“Nineish?”
“Yep. Nineish. Precisely about nineish.”
Vimes rolled his eyes. “Precisely about nineish?” he said, pulling a small box out of his pocket and opening the lid. The demon inside gave him an angry look.
“Yesterday you said,” it said, “that if I, and I quote, Didn't Stop all that Eight Fifty-Six and Six Seconds Precisely business I Would Be Looking at a Hammer From Below. And when I said, Mr Insert Name Here, that this would invalidate my warranty, you said that I could take my warranty and—”
“I thought you'd lost that thing,” said Carrot.
“Hah,” said the Dis-organizer,{49} “really? You thought he did? I don't call putting something in your trouser pockets just before they go into the wash losing it.”
“That was an accident,” muttered Vimes.
“Oh? Oh? And dropping me in the dragon's feeding bowl, that was accidental too, was it?” The demon mumbled to itself for a moment and then said, “Anyway, do you want to know your appointments for this evening?”
Vimes looked at the smouldering wreckage of the embassy.
“Do tell,” he said.
“You don't have any,” said the demon sulkily. “You haven't told me any.”
“You see?” said Vimes. “That's what drives me livid! Why should I have to tell you? Why didn't you tell me, ‘Eightish: break up riot at Mundane Meals and stop Detritus shooting people,’ eh?”
“You didn't tell me to tell you!”
“I didn't know! And that's how real life works! How can I tell you to warn me about things that no one knows are going to happen? If you were any good, that'd be your job!”
“He writes in the manual,” said the demon nastily. “Did you know that, everybody? He writes in the manual.”
“Well, of course I make notes—”
“He's actually sneakily trying to keep his diary in the manual so his wife won't find out he's never bothered to learn how to use me,” said the demon.
“What about the Vimes manual, then?” snapped Vimes. “I notice you've never bothered to learn how to use me!”
The demon hesitated. “Humans come with a manual?” it said.
“It'd be a damn good idea!” said Vimes.
“True,” murmured Angua.
“It could say things like ‘Chapter One: Bingeley-bingeley beep and other damn fool things to spring on people at six in the morning,’” said Vimes, his eyes wild. “And ‘Toubleshooting: my owner keeps trying to drop me in the privy, what am I doing wrong?’ And—”
Carrot patted him gently on the back. “I should sign off now, sir,” he said gently. “It's been a busy few days.”
Vimes rubbed his forehead. “I daresay I could do with a rest,” he said. “Come on, there's nothing more to see here. Let's go home.”
“I thought you said you weren't going—” Carrot began, but Vimes's mind was already scolding him.
“I meant the Yard, of course,” he said. “I'll go home afterwards.”
A ball of lamplight floated through the Ramkin library, drifting across the shelves of huge, leatherbound books.
Many of them had never been read, Sybil knew. Various ancestors had simply ordered them from the engravers and put them on the shelves, because a library was something you had to have, don'tcherknow, like a stableyard and a servants' wing and some ghastly landscaping mistake created by “Bloody Stupid” Johnson, although in the latter case her grandfather had shot the man before he could do any real damage.
She held the lamp higher.
Ramkins looked down their noses at her from their frames, through the brown varnish of the centuries. Portraits were another thing that had been collected out of unregarded habit.
Most of them were of men. They were invariably in armour and always on horseback. And every single one of them had fought the sworn enemies of Ankh-Morpork.
In recent times this had been quite difficult and her grandfather, for example, had to lead an expedition all the way to Howondaland in order to find some sworn enemies, although there was an adequate supply and a lot of swearing by the time he left. Earlier, of course, it had been a lot easier. Ramkin regiments had fought the city's enemies all over the Sto Plains and had inflicted heroic casualties, quite often on people in the opposing armies.8
There were a few women among the sitters, none of them holding anything heavier than a glove or a small pet dragon. Their job had largely been to roll bandages and await the return of their husbands with, she liked to think, resolution and fortitude and a general hope that said husbands would return with as many of their bits as possible.
