“Are you going to tell me, sarge?”
“Excuse me, your lordship?” Sergeant Colon raised his voice. The Patrician looked up from a conversation with Leonard.
“Yes, sergeant?”
“What do they do to spies in Klatch, sir?”
“Er… let me see…” said Leonard. “Oh, yes… I believe they give you to the women.”
Nobby brightened up. “Oh well, that doesn't sound too bad—”
“Er, no, Nobby—” Colon began.
“—'cos I've seen the pictures in that book The Perfumed Allotment that Corporal Angua was reading, and—”
“—no, listen, Nobby, you've got the wrong—”
“—I mean, blimey, I didn't know you could do that with a—”
“—Nobby, listen—”
“—and then there's this bit where she—”
“Corporal Nobbs!” Colon yelled.
“Yes, sarge?”
Colon leaned forward and whispered in Nobby's ear. The corporal's expression changed, slowly.
“They really—”
“Yes, Nobby.”
“They really—”
“Yes, Nobby.”
“They don't do that at home.”
“We ain't at home, Nobby. I wish we was.”
“Although you hear stories about the Agony Aunts, sarge.”
“Gentlemen,” said Lord Vetinari. “I am afraid Leonard is being rather fanciful. That may apply to some of the mountain tribes, but Klatch is an ancient civilization and that sort of thing is not done officially. I should imagine they'd give you a cigarette.”
“A cigarette?” said Fred.
“Yes, sergeant. And a nice sunny wall to stand in front of.”
Sergeant Colon examined this for any downside. “A nice roll-up and a wall to lean against?” he said.
“I think they prefer you to stand up straight, sergeant.”
“Fair enough. No need to be sloppy just because you're a prisoner. Oh, well. I don't mind risking it, then.”
“Well done,” said the Patrician calmly. “Tell me, sergeant… in your long military career, did anyone ever consider promoting you to an officer?”
“Nossir!”
“I cannot think why.”
Night poured over the desert. It came suddenly, in purple. In the clear air, the stars drilled down out of the sky, reminding any thoughtful watcher that it is in the deserts and high places that religions are generated. When men see nothing but bottomless infinity over their heads they have always had a driving and desperate urge to find someone to put in the way.
Life emerged from the burrows and fissures. Soon, the desert was filled with the buzz and click and screech of creatures which, lacking mankind's superior brainpower, did not concern themselves with finding someone to blame and instead tried to find someone to eat.
At around three in the morning Sam Vimes walked out of the tent for a smoke. The cold air hit him like a door. It was freezing. That wasn't what was supposed to happen in deserts, was it? Deserts were all hot sand and camels and… and… he struggled for a while, as a man whose geographical knowledge got severely cramped once you got off paved road… camels, yes, and dates. And possibly bananas and coconuts. But the temperature here made your breath tinkle in the air.
He waved his cigar packet theatrically at a D'reg who was lounging near the tent. The man shrugged.
The fire was just a heap of grey, but Vimes poked around in the vain hope of finding a glowing ember.
He was amazed at how angry he was. Ahmed was the key, he knew it. And now they were stuck out here in the desert, the man had gone, and they were in the hands of… quiet, likeable people, fair enough. Brigands, maybe, the dry land equivalent of pirates, but Carrot would have said they were jolly good chaps for all that. If you were content to be their guest then they were as nice as pie, or sheep's eyeball and treacle or whatever you got out here—
Something moved in the moonlight. A shadow slipped down the side of a dune.
Something howled, out in the desert night.
Tiny hairs rose, all down Vimes's back, just like they had for his distant ancestors.
The night is always old. He'd walked too often down dark streets in the secret hours and felt the night stretching away, and known in his blood that while days and kings and empires come and go, the night is always the same age, always aeons deep. Terrors unfolded in the velvet shadows and while the nature of the talons may change, the nature of the beast does not.
He stood up quietly, and reached for his sword.
It wasn't there.
