“So I understand,” said Vimes.
“But why?”
“Because many of his patients survive,” said Vimes. He raised his hands as the protests grew. “And now, gentlemen, I must leave you. Somewhere there’s a poisoner. I’d like to find him before he becomes a murderer.”
He went back up the stairs, trying to ignore the shouts behind him.
“You sure about old Doughnut, sir?” said Colon, catching him up.
“Well, do you trust him?” said Vimes.
“Doughnut? Of course not!”
“Right. He’s untrustworthy, and so we don’t trust him. So that’s all right. But I’ve seen him revive a horse when everyone else said it was fit only for the knackers. Horse doctors have to get results, Fred.”
And that was true enough: When a human doctor, after much bleeding and cupping, finds that a patient has died out of sheer desperation, he can always say, “Dear me, will of the gods, that will be thirty dollars please,” and walk away a free man. This is because human beings are not, technically, worth anything. A good racehorse, on the other hand, may be worth twenty thousand dollars. A doctor who lets one hurry off too soon to that great big paddock in the sky may well expect to hear, out of some dark alley, a voice saying something on the lines of “Mr. Chrysoprase is very upset,” and find the brief remainder of his life full of incident.
“No one seems to know where Captain Carrot and Angua are,” said Colon. “It’s their day off. And Nobby’s nowhere to be found.”
“Well, that’s something to be thankful for…”
“Bingeley bingeley bong beep,” said a voice from Vimes’s pocket.
He lifted out the little organizer and raised the flap.
“Yes?”
“Ey…twelve noon,” said the imp. “Lunch with Lady Sybil.”
It stared at their faces.
“Er…that’s all right, isn’t it?” it said.
Cheery Littlebottom wiped his brow.
“Commander Vimes is right. It could be arsenic,” he said. “It looks like arsenic poisoning to me. Look at his color.”
“Nasty stuff,” said Doughnut Jimmy. “Has he been eating his bedding?”
“All the sheets seem to be here, so I suppose the answer is no.”
“How’s he pissing?”
“Er. The usual way, I assume.”
Doughnut sucked at his teeth. He had amazing teeth. It was the second thing everyone noticed about him. They were the color of the inside of an unwashed teapot.
“Walk him round a bit on the loose rein,” he said.
The Patrician opened his eyes. “You are a doctor, aren’t you?” he said.
Doughnut Jimmy gave him an uncertain look. He was not used to patients who could talk. “Well, yeah…I have a lot of patients,” he said.
“Indeed? I have very little,” said the Patrician. He tried to lift himself off the bed, and slumped back.
“I’ll mix up a draught,” said Doughnut Jimmy, backing away. “You’re to hold his nose and pour it down his throat twice a day, right? And no oats.”
He hurried out, leaving Cheery alone with the Patrician.
Corporal Littlebottom looked around the room. Vimes hadn’t given him much instruction. He’d said: “I’m sure it won’t be the food-tasters. For all they know they might be asked to eat the whole plateful. Still, we’ll get Detritus to talk to them. You find out the how, right? And then leave the who to me.”
If you didn’t eat or drink a poison, what else was left? Probably you could put it on a pad and make someone breathe it, or dribble some in their ear while they slept. Or they could touch it. Maybe a small dart…Or an insect bite…
The Patrician stirred, and looked at Cheery through watery red eyes. “Tell me, young man, are you a policeman?”
“Er…just started, sir.”
“You appear to be of the dwarf persuasion.”
Cheery didn’t bother to answer. There was no use denying it. Somehow, people could tell if you were a dwarf just by looking at you.
“Arsenic is a very popular poison,” said the Patrician. “Hundreds of uses around the home. Crushed diamonds used to be in vogue for hundreds of years, despite the fact they never worked. Giant spiders, too, for some reason. Mercury is for those with patience, aquafortis for those without. Cantharides has its followers. Much can be done with the secretions of various animals. The bodily fluids of the caterpillar of the Quantum Weather Butterfly will render a man quite, quite helpless. But we return to arsenic like an old, old friend.”