The point was, though, that they never thought about it. There was a war, and off they went. If there wasn't a war, they looked for one. They didn't even use words like “duty”. It was all built in at bone level.
She sighed. It was all so difficult these days, and Lady Sybil came from a class that was not used to difficulty, or at least the kind that couldn't be sorted out by shouting at a servant. Five hundred years ago one of her ancestors had cut off a Klatchian's head in battle and had brought it home on a pole, and no one thought any the worse of him, given what the Klatchians would have cut off if they'd caught him. That seemed straightforward. You fought them, they fought you, everyone knew the rules, and if you got your head cut off you jolly well didn't blub about it afterwards.
Certainly, things were better now. But they were just… more difficult.
And of course some of those antique husbands were away for months or years at a time, and for them wives and families were pretty much like the library and stableyard and the Johnson Exploding Pagoda. You got them sorted out and then didn't think much about it. At least Sam was home every day.
Well, most days. Every night, anyway.
Well… part of most nights, certainly.
At least they ate meals together.
Well, most meals.
Well, at least they made a start on most meals.
Well, at least she knew he was never very far away, just somewhere where he was trying to do too much and run too fast and people were trying to kill him.
All in all, she considered, she was jolly lucky.
Vimes stared at Carrot, who was standing in front of his desk.
“So what does all that add up to?” he said. “The man we know didn't get the Prince is dead. The man who probably did… is dead. Someone tried very clumsily to make it look as if Ossie was paid by the Klatchians. OK, I can see why someone might want to do that. That's what Fred calls politics. They get Snowy to do the real business, and he helps poor dumb Ossie who's there to take the fall, and then the Watch proves that Ossie was in the pay of the Klatchians and that's another reason for fighting. And Snowy just slopes off. Only someone cured his dandruff for him.”
“After he'd written something, sir,” said Carrot.
“Ah… yes.”
Vimes looked at the notepad retrieved from Snowy's room. It was a crude affair, the wads of mismatched bits of scrap that the engravers sold off cheaply. He sniffed at it.
“Soap on the edges,” he said.
“His new shampoo,” said Carrot. “First time he'd used it.”
“How do you know?”
“We looked at all the bottles on the heap, sir.”
“Hmm. Looks like fresh blood here, at the spine, where they're stitched together…”
“His, sir,” said Angua.
Vimes nodded. You never argued with Angua about blood.
“But none of the actual pages have blood on them…” said Vimes. “Which is a bit odd. Messy business, decapitation. People tend to… spray. So the top page—”
“—has been taken away, sir,” said Carrot, grinning and nodding. “But that's not the funny part, sir. See if you can guess, sir!”
Vimes glared at him and then moved the lamp closer. “Very faint impression of writing on the top page…” he muttered. “Can't make it out…”
“We can't either, sir. We know he wrote in pencil, sir.
There was one on the table.”
“Very faint traces,” said Vimes. “Blokes like Snowy write as though they're chipping stone.” He flicked the notebook. “Someone tore out… not just the page he'd written on but several below it as well.”
“Clever, eh, sir? Everyone knows—”
“—you can read the suspicious note by looking at the marks on the page below,” said Vimes. He tossed the book on to the table again. “Hmm. There's a message there, yes…”
“Perhaps he was blackmailing whoever's behind all this?” said Angua.
“That's not his style,” said Vimes. “No, what I meant was—”
There was a knock on the door, and Fred Colon entered.
“Brung you a mug of coffee,” he said, “and there's a bunch of wo— Klatchians to see you downstairs, Mr Vimes. Probably come to give you a medal and gabble at you in their lingo. And if you're on for late supper, Mrs Goriffs doing goat and rice and foreign gravy.”
“I suppose I'd better go down and see them,” said Vimes. “But I haven't even had time for a wash—”
“That's evidence of your heroic endeavours,” said Colon stoutly.
