‘Still with us, lads?’ he said, to the group caught behind the line.
‘That’s right, sarge!’ said Lance-Constable Vimes. The rest of the volunteers seemed slightly less certain.
‘Are we gonna get killed?’ said Wiglet.
‘Who said it’s going to come to a fight?’ said Vimes, watching Coates’s retreating back. ‘Wait a moment, I want a word with Ned-‘
‘Got the Shilling, sarge,’ Snouty announced, advancing across the yard. ‘And the captain wants a word with you.’
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‘Tell him I’ll be up in just a few-‘
‘It’s the new captain,’ said Snouty quickly. ‘He’s here already, hnah. Keen. Milit’ry. Not the patient type, sarge.’
I used to have Carrot and Detritus and Angua and Cheery for this, Vimes thought bitterly. I’d say you do this, and you do that, and all I had to do was fret and deal with the soddin’ politics…
‘Get Fred to swear the men in,’ he said. ‘And tell the officer I’ll be with him shortly.’
He ran through the Watch House and out of the front door.
There were a lot of people in the street, more than usual. It wasn’t a mob as such, but it was Ankh-Morpork’s famous
urmob, the state you got just before a real mob happened. It spread across the city like web and spider and, when some triggering event happened, twanged its urgent message through the streets and thickened and tightened around the spot. The Dolly Sisters Massacre had got around and the numbers had grown in the telling. Vimes could sense the tension in the web.
It was just waiting for some idiot to do the wrong thing, and Nature is bountiful where idiots are concerned.
‘Coates!’ he yelled.
To his surprise, the man stopped and turned.
‘Yeah?’
‘I know you’re with the revolutionaries.’
‘You’re just guessing.’
‘No, you had the password in your notebook,’ said Vimes. The same one Dibbler was passing out in pies. You must know I was able to get into the lockers. Look, do you think you and Dibbler’d still be walking around if I was a spy for Swing?’
‘Sure. You’re not after us, we can be mopped up later. Swing wants the leaders.’
Vimes stood back. ‘Okay. Why haven’t you told the lads?’
‘Things are moving, that’s why. It’s all starting,’ said Ned.
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‘Who you are doesn’t matter any more. But you’re going to get the lads killed. They’d have been on our side, if it wasn’t for you.
I was working on ’em. You know Spatchcock always drops his sword on his foot and Nancyball wets himself when he’s
threatened and Vimesy is simple, and now you’re going to stick
’em all right in the middle and they’re gonna die. And all for no reason!’
‘Why haven’t you told them?’ Vimes repeated.
‘Maybe you’ve got friends in high places,’ Ned snarled.
Vimes glanced up at the rooftops.
‘Have we finished?’ said Ned.
‘Give me your badge,’ said Vimes.
‘You what?’
‘You’re quitting. Fair enough. Give me your badge.’
Coates recoiled as if he’d been stung. ‘Blow that!’
‘Then leave the city,’ said Vimes. ‘It’d be for your own good.’
‘Is that a threat?’
‘Not from me. But here’s some advice, boy. Don’t put your trust in revolutions. They always come around again. That’s why they’re called revolutions. People die, and nothing changes. I’ll see you later.’
He turned his back and hurried away, so that the man wouldn’t see his face.
Okay. Now it was time. It had to be now, or he’d burst like Mr Salciferous. He had wanted to do this, hadn’t dared try it, because those monks could probably do a man a lot of no good if he crossed them, but it had all gone too far now…
A sense of duty told him there was an officer waiting to see him. He overruled it. It was not in possession of all the facts.
Vimes reached the entrance to the Watch House, and stopped.
He shut his eyes. If anyone had bothered to look at him, they’d
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have seen a man apparently trying to grind two cigarette stubs into the road, one with each foot. Thank you, Rosie, for those cardboard soles. He smiled.
