‘He’s been killing people!’
‘Yes, sir. But my mother’s just a rather ignorant snob and my father’s half-gone now. He spends
so much time as a wolf he hardly knows how to act human any more. They don’t live in the real world. They really think Uberwald can stay the same. There isn’t a lot up here, really, but it’s ours. Wolfgang’s a murderous idiot who thinks that werewolves were born to rule. The trouble is, sir, he hasn’t broken the lore.’
‘Oh, ye gods!’
‘I bet he could find plenty of witnesses to say that he gave everyone the start the lore requires. That’s the rules of the game.’
‘And meddling with the dwarfs’ affairs? He’s stolen the Scone or swapped it or … something, I haven’t worked it all out yet, but one poor dwarf’s already dead because of it! Cheery and Detritus are under arrest! Inigo is dead! Sybil’s locked up somewhere! And you’re saying it’s all Okay?’
‘Things are different here, sir,’ said Carrot. ‘It wasn’t until ten years ago that they replaced trial by ordeal here with trial by lawyer, and that was only because they found that lawyers were nastier.’
‘I’ve got to get back to Bonk. If they’ve harmed Sybil I don’t care what the damn lore is.’
‘Mister Vimes! You look done in as it is!’ said Carrot.
‘I’ll keep going. Come on. Get some of the wolves to pull the sleigh-‘
‘You don’t get them to, sir. You ask Gavin if they will,’ said Carrot.
‘Oh. Er, can you explain the situation to him?’
I’m standing in the cold in the middle of a forest, thought Vimes a moment later, watching
a quite handsome young woman growling a conversation with a wolf who is watching her. This does not often happen. Not in AnkhMorpork, anyway. It’s probably a daily occurrence up here.
Eventually six wolves allowed themselves to be harnessed, and Vimes was carried up the hill to the road.
‘Stop!’
‘Sir?’ said Carrot.
‘I want a weapon! There’s got to be something in the tower I can use!’
‘Sir, you can use my sword! And there’s the… hunting spears.’
‘You know what you can do with the hunting spears!’
Vimes kicked the door at the base of the tower. Fresh snow had blown in, smoothing the edges of wolf and human tracks.
He felt drunk. Bits of his brain were going on and off. His eyeballs felt as though they were lined with towelling. His legs seemed only vaguely under his control.
Surely the signallers must’ve had something?
Even the sacks and barrels had gone. Well, there were plenty of peasants in the hills, and winter was coming on, and the men who’d been here certainly had no further use for the food. Even Vimes wouldn’t call that theft.
He climbed up to the next floor. The thrifty people of the forest had been up here, too. But they hadn’t taken the bloodstains off the floor, or Inigo’s little round hat which inexplicably was wedged into the wooden wall.
He pulled it out and saw where the thin felt on the brim had been pushed back to reveal the razor-sharp edge.
An assassin’s hat, he thought. And then, no, not an assassin’s hat. He remembered the street fights he’d seen when he was a kid, among the hard-drinking men who thought that even bareknuckle fighting was posh. Some of them would sew a razorblade into the brim of their cap, for a bit of help in a melee. This was the hat of a man who was always looking for that extra edge.
It hadn’t worked here.
He dropped it on the floor and his eye caught, in the gloom, the box of mortars. Even that had been ransacked, but the tubes had simply been scattered across the floor. The gods alone knew what the scavengers thought they were.
He put them back in their box. Inigo was right about them, at least. A weapon so inaccurate that it probably couldn’t hit a barn wall from inside the barn was no good as a weapon. But other things had been scattered around, too. The men who’d been living rough here had left a few personal items. Pictures had been thumbtacked to the wall. There was a diary, a pipe, someone’s shaving gear. Boxes had been tipped out on the floor …
‘We’d better be getting on, sir,’ said Carrot from the ladder.
They’d been killed. They’d been sent racing off into the dark with monsters at their heels, and then some blank-faced peasants who’d done nothing to help had come in here and picked over the little things they’d left behind.