There was a drowsiness in the Patrician’s voice. “Is that not so, young Vetinari? Yes indeed, sir. Correct. But where then shall we put it, seeing that all will look for it? In the last place they will look, sir. Wrong. Foolish. We put it where no one will look at all…”
The voice faded to a murmur.
The bed linen, Cheery thought. Even clothes. Into the skin, slowly…
Cheery hammered on the door. A guard opened it.
“Get another bed.”
“What?”
“Another bed. From anywhere. And fresh bed linen.”
He looked down. There wasn’t much of a carpet on the floor. Even so, in a bedroom, where people might walk with bare feet…
“And take away this rug and bring another one.”
What else?
Detritus came in, nodded at Cheery, and looked carefully around the room. Finally he picked up a battered chair.
“Dis’ll have to do,” he said. “If he want, I can break der back off’f it.”
“What?” said Cheery.
“Ole Doughnut said for to get a stool sample,” said Detritus, going out again.
Cheery opened his mouth to stop the troll, and then shrugged. Anyway, the less furniture in here the better…
And that seemed about it, short of stripping the wallpaper off the wall.
Sam Vimes stared out of the window.
Vetinari hadn’t bothered much in the way of bodyguards. He had used—that is, he still did use—food-tasters, but that was common enough. Mind you, Vetinari had added his own special twist. The tasters were well paid and treated, and they were all sons of the chief cook. But his main protection was that he was just that bit more useful alive than dead, from everyone’s point of view. The big powerful guilds didn’t like him, but they liked him in power a lot more than they liked the idea of someone from a rival guild in the Oblong Office. Besides, Lord Vetinari represented stability. It was a cold and clinical kind of stability, but part of his genius was the discovery that stability was what people wanted more than anything else.
He’d said to Vimes once, in this very room, standing at this very window: “They think they want good government and justice for all, Vimes, yet what is it they really crave, deep in their hearts? Only that things go on as normal and tomorrow is pretty much like today.”
Now, Vimes turned around. “What’s my next move, Fred?”
“Dunno, sir.”
Vimes sat down in the Patrician’s chair. “Can you remember the last Patrician?”
“Old Lord Snapcase? And the one before him, Lord Winder. Oh, yeah. Nasty pieces of work, they were. At least this one didn’t giggle or wear a dress.”
The past tense, thought Vimes. It creeps in already. Not long past, but already very tense.
“It’s gone very quiet downstairs, Fred,” he said.
“Plotting don’t make a lot of noise, sir, generally.”
“Vetinari’s not dead, Fred.”
“Yessir. But he’s not exactly in charge, is he?”
Vimes shrugged. “No one’s in charge, I suppose.”
“Could be, sir. There again, you never know your luck.”
Colon was standing stiffly to attention, with his eyes firmly fixed on the middle distance and his voice pitched carefully to avoid any hint of emotion in the words.
Vimes recognized the stance. He used it himself, when he had to. “What do you mean, Fred?” he said.
“Not
a thing, sir. Figure of speech, sir.”
Vimes sat back.
This morning, he thought, I knew what the day held. I was going to see about that damn’ coat of arms. Then there was my usual meeting with Vetinari. I was going to read some reports after lunch, maybe go and see how they’re getting on with the new Watch House in Chittling Street, and have an early night. Now Fred’s suggesting…what?
“Listen, Fred, if there is to be a new ruler, it won’t be me.”
“Who’ll it be, sir?” Colon’s voice still held that slow, deliberate tone.
“How should I know? It could be…”
The gap opened ahead of him and he could feel his thoughts being sucked into it. “You’re talking about Captain Carrot, aren’t you, Fred?”
“Could be, sir. I mean none of the guilds’d let some other guild bloke be ruler now, and everyone likes Captain Carrot, and, well…rumors got about that he’s the hair to the throne, sir.”
“There’s no proof of that, Sergeant.”
“Not for me to say, sir. Dunno about that. Dunno what is proof,” said Colon, with just a hint of defiance, “But he’s got that sword of his, and the birthmark shaped like a crown, and…well, everyone knows he’s king. It’s his krisma.”
