Snuff
Page 39
Drumknott meticulously and unnecessarily tidied some paperwork and said, “It is indeed so. Young Gravid is a regrettable exception.”
“Do you think him beyond redemption?” said Vetinari.
“Quite likely not,” said Drumknott, carefully folding a pen wiper. “However, Arachne is working in Fourecks at the moment as a filing clerk in our embassy. She pleaded for the position because she’s particularly attracted by venomous spiders.”
“Well, I suppose every girl should have a hobby,” said Vetinari. “And are there a lot of them in Fourecks?”
“The place is positively overwhelmed, I am given to understand, sir, and apparently Arachne already has a large selection of them.”
Vetinari said nothing, but remained sitting with eyes closed.
Drumknott cleared his throat. “They do say, sir, that in the end all sins are forgiven?”
Reluctantly, Havelock, Lord Vetinari tore his recollection away from the wondrous music that he longed to hear again. “Not all, Drumknott, not all.”
In bed that night in Scoone Avenue, listening to the absence of owls and nightjars, Vimes said, “You know, dear, I’ll have to go back to the Shires soon. Feeney is a good lad but they need a proper headquarters and the right kind of guidance and that doesn’t mean just Nobby Nobbs and Fred Colon.”
Sybil turned over. “Oh, I don’t know, Sam. Fred and Nobby aren’t as bad as all that and might be all that’s needed right now. I mean, they’re coppers, but they amble about extremely slowly and on the whole it’s good to see them around. Right now you’ve got two young men full of vim and vigor and if you don’t want to upset things it might just be that, in this bewildered place, they should be backed up by slow and steady, don’t you think?”
“You are, as always, right, my dear.”
“Besides, I’ve seen Fred, and having to rethink his world view has clearly shaken him a little.”
“He’ll get over it,” said Vimes. “Once you get past the stupid Fred there is, against all expectations, a decent man there.”
Sybil sighed. “Yes, Sam, but that decent man needs a holiday out in the sunshine away from the smoke and the grime and the terrible spells.”
“But they’re the best bits!” said Vimes, laughing.
“No, he needs a holiday. Everybody needs a holiday, Sam, even you.”
“I’ve just had one, dear, thank you.”
“No, you had a few days interspersed with fighting and floods and murders and I don’t know what else. Look at your desk, make certain everybody is on their toes, and then we’ll go down there for another week, do you hear me, Sam Vimes?”
EPILOGUE
And three months later Sam Vimes went on holiday again, and this time he was allowed to steer the Black-Eyed Susan all the way to Quirm without hardly hitting anything important, and was so happy that they had to find another cat full of sixpences for him to be as happy as.
He was amazed at how much fun a holiday could be, but not so amazed as he was eight months after that when he and Sybil were invited to be guests at the wedding of Ms. Emily Gordon to the eldest son of Sir Abuthknott Makewar, owner of the famous Makewar pottery manufactory and incidentally the inventor of Makewar’s Crispy Nuts, the breakfast cereal of champions, without whose nourishing roughage the bowels of Ankh-Morpork would be more congested than was good for them. The wedding present from Vimes and Sybil was a silver egg coddler, Sybil being of the view that you can’t go wrong with a coddled egg.
And Vimes was gratified when he noticed at the ceremony that one of the daughters was wearing a spanking new nurse’s uniform and three of the others were sporting some quite fabulous and also, according to Sybil with great glee, quite scandalous bonnets from the new Gordon Bonnets range.
There was an apology from the ax-wielding Hermione, but according to her mother she was detained in the woods dealing with a very large and troublesome Pinus, which caused Vimes’s face to go blank until Sybil nudged him and pointed out that the pinus strobus was the official name for the white pine.
But most of all, later that year, Vimes was totally amazed to find that the bestselling novel taking the Ankh-Morpork literary world by storm was dedicated to Commander Samuel Vimes.
