Guards! Guards! (6 page)

And so the Guild had been encouraged to come out of the shadows and build a big Guildhouse, take their place at civic banquets, and set up their training college with day-release courses and City and Guilds certificates and everything. In exchange for the winding down of the Watch, they agreed, while trying to keep their faces straight, to keep crime levels to a level to be determined annually. That way, everyone could plan ahead, said Lord Vetinari, and part of the uncertainty had been removed from the chaos that is life.

And then, a little while later, the Patrician summoned the leading thieves again and said, oh, by the way, there was something else. What was it, now? Oh, yes…

I know who you are, he said. I know where you live. I know what kind of horse you ride. I know where your wife has her hair done. I know where your lovely children, how old are they now, my, doesn’t time fly, I know where they play. So you won’t forget about what we agreed, will you? And he smiled.

So did they, after a fashion.

And in fact it had turned out very satisfactorily from everyone’s point of view. It took the head thieves a very little time to grow paunches and start having coats-of-arms made and meet in a proper building rather than smoky dens, which no one had liked much. A complicated arrangement of receipts and vouchers saw to it that, while everyone was eligible for the attentions of the Guild, no one had too much, and this was very acceptable—at least to those citizens who were rich enough to afford the quite reasonable premiums the Guild charged for an uninterrupted life. There was a strange foreign word for this:
inn-sewer-ants
. No one knew exactly what it had originally meant, but Ankh-Morpork had made it its own.

The Watch hadn’t liked it, but the plain fact was that the thieves were far better at controlling crime than the Watch had ever been. After all, the Watch had to work twice as hard to cut crime just a little, whereas all the Guild had to do was to work less.

And so the city prospered, while the Watch had dwindled away, like a useless appendix, into a handful of unemployables who no one in their right mind could ever take seriously.

The last thing anyone wanted them to do was get it into their heads to fight crime. But seeing the head thief discommoded was always worth the trouble, the Patrician felt.

Captain Vimes knocked very hesitantly at the door, because each tap echoed around his skull.

“Enter.”

Vimes removed his helmet, tucked it under his arm and pushed the door open. Its creak was a blunt saw across the front of his brain.

He always felt uneasy in the presence of Lupine Wonse. Come to that, he felt uneasy in the presence of Lord Vetinari—but that was different, that was down to
breeding
. And ordinary fear, of course. Whereas he’d known Wonse since their childhood in the Shades. The boy had shown promise even then. He was never a gang leader. Never a gang leader. Hadn’t got the strength or stamina for that. And, after all, what was the point in being the gang leader? Behind every gang leader were a couple of lieutenants bucking for promotion. Being a gang leader is not a job with long-term prospects. But in every gang there is a pale youth who’s allowed to stay because he’s the one who comes up with all the clever ideas, usually to do with old women and unlocked shops; this was Wonse’s natural place in the order of things.

Vimes had been one of the middle rankers, the falsetto equivalent of a yes-man. He remembered Wonse as a skinny little kid, always tagging along behind in hand-me-down pants with the kind of odd skipping run he’d invented to keep up with the bigger boys, and forever coming up with fresh ideas to stop them idly ganging up on him, which was the usual recreation if nothing more interesting presented itself. It was superb training for the rigors of adulthood, and Wonse became good at it.

Yes, they’d both started in the gutter. But Wonse had worked his way up whereas, as he himself would be the first to admit, Vimes had merely worked his way
along
. Every time he seemed to be getting anywhere he spoke his mind, or said the wrong thing. Usually both at once.

That was what made him uncomfortable around Wonse. It was the ticking of the bright clockwork of ambition.

Vimes had never mastered ambition. It was something that happened to other people.

“Ah, Vimes.”

“Sir,” said Vimes woodenly. He didn’t try to salute in case he fell over. He wished he’d had time to drink dinner.

Wonse rummaged in the papers of his desk.

“Strange things afoot, Vimes. Serious complaint about you, I’m afraid,” he said. Wonse didn’t wear glasses. If he
had
worn glasses, he’d have peered at Vimes over the top of them.

“Sir?”

“One of your Night Watch men. Seems he arrested the head of the Thieves’ Guild.”

