“Might have been just an innocent bystander, sir,” said Carrot.
“What, in Ankh-Morpork?”
“Yes, sir.”
“We should have grabbed him, then, just for the rarity value,” said Vimes.
He patted Carrot on the shoulder. “Come on. We’d better get along to the Patrician’s palace.”
“The King’s palace,” corrected Carrot.
“What?” said Vimes, his train of thought temporarily shunted.
“It’s the King’s palace now,” said Carrot. Vimes squinted sideways at him.
He gave a short, mirthless laugh.
“Yeah, that’s right,” he conceded. “Our dragon-killing king. Well done that man.” He sighed. “They’re not going to like this.”
…
They didn’t. None of them did.
The first problem was the palace guard.
Vimes had never liked them. They’d never liked him. Okay, so maybe the rank were only one step away from petty scofflaws, but in Vimes’s professional opinion the palace guard these days were only one step away from being the worst criminal scum the city had ever produced. A step further down. They’d have to reform a bit before they could even be considered for inclusion in the Ten Most Unwanted list.
They were rough. They were tough. They weren’t the sweepings of the gutter, they were what you still found sticking to the gutter when the gutter sweepers had given up in exhaustion. They had been extremely well-paid by the Patrician, and presumably were extremely well-paid by someone else now, because when Vimes walked up to the gates a couple of them stopped lounging against the walls and straightened up while still maintaining just the right amount of psychological slouch to cause maximum offense.
“Captain Vimes,” said Vimes, staring straight ahead. “To see the king. It’s of the utmost importance.”
“Yeah? Well, it’d have to be,” said a guard. “Captain Slimes, was it?”
“Vimes,” said Vimes evenly. “With a Vee.”
One of the guards nodded to his companion.
“Vimes,” he said. “With a Vee.”
“Fancy,” said the other guard.
“It’s most urgent,” said Vimes, maintaining a wooden expression. He tried to move forward.
The first guard sidestepped neatly and pushed him sharply in the chest.
“No-one is going nowhere,” he said. “Orders of the king, see? So you can push off back to your pit, Captain Vimes with a Vee.”
It wasn’t the words which made up Vimes’s mind. It was the way the other man sniggered.
“Stand aside,” he said.
The guard leaned down. “Who’s going to make me,” he rapped on Vimes’s helmet, “copper?”
There are times when it is a veritable pleasure to drop the bomb right away.
“Lance-constable Carrot, I want you to charge these men,” said Vimes.
Carrot saluted. “Very good, sir,” he said, and turned and trotted smartly back the way they had come.
“Hey!” shouted Vimes, as the boy disappeared around a corner.
“That’s what I like to see,” said the first guard, leaning on his speak. “That’s a young man with initiative, that young man. A bright lad. He doesn’t want to stop along here and have his ears twisted off. That’s a young man who’s going to go a long way, if he’s got any sense.”
“Very sensible,” said the other guard.
He leaned the spear against the wall.
“You Watch men make me want to throw up,” he said conversationally. “Poncing around all the time, never doing a proper job of work. Throwing your weight about as if you counted for something. So me and Clarence are going to show you what real guarding is all about, isn’t that right?”
I could just about manage one of them, Vimes thought as he took a few steps backward. If he was facing the other way, at least.
Clarence propped his spear against the gateway and spat on his hands.
There was a long, terrifying ululation. Vimes was amazed to realise it wasn’t coming from him.
Carrot appeared around the corner at a dead run. He had a felling axe in either hand.
His huge leather sandals flapped on the cobblestones as he bounded closer, accelerating all the time. And all the time there was this cry, deedahdeedahdeedah, like something caught in a trap at the bottom of a two-tone echo canyon.
The two palace guards stood rigid with astonishment.
“I should duck, if I was you,” said Vimes from near ground level.
The two axes left Carrot’s hands and whirred through the air making a noise like a brace of partridges. One of them hit the palace gate, burying half the head in the woodwork. The other one hit the shaft of the first one, and split it. Then Carrot arrived.