The title of the book was Pride and Extreme Prejudice.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Terry Pratchett’s novels have sold more than 75 million copies (give or take a few million) worldwide. He lives in England.
Also by Terry Pratchett
The Carpet People
The Dark Side of the Sun
Strata
Good Omens
(WITH NEIL GAIMAN)
For Young Adults
The Bromeliad Trilogy: Truckers · Diggers · Wings
The Johnny Maxwell Trilogy:
Only You Can Save Mankind · Johnny and the Dead · Johnny and the Bomb
The Unadulterated Cat
(ILLUSTRATED BY GRAY JOLLIFE)
Nation
THE DISCWORLD® BOOKS
The Color of Magic
The Light Fantastic
Equal Rites
Mort
Sourcery
Wyrd Sisters
Pyramids
Guards! Guards!
Eric
(WITH JOSH KIRBY)
Moving Pictures
Reaper Man
Witches Abroad
Small Gods
Lords and Ladies
Men at Arms
Soul Music
Feet of Clay
Interesting Times
Maskerade
Hogfather
Jingo
The Last Continent
Carpe Jugulum
The Fifth Elephant
The Truth
Thief of Time
Night Watch
Monstrous Regiment
Going Postal
Thud!
Where’s My Cow?
(ILLUSTRATED BY MELVYN GRANT)
Making Money
Unseen Academicals
The Last Hero
(ILLUSTRATED BY PAUL KIDBY)
The Art of Discworld
(ILLUSTRATED BY PAUL KIDBY)
The Streets of Ankh-Morpork
(WITH STEPHEN BRIGGS)
The Discworld Companion
(WITH STEPHEN BRIGGS)
The Discworld Mapp
(WITH STEPHEN BRIGGS)
The Wit and Wisdom of Discworld
(WITH STEPHEN BRIGGS)
The Discworld Graphic Novels:
The Color of Magic · The Light Fantastic
For Young Adults
The Amazing Maurice and His
Educated Rodents
The Wee Free Men
A Hat Full of Sky
Wintersmith
I Shall Wear Midnight
The Illustrated Wee Free Men
(ILLUSTRATED BY STEPHEN PLAYER)
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
SNUFF. Copyright © 2011 by by Terry and Lyn Pratchet. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage an
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Footnotes
* The exchange scheme with the Quirm gendarmerie was working very well: they were getting instruction on policing à la Vimes, while the food in the Pseudopolis Yard canteen had been improved out of all recognition by Captain Emile, even though he used far too much avec.
* And thenceforth would be glad to get a gentle second place in almost every domestic decision. Lady Sybil took the view that her darling husband’s word was law for the City Watch while, in her own case, it was a polite suggestion to be graciously considered.
* Apart, that is, from the line of artistically naked ladies along its parapets. They were holding urns; urns is art.
* It was tricky; to Vimes all men were equal but, well, obviously a sergeant wasn’t as equal as a captain and a captain wasn’t as equal as a commander and as for corporal Nobby Nobbs…well, nobody…could be the equal of corporal Nobby Nobbs.
* Metal, in the circumstances, would not be appropriate…or safe.
* Not to mention Blackboard Monitor Vimes, a figure of note in dwarfish society.
* Willikins was an excellent butler and/or gentleman’s gentleman when the occasion required it, but in a long career he had also been an enthusiastic street fighter, and knew enough never to turn his back on anybody who could possibly have a weapon on them.
* Later on Vimes pondered Willikins’ accurate grasp of the plural noun in the circumstances, but there you were; if someone hung around in houses with lots of books in it, some of it rubbed off just as, come to think of it, it had on Vimes.
* More than once watchmen had found handwritten suicide notes which on careful examination weren’t in the right handwriting.
* Saddle pork was invented some time around the Year of the Stoat by Reverend Joseph “Causality” Robinson, rector of All Saints and Three Sinners in the parish of Lower Overhang. As far as can be determined from notes made by his contemporaries, the game may be considered an amalgam of spillikins, halma and brandy. No known rules exist, if, indeed, there ever really were any.
