Men at Arms tds-15

by Terry Pratchett

  He wandered to the end of the alley and stood listening for a while.

  “What are we waiting for?” said Angua.

  There was the sound of running feet. Carrot leaned against the wall, and stuck out one arm into Zephire Street. There was a thud. Carrot's arm didn't move an inch. It must have been like running into a girder.

  They looked down at the unconscious figure. Silver dollars rolled across the cobbles.

  “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear,” said Carrot. “Poor old Here'n'now. He promised me he was going to give it up, too. Oh well…” He picked up a leg.

  “How much money?” he said.

  “Looks like three dollars,” said Angua.

  “Well done. The exact amount.”

  “No, the shopkeeper said—”

  “Come on. Back to the Watch House. Come on, Here'n'now. It's your lucky day.”

  “Why is it his lucky day?” said Angua. “He was caught, wasn't he?”

  “Yes. By us. Thieves' Guild didn't get him first. They aren't so kind as us.”

  Here'n'now's head bounced from cobblestone to cobblestone.

  “Pinching three dollars and then trotting straight home,” sighed Carrot. “That's Here'n'now. Worst thief in the world.”

  “But you said Thieves' Guild—”

  “When you've been here a while, you'll understand how it all works,” said Carrot. Here'n'now's head banged on the kerb. “Eventually,” Carrot added. “But it all does work. You'd be amazed. It all works. I wish it didn't. But it does.”

  While Here'n'now was being mildly concussed on the way to the safety of the Watch's jail, a clown was being killed.

  He was ambling along an alley with the assurance of one who is fully paid up this year with the Thieves' Guild when a hooded figure stepped out in front of him.

  “Beano?”

  “Oh, hello… it's Edward, right?”

  The figure hesitated.

  “I was just going back to the Guild,” said Beano.

  The hooded figure nodded.

  “Are you OK?” said Beano.

  “I'm sorry about th-is,” it said. “But it is for the good of the city. It is nothing p-ersonal.”

  He stepped behind the clown. Beano felt a crunch, and then his own personal internal universe switched off.

  Then he sat up.

  “Ow,” he said, “that hur—”

  But it didn't.

  Edward d'Eath was looking down at him with a horrified expression.

  “Oh… I didn't mean to hit you that hard! I only wanted you out of the way!”

  “Why'd you have to hit me at all?”

  And then the feeling stole over Beano that Edward wasn't exactly looking at him, and certainly wasn't talking to him.

  He glanced at the ground, and experienced that peculiar sensation known only to the recently dead—horror at what you see lying in front of you, followed by the nagging question: so who's doing the looking?

  KNOCK KNOCK.

  He looked up. “Who's there?”

  DEATH.

  “Death who?”

  There was a chill in the air. Beano waited. Edward was frantically patting his face… well, what until recently had been his face.

  I WONDER… CAN WE START AGAIN? I DON'T SEEM TO HAVE THE HANG OF THIS.

  “Sorry?” said Beano.

  “I'm s-orry!” moaned Edward, “I meant it for the best!”

  Beano watched his murderer drag his… the… body away.

  “Nothing personal, he says,” he said. “I'm glad it wasn't anything personal. I should hate to think I've just been killed because it was personal.”

  IT'S JUST THAT IT HAS BEEN SUGGESTED THAT I SHOULD BE MORE OF A PEOPLE PERSON.

  “I mean, why? I thought we were getting on really well. It's very hard to make friends in my job. In your job too, I suppose.”

  BREAK IT TO THEM GENTLY, AS IT WERE.

  “One minute walking along, the next minute dead. Why?”

  THINK OF IT MORE AS BEING… DIMENSIONALLY DISADVANTAGED.

  The shade of Beano the clown turned to Death.

  “What are you talking about?”

  YOU'RE DEAD.

  “Yes. I know.” Beano relaxed, and stopped wondering too much about events in an increasingly irrelevant world. Death found that people often did, after the initial confusion. After all, the worst had already happened. At least… with any luck.