Charisma, thought Vimes. Oh yes. Carrot has charisma. He makes something happen in people’s heads. He can talk a charging leopard into giving up and handing over its teeth and doing good work in the community, and that would really upset the old ladies.
Vimes distrusted charisma. “No more kings, Fred.”
“Right you are, sir. By the way, Nobby’s turned up.”
“The day gets worse and worse, Fred.”
“You said you’d talk to him about all these funerals, sir…”
“The job goes on, I suppose. All right, go and tell him to come up here.”
Vimes was left to himself.
No more kings. Vimes had difficulty in articulating why this should be so, why the concept resonated in his very bones. After all, a good many of the patricians had been as bad as any king. But they were…sort of…bad on equal terms. What set Vimes’s teeth on edge was the idea that kings were a different kind of human being. A higher lifeform. Somehow magical. But, huh, there was some magic, at that. Ankh-Morpork still seemed to be littered with Royal this and Royal that, little old men who got paid a few pence a week to do a few meaningless chores, like the Master of the King’s Keys or the Keeper of the Crown Jewels, even though there were no keys and certainly no jewels.
Royalty was like dandelions. No matter how many heads you chopped off, the roots were still there underground, waiting to spring up again.
It seemed to be a chronic disease. It was as if even the most intelligent person had this little blank spot in their heads where someone had written: “Kings. What a good idea.” Whoever had created humanity had left in a major design flaw. It was its tendency to bend at the knees.
There was a knock at the door. It should not be possible for a knock to sound surreptitious, yet this knock achieved it. It had harmonics. They told the hindbrain: the person knocking will, if no one eventually answers, open the door anyway and sidle in, whereupon he will certainly nick any smokes that are lying around, read any correspondence that catches his eye, open a few drawers, take a nip out of such bottles of alcohol as are discovered, but stop short of major crime because he is not criminal in the sense of making a moral decision but in the sense that a weasel is evil—it is built into his very shape. It was a knock with a lot to say for itself.
“Come in, Nobby,” said Vimes, wearily.
Corporal Nobbs sidled in. It was another special trait of his that he could sidle forwards as well as sideways.
He saluted awkwardly.
There was something absolutely changeless about Corporal Nobbs, Vimes told himself. Even Fred Colon had adapted to the changing nature of the City Watch, but nothing altered Corporal Nobbs in any way. It wouldn’t matter what you did to him, there was always something fundamentally Nobby about Corporal Nobbs.
“Nobby…”
“Yessir?”
“Er…take a seat, Nobby.”
Corporal Nobbs looked suspicious. This was not how a dressing-down was supposed to begin.
“Er, Fred said you wanted to see me, Mr. Vimes, on account of timekeeping…”
“Did I? Did I? Oh, yes. Nobby, how many grandmothers’ funerals have you really been to?”
“Er…three…” said Nobby, uncomfortably.
“Three?”
“It turned out Nanny Nobbs wasn’t quite dead the first time.”
“So why have you’ve taken all this time off?”
“Don’t like to say, sir…”
“Why not?”
“You’re gonna go spare, sir.”
“Spare?”
“You know, sir…throw a wobbler.”
“I might, Nobby.” Vimes sighed. “But it’ll be nothing to what’ll get heaved if you don’t tell me…”
“Thing is, it’s the tricentre—tricera—this three-hundred-year celebration thing next year, Mr. Vimes…”
“Yes?”
Nobby licked his lips. “I dint like to ask for time off special. Fred said you were a bit sensitive about it all. But…you know I’m in the Peeled Nuts, sir…”
Vimes nodded. “Those clowns who dress up and pretend to fight old battles with blunt swords,” he said.
“The Ankh-Morpork Historical Re-creation Society, sir,” said Nobby, a shade reproachfully.
“That’s what I said.”
“Well…we’re going to recreate the Battle of Ankh-Morpork for the celebrations, see. That means extra practice.”
“It all begins to make sense,” said Vimes, nodding wearily. “You’ve been marching up and down with your tin pike, eh? In my time?”
