‘Oh, thank you for telling me,’ said Vimes. ‘I do hate wasted effort.’
‘Oh, hello, Mr Wazir,’ said Carrot, appearing behind Vimes. ‘Did you get the note about that book?’
There was one of those silences that happen when everyone has to reprogramme their faces.
Then Vimes said, ‘What?’
‘Mr Wazir sells books in Widdy Street,’ said Carrot. ‘Only I asked him for some books on Klatch, you see, and one of the ones he gave me was The Perfumed Allotment, or, The Garden of Delights. And I didn’t mind because the Klatchians invented gardens, sir, so I thought it might be a very useful cultural insight. Get inside the Klatchian mind, as it were. Only it, er, it… er… well, it wasn’t about gardening… er…’ He started to blush.
‘Yes, yes, all right, bring it back if you like,’ said Mr Wazir, looking a little derailed.
‘I just thought you ought to know in case you hadn’t… in case you sold… well… it could shock the impressionable, you know, a book like that…’
‘Yes, fine–’
‘Corporal Angua was so shocked she couldn’t stop laughing.’ Carrot went on.
I will have your money sent round directly,’ said Wazir. His expression turned vengeful again. He glared at Vimes.
‘Books are unimportant at this time! We demand you release my countrymen now!’
‘Detritus, why the hell did you put them in the cells?’ said Vimes wearily.
‘What else we got, sir? Dey’re not locked in and dey got dean blankets.’
‘There’s your explanation,’ said Vimes. ‘They’re our guests.’
‘In the cells!’ said Wazir, relishing the word.
‘They’re free to go whenever they like,’ said Vimes.
‘I’m sure they are now,’ said Wazir, contriving to indicate that only his arrival had prevented officially sanctioned bloodshed. ‘You can be sure the Patrician will hear about this!’
‘He hears about everything else,’ said Vimes. ‘But if they leave here, who is going to protect them?’
‘We are! Their fellow countrymen!’
‘How?’
Wazir almost stood to attention. ‘By force of arms, if necessary.’
‘Oh, good,’ said Vimes. ‘Then there’ll be two mobs–’
‘Bingeley–bingeley beep!’
‘Damn!’ Vimes slapped at his pocket. ‘I don’t want to know I haven’t got any appointments!’
‘You have one at eleven pee em. The Rats Chamber, at the palace,’ said the Dis–organizer.
‘Don’t be stupid!’
‘Please yourself.’
‘And shut up.’
‘I was just trying to help.’
‘Shut up.’ Vimes turned back to the Klatchian bookseller.
‘Mr Wazir, if Goriff wants to leave with you, we won’t stop him–’
‘Aha! You may well try!’
Vimes told himself that there was no reason at all why a Klatchian couldn’t be a pompous little troublemaker. But he felt uneasy about it, like a man edging along the side of a very deep crevasse.
‘Sergeant Colon?’
‘Yessir?’
‘See to this, will you?’
‘Yessir!’
‘Diplomatically.’
‘Right, sir!’ Colon tapped the side of his nose. ‘Is this politics, sir?’
‘Just… just go and fetch the Goriff family and they can…’ Vimes waved a hand vaguely. ‘They can do whatever they like.’
He turned and walked up the stairs.
‘Someone has to protect my people’s rights!’ shouted Wazir.
They heard Vimes stop halfway up the stairs. The board creaked under his weight for a second. Then he continued upwards, and several of the watchmen started breathing again.
Vimes shut his office door behind him.
Politics! He sat down and scrabbled through the papers. It was much easier to think about crime. Give him good honest–crime any time.
He tried to shut out the outside world.
Someone had beheaded Snowy Slopes. That was a fact. You couldn’t put it down to a shaving accident, or unreasonably strong shampoo.
And Snowy had attempted to shoot the Prince.
And so had Ossie, but Ossie only thought he was an assassin. Everyone else thought he was a weird little twerp who was as impressionable as wet clay.
A lovely idea, though. You used a real murderer, a nice quite professional, and then you had – Vimes smiled grimly – someone else to take the fall. And if he hadn’t taken a less metaphorical fall the poor twisted little sod would have believed he was the murderer.
And the Watch was supposed to believe it was a Klatchian plot.