They'd taken it away. They'd not even—
“A fine night,” said a voice beside him.
Jabbar was standing by his shoulder.
“Who is out there?” Vimes hissed.
“An enemy.”
“Which one?”
Teeth gleamed in the shadows.
“We will find out, offendi.”
“Why would they attack you now?”
“Maybe they think we have something they want, offendi.”
More shadows slid across the desert.
And one rose up right behind Jabbar, reached down and picked him up. A huge grey hand dragged his sword out of his belt.
“What do you want me to do with him, Mr Vimes?”
“Detritus?”
The troll saluted with the hand that still held the D'reg.
“All present and correct, sir!”
“But—” And then Vimes realized. “It's freezing cold! Your brain's working again?”
“With rather more efficiency, sir.”
“Is this a djinn?” said Jabbar.
“I don't know, but I could certainly do with one,” said Vimes. He finally managed to locate some matches in his pocket, and lit one. “Put him down, sergeant,” he said, puffing his cigar into life. “Jabbar, this is Sergeant Detritus. He could break every bone in your body, including some of the small ones in the fingers which are quite hard to do—”
The darkness went shwup and something whispered past the back of his neck, just a slice of a second before Jabbar cannoned into him and bore him to the ground.
“They shoot at the light!”
“Mwwf?”
Vimes raised his head cautiously and spat out sand and fragments of tobacco.
“Mr Vimes?”
Only Carrot could whisper like that. He associated whispering with concealment and untruth and compromised by whispering very loudly. To Vimes's horror the man came round the edge of a tent holding a tiny lamp.
“Put that damn—”
But he didn't have time to finish the sentence because, somewhere out in the night, a man screamed. It was a high-pitched scream and was suddenly cut off.
“Ah,” said Carrot, crouching down by Vimes and blowing out the lamp. “That was Angua.”
“That was nothing like— oh. Yeah, I think I see what you mean,” Vimes said, uneasily. “She's out there, is she?”
“I heard her earlier. She's probably enjoying herself. She doesn't really get much of a chance to let herself go in Ankh-Morpork.”
“Er… no…” Vimes had a mental picture of a werewolf letting go. But surely, Angua wouldn't—
“You two, uh… you're getting along OK, are you?” he said, trying to make out shapes in the darkness.
“Oh, fine, sir. Fine.”
So her turning into a wolf occasionally doesn't worry you? Vimes couldn't bring himself to say it.
“No… problems, then?”
“Oh, not really, sir. She buys her own dog biscuits and she's got her own flap in the door. When it's full moon I don't really get involved.”
There were shouts in the night and then a shape erupted from the darkness, streaked past Vimes, and disappeared into a tent. It didn't wait for a door. It simply hit the cloth at full speed and continued until the tent collapsed around it.
“And what is that?” said Jabbar.
“This may take some explaining,” said Vimes,
picking himself up.
Carrot and Detritus were already hauling at the collapsed tent.
“We are D'regs,” said Jabbar reproachfully. “We are supposed to fold tents silently in the night, not—”
There was enough moonlight. Angua sat up and snatched a piece of tent out of Carrot's hands.
“Thank you,” she said, wrapping it around her. “And before anyone says anything, I just bit him on the bum. Hard. And that was not the soft option, let me tell you.”
Jabbar looked back into the desert, and then down at the sand, and then at Angua. Vimes could see him thinking, and put a fraternal arm around his shoulders.
“I'd better explain—” he began.
“There's a couple of hundred soldiers out there!” Angua snapped.
“—later.”
“They're taking up positions all round you! And they don't look nice! Has anyone got any clothes that might fit? And some decent food? And a drink! There's no water in this place!”
“They will not dare attack before dawn,” said Jabbar.
“And what will you do, sir?” said Carrot.
“At dawn we will charge!”
“Ah. Uh. I wonder if I could suggest an alternative approach?”
“Alternative? It is right to charge! Charging is what dawn is for.”
