The door to the office was open. It was hard to tell if anything had been disturbed; Shoe got the impression that the mess was normal. A desk was awash with paperwork, Mr Sonky having followed the usual ‘put it down somewhere’ method of filing. A bench was covered with samples of rubber, bits of sacking, large bottles of chemicals and some wooden moulds that Reg refrained from looking at too closely.
`Did you hear Corporal Littlebottom talking about that museum theft when we came on duty today, Buggy?’ he said, opening a jar of yellow powder and sniffing it.
No.
‘I did,’ said Reg.
He put the lid on the sulphur again and sniffed the air of the factory. It smelled of liquid rubber, which is very much like the smell of incontinent cats.
`And some things stick in the mind,’ he said. ‘Special job, eh?’
It was Constable Visit -The-Infidel-WithExplanatory-Pamphlets’s week as Communications Officer, which largely meant looking after the pigeons and keeping an eye on the clacks, with of course the assistance of Constable Downspout. Constable Downspout was a gargoyle. When it came to staring fixedly at one thing you couldn’t beat a gargoyle. The gargoyles were getting a lot of employment in the clacks industry.
Constable Visit quite enjoyed the pigeons. He sang them hymns. They listened to short homilies, cocking their heads from side to side. After all, he reasoned, had not Bishop Horn
preached to the molluscs of the sea? And there was no record of them actually listening, whereas he was certain that the pigeons were taking it in. And they seemed to be interested in his pamphlets on the virtues of Omnianism, admittedly as nesting material at the moment, but this was certainly a good start.
A pigeon fluttered in as he was scraping the perches.
‘Ah, Zebedinah,’ he said, lifting her up and removing the message capsule from her leg. ‘Well done. This is from Constable Shoe. And you shall have some corn, provided locally by Josiah Frument and Sons, Seed Merchants, but ultimately by the grace of Om.’
There was a whirr of wings and another pigeon settled on the perch. Constable Visit recognized it as Wilhelmina, one of Sergeant Angua’s pigeons.
He removed the message capsule. The thin paper inside was tightly folded and on it someone had written ‘Cpt. Carrot, Personal.’
He hesitated, then put the message from Reg Shoe into the pneumatic tube and heard the whoosh of the suction as it headed off to the main office. The other one, he decided, required a more careful delivery.
Carrot was working in Vimes’s office but, Visit noticed, not at the Commander’s desk. Instead he’d set up a folding table in the corner. The tottering piles of paperwork on the desk were slightly less alpine than yesterday. There were even occasional patches of desktop.
‘Personal message for you, captain.’
‘Thank you.’
`And Constable Shoe wants a sergeant down at Sonky’s boot factory.’
‘Did you send the message down to the office?’
‘Yes, sir. The pneumatic tube is very useful,’ Visit added dutifully.
‘Commander Vimes isn’t very keen on it but I’m sure it will eventually save us time,’ said Carrot. He unfolded the note.
Visit watched him. Carrot’s lips moved slightly as he read.
‘Where did the pigeon come from?’ he said at last, screwing up the note.
‘It looks pretty worn out, sir. Not from inside the city, I’m sure.’
‘Ah. Right. Thank you.’
‘Bad news, sir?’ Visit angled.
‘Just news, constable. Don’t let me detain you.’
‘Right, sir.’
When the disappointed Visit had gone, Carrot went and looked out of the window. There was a typical AnkhMorpork street scene outside, although people were trying to separate them.
After a few minutes he went back to his table, wrote a short note, put it into one of the little carriers and sent it away with a hiss of air.
A few minutes later Sergeant Colon came panting along the corridor. Carrot was very keen on modernizing the Watch, and in some strange way sending a message via the tube was so much more modern than simply opening the door and shouting, which is what Mr Vimes did.
Carrot gave Colon a bright smile. ‘Ah, Fred. Everything going well?’
‘Yessir?’ said Fred Colon uncertainly.
‘Good. I’m off to see the Patrician, Fred. As senior sergeant you are in charge of the Watch until Mister Vimes gets back.’
‘Yessir. Er … until you get back, you mean …’
‘I shall not be coming back, Fred. I am resigning.’
