Men at Arms (3 page)

Vimes drummed his fingers on the desk.

“Not Colon, then,” he said. “He’s not as young as he was. Time he stayed in the Watch House, keeping up on the paperwork. Besides, he’s got a lot on his plate.”

“Sergeant Colon has always had a lot on his plate, I should say,” said the Patrician.

“With the new recruits, I mean,” said Vimes, meaningfully. “You remember, sir?”

The ones you told me I had to have? he added in the privacy of his head. They weren’t to go in the
Day
Watch, of course. And those bastards in the Palace Guard wouldn’t take them, either. Oh, no. Put ’em in the Night Watch, because it’s a joke anyway and no one’ll really see ’em. No one important, anyway.

Vimes had only given in because he knew it wouldn’t be his problem for long.

It wasn’t as if he was speciesist, he told himself. But the Watch was a job for men.

“How about Corporal Nobbs?” said the Patrician.

“Nobby?”

They shared a mental picture of Corporal Nobbs.

“No.”

“No.”

“Then of course there is,” the Patrician smiled, “Corporal Carrot. A fine young man. Already making a name for himself, I gather.”

“That’s…true,” said Vimes.

“A further promotion opportunity, perhaps? I would value your advice.”

Vimes formed a mental picture of Corporal Carrot—

“This,” said Corporal Carrot, “is the Hubwards Gate. To the whole city. Which is what we guard.”

“What from?” said Lance-Constable Angua, the last of the new recruits.

“Oh, you know. Barbarian hordes, warring tribesmen, bandit armies…that sort of thing.”

“What? Just
us?
”

“Us? Oh, no!” Carrot laughed. “That’d be silly, wouldn’t it? No, if you see anything like that, you just ring your bell as hard as you like.”

“What happens then?”

“Sergeant Colon and Nobby and the rest of ’em will come running along just as soon as they can.”

Lance-Constable Angua scanned the hazy horizon.

She smiled.

Carrot blushed.

Constable Angua had mastered saluting first go. She wouldn’t have a full uniform yet, not until someone had taken a, well, let’s face it, a
breastplate
along to old Remitt the armorer and told him to beat it out really well
here
and
here
, and no helmet in the world would cover all that mass of ash-blond hair but, it occurred to Carrot, Constable Angua wouldn’t need any of that stuff really. People would be queuing up to get arrested.

“So what do we do now?” she said.

“Proceed back to the Watch House, I suppose,” said Carrot. “Sergeant Colon’ll be reading out the evening report, I expect.”

She’d mastered “proceeding”, too. It’s a special walk devised by beat officers throughout the multiverse—a gentle lifting of the instep, a careful swing of the leg, a walking pace that can be kept up hour after hour, street after street. Lance-Constable Detritus wasn’t going to be ready to learn “proceeding” for some time, or at least until he stopped knocking himself out every time he saluted.

“Sergeant Colon,” said Angua. “He was the fat one, yes?”

“That’s right.”

“Why has he got a pet monkey?”

“Ah,” said Carrot. “I think it is Corporal Nobbs to whom you refer…”

“It’s human? He’s got a face like a join-the-dots puzzle!”

“He does have a very good collection of boils, poor man. He does tricks with them. Just never get between him and a mirror.”

Not many people were on the streets. It was too hot, even for an Ankh-Morpork summer. Heat radiated from every surface. The river slunk sullenly in the bottom of its bed, like a student around 11
A.M.
People with no pressing business out of doors lurked in cellars and only came out at night.

Carrot moved through the baking streets with a proprietorial air and a slight patina of honest sweat, occasionally exchanging a greeting. Everyone knew Carrot. He was easily recognizable. No one else was about two meters tall with flame-red hair. Besides, he walked as if he owned the city.

“Who was that man with the granite face I saw in the Watch House?” said Angua, as they proceeded along Broad Way.

“That was Detritus the troll,” said Carrot. “He used to be a bit of a criminal, but now he’s courting Ruby she says he’s got to—”

“No, that
man
,” said Angua, learning as had so many others that Carrot tended to have a bit of trouble with metaphors. “Face like thu—face like someone very disgruntled.”

“Oh, that was Captain Vimes. But he’s never
been
gruntled, I think. He’s retiring at the end of the week, and getting married.”

“Doesn’t look very happy about it,” said Angua.

“Couldn’t say.”

“I don’t think he likes the new recruits.”

The other thing about Constable Carrot was that he was incapable of lying.