Carrot saluted Vimes. “I've been reading your book, sir. While you were… asleep. Tacticus's got quite a lot to say about how to deal with overwhelming odds, sir.”
“Yes?”
“He says take every opportunity to turn them into underwhelming odds, sir. We could attack now.”
“But it's dark, man!”
“It's just as dark for the enemy, sir.”
“I mean it's pitch black! You wouldn't know who the hell you were fighting! Half the time you'd be shooting your own side!”
“We wouldn't, sir, because there'd only be a few of us. Sir? All we need to do is crawl out there, make a bit of noise, and then let them get on with it. Tacticus says all armies are the same size in the night, sir.”
“There might be something in that,” said Angua. “They're crawling around in ones and twos, and they're dressed pretty much like—” She waved a hand at Jabbar.
“This is Jabbar,” said Carrot. “He's sort of not the leader.”
Jabbar grinned nervously. “It happens often in your country, where dogs turn into naked women?”
“Sometimes days can go past and it doesn't happen at all,” Angua snapped. “I'd like some clothes, please. And a sword, if there's going to be fighting.”
“Um, I think Klatchians have a very particular view about women fighting—” Carrot began.
“Yes!” said Jabbar. “We expect them to be good at it, Blue Eyes. We are D'regs!”
The Boat surfaced in the scummy dead water under a jetty. The lid opened slowly.
“Smells like home,” said Nobby.
“You can't trust the water,” said Sergeant Colon.
“But I don't trust the water at home, sarge.”
Fred Colon managed to get a foothold on the greasy wood. It was, in theory, quite a heroic enterprise. He and Nobby Nobbs, the bold warriors, were venturing forth in hostile territory. Unfortunately, he knew they were doing it because Lord Vetinari was sitting in the Boat and would raise his eyebrows in no uncertain manner if they refused.
Colon had always thought that heroes had some special kind of clockwork that made them go out and die famously for god, country and apple pie, or whatever particular delicacy their mother made. It had never occurred to him that they might do it because they'd get yelled at if they didn't.
He reached down.
“Come on up, Nobby,” he said. “And remember we're doing this for the gods, Ankh-Morpork and—” It seemed to Colon that a foodstuff would indeed be somehow appropriate. “And my mum's famous knuckle sandwich!”
“Our mum never made us knuckle sandwiches,” said Nobby, as he hauled himself on to the planks. “But you'd be amazed at what she could do with a bit of cheese…”
“Yeah, all right, but that aint much of a battle cry, is it? ‘For the gods, Ankh-Morpork and amazing things Nobby's mum can do with cheese’? That'll strike fear in the hearts of the enemy!” said Sergeant Colon, as they crept forward.
“Oh, well, if that's what you're after, you want my mum's Distressed Pudding and custard,” said Nobby.
“Frightening, is it?”
“They wouldn't want to know about it, sarge.”
The docks of Al-Khali were like docks everywhere, because all docks everywhere are connected. Men have to put things on and off boats. There are only a limited number of ways to do this. So all docks look the same. Some are hotter, some are damper, there are always piles of vaguely forgotten-looking things.
In the distance there was the glow of the city, which seemed quite unaware of the enemy incursion.
“‘Get us some clothes so that we'll blend in,’” muttered Colon. “That's all very well to say.”
“Nah, nah, that's easy,” said Nobby. “Everyone knows how to do that one. You lurk in an alley somewhere, right, and you wait until a couple of blokes come by and you lure them into the alley, see, and there's a couple of thumps, and then you come out wearing their clothes.”
“That works, does it?”
“Never fails, sarge,” said Nobby confidently.
The desert looked like snow in the moonlight.
Vimes found himself quite at ease with the Tacticus method of fighting. It was how coppers had always fought. A proper copper didn't line up with a lot of other coppers and rush at people. A copper lurked in the shadows, walked quietly and bided his time. In all honesty, of course, the time he bided until was the point when the criminal had already committed the crime and was carrying the loot. Otherwise, what was the point? You had to be realistic. “We got the man what done it” carries a lot more gravitas than “We got the man what looked as if he was going to do it,” especially when people say, “Prove it.”
