Guards! Guards! (23 page)

“Oh,” he said. “I, er, see. I don’t think he meant in
every
circumstance, lad.” He stared back into the fog. “Not that we had much of a chance in this fog and these streets.”

“Might have been just an innocent bystander, sir,” said Carrot.

“What, in Ankh-Morpork?”

“Yes, sir.”

“We should have grabbed him, then, just for the rarity value,” said Vimes.

He patted Carrot on the shoulder. “Come on. We’d better get along to the Patrician’s palace.”

“The King’s palace,” corrected Carrot.

“What?” said Vimes, his train of thought temporarily shunted.

“It’s the King’s palace now,” said Carrot. Vimes squinted sideways at him.

He gave a short, mirthless laugh.

“Yeah, that’s right,” he conceded. “Our dragon-killing king. Well done that man.” He sighed. “They’re not going to like this.”

They didn’t. None of them did.

The first problem was the palace guard.

Vimes had never liked them. They’d never liked
him
. Okay, so maybe the rank were only one step away from petty scofflaws, but in Vimes’s professional opinion the palace guard these days were only one step away from being the worst criminal scum the city had ever produced. A step further
down
. They’d have to
reform
a bit before they could even be considered for inclusion in the Ten Most Unwanted list.

They were rough. They were tough. They weren’t the sweepings off the gutter, they were what you still found sticking to the gutter when the gutter sweepers had given up in exhaustion. They had been extremely well-paid by the Patrician, and presumably were extremely well-paid by someone else now, because when Vimes walked up to the gates a couple of them stopped lounging against the walls and straightened up while still maintaining just the right amount of psychological slouch to cause maximum offense.

“Captain Vimes,” said Vimes, staring straight ahead. “To see the king. It’s of the utmost importance.”

“Yeah? Well, it’d have to be,” said a guard. “Captain Slimes, was it?”

“Vimes,” said Vimes evenly. “With a Vee.”

One of the guards nodded to his companion.

“Vimes,” he said. “With a Vee.”

“Fancy,” said the other guard.

“It’s most urgent,” said Vimes, maintaining a wooden expression. He tried to move forward.

The first guard sidestepped neatly and pushed him sharply in the chest.

“No one is going nowhere,” he said. “Orders of the king, see? So you can push off back to your pit, Captain Vimes with a Vee.”

It wasn’t the words which made up Vimes’s mind. It was the way the other man sniggered.

“Stand aside,” he said.

The guard leaned down. “Who’s going to make me,” he rapped on Vimes’s helmet, “copper?”

There are times when it is a veritable pleasure to drop the bomb right away.

“Lance-constable Carrot, I want you to charge these men,” said Vimes.

Carrot saluted. “Very good, sir,” he said, and turned and trotted smartly back the way they had come.

“Hey!” shouted Vimes, as the boy disappeared around a corner.

“That’s what I like to see,” said the first guard, leaning on his spear. “That’s a young man with initiative, that young man. A bright lad. He doesn’t want to stop along here and have his ears twisted off. That’s a young man who’s going to go a long way, if he’s got any sense.”

“Very sensible,” said the other guard.

He leaned the spear against the wall.

“You Watch men make me want to throw up,” he said conversationally. “Poncing around all the time, never doing a proper job of work. Throwing your weight about as if you counted for something. So me and Clarence are going to show you what
real
guarding is all about, isn’t that right?”

I could just about manage one of them, Vimes thought as he took a few steps backward. If he was facing the other way, at least.

Clarence propped his spear against the gateway and spat on his hands.

There was a long, terrifying ululation. Vimes was amazed to realize it wasn’t coming from him.

Carrot appeared around the corner at a dead run. He had a felling ax in either hand.

His huge leather sandals flapped on the cobblestones as he bounded closer, accelerating all the time. And all the time there was this cry,
deedahdeedahdeedah
, like something caught in a trap at the bottom of a two-tone echo canyon.

The two palace guards stood rigid with astonishment.

“I should duck, if I was you,” said Vimes from near ground level.

The two axes left Carrot’s hands and whirred through the air making a noise like a brace of partridges. One of them hit the palace gate, burying half the head in the woodwork. The other one hit the shaft of the first one, and split it. Then Carrot arrived.

