104
iconograph and looked at it again. Then he scratched it with a long pale finger, as if trying to remove something.
‘Strange . . ,’ he said.
The imp hadn’t imagined it, he knew. Imps had no imagination whatsoever. They didn’t know how to lie.
He looked around the bare cellar suspiciously.
‘Is zere anyvun zere?’ he said. ‘Is anyvun playink zer silly buggers?’
Thankfully there was no answer.
Dark light. Oh dear. There were lots of theories about dark light. . .
‘Otto!’
He glanced up, shoving the picture into his pocket.
‘Yes, Mr Villiam?’
‘Get your stuff together and come with me! Lord Vetinari’s murdered someone! Er, it is alleged,’ William added. ‘And it can’t possibly be true.’
~blk~
It sometimes seemed to William that the whole population of Ankh-Morpork was simply a mob waiting to happen. It was mostly spread thin, like some kind of great amoeba, all across the city. But when something happened somewhere it contracted around that point, like a cell around a piece of food, filling the streets with people.
It was growing around the main gates to the palace. It came together apparently at random. A knot of people would attract other people, and become a bigger, more complicated knot. Carts and sedan chairs would stop to find out what was going on. The invisible beast grew bigger.
There were watchmen on the gate instead of the palace guard. This was a problem. ‘Let me in, I’m nosy,’ was not a request likely to achieve success. It lacked a certain authority.
‘Vy are ve stoppink?’ said Otto.
‘That’s Sergeant Detritus on the gate,’ said William.
‘Ah. A troll. Very stupid,’ opined Otto.
‘But hard to fool. I’m afraid I shall have to try the truth.’
‘Vy vill zat vork?’
105
‘He’s a policeman. The truth usually confuses them. They don’t often hear it.’
The big troll sergeant watched William impassively as he approached. It was a proper policeman’s stare. It gave nothing away. It said: I can see you, now I’m waiting to see what you’re going to do that’s wrong.
‘Good morning, sergeant,’ said William.
A nod from the troll indicated that he was prepared to accept, on available evidence, that it was morning and, in certain circumstances, by some people, it might be considered good.
‘I urgently need to see Commander Vimes.’
‘Oh, yes?’
‘Yes. Indeed.’
‘And does he urgently need to see you?’ The troll leaned closer. ‘You’re Mr de Worde, right?’
‘Yes. I work for the Times.’
‘I don’t read dat,’ said the troll.
‘Really? We’ll bring out a large-print edition,’ said William.
‘Dat was a very funny joke,’ said Detritus. Ting is, fick though I am, I am der one that’s sayin’ you can stay outside, so– What’s dat vampire doing?’
‘Hold it just vun second!’ said Otto.
WHOOMPH.
‘–damndamndamn!’
Detritus watched Otto roll around on the cobbles screaming.
‘What was dat about?’ he said, eventually.
‘He’s taken a picture of you not letting me into the palace,’ said William.
Detritus, although born above the snowline on some distant mountain, a troll who had never seen a human until he was five years old, nevertheless was a policeman to his craggy, dragging fingertips and reacted accordingly.
‘He can’t do dat,’ he said.
William pulled out his notebook and poised his pencil. ‘Could you explain to my readers exactly why not?’ he said.
Detritus looked around, a little worried. ‘Where are dey?’
‘No, I mean I’m going to write down what you say.’
106
Basic policing rushed to Detritus’s aid once again. ‘You can’t do dat,’ he said.
Then can I write down why I can’t write anything down?’ William said, smiling brightly.
Detritus reached up and moved a little lever on the side of his helmet. A barely audible whirring noise became fractionally louder. The troll had a helmet with a clockwork fan, to blow air across his silicon brain when overheating threatened to reduce its operating efficiency. Right now he obviously needed a cooler head.
‘Ah. Dis is some kind of politics, right?’ he said.
‘Um, maybe. Sorry.’
Otto had staggered to his feet and was fiddling with the icono-graph again.