“Er…not exactly, Mister Vimes…er…I’ve been riding up and down on my white horse, to tell the truth…”
“Oh? Playing at being a general eh?”
“Er…a bit more’n a general, sir…”
“Go on.”
Nobby’s adam’s apple bobbed nervously. “Er…I’m going to be King Lorenzo, sir. Er…you know…the last king, the one your…er…”
The air froze.
“You…are going to be…” Vimes began, unpeeling each word like a sullen grape of wrath.
“I said you’d go spare,” said Nobby. “Fred Colon said you’d go spare, too.”
“Why are you—”
“We drew lots, sir.”
“And you lost?”
Nobby squirmed. “Er…not exactly lost, sir. Not precisely lost. More sort of won, sir. Everyone wanted to play him. I mean, you get a horse and a good costume and everything, sir. And he was a king, when all’s said and done, sir.”
“The man was a vicious monster!”
“Well, it was all a long time ago, sir,” said Nobby anxiously.
Vimes calmed down a little. “And who drew the straw to play Stoneface Vimes?”
“Er…er…”
“Nobby!”
Nobby hung his head. “No one, sir. No one wanted to play him, sir.” The little corporal swallowed, and then plunged onwards with the air of a man determined to get it all over with. “So we’re making a man out of straw, sir, so he’ll burn nicely when we throw him on the bonfire in the evening. There’s going to be fireworks, sir,” he added, with dreadful certainty.
Vimes’s face shut down. Nobby preferred it when people shouted. He had been shouted at for most of his life. He could handle shouting.
“No one wanted to be Stoneface Vimes,” Vimes said coldly.
“On account of him being on the losing side, sir.”
“Losing? Vimes’s Ironheads won. He ruled the city for six months.”
Nobby squirmed again. “Yeah, but…everyone in the Society says he didn’t ought to of, sir. They said it was just a fluke, sir. After all, he was outnumbered ten to one, and he had warts, sir. And he was a bit of a bastard, sir, when all’s said an
d done. He did chop off a king’s head, sir. You got to be a bit of a nasty type to do that, sir. Saving your presence, Mr. Vimes.”
Vimes shook his head. What did it matter, anyway? (But it did matter, somewhere.) It had all been a long time ago. It didn’t matter what a bunch of deranged romantics thought. Facts were facts.
“All right, I understand,” he said. “It’s almost funny, really. Because there something else I’ve got to tell you, Nobby.”
“Yessir?” said Nobby, looking relieved.
“Do you remember your father?”
Nobby looked about to panic again. “What kind of question is that to suddenly ask anybody, sir?”
“Purely a social inquiry.”
“Old Sconner, sir? Not much, sir. Never used to see him much except when the milit’ry police used to come for to drag him outa the attic.”
“Do you know much about your, er, antecedents?”
“That is a lie, sir. I haven’t got no antecedents, sir, no matter what you might have been tole.”
“Oh. Good. Er…you don’t actually know what ‘antecedents’ means, do you, Nobby?”
Nobby shifted uneasily. He didn’t like being questioned by policemen, especially since he was one. “Not in so many words, sir.”
“You never got told anything about your forebears?” Another worried expression crossed Nobby’s face, so Vimes quickly added: “Your ancestors?”
“Only old Sconner, sir. Sir…if all this is working up to asking about them sacks of vegetables which went missing from the shop in Treacle Mine Road, I was not anywhere near the—”
Vimes waved a hand vaguely. “He didn’t…leave you anything? Or anything?”
“Coupla scars, sir. And this trick elbow of mine. It aches sometimes, when the weather changes. I always remembers ole Sconner when the wind blows from the Hub.”
“Ah, right—”
“And this, o’ course…” Nobby fished around behind his rusting breastplate. And that was a marvel, too. Even Sergeant Colon’s armor could shine, if not actually gleam. But any metal anywhere near Nobby’s skin corroded very quickly. The corporal pulled out a leather thong that hung around his neck. There was a gold ring on it. Despite the fact that gold cannot corrode, it had nevertheless developed a patina.
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