Vimes went and sat down on a nearby bench for a while, and rolled himself a cigarette.

Eventually he said, “I think that’s about enough, constable. I think they’d like to come quietly now.”

“Yes, sir. What are they accused of, sir?” said Carrot, holding one limp body in either hand.

“Assaulting an officer of the Watch in the execution of his duty and…oh, yes. Resisting arrest.”

“Under Section (vii) of the Public Order Act of 1457?” said Carrot.

“Yes,” said Vimes solemnly. “Yes. Yes, I suppose so.”

“But they didn’t resist very much, sir,” Carrot pointed out.

“Well,
attempting
to resist arrest. I should just leave them over by the wall until we come back. I don’t expect they’ll want to go anywhere.”

“Right you are, sir.”

“Don’t hurt them, mind,” said Vimes. “You mustn’t hurt prisoners.”

“That’s right, sir,” said Carrot, conscientiously. “Prisoners once Charged have Rights, sir. It says so in the Dignity of Man (Civic Rights) Act of 1341. I keep telling Corporal Nobbs. They have Rights, I tell him. This means you do not Put the Boot in.”

“Very well put, constable.”

Carrot looked down. “You have the right to remain silent,” he said. “You have the right not to injure yourself falling down the steps on the way to the cells. You have the right not to jump out of high windows. You do not have to say anything, you see, but anything you do say, well, I have to take it down and it might be used in evidence.” He pulled out his notebook and licked his pencil. He leaned down further.

“Pardon?” he said. He looked up at Vimes.

“How do you spell ‘groan,’ sir?” he said.

“G-R-O-N-E, I think.”

“Very good, sir.”

“Oh, and constable?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Why the axes?”

“They
were
armed, sir. I got them from the blacksmith in Market Street, sir. I said you’d be along later to pay for them.”

“And the cry?” said Vimes weakly.

“Dwarfish war yodel, sir,” said Carrot proudly.

“It’s a
good
cry,” said Vimes, picking his words with care. “But I’d be grateful if you’d warn me first another time, all right?”

“Certainly, sir.”

“In writing, I think.”

The Librarian swung on. It was slow progress, because there were things he wasn’t keen on meeting. Creatures evolve to fill every niche in the environment, and some of those in the dusty immensity of L-space were best avoided. They were much more unusual than ordinary unusual creatures.

Usually he could forewarn himself by keeping a careful eye on the kickstool crabs that grazed harmlessly on the dust. When they were spooked, it was time to hide. Several times he had to flatten himself against the shelves as a thesaurus thundered by. He waited patiently as a herd of Critters crawled past, grazing on the contents of the choicer books and leaving behind them piles of small slim volumes of literary criticism. And there were other things, things which he hurried away from and tried not to look hard at…

And you had to avoid cliches at all costs.

He finished the last of his peanuts atop a stepladder, which was browsing mindlessly off the high shelves.

The territory definitely had a familiar feel, or at least he got the feeling that it would eventually be familiar. Time had a different meaning in L-space.

There were shelves whose outline he felt he knew. The book titles, while still unreadable, held a tantalizing hint of legibility. Even the musty air had a smell he thought he recognized.

He shambled quickly along a side passage, turned the corner and, with only the slightest twinge of disorientation, shuffled into that set of dimensions that people, because they don’t know any better, think of as normal.

He just felt extremely hot and his fur stood straight out from his body as temporal energy gradually discharged.

He was in the dark.

He extended one arm and explored the spines of the books by his side. Ah.
Now
he knew where he was.

He was home.

He was home a week ago.

It was essential that he didn’t leave footprints. But that wasn’t a problem. He shinned up the side of the nearest bookcase and, under the starlight of the dome, hurried onward.

Lupine Wonse glared up, red-eyed, from the heap of paperwork on his desk. No-one in the city knew anything about coronations. He’d had to make it up as he went along. There should be plenty of things to wave, he knew that.

“Yes?” he said, abruptly.

“Er, there’s a Captain Vimes to see you,” said the flunkey.

“Vimes of the Watch?”

“Yes, sir. Says it’s of the utmost importance.”