  IF YOU WOULD CARE TO FOLLOW ME…

  “Will there be custard pies? Red noses? Juggling? Are there likely to be baggy trousers?”

  NO.

  Beano had spent almost all his short life as a clown. He smiled grimly, under his make-up.

  “I like it.”

  Vimes' meeting with the Patrician ended as all such meetings did, with the guest going away in possession of an unfocused yet nagging suspicion that he'd only just escaped with his life.

  Vimes trudged on to see his bride-to-be. He knew where she would be found.

  The sign scrawled across the big double gates in Morphic Street said: Here be Dragns.

  The brass plaque beside the gates said: The Ankh-Morpork Sunshine Sanctuary for Sick Dragons.

  There was a small and hollow and pathetic dragon made out of papier-mache and holding a collection box, chained very heavily to the wall, and bearing the sign: Don't Let My Flame Go Out.

  This was where Lady Sybil Ramkin spent most of her days.

  She was, Vimes had been told, the richest woman in Ankh-Morpork. In fact she was richer than all the other women in Ankh-Morpork rolled, if that were possible, into one.

  It was going to be a strange wedding, people said. Vimes treated his social superiors with barely concealed distaste, because the women made his head ache and the men made his fists itch. And Sybil Ramkin was the last survivor of one of the oldest families in Ankh. But they'd been thrown together like twigs in a whirlpool, and had yielded to the inevitable…

  When he was a little boy, Sam Vimes had thought that the very rich ate off gold plates and lived in marble houses.

  He'd learned something new: the very very rich could afford to be poor. Sybil Ramkin lived in the kind of poverty that was only available to the very rich, a poverty approached from the other side. Women who were merely well-off saved up and bought dresses made of silk edged with lace and pearls, but Lady Ramkin was so rich she could afford to stomp around the place in rubber boots and a tweed skirt that had belonged to her mother. She was so rich she could afford to live on biscuits and cheese sandwiches. She was so rich she lived in three rooms in a thirty-four-roomed mansion; the rest of them were full of very expensive and very old furniture, covered in dust sheets.

  The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

  Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

  But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

  This was the Captain Samuel Vimes “Boots” theory of socio-economic unfairness.

  The point was that Sybil Ramkin hardly ever had to buy anything. The mansion was full of this big, solid furniture, bought by her ancestors. It never wore out. She had whole boxes full of jewellery which just seemed to have accumulated over the centuries. Vimes had seen a wine cellar that a regiment of speleologists could get so happily drunk in that they wouldn't mind that they'd got lost without trace.

  Lady Sybil
Ramkin lived quite comfortably from day to day by spending, Vimes estimated, about half as much as he did. But she spent a lot more on dragons.

  The Sunshine Sanctuary for Sick Dragons was built with very, very thick walls and a very, very lightweight roof, an idiosyncrasy of architecture normally only found elsewhere in firework factories.

  And this is because the natural condition of the common swamp dragon is to be chronically ill, and the natural state of an unhealthy dragon is to be laminated across the walls, floor and ceiling of whatever room it is in. A swamp dragon is a badly run, dangerously unstable chemical factory one step from disaster. One quite small step.

  It has been speculated that its habit of exploding violently when angry, excited, frightened or merely plain bored is a developed survival trait3 to discourage predators. Eat dragons, it proclaims, and you'll have a case of indigestion to which the term “blast radius” will be appropriate.

  Vimes therefore pushed the door open carefully. The smell of dragons engulfed him. It was an unusual smell, even by Ankh-Morpork standards—it put Vimes in mind of a pond that had been used to dump alchemical waste for several years and then drained.

  Small dragons whistled and yammered at him from pens on either side of the path. Several excited gusts of flame sizzled the hair on his bare shins.

  He found Sybil Ramkin with a couple of the miscellaneous young women in breeches who helped run the Sanctuary; they were generally called Sara or Emma, and all looked exactly the same to Vimes. They were struggling with what seemed to be an irate sack. She looked up as he approached.