The Patrician looked at the badge on his desk.
‘… and well-trained men,’ Carrot was saying, somewhere in front of him. ‘After all, a few years ago there were only four of us in the Watch. Now it’s functioning just like a machine.’
‘Yes, although bits of it do go boing occasionally,’ said Lord Vetinari, still staring at the badge. ‘Could I invite you to reconsider, captain?’
‘I’ve reconsidered several times, sir. And it’s not-captain, sir.’
‘The Watch needs you, Mister Ironfoundersson.’
‘The Watch is bigger than one man, sir,’ said Carrot, still looking straight ahead.
‘I’m not sure if it’s bigger than Sergeant Colon, though.’
‘People get mistaken about old Fred, sir. He’s a man with a solid bottom to his character.’
‘He’s got a solid bottom to his bottom, ca-Mister Ironfoundersson.’
‘I mean he doesn’t flap in an emergency, sir.’
‘He doesn’t do anything in an emergency,’ said the Patrician. ‘Except possibly hide. I might go so far as to say that the man appears to consist of an emergency in his own right.’
‘My mind is made up, sir.’
Lord Vetinari sighed, sat back and stared up at the ceiling for a moment.
‘Then all I can do is thank you for your services, captain, and wish you good luck in your future endeavour. Do you have enough money?’
‘I’ve saved quite a lot, sir.’
‘Nevertheless, it is a long way to Uberwald.’
There was silence.
‘Sir?’
‘Yes?’
‘How did you know?’
‘Oh, people measured it years ago. Surveyors and so forth.’
‘Sir!’
Vetinari sighed. ‘I think the term is … deduction. Be that as it may – captain – I am choosing to believe that you are merely taking an extended leave of absence. I understand that you’ve never taken a holiday while you’ve been here. I’m sure you’re owed a few weeks.’
Carrot said nothing.
‘And if I was you, I’d begin my search for Sergeant Angua at the Shambling Gate,’ Vetinari added.
After a while Carrot said quietly: ‘Is that as a result of information received, my lord?’
Vetinari smiled a thin little smile. ‘No. But Uberwald is going through some troubling times, and of course she is from one of the aristocratic families. I surmise that she has been called away. Beyond that, I cannot be of much help. You will have to follow, as. they say, your nose.’
‘No, I think I can find a much more reliable nose than mine,’ said Carrot.
‘Good.’ Lord Vetinari went back to his desk and sat down. ‘I wish you well in your search. Nevertheless, I’m sure we’ll be seeing you again. A lot of people here depend on you.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Good day to you.’
When Carrot had gone, Lord Vetinari got up and walked across to the other side of the room, where a map of Uberwald was unrolled on a table. It was quite old, but in recent years any mapmakers who had wandered off the beaten track in that country had spent all their time trying to find it again. There were a few rivers, their courses mostly guesswork, and the occasional town or at least the name of a town, probably put in to save the cartographer the embarrassment of filling his chart with, as they said in the trade, MMB U.*
The door opened and Vetinari’s head clerk, Drumknott, eased his way in with the silence of a feather falling in a cathedral.
‘A somewhat unexpected development, my lord,’ he said quietly.
‘An uncharacteristic one, certainly,’ said Vetinari.
‘Do you wish me to send a clacks to Vimes, sir? He could be back in a day or so.’
Vetinari was looking intently at the blind, blank map. It was, he felt, very much like the future; a few things were outlined, there were some rough guesses, but everything else was waiting to be created …
*Miles and Miles of Bloody Uberwald.
‘Hmm?’ he said.
‘Do you wish me to recall Vimes, sir?’
‘Good heavens, no. Vimes in Uberwald will be more amusing than an amorous armadillo in a bowling alley. And who else could I send? Only Vimes could go to Uberwald.’
‘But surely this is an emergency, sir?’
‘Hmm?’
‘What else are we to call it, sir, when a young man of such promise throws away his career for the pursuit of a girl?’
The Patrician stroked his beard and smiled at something.
There was a line across the map: the progress of the semaphore towers. It was mathematically straight, a statement of intellect in the crowding darkness of miles and miles of bloody Uberwald.