Detritus reached a decision. He nodded to a constable.
‘Fiddyment, you take dese . . . two to Mister Vimes. Dey are not to fall down any steps on der way or any stuff like dat.’
Mister Vimes, thought William, as they hurried after the constable. All the watchmen called him that. The man had been a knight and was now a duke and a commander, but they called him Mister. And it was Mister, too, the full two syllables, not the everyday unheeded ‘Mr’; it was the ‘mister’ you used when you wanted to say things like Tut down that crossbow and turn around real slow, mister.’ He wondered why.
William had not been brought up to respect the Watch. They weren’t our kind of people. It was conceded that they were useful, like sheepdogs, because clearly someone had to keep people in order, heavens knew, but only a fool would let a sheepdog sleep in the parlour. The Watch, in other words, was a regrettably necessary sub-set of the criminal classes, a section of the population informally defined by Lord de Worde as anyone with less than a thousand dollars a year.
William’s family and everyone they knew also had a mental map of the city that was divided into parts where you found upstanding citizens and other parts where you found criminals. It had come as a shock to them . . . no, he corrected himself, it had come as an affront to learn that Vimes operated on a different map. Apparently he’d instructed his men to use the front door when calling at any
107
building, even in broad daylight, when sheer common sense said that they should use the back, just like any other servant.* The man simply had no idea.
That Vetinari had made him a duke was just another example of the Patrician’s lack of grip.
William therefore felt predisposed to like Vimes, if only because of the type of enemies he made, but as far as he could see everything about the man could be prefaced by the word ‘badly’, as in -spoken, -educated and -in need of a drink.
Fiddyment stopped in the big hall of the palace.
‘Don’t you go anywhere and don’t you do anything,’ he said. ‘I’ll go and–‘
But Vimes was already coming down the wide stairs, trailed by a giant of a man William recognized as Captain Carrot.
You could add ‘-dressed’ to Vimes’s list. It wasn’t that he wore bad clothes. He just seemed to generate an internal scruffiness field. The man could rumple a helmet.
Fiddyment met them halfway. There was a muttered conversation, out of which the unmistakable words ‘He’s what?’ arose, in Vimes’s voice. He glared darkly at William. The expression was clear. It said: it’s been a bad day and now there’s you.
Vimes walked the rest of the way down the stairs and looked William up and down.
‘What is it you’re wanting?’ he demanded.
‘I want to know what’s happened here, please,’ said William.
‘Why?’
‘Because people will want to know.’
‘Hah! They’ll find out soon enough!’
‘But who from, sir?’
Vimes walked round William as if he was examining some strange new thing.
‘You’re Lord de Worde’s boy, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, your grace.’
‘Commander will do,’ said Vimes sharply. ‘And you write that little gossipy thing, right?’
~blk~~foot~
* William’s class understood that justice was like coal or potatoes. You ordered it when you needed it.
108
‘Broadly, sir.’
‘What was it you did to Sergeant Detritus?’
‘I only wrote down what he said, sir.’
‘Aha, pulled a pen on him, eh?’
‘Sir?’
‘Writing things down at people? Teh, tch . . . that sort of thing only causes trouble.’
Vimes stopped walking round William, but having him glare from a few inches away was no improvement.
‘This has not been a nice day,’ he said. ‘And it’s going to get a lot worse. Why should I waste my time talking to you?’
‘I can tell you one good reason,’ said William.
‘Well, go on, then.’
‘You should talk to me so that I can write it down, sir. All neat and correct. The actual words you say, right down there on the paper. And you know who I am, and if I get them wrong you know where to find me.’
‘So? You’re telling me that if I do what you want you’ll do what you want?’
‘I’m saying, sir, that a lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on.’
‘Ha! Did you just make that up?’
‘No, sir. But you know it’s true.’
Vimes sucked on his cigar. ‘And you’ll let me see what you’ve written?’
‘Of course. I’ll make sure you get one of the first papers off the press, sir.’
‘I meant before it gets published, and you know it.’