Men at Arms tds-15

by Terry Pratchett

  “I'll turn the matter over to Corporal Nobbs,” he said.

  “That's what I like,” said Gaspode bitterly. “Incentive.”

  He presssed his blotchy nose to the ground. It was all show, anyway. Angua's scent hung in the air like a rainbow.

  “You can really talk?” said Carrot.

  Gaspode rolled his eyes.

  “'Course not,” he said.

  The figure had reached the top of the tower.

  Lamps and candles were alight all over the city. It was spread out below him. Ten thousand little earthbound stars… and he could turn off any one he wanted, just like that. It was like being a god.

  It was amazing how sounds were so audible up here. It was like being a god. He could hear the howl of dogs, the sound of voices. Occasionally one would be louder than the rest, rising up into the night sky.

  This was power. The power he had below, the power to say: do this, do that… that was just something human, but this… this was like being a god.

  He pulled the gonne into position, clicked a rack of six bullets into position, and sighted at random on a light. And then on another one. And another one.

  He really shouldn't have let it shoot that beggar girl. That wasn't the plan. Guild leaders, that was poor little Edward's plan. Guild leaders, to start with. Leave the city leaderless and in turmoil, and then confront his silly candidate and say: Go forth and rule, it is your destiny.

  That was an old disease, that kind of thinking. You caught it from crowns, and silly stories. You believed… hah… you believed that some trick like, like pulling a sword from a stone was somehow a qualification for kingly office. A sword from a stone? The gonne was more magical than that.

  He lay down, stroked the gonne, and waited.

  Day broke.

  “I never touched nuffin,” said Coalface, and turned over on his slab.

  Detritus hit him over the head with his club.

  “Up you get, soldiers! Hand off rock and on with sock! It another beautiful day inna Watch! Lance-Constable Coalface, on your feet, you horrible little man!”

  Twenty minutes later a bleary-eyed Sergeant Colon surveyed the troops. They were slumped on the benches, except for Acting-Constable Detritus, who was sitting bolt upright with an air of official helpfulness.

  “Right, men,” Colon began, “now, as you—”

  “You men, you listen up good right now!” Detritus boomed.

  “Thank you, Acting-Constable Detritus,” said Colon wearily. “Captain Vimes is getting married today. We're going to provide a guard of honour. That's what we always used to do in the old days when a Watchman got wed. So I want helmets and breastplates bright and shiny. And cohorts gleaming. Not a speck of muck… where's Corporal Nobbs?”

  There was a dink as Acting-Constable Detritus' hand bounced off his new helmet.

  “Hasn't been seen for hours, sir!” he reported.

  Colon rolled his eyes.

  “And some of you will… Where's Lance-Constable Angua?”

  Dink. “No-one's seen her since last night, sir.”

  “All right. We got through the night, we're going to get through the day. Corporal Carrot says we're to look sharp.”

  Dink. “Yes, sir!”

  “Acting-Constable Detritus?”

  “Sir?”

  “What's that you've got on your head?”

  Dink. “Acting-Constable Cuddy made it for me, sir. Special clockwork thinking helmet.”

  Cuddy coughed. “These big bits are cooling fins, see? Painted black. I glommed a clockwork engine off my cousin, and this fan here blows air over—” He stopped when he saw Colon's expression.

  “That's what you've been working on all night, is it?”

  “Yes, because I reckon troll brains get too—”

  The sergeant waved him into silence.

  “So we've got a clockwork soldier, have we?” said Colon. “We're a real model army, we are.”

  Gaspode was geographically embarrassed. He knew where he was, more or less. He was somewhere beyond the Shades, in the network of dock basins and cattle-yards. Even though he thought of the whole city as belonging to him, this wasn't his territory. There were rats here almost as big as he was, and he was basically a sort of terrier shape, and Ankh-Morpork rats were intelligent enough to recognize it. He'd also been kicked by two horses and almost run over by a cart. And he'd lost the scent. She'd doubled back and forth and used rooftops and crossed the river a few times. Werewolves were instinctively good at avoiding pursuit; after all, the surviving ones were descendants of those who could outrun an angry mob. Those who couldn't outwit a mob never had descendants, or even graves.