Vimes swayed a little and tried hard to focus. He wasn’t ready for this sort of thing.

“Sorry, sir,” he said. “Seem to have lost you there.”

“I
said
, Vimes, that one of your men arrested the head of the Thieves’ Guild.”

“One of my men?”

“Yes.”

Vimes’s scattered brain cells tried valiantly to regroup. “A member of the
Watch
?” he said.

Wonse grinned mirthlessly. “Tied him up and left him in front of the palace. There’s a bit of a stink about it, I’m afraid. There was a note…ah…here it is…‘This man is charged with, Conspiracy to commit Crime, under Section 14 (iii) of the General Felonies Act, 1678, by me, Carrot Ironfoundersson.’”

Vimes squinted at him.

“Fourteen eye-eye-eye?”

“Apparently,” said Wonse.

“What does that mean?”

“I really haven’t the faintest notion,” said Wonse dryly. “And what about the name…Carrot?”

“But we don’t do things like that!” said Vimes. “You can’t go around arresting the Thieves’ Guild. I mean, we’d be at it all day!”

“Apparently this Carrot thinks otherwise.”

The captain shook his head, and winced. “Carrot? Doesn’t ring a bell.” The tone of blurred conviction was enough even for Wonse, who was momentarily taken aback.

“He was quite—” The secretary hesitated. “Carrot, Carrot,” he said. “
I’ve
heard the name before. Seen it written down.” His face went blank. “The volunteer, that was it! Remember me showing you?”

Vimes stared at him. “Wasn’t there a letter from, I don’t know, some dwarf—?”

“All about serving the community and keeping the streets safe, that’s right. Begging that his son would be found suitable for a humble position in the Watch.” The secretary was rummaging among his files.

“What’d he done?” said Vimes.

“Nothing. That was it. Not a blessed thing.”

Vimes’s brow creased as his thoughts shaped themselves around a new concept.

“A
volunteer
?” he said.

“Yes.”

“He didn’t have to join?”

“He
wanted
to join. And you said it must be a joke, and I said we ought to try and get more ethnic minorities into the Watch. You remember?”

Vimes tried to. It wasn’t easy. He was vaguely aware that he drank to forget. What made it rather pointless was that he couldn’t remember what it was he was forgetting anymore. In the end he just drank to forget about drinking.

A trawl of the chaotic assortment of recollections that he didn’t even try to dignify anymore by the name of memory produced no clue.

“Do I?” he said helplessly.

Wonse folded his hands on the desk and leaned forward.

“Now look, Captain,” he said. “Lordship wants an explanation. I don’t want to have to tell him the captain of the Night Watch hasn’t the faintest idea what goes on among the men under, if I may use the term loosely, his command. That sort of thing only leads to trouble, questions asked, that sort of thing. We don’t want that, do we. Do we?”

“No, sir,” Vimes muttered. A vague recollection of someone earnestly talking to him in the Bunch of Grapes was bobbing guiltily at the back of his mind. Surely that hadn’t been a dwarf? Not unless the qualification had been radically altered, at any rate.

“Of course we don’t,” said Wonse. “For old times’ sake. And so on. So I’ll think of something to tell him and you, Captain, will make a point of finding out what’s going on and putting a stop to it. Give this dwarf a short lesson in what it means to be a guard, all right?”

“Haha,” said Vimes dutifully.

“I’m sorry?” said Wonse.

“Oh. Thought you made an ethnic joke, there. Sir.”

“Look, Vimes, I’m being very understanding. In the circumstances. Now, I want you to get out there and sort this out. Do
you
understand?”

Vimes saluted. The black depression that always lurked ready to take advantage of his sobriety moved in on his tongue.

“Right you are, Mr. Secretary,” he said. “I’ll see to it that he learns that arresting thieves is against the law.”

He wished he hadn’t said that. If he didn’t say things like that he’d have been better off now, Captain of the
Palace
Guard, a big man. Giving him the Watch had been the Patrician’s little joke. But Wonse was already reading a new document on his desk. If he noticed the sarcasm, he didn’t show it.

“Very good,” he said.