  “Ah, here's Sam,” she said. “Hold this, there's a lamb.”

  The sack was thrust into his arms. At the same moment a talon ripped out of the bottom of the sack and scraped down his breastplate in a spirited attempt to disembowel him. A spiky-eared head thrust its way out of the other end, two glowing red eyes focused on him briefly, a tooth-serrated mouth gaped open and a gush of evil-smelling vapour washed over him.

  Lady Ramkin grabbed the lower jaw triumphantly, and thrust the other arm up to the elbow down the little dragon's throat.

  “Got you!” She turned to Vimes, who was still rigid with shock. “Little devil wouldn't take his limestone tablet. Swallow. Swallow!, there! Who's a good boy then? You can let him go now.”

  The sack slipped from Vimes' arms.

  “Bad case of Flameless Gripe,” said Lady Ramkin. “Hope we've got it in time—”

  The dragon ripped its way out of the sack and looked around for something to incinerate. Everyone tried to get out of the way.

  Then its eyes crossed, and it hiccuped.

  The limestone tablet pinged off the opposite wall.

  “Everybody down!”

  They leapt for such cover as was provided by a watertrough and a pile of clinkers.

  The dragon hiccuped again, and looked puzzled.

  Then it exploded.

  They stuck their heads up when the smoke had cleared and looked down at the sad little crater.

  Lady Ramkin took a handkerchief out of a pocket of her leather overall and blew her nose.

  “Silly little bugger,” she said. “Oh, well. How are you, Sam? Did you go to see Havelock?”

  Vimes nodded. Never in his life, he thought, would he get used to the idea of the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork having a first name, or that anyone could ever know him well enough to call him by it.

  “I've been thinking about this dinner tomorrow night.” he said desperately. “You know, I really don't think I can—”

  “Don't be silly,” said Lady Ramkin. “You'll enjoy it. It's time you met the Right People. You know that.”

  He nodded mournfully.

  “We shall expect you up at the house at eight o'clock, then,” she said. “And don't look like that. It'll help you tremendously. You're far too good a man to spend his nights traipsing around dark wet streets. It's time you got on in the world.”

  Vimes wanted to say that he liked traipsing around dark wet streets, but it would be no use. He didn't like it much. It was just what he'd always done. He thought about his badge in the same way he thought about his nose. He didn't love it or hate it. It was just his badge.

  “So just you run along. It'll be terrific fun. Have you got a handkerchief?”

  Vimes panicked.

  “What?”

  “Give it to me.” She held it close to his mouth. “Spit…” she commanded.

  She dabbed at a smudge on his cheek. One of the Interchangeable Emmas gave a giggle that was just audible. Lady Ramkin ignored it.

  “There,” she said. “That's better. Now off you go and keep the streets safe for all of us. And if you want to do something really useful, you could find Chubby.”

  “Chubby?”

  “He got out of his pen last night.”

  “A dragon?”

  Vimes groaned, and pulled a cheap cigar out of his pocket. Swamp dragons were becoming a minor nuisance in the city. Lady Ramkin got very angry about it.

  People would buy them when they were six inches long and a cute way of lighting fires and then, when they were burning the furniture and leaving corrosive holes in the carpet, the floor and the cellar ceiling underneath it, they'd be shoved out to fend for themselves.

  “We rescued him from a blacksmith in Easy Street,” said Lady Ramkin. “I said, ‘My good man, you can use a forge like everyone else’. Poor little thing.”

  “Chubby,” said Vimes. “Got a light?”

  “He's got a blue collar,” said Lady Ramkin.

  “Right, yes.”

  “He'll follow you like a lamb if he thinks you've got a charcoal biscuit.”

  “Right.” Vimes patted his pockets.

  “They're a little bit over-excited in this heat.”

  Vimes reached down into a pen of hatchlings and picked up a small one, which flapped its stubby wings excitedly. It spurted a brief jet of blue flame. Vimes inhaled quickly.