  Several times the scent petered out at a wall or a low-roofed hut, and Gaspode would limp around in circles until he found it again.

  Random thoughts wavered in his schizophrenic doggy mind.

  “Clever Dog Saves The Day,” he muttered. “Everyone Says, Good Doggy. No they don't, I'm only doing it 'cos I was threatened. The Marvellous Nose. I didn't want to do this. You Shall Have A Bone. I'm just flotsam on the sea of life, me. Who's a Good Boy? Shut up.”

  The sun toiled up the sky. Down below, Gaspode toiled on.

  Willikins opened the curtains. Sunlight poured in. Vimes groaned and sat up slowly in what remained of his bed.

  “Good grief, man,” he mumbled. “What sort of time d'you call this?”

  “Almost nine in the morning, sir,” said the butler.

  “Nine in the morning? What sort of time is that to get up? I don't normally get up until the afternoon's got the shine worn off!”

  “But sir is not at work any more, sir.”

  Vimes looked down at the tangle of sheets and blankets. They were wrapped around his legs and knotted together. Then he remembered the dream.

  He'd been walking around the city.

  Well, maybe not so much a dream as a memory. After all, he walked the city every night. Some part of him wasn't giving up; some part of Vimes was learning to be a civilian, but an old part was marching, no, proceeding to a different beat. He'd thought the place seemed deserted and harder to walk through than usual.

  “Does sir wish me to shave him or will sir do it himself?”

  “I get nervous if people hold blades near my face,” said Vimes. “But if you harness the horse and cart I'll try and get to the other end of the bathroom.”

  “Very amusing, sir.”

  Vimes had another bath, just for the novelty of it. He was aware from a general background noise that the mansion was busily humming towards W-hour. Lady Sybil was devoting to her wedding all the directness of thought she'd normally apply to breeding out a tendency towards floppy ears in swamp dragons. Half a dozen cooks had been busy in the kitchens for three days. They were roasting a whole ox and doing amazing stuff with rare fruit. Hitherto Sam Vimes' idea of a good meal was liver without tubes. Haute cuisine had been bits of cheese on sticks stuck into half a grapefruit.

  He was vaguely aware that prospective grooms were not supposed to see putative brides on the morning of the wedding, possibly in case they took to their heels. That was unfortunate. He'd have liked to have talked to someone. If he could talk to someone, it might all make sense.

  He picked up the razor, and looked in the mirror at the face of Captain Samuel Vimes.

  Colon saluted, and then peered at Carrot.

  “You all right, sir? You look like you could do with some sleep.”

  Ten o'clock, or various attempts thereof, began to boom around the city. Carrot turned away from the window.

  “I've been out looking,” he said.

  “Three more recruits this morning already,” said Colon. They'd asked to join “Mr Carrot's army”. He was slightly worried about that.

  “Good.”

  “Detritus is giving 'em very basic training,” said Colon. “It works, too. After an hour of him shouting in their ear, they do anything I tell 'em.”

  “I want all the men we can spare up on the rooftops be
tween the Palace and the University,” said Carrot.

  “There's Assassins up there already,” said Colon. “And the Thieves' Guild have got men up there, too.”

  “They're Thieves and Assassins. We're not. Make sure someone's up on the Tower of Art as well—”

  “Sir?”

  “Yes, sergeant?”

  “We've been talking… me and the lads… and, well…”

  “Yes?”

  “It'd save a lot of trouble if we went to the wizards and asked them—”

  “Captain Vimes never had any truck with magic.”

  “No, but…”

  “No magic, sergeant.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Guard of honour all sorted out?”

  “Yes, sir. Their cohorts all gleaming in purple and gold, sir.”

  “Really?”

  “Very important, sir, good clean cohorts. Frighten the life out the enemy.”

  “Good.”

  “But I can't find Corporal Nobbs, sir.”

  “Is that a problem?”

