She looked up as the door shut behind Vimes.
‘Oh, there you are. You’re home early,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t stand the fuss, so I came out here. But I’ll have to go and change soon—’
She stopped when she saw his expression. ‘There’s something wrong, isn’t there?’
‘I’m not going back,’ said Vimes.
‘Really? Last week you said you’d do a full watch. You said you were looking forward to it.’
Not much gets past old Sybil, Vimes thought.
She patted his hand.
‘I’m glad you’re out of it,’ she said.
Corporal Nobbs darted into the Watch House and slammed the door behind him.
‘Well?’ said Carrot.
‘It’s not good,’ said Nobby. ‘They say the trolls are planning to march to the Palace to get Coalface out. There’s gangs of dwarfs and trolls wandering around looking for trouble. And beggars. Lettice was very popular. And there’s a lot of Guild people out there, too. The city,’ he said, importantly, ‘is def’nitely a keg of No.1 Powder.’
‘How do you like the idea of camping out on the open plain?’ said Colon.
‘What’s that got to do with it?’
‘If anyone puts a match to anything tonight, it’s goodbye Ankh,’ said the sergeant morosely. ‘Usually we can shut the city gates, right? But there’s hardly more’n a few feet of water in the river.’
‘You flood the city just to put out fires?’ said Angua.
‘Yep.’
‘Another thing,’ said Nobby. ‘People threw stuff at me!’
Carrot had been staring at the wall. Now he produced a small, battered black book from his pocket, and started to thumb through the pages.
‘Tell me,’ he said, in a slightly distant voice, ‘has there been an irretrievable breakdown of law and order?’
‘Yeah. For about five hundred years,’ said Colon. ‘Irretrievable breakdown of law’n’order is what Ankh-Morpork is all about.’
‘No, I mean more than usual. It’s important.’ Carrot turned a page. His lips moved silently as he read.
‘Throwing stuff at me sounds like a breakdown in law and order,’ said Nobby.
He was aware of their expressions.
‘I don’t think we could make that stick,’ said Colon.
‘It stuck all right,’ said Nobby, ‘and some of it went down my shirt.’
‘Why throw things at you?’ said Angua.
‘It’s ‘cos I was a Watchman,’ said Nobby. ‘The dwarfs don’t like the Watch ‘cos of Mr Hammerhock, and the trolls don’t like the Watch ‘cos of Coalface being arrested, and people don’t like the Watch ‘cos of all these angry dwarfs and trolls around.’
Someone thumped at the door.
‘That’s probably an angry mob right now,’ said Nobby.
Carrot opened the door.
‘It’s not an angry mob,’ he announced.
‘Ook.’
‘It’s an orang-utan carrying a stunned dwarf followed by a troll. But he is quite angry, if that’s any help.’
Lady Ramkin’s butler, Willikins, had filled him a big bath. Hah! Tomorrow it’d be his butler, and his bath. And this wasn’t one of the old hip bath, drag-it-in- front-of-the-fire jobs, no. The Ramkin mansion collected water off the roof into a big cistern, after straining out the pigeons, and then it was heated by an ancient geyser[24] and flowed along drumming, groaning lead pipes to a pair of mighty brass taps and then into an enamelled tub. There were things laid out on a fluffy towel beside it -huge scrubbing brushes, three kinds of soap, a loofah.
Willikins was standing patiently beside the bath, like a barely heated towel rail.
‘Yes?’ said Vimes.
‘His lordship . . . that is, her ladyship’s father . . . he required to have his back scrubbed,’ said Willikins.
‘You go and help the old geyser stoke the furnace,’ said Vimes firmly.
Left alone, he struggled out of his breastplate and threw it in the corner. The chainmail shirt followed it, and the helmet, and the money pouch, and various leather and cotton oddments that came between a Watchman and the world.
And then he sank, gingerly at first, into the suds.
‘Try soap. Soap’11 work,’ said Detritus.
‘Hold still, will you?’ said Carrot.
‘You’re twisting my head off!’
‘Go on, soap him head.’
‘Soap your own head!’
There was a thung noise and Cuddy’s helmet came free.
Cuddy emerged, blinking, into the light. He focused on the Librarian, and growled.
‘He hit me on the head!’
‘Oook.’
‘He says you came up through the floor,’ said Carrot.
‘That’s no reason to hit me on the head.’
‘Some of the things that come up through the floor at Unseen University don’t even have a head,’ said Carrot.