“Oh, all right.”
Unease began about halfway down the stairs. Vimes had never run into a group of citizens wishing to give him a medal and so he did not have a lot of experience on this score, but the group waiting for him in a tight cluster near the sergeant's desk did not look like a committee of welcome.
They were Klatchian. At least, they were wearing foreign-looking clothes and one or two of them had caught more sun than you generally got in Ankh-Morpork. The feeling crept over Vimes that Klatch was a very big place in which his city and the whole of the Sto Plains would be lost, and so there must be room in it for all kinds of peoples, including this short chap in the red fez who was practically vibrating with indignation.
“Are you the man Vimes?” the enfezzed one demanded.
“Well, I'm Commander Vimes—”
“We demand the release of the Goriff family! And we won't take any excuses!”
Vimes blinked. “Release?”
“You have locked them up! And confiscated their shop!”
Vimes stared at the man, and then he looked across the room at Sergeant Detritus.
“Where did you put the family, sergeant?”
Detritus saluted. “In der cells, sir.”
“Aha!” said the man in the fez. “You admit it!”
“Excuse me, who are you?” said Vimes, blinking with tiredness.
“I don't have to tell you and you can't beat it out of me!” said the man, sticking out his chest.
“Oh, thank you for telling me,” said Vimes. “I do hate wasted effort.”
“Oh, hello, Mr Wazir,” said Carrot, appearing behind Vimes. “Did you get the note about that book?”
There was one of those silences that happen when everyone has to reprogramme their faces.
Then Vimes said, “What?”
“Mr Wazir sells books in Widdy Street,” said Carrot. “Only I asked him for some books on Klatch, you see, and one of the ones he gave me was The Perfumed Allotment, or, The Garden of Delights. And I didn't mind because the Klatchians invented gardens, sir, so I thought it might be a very useful cultural insight. Get inside the Klatchian mind, as it were. Only it, er, it… er… well, it wasn't about gardening… er…” He started to blush.
“Yes, yes, all right, bring it back if you like,” said Mr Wazir, looking a little derailed.
“I just thought you ought to know in case you hadn't… in case you sold… well… it could shock the impressionable, you know, a book like that…”
“Yes, fine—”
“Corporal Angua was so shocked she couldn't stop laughing.” Carrot went on.
“I will have your money sent round directly,” said Wazir. His expression turned vengeful again. He glared at Vimes.
“Books are unimportant at this time! We demand you release my countrymen now!”
“Detritus, why the hell did you put them in the cells?” said Vimes wearily.
“What else we got, sir? Dey're not locked in and dey got clean blankets.”
“There's your explanation,” said Vimes. “They're our guests.”
“In the cells!” said Wazir, relishing the word.
“They're free to go whenever they like,” said Vimes.
“I'm sure they are now,” said Wazir, contriving to indicate that only his arrival had prevented officially sanctioned bloodshed. “You can be sure the Patrician will hear about this!”
“He hears about everything else,” said Vimes. “But if they leave here, who is going to protect them?”
“We are! Their fellow countrymen!”
“How?”
Wazir almost stood to attention. “By force of arms, if necessary.”
“Oh, good,” said Vimes. “Then there'll be two mobs—”
“Bingeley-bingeley beep!”
“Damn!” Vimes slapped at his pocket. “I don't want to know I haven't got any appointments!”
“You have one at eleven pee em. The Rats Chamber, at the palace,” said the Dis-organizer.
“Don't be stupid!”
“Please yourself.”
“And shut up.”
“I was just trying to help.”
“Shut up.” Vimes turned back to the Klatchian bookseller.
“Mr Wazir, if Goriff wants to leave with you, we won't stop him—”
“Aha! You may well try!”
Vimes told himself that there was no reason at all why a Klatchian couldn't be a pompous little troublemaker. But he felt uneasy about it, like a man edging along the side of a very deep crevasse.
“Sergeant Colon?”
“Yessir?”