  “Well, it means the honour guard'll be a bit smarter, sir.”

  “I've sent him on a special errand.”

  “Er… can't find Lance-Constable Angua, either.”

  “Sergeant?”

  Colon braced himself. Outside, the bells were dying away.

  “Did you know she was a werewolf?”

  “Um… Captain Vimes kind of hinted, sir…”

  “How did he hint?”

  Colon took a step back.

  “He sort of said, ‘Fred, she's a damn werewolf. I don't like it any more than you do, but Vetinari says we've got to take one of them as well, and a werewolf's better than a vampire or a zombie, and that's all there is to it.’ That's what he hinted.”

  “I see.”

  “Er… sorry about that, sir.”

  “Just let's get through the day, Fred. That's all—”

  –abing, abing, a-bing-bong–

  “We never even presented the captain with his watch,” said Carrot, taking it out of his pocket. “He must have gone off thinking we didn't care. He was probably looking forward to getting a watch. I know it always used to be a tradition.”

  “It's been a busy few days, sir. Anyway, we can give it to him after the wedding.”

  Carrot slipped the watch back into its bag.

  “I suppose so. Well, let's get organized, sergeant.”

  Corporal Nobbs toiled through the darkness under the city. His eyes had got accustomed to the gloom now. He was dying for a smoke, but Carrot had warned him about that. Just take the sack, follow the trail, bring back the body. And don't nick any jewellery.

  People were already filing into the Great Hall of Unseen University.

  Vimes had been firm about this. It was the only thing he'd held out for. He wasn't exactly an atheist, because atheism was a non-survival trait on a world with several thousand gods. He just didn't like any of them very much, and didn't see what business it was of theirs that he was getting married. He'd turned down any of the temples and churches, but the Great Hall had a sufficiently churchy look, which is what people always feel is mandatory on these occasions. It's not actually essential for any gods to drop in, but they should feel at home if they do.

  Vimes strolled down there early, because there's nothing more useless in the world than a groom just before the wedding. Interchangeable Emmas had taken over the house.

  There were already a couple of ushers in place, ready to ask guests whose side they were on.

  And there were a number of senior wizards hanging around. They were automatically guests at such a society wedding, and certainly at the reception afterwards. Probably one roast ox wouldn't be enough.

  Despite his deep distrust of magic, he quite liked the wizards. They didn't cause trouble. At least, they didn't cause his kind of trouble. True, occasionally they fractured the time/space continuum or took the canoe of reality too close to the white waters of chaos, but they never broke the actual law.

  “Good morning, Archchancellor,” he said.

  Archchancellor Mustrum Ridcully, supreme leader of all the wizards in Ankh-Morpork whenever they could be bothered, gave him a cheery nod.

  “Good morning, captain,” he said. “I must say you've got a nice day for it!”

  “Hahaha, a nice day for it!” leered the Bursar.

  “Oh dear,” said Ridcully, “he's off again. Can't understand the man. Anyone got the dried frog pills?”

  It was a complete mystery to Mustrum Ridcully, a man designed by Nature to live outdoors and happily slaughter anything that coughed in the bushes, why the Bursar (a man designed by Nature to sit in a small room somewhere, adding up figures) was so nervous. He'd tried all sorts of things to, as he put it, buck him up. These included practical jokes, surprise early morning runs, and leaping out at him from behind doors while wearing Willie the Vampire masks in order, he said, to take him out of himself.

  The service itself was going to be performed by the Dean, who had carefully made one up; there was no official civil marriage service in Ankh-Morpork, other than something approximating to “Oh, all right then, if you really must.” He nodded enthusiastically at Vimes.

  “We've cleaned our organ especially for the occasion,” he said.

  “Hahaha, organ!” said the Bursar.

  “And a mighty one it is, as organs go—” Ridcully stopped, and signalled to a couple of student wizards. “Just take the Bursar away and make him lie down for a while, will you?” he said. “I think someone's been feeding him meat again.”

  There was a hiss from the far end of the Great Hall, and then a strangled squeak. Vimes stared at the monstrous array of pipes.

