Men at Arms (39 page)
Cigar smoke filled the room. The little presentation watch played every quarter of an hour, entirely unheeded.
Lady Sybil smiled and shut the door behind her, and went to feed the dragons.
“Dearest Mumm and Dad,
Well here is Amazing news for, I am now Captain!! It has been a very busy and vareid Week all round as, I shall now recount…”
And only one thing more…
There was a large house in one of the nicer areas of Ankh, with a spacious garden with a children’s tree-house in it and, quite probably, a warm spot by the fire.
And a window, breaking…
Gaspode landed on the lawn, and ran like hell toward the fence. Flower-scented bubbles streamed off his coat. He was wearing a ribbon with a bow on it, and carrying in his mouth a bowl labelled MR. HUGGY.
He dug his way frantically under the fence and squirmed into the road.
A fresh pile of horse droppings took care of the floral smell, and five minutes of scratching removed the bow.
“Not a bloody flea left,” he moaned, dropping the bowl. “An’ I had nearly the complete set. Whee-ooo! I’m well out of
that
. Huh!”
Gaspode brightened up. It was Tuesday. That meant steak-and-suspicious-organs pie at the Thieves’ Guild, and the head cook there was known to be susceptible to a thumping tail and a penetrating stare. And holding an empty bowl in your mouth and looking pathetic was a sure-fire winner, if Gaspode was any judge. It shouldn’t take too long to claw off MR. HUGGY.
Perhaps this wasn’t the way it ought to be. But it was the way it was.
On the whole, he reflected, it could have been a lot worse.
Terry Pratchett
is one of the most popular living authors in the world. His first story was published when he was thirteen, and his first full-length book when he was twenty. He worked as a journalist to support the writing habit, but gave up the day job when the success of his books meant that it was costing him money to go to work.
Pratchett’s acclaimed novels are bestsellers in the U.S. and the United Kingdom and have sold more than thirty million copies worldwide. He lives in England, where he writes all the time. (It’s his hobby, as well.)
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Elizabeth Peters
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
:
Going Postal
•
Monstrous Regiment
•
Night Watch
The Last Hero
•
The Truth
•
Thief of Time
The Fifth Elephant
•
Carpc Jugulum
The Last Continent
•
Jingo
Hogfather
•
Feet of Clay
•
Maskerade
Interesting Times
•
Soul Music
•
Men at Arms
Lords and Ladies
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Moving Pictures
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Eric
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The Color of Magic
Mort: A Discworld Big Comic
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The Discworld Companion
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The Pratchett Portfolio
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This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from t1:09 PM 6/11/2007he author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
MEN AT ARMS. Copyright © 1993 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.
EPub Edition © JUNE 2007 ISBN: 9780061804717
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*
But no gentleman would
dream
of being trained as a Thief.
*
Often with discreet plaques under them modestly recording the name of the person who’d killed them. This was the
Assassins’
portrait gallery, after all.
*
From the point of view of the species as a whole. Not from the point of view of the dragon now landing in small pieces around the landscape.
*
Fingers-Mazda, the first thief in the world, stole fire from the gods. But he was unable to fence it. It was too hot
†
†
He got really burned on that deal.
*
The Battle of Koom Valley is the only one known to history where both sides ambushed each other.
*
There’s always one.
*
This is
another
survival trait.
*
Because he was an early form of free-thinking scientist, and did not believe that human beings had been created by some sort of divine being. Dissecting people when they were still alive tended to be a priestly preoccupation; they thought mankind
had
been created by some sort of divine being and wanted to have a closer look at His handiwork.
*
Suicide, for example Murder was in fact a fairly uncommon event in Ankh-Morpork, but there were a lot of suicides. Walking in the night-time alleyways of The Shades was suicide. Asking for a short in a dwarf bar was suicide. Saying “Got rocks in your head?” to a troll was suicide. You could commit suicide very easily, if you weren’t careful.
*
A survey by the Ankh-Morpork Guild of Merchants of tradespeople in the dock areas of Morpork found 987 women who gave their profession as “seamstress.” Oh…and two needles.
*
In fact, trolls traditionally count like this: one, two, three…
many
, and people assume this means they can have no grasp of higher numbers. They don’t realize that many can
be
a number. As in: one, two, three,
many
, many-one, many-two, many-three,
many many
, many-many-one, many-many-two, many-many-three,
many many many
, many-many-many-one, many-many-many-two, many-many-many-three,
LOTS
.
*
More usually a landlady would ask “Are you decent?”, but Mrs. Cake knew her lodgers.
*
Brown
*
And brown
*
It works like this. Phrenology, as everyone knows, is a way of reading someone’s character, aptitude and abilities by examining the bumps and hollows on their head. Therefore—according to the kind of logical thinking that characterizes the Ankh-Morpork mind—it should be possible to
mould
someone’s character by
giving
them carefully graded bumps in all the right places. You can go into a shop and order an artistic temperament with a tendency to introspection and a side order of hysteria. What you actually
get
is hit on the head with a selection of different size mallets, but it creates employment and keeps the money in circulation, and that’s the main thing.
*
Rat and cream cheese is only one of the famous Discworld dishes available in cosmopolitan Ankh-Morpork. According to the Guild of Merchants’ publication Wellcome to Ankh-Morpork, Citie of One Thousand Surprises: “Also to be bought in its well-stuffed emporia are Slumpie, Jammy Devils, Fikkun haddock, Distressed Pudding, Clooty Dumpling
†
and, not to be forgotten, the Knuckle Sandwich, made from finest pig knuckles. Not for something is it said, For a True Taste of Ankh-Morpork, Try a Knuckle Sandwich.”
†
Not to be confused with the Scottish Clootie Dumpling, which is a kind of suet pudding full of fruit. The Ankh-Morpork version sits on the tongue like finest meringue, and on the stomach like a concrete bowling ball.