Somewhere off to the left, in the distance, someone screamed.
Vimes was a bit uneasy in this robe, though. It was like going into battle in a nightshirt.
Because he wasn't at all certain he could kill a man who wasn't actively trying to kill him. Of course, technically any armed Klatchian these days was actively trying to kill him. That was what war was about. But—
He raised his head over the top of the dune. A Klatchian warrior was looking the other way. Vimes crept—
“Bingeley-bingeley beep! This is your seven eh em alarm call, Insert Name Here! At least I hope—”
“Huh?”
“Damn!”
Vimes reacted first and punched the man on the nose. Since there was no point in waiting to see what effect this would have, he threw himself forward and the two of them rolled down the other side of the freezing dune, struggling and punching.
“—but my real-time function seems erratic at the moment—”
The Klatchian was smaller than Vimes. He was younger, too. But it was unfortunate for him that he appeared to be too young to have learned the repertoire of dirty fighting that spelled survival in Ankh-Morpork's back streets. Vimes, on the other hand, was prepared to hit anything with anything. The point was that the opponent shouldn't get up again. Everything else was decoration.
They slid to a halt at the bottom of the dune, with Vimes on top and the Klatchian groaning.
“Things To Do,” the Dis-organizer shrilled: “Ache.”
And then… It was probably throat cutting time. Back home Vimes could have dragged him off to the cells, in the knowledge that everything would look better in the morning, but the desert had no such options.
No, he couldn't do that. Thump the bloke senseless. That was the merciful way.
“Vindaloo! Vindaloo!”
Vimes's fist stayed raised.
“What?”
“That's you, isn't it? Mr Vimes? Vindaloo!”
Vimes pulled a fold of cloth away from the figure's f
ace.
“Are you Goriff's boy?”
“I didn't want to be here, Mr Vimes!” The words came fast, desperate.
“All right, all right, I'm not going to hurt you…”
Vimes lowered his fist and stood up, pulling the boy up after him.
“Talk later,” he muttered. “Come on!”
“No! Everyone knows what the D'regs do to their captives!”
“Well I'm their captive and they'll have to do it to both of us, OK? Keep away from the more amusing food and you'll probably be OK.”
Someone whistled in the darkness.
“Come on, lad!” hissed Vimes. “No harm's going to come to you! Well… less than'd come if you stayed here. All right?”
This time he didn't give the boy time to argue, but dragged him along. As he headed towards the D'regs' camp, other figures slid down the dunes.
One of them had an arm missing and had a sword sticking in him.
“How did you get on, Reg?” said Vimes.
“A bit odd, sir. After the first one chopped my arm off and stabbed me, the rest of them seemed to keep out of my way. Honestly, you'd think they'd never seen a man stabbed before.”
“Did you find your arm?”
Reg waved something in the air.
“That's another thing,” he said. “I hit a few of them with it and they ran off screaming.”
“It's your type of unarmed combat,” said Vimes. “It probably takes some getting used to.”
“Is that a prisoner you've got there?”
“In a way.” Vimes glanced around. “He seems to have fainted. I can't think why.”
Reg leaned closer. “These foreigners are a bit weird,” he said.
“Reg?”
“Yes?”
“Your ear's hanging off.”
“Is it? Wretched thing. You'd think a nail would work, wouldn't you?”
Sergeant Colon looked up at the stars. They looked down at him. At least Fred Colon had a choice.
Beside him, Corporal Nobbs gave a groan. But the attackers had left him his pants. There are some places where the boldest dare not go, and those areas of Nobby upwards of the knees and downwards of the stomach were among them.
Well, Colon thought of them as attackers. Technically, he supposed they were defenders. Aggressive defenders.
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