Vimes went and sat down on a nearby bench for a while, and rolled himself a cigarette.
Eventually he said, “I think that’s about enough, constable. I think they’d like to come quietly now.”
“Yes, sir. What are they accused of, sir?” said Carrot, holding one limp body in either hand.
“Assaulting an officer of the Watch in the execution of his duty and … oh, yes. Resisting arrest.”
“Under Section (vii) of the Public Order Act of 1457?” said Carrot.
“Yes,” said Vimes solemnly. “Yes. Yes, I suppose so.”
“But they didn’t resist very much, sir,” Carrot pointed out.
“Well, attempting to resist arrest. I should just leave them over by the wall until we come back. I don’t expect they’ll want to go anywhere.”
“Right you are, sir.”
“Don’t hurt them, mind,” said Vimes. “You mustn’t hurt prisoners.”
“That’s right, sir,” said Carrot, conscientiously. “Prisoners once Charged have Rights, sir. It says so in the Dignity of Man (Civic Rights) Act of 1341. I keep telling Corporal Nobbs. They have Rights, I tell him. This means you do not Put the Boot in.”
“Very well put, constable.”
Carrot looked down. “You have the right to remain silent,” he said. “You have the right not to injure yourself falling down the steps on the way to the cells. You have the right not to jump out of high windows. You do not have to say anything, you see, but any thing you do say, well, I have to take it down and it might be used in evidence.” He pulled out his notebook and licked his pencil. He leaned down further.
“Pardon?” he said. He looked up at Vimes.
“How do you spell ‘groan’, sir?” he said.
“G-R-O-N-E, I think.”
“Very good, sir.”
“Oh, and constable?’
“Yes, sir?”
“Why the axes?”
“They were armed, sir. I got them from the blacksmith in Market Street, sir. I said you’d be along later to pay for them.”
“And the cry?” said Vimes weakly.
“Dwarfish war yodel, sir,” said Carrot proudly.
“It’s a good cry,” said Vimes, picking his words with care. “But I’d be grateful if you’d warn me first another time, all right?”
“Certainly, sir.”
“In writing, I think.”
…
The Librarian swung on. It was slow progress, because there were things he wasn’t keen on meeting. Creatures evolve to fill every niche in the environment, and some of those in the dusty immensity of L-space were best avoided. They were much more unusual than ordinary unusual creatures.
Usually he could forewarn himself by keeping a careful eye on the kickstool crabs that grazed harmlessly on the dust. When they were spooked, it was time to hide. Several times he had to flatten himself against the shelves as a thesaurus thundered by. He waited patiently as a herd of Critters crawled past, grazing on the contents of the choicer books and leaving behind them piles of small slim volumes of literary criticism. And there were other things, things which he hurried away from and tried not to look hard at …
And you had to avoid cliches at all costs.
He finished the last of his peanuts atop a stepladder, which was browsing mindlessly off the high shelves.
The territory definitely had a familiar feel, or at least he got the feeling that it would eventually be familiar. Time had a different meaning in L-space.
There were shelves whose outline he felt he knew. The book titles, while still unreadable, held a tantalising hint of legibility. Even the musty air had a smell he thought he recognised.
He shambled quickly along a side passage, turned the corner and, with only the slightest twinge of disorientation, shuffled into that set of dimensions that people, because they don’t know any better, think of as normal.
He just felt extremely hot and his fur stood straight out from his body as temporal energy gradually discharged.
He was in the dark.
He extended one arm and explored the spines of the books by his side. Ah. Now he knew where he was.
He was home.
He was home a week ago.
It was essential that he didn’t leave footprints. But that wasn’t a problem. He shinned up the side of the nearest bookcase and, under the starlight of the dome, hurried onwards.
…
Lupine Wonse glared up, red-eyed, from the heap of paperwork on his desk. No-one in the city knew anything about coronations. He’d had to make it up as he went along. There should be plenty of things to wave, he knew that.