Dearest Mother [Carrot wrote] It has been a much better day. I went into the Thieves’ Guild and arrested the chief Miscreant and dragged him to the Patrician’s Palace. No more trouble from him, I fancy. And Mrs. Palm says I can stay in the attic because, it is always useful to have a man around the place. This was because, in the night, there were men the Worse for Drink making a Fuss in one of the Girl’s Rooms, and I had to speak to them and they Showed Fight and one of them tried to hurt me with his knee but I had the Protective and Mrs. Palm says he has broken his Patella but I needn’t pay for a new one.

I do not understand some of the Watch duties. I have a partner, his name is Nobby. He says I am too keen. He says I have got a lot to learn. I think this is true, because, I have only got up to Page 326 in, The Laws and Ordinances of the Cities of Ankh and Morpork. Love to all, Your Son, Carrot.

PS. Love to Minty.

It wasn’t just the loneliness, it was the back-to-front way of living. That was it, thought Vimes.

The Night Watch got up when the rest of the world was going to bed, and went to bed when dawn drifted over the landscape. You spent your whole time in the damp, dark streets, in a world of shadows. The Night Watch attracted the kind of people who for one reason or another were inclined to that kind of life.

He reached the Watch House. It was an ancient and surprisingly large building, wedged between a tannery and a tailor who made suspicious leather goods. It must have been quite imposing once, but quite a lot of it was now uninhabitable and patrolled only by owls and rats. Over the door a motto in the ancient tongue of the city was now almost eroded by time and grime and lichen, but could just be made out:

FABRICATI DIEM
,
PVNC

It translated–according to Sergeant Colon, who had served in foreign parts and considered himself an expert on languages–as “To Protect and to Serve.”

Yes. Being a guard must have meant something, once.

Sergeant Colon, he thought, as he stumbled into the musty gloom. Now there was a man who liked the dark. Sergeant Colon owed thirty years of happy marriage to the fact that Mrs. Colon worked all day and Sergeant Colon worked all night. They communicated by means of notes. He got her tea ready before he left at night, she left his breakfast nice and hot in the oven in the mornings. They had three grown-up children, all born, Vimes had assumed, as a result of extremely persuasive handwriting.

And Corporal Nobbs…well, anyone like Nobby had unlimited reasons for not wishing to be seen by other people. You didn’t have to think hard about
that
. The only reason you couldn’t say that Nobby was close to the animal kingdom was that the animal kingdom would get up and walk away.

And then, of course, there was himself. Just a skinny, un-shaven collection of bad habits marinated in alcohol. And that was the Night Watch. Just the three of them. Once there had been dozens, hundreds. And now–just three.

Vimes fumbled his way up the stairs, groped his way into his office, slumped into the primeval leather chair with its prolapsed stuffing, scrabbled at the bottom drawer, grabbed bottle, bit cork, tugged, spat out cork, drank. Began his day.

The world swam into focus.

Life is just chemicals. A drop here, a drip there, everything’s changed. A mere dribble of fermented juices and suddenly you’re going to live another few hours.

Once, in the days when this had been a respectable district, some hopeful owner of the tavern next door had paid a wizard a considerable sum of money for an illuminated sign, every letter a different color. Now it worked erratically and sometimes short-circuited in the damp. At the moment the E was a garish pink and flashed on and off at random.

Vimes had grown accustomed to it. It seemed like part of life.

He stared at the flickering play of light on the crumbling plaster for a while, and then raised one sandalled foot and thumped heavily on the floorboards, twice.

After a few minutes a distant wheezing indicated that Sergeant Colon was climbing the stairs.

Vimes counted silently. Colon always paused for six seconds at the top of the flight to get some of his breath back.

On the seventh second the door opened. The sergeant’s face appeared around it like a harvest moon.

You could describe Sergeant Colon like this: he was the sort of man who, if he took up a military career, would automatically gravitate to the post of sergeant. You couldn’t imagine him ever being a corporal. Or, for that matter, a captain. If he didn’t take up a military career, then he looked cut out for something like, perhaps, a sausage butcher; some job where a big red face and a tendency to sweat even in frosty weather were practically part of the specification.

He saluted and, with considerable care, placed a scruffy piece of paper on Vimes’s desk and smoothed it out.