Guards! Guards! (40 page)
The Carpet People
The Dark Side of the Sun Strata
Truckers
Diggers
Wings
Only You Can Save Mankind
Johnny and the Dead
Johnny and the Bomb
The Unadulterated Cat
(with Gray Jollife)
Good Omens
(with Neil Gaiman)
T
HE
D
ISCWORLD
S
ERIES
The Color of Magic*
The Light Fantastic*
Equal Rites*
Mort
Sourcery
Wyrd Sisters
Pyramids
Guards! Guards!
Eric
(with Josh Kirby)
Moving Pictures
Reaper Man
Witches Abroad
Small Gods*
Lords and Ladies*
Men at Arms*
Soul Music*
Interesting Times*
Maskerade*
Feet of Clay*
Hogfather*
Jingo*
The Last Continent*
Carpe Jugulum*
The Fifth Elephant*
The Truth*
Mort: A Discworld Big Comic
(with Graham Higgins)
The Streets of Ankh-Morpork
(with Stephen Briggs)
The Discworld Companion
(with Stephen Briggs)
The Discworld Mapp
*Published by HarperCollins
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
GUARDS! GUARDS!
. Copyright © 1989 by Terry and Lyn Pratchett. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Mobipocket Reader April 2007 ISBN 978-0-06-144049-6
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.
25 Ryde Road (PO Box 321)
Pymble, NSW 2073, Australia
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com.au
Canada
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
55 Avenue Road, Suite 2900
Toronto, ON, M5R, 3L2, Canada
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.ca
New Zealand
HarperCollinsPublishers (New Zealand) Limited
P.O. Box 1
Auckland, New Zealand
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.nz
United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
77-85 Fulham Palace Road
London, W6 8JB, UK
http://www.uk.harpercollinsebooks.com
United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
10 East 53rd Street
New York, NY 10022
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com
1
All this was untrue. The truth is that even big collections of ordinary books distort space, as can readily be proved by anyone who has been around a really old-fashioned secondhand bookshop, one of those that look as though they were designed by M. Escher on a bad day and has more staircases than storys and those rows of shelves which end in little doors that are surely too small for a full-sized human to enter. The relevant equation is: Knowledge = power = energy = matter = mass; a good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.
1
A figgin is defined in the
Dictionary of Eye-Watering Words
as “a small short-crust pasty containing raisins.” The Dictionary would have been invaluable for the Supreme Grand Master when he thought up the Society’s oaths, since it also includes welchet (“a type of waistcoat worn by certain clock-makers”), gaskin (“a shy, gray-brown bird of the coot family”), and moules (“a game of skill and dexterity, involving tortoises”).
1
The pronoun is used by dwarfs to indicate both sexes. All dwarfs have beards and wear up to twelve layers of clothing. Gender is more or less optional.
2
i.e., about 55.
1
Lit.
dezka-knik
, “mine supervisor.”
1
One of the remarkable innovations introduced by the Patrician was to make the Thieves’ Guild
responsible
for theft, with annual budgets, forward planning and, above all, rigid job protection. Thus, in return for an agreed average level of crime per annum, the thieves themselves saw to it that unauthorized crime was met with the full force of Injustice, which was generally a stick with nails in it.
1
Lit: “Good day! Good day! What is all of this that is going on here (in this place )?”
1
“Listen, sunshine [lit: “the stare of the great hot eye in the sky whose fiery gaze penetrates the mouth of the cavern”] I don’t want to have to give anyone a smacking, so if you play B’tduz
2
A popular dwarfish game which consists of standing a few feet apart and throwing large rocks at one another’s head.
3
Lit: “All correctly beamed and propped?” with me, I’ll play B’tduz with you. Okay?”
1
“Evening, all.” (Lit: “Felicitations to all present at the closing of the day.”)
1
Like a bouncer, but trolls use more force.
1
And mime artists. It was a strange aversion, but there you are. Anyone in baggy trousers and a white face who tried to ply their art anywhere within Ankh’s crumbling walls would very quickly find themselves in a scorpion pit, on one wall of which was painted the advice: Learn The Words.
1
While being bang alongside the idea of necessary cruelty, of course.
1
Only until their third clutch, of course. After that they’re dams.
1
The Guild of Fire Fighters had been outlawed by the Patrician the previous year after many complaints. The point was that, if you bought a contract from the Guild, your house would be protected against fire. Unfortunately, the general Ankh-Morpork ethos quickly came to the fore and fire fighters would tend to go to prospective clients’ houses in groups, making loud comments like “Very inflammable looking place, this” and “Probably go up like a firework with just one carelessly-dropped match, know what I mean?”
1
A species of geranium.
1
Some rioters can be quite ell-educated.
1
The phrase “Set a thief to catch a thief” had by this time (after strong representations from the Thieves’ Guild) replaced a much older and quintessentially Ankh-Morporkian proverb, which was “Set a deep hole with spring-loaded sides, tripwires, whirling knife blades driven by water power, broken glass and scorpions, to catch a thief.”
1
Tridlins: A short and unnecessary religious observance performed daily by the Holy Balancing Dervishes of Otherz, according to the
Dictionary of Eye-Watering Words.
1
Like a pea-souper, only much thicker, fishier, and with things in it you’d probably rather not know about.
1
The three rules of the Librarians of Time and Space are: 1) Silence; 2) Books must be returned no later than the last date shown; and 3) Do not interfere with the nature of causality.
1
A number of religions in Ankh-Morpork still practiced human sacrifice, except that they didn’t really need to practice anymore because they had got so good at it. City law said that only condemned criminals should be used, but that was all right because in most of the religions refusing to volunteer for sacrifice was an offense punishable by death.