  “Sam, I really wish you wouldn't do that.”

  “Sorry.”

  “So if you could get young Carrot and that nice Corporal Nobbs to keep an eye out for—”

  “No problem.”

  For some reason Lady Sybil, keen of eye in every other respect, persisted in thinking of Corporal Nobbs as a cheeky, lovable rascal. It had always puzzled Sam Vimes. It must be the attraction of opposites. The Ramkins were more highly bred than a hilltop bakery, whereas Corporal Nobbs had been disqualified from the human race for shoving.

  As he walked down the street in his old leather and rusty mail, with his helmet screwed on his head, and the feel of the cobbles through the worn soles of his boots telling him he was in Acre Alley, no-one would have believed that they were looking at a man who was very soon going to marry the richest woman in Ankh-Morpork.

  Chubby was not a happy dragon.

  He missed the forge. He'd quite liked it in the forge. He got all the coal he could eat and the blacksmith hadn't been a particularly unkind man. Chubby had not demanded much out of life, and had got it.

  Then this large woman had taken him away and put him in a pen. There had been other dragons around. Chubby didn't particularly like other dragons. And people'd given him unfamiliar coal.

  He'd been quite pleased when someone had taken him out of the pen in the middle of the night. He'd thought he was going back to the blacksmith.

  Now it was dawning on him that this was not happening. He was in a box, he was being bumped around, and now he was getting angry…

  Sergeant Colon fanned himself with his clipboard, and then glared at the assembled guards.

  He coughed.

  “Right then, people,” he said. “Settle down.”

  “We are settled down, Fred,” said Corporal Nobbs.

  “That's Sergeant to you, Nobby,” said Sergeant Colon.

  “What do we have to sit down for anyway? We didn't used to do all this. I feel a right berk, sitting down listenin' to you goin' on about—”

  “We got to do it prope
r, now there's more of us,” said Sergeant Colon. “Right! Ahem. Right. OK. We welcome to the guard today Lance-Constable Detritus—don't salute!—and Lance-Constable Cuddy, also Lance-Constable Angua. We hope you will have a long and—what's that you've got there, Cuddy?”

  “What?” said Cuddy, innocently.

  “I can't help noticing that you still has got there what appears to be a double-headed throwing axe, lance-constable, despite what I vouchsafed to you earlier re Guard rules.”

  “Cultural weapon, sergeant?” said Cuddy hopefully.

  “You can leave it in your locker. Guards carry one sword, short, and one truncheon.”

  With the exception of Detritus, he added mentally. Firstly, because even the longest sword nestled in the troll's huge hand like a toothpick, and secondly, because until they'd got this saluting business sorted out he wasn't about to see a member of the Watch nail his own hand to his own ear. He'd have a truncheon, and like it. Even then, he'd probably beat himself to death.

  Trolls and dwarfs! Dwarfs and trolls! He didn't deserve it, not at his time of life. And that wasn't the worst of it.

  He coughed again. When he read from his clipboard, it was in the sing-song voice of someone who learned his public speaking at school.

  “Right,” he said again, a little uncertainly. “So. Says here—”

  “Sergeant?”

  “Now wh—Oh, it's you, Corporal Carrot. Yes?”

  “Aren't you forgetting something, sergeant?” said Carrot.

  “I dunno,” said Colon cautiously. “Am I?”

  “About the recruits, sarge. Something they've got to take?” Carrot prompted.

  Sergeant Colon rubbed his nose. Let's see… they had, as per standing orders, taken and signed for one shirt (mail, chain) one helmet, iron and copper, one breastplate, iron (except in the case of Lance-Constable Angua, who'd need to be fitted special, and Lance-Constable Detritus, who'd signed for a hastily adapted piece of armour which had once belonged to a war elephant), one truncheon, oak, one emergency pike or halberd, one crossbow, one hourglass, one short sword (except for Lance-Constable Detritus) and one badge, office of, Night Watchman's, copper.