Wonse looked down his list of other things that were also of the utmost importance. Crowning the king, for one thing. The high priests of fifty-three religions were all claiming the honor. It was going to be a scrum. And then there were the crown jewels.

Or rather, there
weren’t
the crown jewels. Somewhere in the preceding generations the crown jewels had disappeared. A jeweller in the Street of Cunning Artificers was doing the best he could in the time with gilt and glass.

Vimes could wait.

“Tell him to come back another day,” said Wonse.

“Good of you to see us,” said Vimes, appearing in the doorway.

Wonse glared at him.

“Since you’re here…” he said. Vimes dropped his helmet on Wonse’s desk in what the secretary thought was an offensive manner, and sat down.

“Take a seat,” said Wonse.

“Have you had breakfast yet?” said Vimes.

“Now really—” Wonse began.

“Don’t worry,” said Vimes cheerfully. “Constable Carrot will go and see what’s in the kitchens. This chap will show him the way.”

When they had gone Wonse leaned across the drifts of paperwork.

“There had better,” he said, “be a very good reason for—”

“The dragon is back,” said Vimes.

Wonse stared at him for a while.

Vimes stared back.

Wonse’s senses came back from whatever corners they’d bounced into.

“You’ve been drinking, haven’t you,” he said.

“No. The dragon is
back.
”

“Now, look—” Wonse began.

“I saw it,” said Vimes flatly.

“A dragon? You’re sure?”

Vimes leaned across the desk. “No! I could be bloody mistaken!” he shouted. “It may have been something else with sodding great big claws, huge leathery wings and hot, fiery breath! There must be masses of things like that!”

“But we all saw it killed!” said Wonse.

“I don’t know what
we
saw!” said Vimes, “But I know what
I
saw!”

He leaned back, shaking. He was suddenly feeling extremely tired.

“Anyway,” he said, in a more normal voice, “it’s flamed a house in Bitwash Street. Just like the other ones.”

“Any of them get out?”

Vimes put his head in his hands. He wondered how long it was since he’d last had any sleep, proper sleep, the sort with sheets. Or food, come to that. Was it last night, or the night before? Had he ever, come to think of it, ever slept at all in all his life? It didn’t seem like it. The arms of Morpheus had rolled up their sleeves and were giving the back of his brain a right pummeling, but bits were fighting back. Any of them get…?

“Any of who?” he said.

“The people in the house, of course,” said Wonse. “I assume there were people in it. At night, I mean.”

“Oh? Oh. Yes. It wasn’t like a normal house. I think it was some sort of secret society thing,” Vimes managed. Something was clicking in his mind, but he was too tired to examine it.

“Magic, you mean?”

“Dunno,” said Vimes. “Could be. Guys in robes.”

He’s going to tell me I’ve been overdoing it, he said. He’ll be right, too.

“Look,” said Wonse, kindly. “People who mess around with magic and don’t know how to control it, well, they can blow themselves up and—”

“Blow themselves up?”

“And you’ve had a busy few days,” said Wonse soothingly.

“If I’d been knocked down and almost burned alive by a dragon I expect
I’d
be seeing them all the time.”

Vimes stared at him with his mouth open. He couldn’t think of anything to say. Whatever stretched and knotted elastic had been driving him along these last few days had gone entirely limp.

“You don’t think you’ve been overdoing it, do you?” said Wonse.

Ah, thought Vimes. Jolly good.

He slumped forward.

The Librarian leaned cautiously over the top of the bookcase and unfolded an arm into the darkness.

There it was.

His thick fingernails grasped the spine of the book, pulled it gently from its shelf and hoisted it up. He raised the lantern carefully.

No doubt about it.
The Summoning of Dragons
. Single copy, first edition, slightly foxed and extremely dragoned.

He set the lamp down beside him, and began to read the first page.

“Mmm?” said Vimes, waking up.

“Brung you a nice cup of tea, Cap’n,” said Sergeant Colon. “And a figgin.”

Vimes looked at him blankly.

“You’ve been asleep,” said Sergeant Colon helpfully. “You was spark out when Carrot brought you back.”

Vimes looked around at the now-familiar surroundings of the Yard. “Oh,” he said.