“Well, he doesn’t like trolls much,” he said. “We couldn’t get a word out of him all day when he heard we had to advertise for a troll recruit. And then we had to have a dwarf, otherwise they’d be trouble. I’m a dwarf, too, but the dwarfs here don’t believe it.”

“You don’t say?” said Angua, looking up at him.

“My mother had me by adoption.”

“Oh. Yes, but I’m not a troll
or
a dwarf,” said Angua sweetly.

“No, but you’re a w—”

Angua stopped. “That’s it, is it? Good grief! This
is
the Century of the Fruitbat, you know. Ye gods, does he really think like that?”

“He’s a bit set in his ways.”

“Congealed, I should think.”

“The Patrician said we had to have a bit of representation from the minority groups,” said Carrot.

“Minority groups!”

“Sorry. Anyway, he’s only got a few more days—”

There was a splintering noise across the street. They turned as a figure sprinted out of a tavern and hared away up the street, closely followed—at least for a few steps—by a fat man in an apron.

“Stop! Stop! Unlicensed thief!”

“Ah,” said Carrot. He crossed the road, with Angua padding along behind him, as the fat man slowed to a waddle.

“Morning, Mr. Flannel,” he said. “Bit of trouble?”

“He took seven dollars and I never saw no Thief License!” said Mr. Flannel. “What you going to do about it? I pay my taxes!”

“We shall be hotly in pursuit any moment,” said Carrot calmly, taking out his notebook. “Seven dollars, was it?”

“At least fourteen.”

Mr. Flannel looked Angua up and down. Men seldom missed the opportunity.

“Why’s she got a helmet on?” he said.

“She’s a new recruit, Mr. Flannel.”

Angua gave Mr. Flannel a smile. He stepped back.

“But she’s a—”

“Got to move with the times, Mr. Flannel,” said Carrot, putting his notebook away.

Mr. Flannel drew his mind back to business.

“In the meantime, there’s eighteen dollars of mine that I won’t see again,” he said sharply.

“Oh,
nil desperandum
, Mr. Flannel,
nil desperandum
,” said Carrot cheerfully. “Come, Constable Angua. Let us proceed upon our inquiries.”

He proceeded off, with Flannel staring at them with his mouth open.

“Don’t forget my twenty-five dollars,” he shouted.

“Aren’t you going to
chase
the man?” said Angua, running to keep up.

“No point,” said Carrot, stepping sideways into an alley that was so narrow as to be barely visible. He strolled between the damp, moss-grown walls, in deep shadow.

“Interesting thing,” he said. “I bet there’s not many people know that you can get to Zephire Street from Broad Way. You ask anyone. They’ll say you can’t get out of the other end of Shirt Alley. But you can because, all you do, you go up Mormius Street, and then you can squeeze between these bollards
here
into Borborygmic Lane—good, aren’t they, very good iron—and here we are in Whilom Alley—”

He wandered to the end of the alley and stood listening for a while.

“What are we waiting for?” said Angua.

There was the sound of running feet. Carrot leaned against the wall, and stuck out one arm into Zephire Street. There was a thud. Carrot’s arm didn’t move an inch. It must have been like running into a girder.

They looked down at the unconscious figure. Silver dollars rolled across the cobbles.

“Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear,” said Carrot. “Poor old Here’n’now. He
promised
me he was going to give it up, too. Oh well…”

He picked up a leg.

“How much money?” he said.

“Looks like three dollars,” said Angua.

“Well done. The exact amount.”

“No, the shopkeeper said—”

“Come on. Back to the Watch House. Come on, Here’n’now. It’s your lucky day.”

“Why is it his lucky day?” said Angua. “He was
caught
, wasn’t he?”

“Yes. By us. Thieves’ Guild didn’t get him first. They aren’t so kind as us.”

Here’n’now’s head bounced from cobblestone to cobblestone.

“Pinching three dollars and then trotting straight home,” sighed Carrot. “That’s Here’n’now. Worst thief in the world.”

“But you said Thieves’ Guild—”

“When you’ve been here a while, you’ll understand how it all works,” said Carrot. Here’n’now’s head banged on the curb. “Eventually,” Carrot added. “But it all does work. You’d be amazed. It all works. I wish it didn’t. But it does.”

While Here’n’now was being mildly concussed on the way to the safety of the Watch’s jail, a clown was being killed.