‘Oook!’
‘Or they have hundreds. Why were you digging down there?’
‘We weren’t digging down. We were digging up . . .’
Carrot sat and listened. He interrupted only twice.
‘Shot at you?’
‘Five time,’ said Detritus, happily. ‘Have to report damage to breastplate but not to backplate on account of fortunately my body got in way, saving valuable city property worth three dollars.’
Carrot listened some more.
‘Sewers?’ he said, eventually.
‘It’s like the whole city, underground. We saw crowns and stuff carved on the walls.’
Carrot’s eyes sparkled. ‘That means they must date right back to the days when we had kings! And then when we kept on rebuilding the city we forgot they were down there . . .’
‘Um. That’s not all that’s down there,’ said Cuddy. ‘We . . . found something.’
‘Oh?’
‘Something bad.’
‘You won’t like it at all,’ said Detritus. ‘Bad, bad, bad. Even worse.’
‘We thought it would be best to leave it there,’ said Cuddy, ‘on account of it being Evidence. But you ought to see it.’
‘It’s going to upset everything,’ said the troll, warming to the part.
‘What was it?’
‘If we tell you, you say, stupid ethnic people, you pulling my leg off,’ said Detritus.
‘So you’d better come and see,’ said Cuddy.
Sergeant Colon looked at the rest of the Watch.
‘All of us?’ he said, nervously. ‘Er. Shouldn’t a couple of senior officers stay up here? In case anything happens?’
‘Do you mean in case anything happens up here?’ said Angua, tartly. ‘Or in case anything happens down there?’
‘I’ll go with Lance-Constable Cuddy and Lance-Constable Detritus,’ said Carrot. ‘I don’t think anyone else ought to come.’
‘But it could be dangerous!’ said Angua.
‘If I find who’s been shooting at Watchmen,’ said Carrot, ‘it will be.’
Samuel Vimes reached up with a big toe and turned on the hot tap.
There was a respectful knock at the door, and Willikins old-retainer’d in.
‘Would sir be wanting anything?’
Vimes thought about it.
‘Lady Ramkin said you wouldn’t be wanting any alcohol,’ said Willikins, as if reading his thoughts.
‘Did she?’
‘Emphatically, sir. But I have here a very fine cigar.’
He winced as Vimes bit the end off and spat it over the side of the bath, but produced some matches and lit it for him.
‘Thank you, Willikins. What’s your first name?’
‘First name, sir?’
‘I mean, what do people call you when they’ve got to know you better?’
‘Willikins, sir.’
‘Oh. Right, then. Well. You may go, Willikins.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Vimes lay back in the warm water. The inner voice was still in there somewhere, but he tried not to pay any attention. About now, it was saying, you’d be proceeding along the Street of Small Gods, just by the bit of old city wall where you could stop and smoke a rollup out of the wind . . .
To drown it out, he started to sing at the top of his voice.
The cavernous sewers under the city echoed with human and near-human voices for the first time in millennia.
‘Hi-ho—’
‘—hi-ho—’
‘Oook oook oook oook ook—’
‘You all stupid!’
‘I can’t help it. It’s my nearly-dwarfish blood. We just like singing underground. It comes naturally to us.’
‘All right, but why him singing? Him ape.’
‘He’s a people person.’
They’d brought torches. Shadows jumped among the pillars in the big cavern, and fled along the tunnels. Whatever the possible lurking dangers, Carrot was beside himself with the joy of discovery.
‘It’s amazing! The Via Cloaca is mentioned in some old book I read, but everyone thought it was a lost street! Superb workmanship. Lucky for you the river was so low. It looks as though these are normally full of water.’
‘That’s what I said,’ said Cuddy. ‘Full of water, I said.’
He glanced cautiously at the dancing shadows, which made weird and worrying shapes on the far wall -strange biped animals, eldritch underground things . . .
Carrot sighed.
‘Stop making shadow pictures, Detritus.’
‘Oook.’
‘What him say?’-
‘He said “Do Deformed Rabbit, it’s my favourite”,’ Carrot translated.
Rats rustled in the darkness. Cuddy peered around. He kept imagining figures, back there, sighting along some kind of pipe . . .
There were a disturbing few moments when he lost sight of the tracks on the wet stone, but he picked them up again near a mould-hung wall. And then, there was the particular pipe. He’d made a scratch on the stones.