to tell
you
? Why didn’t you tell
me
, ‘Eightish: break up riot at Mundane Meals and stop Detritus shooting people,’ eh?”
“You didn’t tell me to tell you!”
“I didn’t
know
! And that’s how real life works! How can I tell you to warn me about things that no one knows are going to happen? If you were any good, that’d be
your
job!”
“He writes in the manual,” said the demon nastily. “Did you know that, everybody?
He writes in the manual
.”
“Well, of course I make notes—”
“He’s actually sneakily trying to keep his diary in the manual so his wife won’t find out he’s never bothered to learn how to use me,” said the demon.
“What about the
Vimes
manual, then?” snapped Vimes. “I notice you’ve never bothered to learn how to use
me
!”
The demon hesitated. “Humans come with a manual?” it said.
“It’d be a damn good idea!” said Vimes.
“True,” murmured Angua.
“It could say things like ‘Chapter One: Bingeley-bingeley beep and other damn fool things to spring on people at six in the morning,’” said Vimes, his eyes wild. “And ‘Troubleshooting: my owner keeps trying to drop me in the privy, what am I doing wrong?’ And—”
Carrot patted him gently on the back. “I should sign off now, sir,” he said gently. “It’s been a busy few days.”
Vimes rubbed his forehead. “I daresay I
could
do with a rest,” he said. “Come on, there’s nothing more to see here. Let’s go home.”
“I thought you said you weren’t going—” Carrot began, but Vimes’s mind was already scolding him.
“I meant the Yard, of course,” he said. “I’ll go
home
afterward.”
A ball of lamplight floated through the Ramkin library, drifting across the shelves of huge, leather-bound books.
Many of them had never been read, Sybil knew. Various ancestors had simply ordered them from the engravers and put them on the shelves, because a library was something you had to have, don’tcher-know, like a stableyard and a servants’ wing and some ghastly landscaping mistake created by “Bloody Stupid” Johnson, although in the latter case her grandfather had shot the man before he could do any real damage.
She held the lamp higher.
Ramkins looked down their noses at her from their frames, through the brown varnish of the centuries. Portraits were another thing that had been collected out of unregarded habit.
Most of them were of men. They were invariably in armor and always on horseback. And every single one of them had fought the sworn enemies of Ankh-Morpork.
In recent times this had been quite difficult and her grandfather, for example, had to lead an expedition all the way to Howondaland in order to find some sworn enemies, although there was an adequate supply and a lot of swearing by the time he left. Earlier, of course, it had been a lot easier. Ramkin regiments had fought the city’s enemies all over the Sto Plains and had inflicted heroic casualties, quite often on people in the opposing armies.
*
There were a
few
women among the sitters, none of them holding anything heavier than a glove or a small pet dragon. Their job had largely been to roll bandages and await the return of their husbands with, she liked to think, resolution and fortitude and a general hope that said husbands would return with as many of their bits as possible.
The point was, though, that they never
thought
about it. There was a war, and off they went. If there wasn’t a war, they looked for one. They didn’t even use words like “duty.” It was all built in at bone level.
She sighed. It was all so
difficult
these days, and Lady Sybil came from a class that was not used to difficulty, or at least the kind that couldn’t be sorted out by shouting at a servant. Five hundred years ago one of her ancestors had cut off a Klatchian’s head in battle and had brought it home on a pole, and no one thought any the worse of him, given what the Klatchians would have cut off if they’d caught him. That seemed straightforward. You fought them, they fought you, everyone knew the rules, and if you got your head cut off you jolly well didn’t blub about it afterward.
Certainly, things were
better
now. But they were just…more difficult.
And of course some of those antique husbands were away for months or years at a time, and for them wives and families were pretty much like the library and stableyard and the Johnson Exploding Pagoda. You got them sorted out and then didn’t think much about it. At least Sam was home every day.
Well, most days. Every night, anyway.
Well…part of most nights, certainly.
At least they ate meals together.
Well, most meals.
Well, at least they made a
start
on most meals.
Well, at least she knew he was never very far away, just somewhere where he was trying to do too much and run too fast and people were trying to kill him.
All in all, she considered, she was jolly lucky.
Vimes stared at Carrot, who was standing in front of his desk.
“So what does all that add up to?” he said. “The man we know
didn’t
get the Prince is dead. The man who probably
did
…is dead. Someone tried very clumsily to make it look as if Ossie was paid by the Klatchians. Okay, I can see why someone might want to do that. That’s what Fred calls
politics
. They get Snowy to do the real business, and he helps poor dumb Ossie who’s there to take the fall, and then the Watch
proves
that Ossie was in the pay of the Klatchians and that’s
another
reason for fighting. And Snowy just slopes off. Only someone cured his dandruff for him.”
“
After
he’d written something, sir,” said Carrot.
“Ah…yes.”
Vimes looked at the notepad retrieved from Snowy’s room. It was a crude affair, the wads of mismatched bits of scrap that the engravers sold off cheaply. He sniffed at it.
“Soap on the edges,” he said.
“His new shampoo,” said Carrot. “First time he’d used it.”
“How do you know?”
“We looked at all the bottles on the heap, sir.”
“Hmm. Looks like fresh blood here, at the spine, where they’re stitched together…”
“His, sir,” said Angua.
Vimes nodded. You never argued with Angua about blood.
“But none of the actual pages have blood on them…” said Vimes. “Which is a bit odd. Messy business, decapitation. People tend to…spray. So the top page—”
“—has been taken away, sir,” said Carrot, grinning and nodding. “But that’s not the funny part, sir. See if you can guess, sir!”
Vimes glared at him and then moved the lamp closer. “Very faint impression of writing on the top page…” he muttered. “Can’t make it out…”
“We can’t either, sir. We know he wrote in pencil, sir. There was one on the table.”
“
Very
faint traces,” said Vimes. “Blokes like Snowy write as though they’re chipping stone.” He flicked the notebook. “Someone tore out…not just the page he’d written on but several below it as well.”
“Clever, eh, sir? Everyone knows—”
“—you can read the suspicious note by looking at the marks on the page below,” said Vimes. He tossed the book on to the table again. “Hmm. There’s a message there, yes…”
“Perhaps he was blackmailing whoever’s behind all this?” said Angua.
“That’s not his style,” said Vimes. “No, what I meant was—”
There was a knock on the door, and Fred Colon entered.
“Brung you a mug of coffee,” he said, “and there’s a bunch of wo—Klatchians to see you downstairs, Mr. Vimes. Probably come to give you a medal and gabble at you in their lingo. And if you’re on for late supper, Mrs. Goriff’s doing goat and rice and foreign gravy.”
“I suppose I’d better go down and see them,” said Vimes. “But I haven’t even had time for a wash—”
“That’s evidence of your heroic endeavors,” said Colon stoutly.
“Oh, all right.”
Unease began about halfway down the stairs. Vimes had never run into a group of citizens wishing to give him a medal and so he did not have a lot of experience on this score, but the group waiting for him in a tight cluster near the sergeant’s desk did not look like a committee of welcome.
They
were
Klatchian. At least, they were wearing foreign-looking clothes and one or two of them had caught more sun than you generally got in Ankh-Morpork. The feeling crept over Vimes that Klatch was a very big place in which his city and the whole of the Sto Plains would be lost, and so there must be room in it for all kinds of peoples, including this short chap in the red fez who was practically vibrating with indignation.