He walked up the steps very carefully, hearing Snouty’s heavy breathing right behind him. Like many people of limited intellectual scope, Snouty took what he could do very seriously.
He’d show a refreshing lack of compunction about pulling that trigger, for one thing.
Vimes reached the top of the stairs and remembered to
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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 tiredlooking 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 armour 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. Rumour had it that Tilden saluted it every day. There was also a very large silver inkstand, with a gilt regimental crest on it, occupying 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 his own men by bad but exciting ones. He’d
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been, in his own way, kind and reasonably fair; the men of the Watch had run rings around him, without his 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 it blankly.
‘What is your name again?’ said Tilden, 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 moustache and the little 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, wizenedlooking
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man standing in the doorway, 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 stickthin 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 near by. 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 near by. 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.
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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 yellowrobed 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 rollup of the sort favoured by Nobby, and 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?’
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‘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’in here to help you… your grace. And I’in your friend because right now I’in 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 disarming little smile. ‘Smoke?’ he said. He fumbled in his robe and produced a ragged handrolled 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 a whisper. He hadn’t been sleeping in the past twelve hours, merely recovering.