He was ambling along an alley with the assurance of one who is fully paid up this year with the Thieves’ Guild when a hooded figure stepped out in front of him.

“Beano?”

“Oh, hello…it’s Edward, right?”

The figure hesitated.

“I was just going back to the Guild,” said Beano.

The hooded figure nodded.

“Are you OK?” said Beano.

“I’m sorry about th-is,” it said. “But it is for the good of the city. It is nothing p-ersonal.”

He stepped behind the clown. Beano felt a crunch, and then his own personal internal universe switched off.

Then he sat up.

“Ow,” he said, “that hur—”

But it didn’t.

Edward d’Eath was looking down at him with a horrified expression.

“Oh…I didn’t mean to hit you that hard! I only wanted you out of the way!”

“Why’d you have to hit me at all?”

And then the feeling stole over Beano that Edward wasn’t exactly looking at him, and certainly wasn’t talking to him.

He glanced at the ground, and experienced that peculiar sensation known only to the recently dead—horror at what you see lying in front of you, followed by the nagging question: so who’s doing the looking?

KNOCK KNOCK.

He looked up.

“Who’s there?”

DEATH.

“Death who?”

There was a chill in the air. Beano waited. Edward was frantically patting his face…well, what until recently had been his face.

I WONDER…CAN WE START AGAIN? I DON’T SEEM TO HAVE THE HANG OF THIS.

“Sorry?” said Beano.

“I’m s-orry!” moaned Edward, “I meant it for the best!”

Beano watched his murderer drag his…
the
…body away.

“Nothing personal, he says,” he said. “I’m glad it wasn’t anything personal. I should hate to think I’ve just been killed because it was
personal
.”

IT’S JUST THAT IT HAS BEEN SUGGESTED THAT I SHOULD BE MORE OF A PEOPLE PERSON.

“I mean,
why?
I thought we were getting on really well. It’s very hard to make friends in my job. In your job too, I suppose.”

BREAK IT TO THEM GENTLY, AS IT WERE.

“One minute walking along, the next minute dead. Why?”

THINK OF IT MORE AS BEING…DIMENSIONALLY DISADVANTAGED.

The shade of Beano the clown turned to Death.

“What
are
you talking about?”

YOU’RE DEAD.

“Yes. I know.” Beano relaxed, and stopped wondering too much about events in an increasingly irrelevant world. Death found that people often did, after the initial confusion. After all, the worst had already happened. At least…with any luck.

IF YOU WOULD CARE TO FOLLOW ME…

“Will there be custard pies? Red noses?
Juggling?
Are there likely to be baggy trousers?”

No.

Beano had spent almost all his short life as a clown. He smiled grimly, under his make-up.

“I
like
it.”

Vimes’ meeting with the Patrician ended as all such meetings did, with the guest going away in possession of an unfocused yet nagging suspicion that he’d only just escaped with his life.

Vimes trudged on to see his bride-to-be. He knew where she would be found.

The sign scrawled across the big double gates in Morphic Street said: Here be Dragns.

The brass plaque
beside
the gates said: The Ankh-Morpork Sunshine Sanctuary for Sick Dragons.

There was a small and hollow and pathetic dragon made out of papier-mâché and holding a collection box, chained very heavily to the wall, and bearing the sign: Don’t Let My Flame Go Out.

This was where Lady Sybil Ramkin spent most of her days.

She was, Vimes had been told, the richest woman in Ankh-Morpork. In fact she was richer than all the other women in Ankh-Morpork rolled, if that were possible, into one.

It was going to be a strange wedding, people said. Vimes treated his social superiors with barely concealed distaste, because the women made his head ache and the men made his fists itch. And Sybil Ramkin was the last survivor of one of the oldest families in Ankh. But they’d been thrown together like twigs in a whirlpool, and had yielded to the inevitable…

When he was a little boy, Sam Vimes had thought that the very rich ate off gold plates and lived in marble houses.

He’d learned something new: the very
very
rich could afford to be poor. Sybil Ramkin lived in the kind of poverty that was only available to the very rich, a poverty approached from the other side. Women who were merely well-off saved up and bought dresses made of silk edged with lace and pearls, but Lady Ramkin was so rich she could afford to stomp around the place in rubber boots and a tweed skirt that had belonged to her mother. She was so rich she could afford to live on biscuits and cheese sandwiches. She was so rich she lived in three rooms in a thirty-four-roomed mansion; the rest of them were full of very expensive and very
old
furniture, covered in dust sheets.