* Sybil had explained to Vimes that in the country one dresses at least a decade earlier than in the city, hence the bustle, and, for Vimes, a pair of breeches: the ancient ones with trap doors front and rear and a slightly distressing smell all over.
* See Dr. Bentley Purchase, The Vicar Is Coming to Tea and One Hundred and Twenty-seven Other Warnings of Social Embarrassment (Unseen University Press).
* It was all a mystery to Vimes, who was absolutely sure that it was impossible to tell the difference between a chicken fart and a turkey fart, but there were those who professed to be able to do so, and he was glad that such people had chosen this outlet for their puzzling inclinations rather than, for example, fill their sink with human skulls, collected in the high street.
* Because he wasn’t allowed much time talking.
* The fourth Gumption to run the tobacco house and snuff mill felt that his surname lacked prestige, and for some reason chose the name “Bewilderforce”—which did indeed become prestigious owing to the success of his tobacco enterprise, which was extremely well thought of by the gentry and others. And thereafter there was at least one Bewilderforce in every generation of the line (although girls were generally named Bewildred).
* A glint is, in fact, a visual tinkle.
* This is, of course, absolutely true.
* The Colons had survived a long and happy marriage by having as little to do with the other partner as possible. This was achieved by the expedient of his working the night shift when she was working days and vice versa. This was agreed on the basis that anything else would spoil the romance.
* Strictly speaking, the sexuality of any given dwarf remained a secret between him or, as it might be, her, and his, or, as it might be, her mother, until they decided to tell someone else about it, although generally you could work it out by observing dwarfs closely and spotting the ones that were drinking sherry or light white wine. Regrettably, this didn’t always work with dwarf policemen, because like all policemen everywhere they would drink anything strong enough to help them forget what they’d to deal with that day.
* According to dwarf lore the universe was written into being by Tak, who also wrote its lores. All writing is sacred to the dwarfs.
* However that might be rendered in a language that at its best sounded like a man jumping up and down on a very large packet of crisps.
* Regrettably, Constable Upshot was overly hopeful: in Ankh-Morpork the mice and the cockroaches had decided to forget their differences and gang up on the humans.
* Which were, in fact, a permanency in any case.
* Wee Mad Arthur was, as a Feegle, a very economical watchman to have, given that, size for size, he ate in a year what human watchmen ate in a week, although it had to be admitted he could drink, size for size, more alcohol in a week than any human watchman could drink in a year.
* The first two being common theft and public indecency.
* A race of freshwater mariners found everywhere in and around the Sto Plains. They are said to be incapable of lying, although this piece of information has been provided by the Zoons themselves, causing, as it were, a philosophical conundrum. Certainly it is maintained that they find the concept of a lie so difficult to understand that the few among them who have mastered the technique are venerated and given high office in Zoon society.
* Technically, the violent surge of water on Old Treachery was written down in technical manuals as a Dam Slam, but anyone who has experienced one learns to swear, hence the subtle change of name.
* Constable Haddock’s immediate nickname when he joined the force was Kipper, because policemen’s minds worked that way.
* Or three or four, as far as Vimes the landlubber was concerned.
* The sound of the gentle rattle of china cup on china saucer drives away all demons, a little-known fact.
* The Three Disgraces were apparently the daughters of Blind Io (but you know how people talk); they were Nudicia, Pulchritudia and Voluptia.
* That is to say, something bigger than he in fact is, which will turn very nasty if you think you can give this copper in front of you now a seeing-to because you are afloat to the tonsils on beer.
* Or, perhaps, somebody else’s.
* For those unfamiliar with them, periwinkles, like cockles and whelks, might be considered the snot of
the sea.
* It had been said by someone years before that to see Sybil Ramkin’s upholstered bosom rise and fall was to understand the history of empires.