He thought with the brains in his feet. And as young Sam had noticed, the feet had a memory of their own…
Rounded cathead cobbles, the usual kind. They hadn’t been well set in this part of the city and moved very slightly underfoot… then twice before getting to the Watch House his feet had felt larger cobbles, narrow bands of them, where the road surface had been replaced after drains had been laid. And before that, there’d been a similar band but of soft brick rubble, so crushed by cartwheels that it was practically a gully.
A few dozen steps earlier they’d twirled him round a couple of times, but the last surface before that had been… mud.
Vimes, who had been walking with his eyes shut, bumped
into a cart.
Mud, he thought, getting up and ignoring the strange looks of passersby. That meant an alley. Let’s see… ah, yes, over there…
It took twenty minutes.
People turned as he walked through the streets, closing his eyes when he dared so that his feet could see better. Sometimes he did look around, though, and there it was again, the thunderstorm sensation of tensions building up, waiting for the first little thing. People were uneasy – the herd was restless – and they didn’t quite know why. Everyone he looked at returned his gaze blankly.
He stepped onwards. Rough flagstones between two stretches of the ancient cobbles they called trollheads… the only place where you got that in this part of the city was here, where Pewter Street crossed Elm, and before that it had been… yeah, big stones, some of the most ancient in the city, rutted by hundreds and hundreds of years of ironbound cartwheels, that was a road that had been right behind a city wall… yes; he
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crossed the Pitts, still on Elm, and then lost his thread. A metal grating on the pavement gave it back to him. Cellar grating.
Cool cellar. Coat of arms on it, worn down. Buttermarket. Yeah.
Go, feet!
The monks had turned him again here but… long bricks, hardfired in the kiln, and a stretch of quite modern flagstones, well dressed and fitted. It could trick you if you didn’t know you were in… yeah, Masons Road, and there were masons here and they looked after the surface. Now find an alley, mud but with a lot of gravel in it, because the stonemasons dumped their waste here but this one has occasional hummocks across it, where pipes have been laid. Yeah. Now find squarehead cobbles…
He opened his eyes.
Yeah.
Away on his left, on Clay Lane, was a block of three
buildings. A temple sandwiched between two cheapjack corner shops. It was… just a temple, slightly foreignlooking, but weren’t they all? It looked High Hublandish, where everyone lived on yaks or something.
The temple doors were locked. He rattled the handle
impotently, and then hammered on the woodwork with his
sword. It had no effect. He didn’t even leave a mark on the wood.
But the door of the shonky shop next door was open. It was a familiar place. Once upon a time, it was his tailor and bootmaker. And, like a pawn shop, a shonky shop was always open. Vimes stepped inside, and was immediately enveloped in dusty darkness.
It was a cave of cloth. Racks of old suits hung from the ceiling. Ancient shelves bent under piles of shirts and vests and socks. Here and there old boxes loomed in the gloom and caught his knees. Piles of derelict boots slipped and slid under his feet.
And there was the smell. If poverty had a smell, this was it. If
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humbled pride had a smell, this was it. And there was a touch of disinfectant as well.
Within a few feet of the door, Vimes was already lost. He turned and shoved his way through grey aisle after grey aisle of suffocating cloth and wondered if anyone had ever died in here and how anyone could ever find out. He pulled aside a hanger containing a greasy, threadbare suit-
‘You want?’
He turned.
There was no one there, until his gaze fell slightly and met that of a small, glossy little man, totally bald, very small and thin, and wearing some vague clothing that presumably even a shonky shop hadn’t been able to unload on a customer. Who was he? who was he?… surprisingly, the name seemed quite fresh in the memory…
‘Ah, er, yeah… Mr Shine-‘
‘Soon Shine Sun,’ said Mr Soon. He grabbed the suit Vimes was still holding. ‘Good eye, good eye, lovely cloth, lovely cloth, owned by priest, very good, fifty pence to you, shame to sell it, times are hard.’
Vimes hastily put the suit back on the rack and pulled out his badge. Soon glared at it.