Sand in their sandals… The nerve of it! Did they think he was stupid? He wished Fred had carefully swept up the sand, because he was damn well going to find out who’d put it there and they were going to eat it. Someone wanted Vimes to chase Klatchians.
The man on the burning roof. Did he fit in? Did he have to fit in? What could Vimes recall? A man in a robe, his face hidden. And a voice of a man not just used to giving commands – Vimes was used to giving commands – but also used to having commands obeyed, whereas a member of the Watch treated orders as suggestions.
But some things didn’t have to fit. That was where ‘clues’ let you down. And the damn notebook. That was the oddest thing yet. So someone had carefully ripped out several pages after Snowy had written whatever he’d written. Someone bright enough to know the trick of looking at the pages underneath for faint impressions.
So why not pinch the whole pad?
It was all too complicated. But somewhere was the one thing that’d make it simple, that would turn it all into sense–
He flung down his pencil and wrenched open the door to the stairs.
‘What the hells all this noise?’ he yelled.
‘Sergeant Colon was halfway up the stairs.
‘It was Mr Goriff and Mr Wazir having a bit of what you might call an argy–bargy, sir. Someone set fire to someone else’s country two hundred years ago, Carrot says.’
‘What, just now?’
‘ ‘s all Klatchian to me, sir. Anyway, Wazir’s gone off with his nose in a sling.’
‘Wazir comes from Smale, you see,’ said Carrot. ‘And Mr Goriff comes from Elharib, and the two countries only stopped fighting ten years ago. Religious differences.’
‘Run out of weapons?’ said Vimes.
‘Ran out of rocks, sir. They ran out of weapons last century.’
Vimes shook his head. ‘That always chews me up,’ he said. ‘People killing one another just because their gods have squabbled–’
‘Oh, they’ve got the same god, sir. Apparently it’s over a word in their holy book, sir. The Elharibians say it translates as “god” and the Smalies say it’s ”man”.’
‘How can you mix them up?’
‘Well, there’s only one tiny dot difference in the script, you see. And some people reckon it’s only a bit of fly dirt m any case.’
‘Centuries of war because a fly crapped in the wrong place?’
‘It could have been worse,’ said Carrot. ‘If it had been slightly to the left the word would have been “liquorice”.’
Vimes shook his head. Carrot was good at picking up this sort of thing. And I know how to ask for vindaloo, he thought. And it turns out that’s just a Klatchian word meaning ‘mouth–scalding gristle for macho foreign idiots’.
‘I wish we understood more about Klatch,’ he said.
‘Sergeant Colon tapped the side of his nose conspiratorially.
‘Know the enemy, eh, sir?’ he said.
‘Oh, I know the enemy,’ said Vimes. ‘It’s Klatchians I want to find out about.’
‘Commander Vimes?’
The watchmen looked round. Vimes narrowed his eyes.
‘You’re one of Rust’s men, aren’t you?’
The young man saluted.
‘Lieutenant Hornett, sir.’ He hesitated. ‘Er… his lordship has sent me to ask you if you and your senior officers would be so good as to come to the palace at your convenience, sir.’
‘Really? Those were his words?’
The lieutenant decided that honesty was the only policy.
‘In fact he said, “Get Vimes and his mob up here right now,” sir.’
‘Oh, did he?’ said Vimes.
‘Bingeley–bingeley beep!’ said a small triumphant voice from his pocket. ‘The time is eleven pee em precisely!’
The door opened before Nobby knocked, and a small stout woman glared out at him.
‘Yes, I am!’ she snapped.
Nobby stood with his hand still raised. ‘Er… are you Mrs Cake?’ he said.
‘Yes, but I don’t hold with doing it except for money.
Nobby’s hand did not move.
‘Er… you can tell the future, right?’ said Nobby.
They stared at one another. Then Mrs Cake thumped her own ear a couple of times, and blinked.
‘Drat! Left my precognition on again.’ Her gaze unfocused for a moment as she replayed the recent conversation in the privacy of her head.
‘I think we’re sorted out,’ she said. She looked at Nobby and sniffed. ‘You’d better come in. Mind the carpet, it’s just been washed. And I can only give you ten minutes ‘cos I’ve got cabbage boilin’.’
She led Corporal Nobbs into her tiny front room. A lot of it was occupied by a round table covered with a green cloth. There was a crystal ball on the table, not very well covered by a pink knitted lady in a crinoline dress.