“See to this, will you?”
“Yessir!”
“Diplomatically.”
“Right, sir!” Colon tapped the side of his nose. “Is this politics, sir?”
“Just… just go and fetch the Goriff family and they can…” Vimes waved a hand vaguely. “They can do whatever they like.”
He turned and walked up the stairs.
“Someone has to protect my people's rights!” shouted Wazir.
They heard Vimes stop halfway up the stairs. The board creaked under his weight for a second. Then he continued upwards, and several of the watchmen started breathing again.
Vimes shut his office door behind him.
Politics! He sat down and scrabbled through the papers. It was much easier to think about crime. Give him good honest crime any time.
He tried to shut out the outside world.
Someone had beheaded Snowy Slopes. That was a fact. You couldn't put it down to a shaving accident, or unreasonably strong shampoo.
And Snowy had attempted to shoot the Prince.
And so had Ossie, but Ossie only thought he was an assassin. Everyone else thought he was a weird little twerp who was as impressionable as wet clay.
A lovely idea, though. You used a real murderer, a nice quite professional, and then you had — Vimes smiled grimly — someone else to take the fall. And if he hadn't taken a less metaphorical fall the poor twisted little sod would have believed he was the murderer.
And the Watch was supposed to believe it was a Klatchian plot.
Sand in their sandals… The nerve of it! Did they think he was stupid? He wished Fred had carefully swept up the sand, because he was damn well going to find out who'd put it there and they were going to eat it. Someone wanted Vimes to chase Klatchians.
The man on the burning roof. Did he fit in? Did he have to fit in? What could Vimes recall? A man in a robe, his face hidden. And a voice of a man not just used to giving commands — Vimes was used to giving commands — but also used to having commands obeyed, whereas a member of the Watch treated orders as suggestions.
But some things didn't have to fit. That was where “clues” let you down. And the damn notebook. That was the oddest thing yet. So someone had carefully ripped
out several pages after Snowy had written whatever he'd written. Someone bright enough to know the trick of looking at the pages underneath for faint impressions.
So why not pinch the whole pad?
It was all too complicated. But somewhere was the one thing that'd make it simple, that would turn it all into sense—
He flung down his pencil and wrenched open the door to the stairs.
“What the hell's all this noise?” he yelled.
Sergeant Colon was halfway up the stairs.
“It was Mr Goriff and Mr Wazir having a bit of what you might call an argy-bargy, sir. Someone set fire to someone else's country two hundred years ago, Carrot says.”
“What, just now?”
“'s all Klatchian to me, sir. Anyway, Wazir's gone off with his nose in a sling.”
“Wazir comes from Smale, you see,” said Carrot. “And Mr Goriff comes from Elharib, and the two countries only stopped fighting ten years ago. Religious differences.”
“Run out of weapons?” said Vimes.
“Ran out of rocks, sir. They ran out of weapons last century.”
Vimes shook his head. “That always chews me up,” he said. “People killing one another just because their gods have squabbled—”
“Oh, they've got the same god, sir. Apparently it's over a word in their holy book, sir. The Elharibians say it translates as ‘god’ and the Smalies say it's ‘man’.”{50}
“How can you mix them up?”
“Well, there's only one tiny dot difference in the script, you see. And some people reckon it's only a bit of fly dirt in any case.”
“Centuries of war because a fly crapped in the wrong place?”
“It could have been worse,” said Carrot. “If it had been slightly to the left the word would have been ‘liquorice’.”
Vimes shook his head. Carrot was good at picking up this sort of thing. And I know how to ask for vindaloo, he thought. And it turns out that's just a Klatchian word meaning “mouth-scalding gristle for macho foreign idiots”.
“I wish we understood more about Klatch,” he said.
Sergeant Colon tapped the side of his nose conspiratorially.
“Know the enemy, eh, sir?” he said.
“Oh, I know the enemy,” said Vimes. “It's Klatchians I want to find out about.”
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