Damn it! Vimes growled and swept everything into a box and dragged it over to the ladder.
‘We’ll drop this lot off at the embassy,’ he said. ‘I’m not leaving anything here for scavengers. Don’t think about arguing with me.’
‘Wouldn’t dream of it, sir. Wouldn’t. dream of it.’
Vimes paused. ‘Carrot? That wolf and Angua…’ He stopped. How the hell did you continue a sentence like that?
‘They’re old friends, sir.’
‘They are?’.
There was nothing but the usual completely open honesty anywhere in Carrot’s expression.
‘Oh … we … that’s good, then,’ Vimes finished.
A minute later they were on their way again. Angua was running as a wolf far ahead of the sleigh, alongside Gavin. Gaspode had curled up under the blankets.
And here I am again, thought Vimes, racing the sunset. Heavens know why. I’m in the company of a werewolf and a wolf that looks worse, and sitting in a sleigh drawn by wolves which I can’t steer. Try looking that one up in the manual.
He dozed among the blankets, half-open eyes watching the disc of the sun flickering between pine trees.
How could you steal the Scone from its cave?
He’d said there were dozens of ways and there were, but they were all risky. They all depended too much on luck and sleepy guards. And this didn’t feel like a crime that was going to rely on luck. It had to work.
The Scone wasn’t important. It was important that the dwarfs ended in disarray – no king, violent arguments and fighting in the dark. And it would stay dark in Uberwald, too. And it seemed to be important that the King was blamed. After all, he was the one who’d lost the Scone.
Whatever the plan was, it had to be done quickly. Well, the clacks would have been useful. What had Wolfgang said? ‘Those clever men in AnkhMorpork’? Not dwarfs, but men.
Rubber Sonky, floating in his vat …
You dipped in a wooden hand, and out of the vat you got a glove. Hand in glove …
It isn’t where you put it, it’s where people think it is. That’s what matters. That’s the magic.
He remembered the very first thought he’d had when he’d seen Cheery staring at the floor of the Scone’s cave, and the little policemen in Vimes’s head started to clamour.
‘What, sir?’ said Carrot.
‘Hmm?’ Vimes forced open his eyes.
‘You just shouted, sir.’
‘What did I shout?’
‘You shouted, “The bloody thing was never bloody stolen!” sir.’
‘The bastards! I knew I nearly had it! It all fits together if you don’t think like a dwarf! Let’s make sure Sybil is all right and then, captain, we’re going to-‘
‘Prod buttock, sir?’
‘Right!’
‘Only one thing, sir…’
‘What?’
‘You are an escaped criminal, aren’t you?’
For a moment there was only the sound of the runners skimming over the snow.
‘We-ell,’ said Vimes, ‘this isn’t AnkhMorpork, I know. Everyone keeps telling me. But, captain, wherever you are, wherever you go, watchmen are always watchmen.’
A solitary light burned in the window. Captain Colon sat by the candle, staring at nothing.
Regulations called for the Watch House to be manned at all hours, and that’s what he was doing.
The floorboards in the room below creaked into a new position. For many months now they’d been walked on around the clock, because the main office never had fewer than half a dozen people in it. Chairs, too, accustomed ‘to being warmed continuously by a relay of bottoms, groaned gently as they cooled.
There was only one thought buzzing around Fred Colon’s head.
Mister Vimes is going to go completely bursar. He’s going to go totally Librarian-poo.
His hand went down to the desk and came back automatically, while he looked straight ahead.
There was the crunch of a sugar lump being eaten. .
Snow was falling again. The watchman that Vimes had named Colonesque was leaning in his
box by the Hubward gate of Bonk. He’d perfected the art, and it was an art form, of going to sleep upright with his eyes open. It was one of the things you learned on endless nights.
A female voice by his ear said, ‘Now, there are two ways this could go.’
His position didn’t change. He continued to stare straight ahead.