  “Got eight students pumping the bellows,” said Ridcully, to a background of wheezes. “It's got three keyboards and a hundred extra knobs, including twelve with ‘?’ on them.”

  “Sounds impossible for a man to play,” said Vimes politely.

  “Ah. We had a stroke of luck there—”

  There was a moment of sound so loud that the aural nerves shut down. When they opened again, somewhere around the pain threshold, they could just make out the opening and extremely bent bars of Fondel's “Wedding March”, being played with gusto by someone who'd discovered that the instrument didn't just have three keyboards but a whole range of special acoustic effects, ranging from Flatulence to Humorous Chicken Squawk. The occasional “oook!” of appreciation could be heard amidst the sonic explosion.

  Somewhere under the table, Vimes screamed at Ridcully: “Amazing! Who built it!”

  “I don't know! But it's got the name B.S. Johnson on the keyboard cover!”

  There was a descending wail, one last Hurdy-Gurdy Effect, and then silence.

  “Twenty minutes those lads were pumping up the reservoirs,” said Ridcully, dusting himself off as he stood op. “Go easy on the Vox Dei stop, there's a good chap!”

  “Ook!”

  The Archchancellor turned back to Vimes, who was wearing the standard waxen pre-nuptial grimace. The hall was filling up quite well now.

  “I'm not an expert on this stuff,” he said, “but you've got the ring, have you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who's giving away the bride?”

  “Her Uncle Lofthouse. He's a bit gaga, but she insisted.”

  “And the best man?”

  “What?”

  “The best man. You know? He hands you the ring and has to marry the bride if you run away and so on. The Dean's been reading up on it, haven't you, Dean?”

  “Oh, yes,” said the Dean, who'd spent all the previous day with Lady Deirdre Waggon's Book of Etiquette. “She's got to marry someone once she's turned up. You can't have unmarried brides flapping around the place, being a danger to society.”

  “I completely forgot about a best man!” said Vimes.

  The Librarian, who'd given up on the organ until it had some more puff, brightened up.

  “Ook?”

  “Wel
l, go and find one,” said Ridcully. “You've got nearly half an hour.”

  “It's not as easy as that, is it? They don't grow on trees!”

  “Oook?”

  “I can't think who to ask!”

  “Oook.”.

  The Librarian liked being best man. You were allowed to kiss bridesmaids, and they weren't allowed to run away. He was really disappointed when Vimes ignored him.

  Acting-Constable Cuddy climbed laboriously up the steps inside the Tower of Art, grumbling to himself He knew he couldn't complain. They'd drawn lots because, Carrot said, you shouldn't ask the men to do anything you wouldn't do yourself. And he'd drawn the short straw, harhar, which meant the tallest building. That meant if there was any trouble, he'd miss it.

  He paid no attention to the thin rope dangling from the trapdoor far above. Even if he'd thought about it… so what? It was just a rope.

  Gaspode looked up into the shadows.

  There was a growl from somewhere in the darkness. It was no ordinary dog growl. Early man had heard sounds like that in deep caves.

  Gaspode sat down. His tail thumped uncertainly.

  “Knew I'd find you sooner or later,” he said. “The old nose, eh? Finest instrument known to dog.”

  There was another growl. Gaspode whimpered a bit.

  “The thing is,” he said, “the thing is… the actual thing is, see… the thing what I've been sent to do…”

  Late man heard sounds like that, too. Just before he became late.

  “I can see you… don't want to talk right now,” said Gaspode. “But the thing is… now, I know what you're thinking, is this Gaspode obeyin' orders from a human?”

  Gaspode looked conspiratorially over his shoulder, as if there could be anything worse than what was in front of him.

  “That's the whole mess about being a dog, see?” he said. “That's the thing what Big Fido can't get his mind around, see? You looked at the dogs in the Guild, right? You heard 'em howl. Oh, yes, Death To The Humans, All Right. But under all that there's the fear. There's the voice sayin': Bad Dog. And it don't come from anywhere but inside, right from inside the bones, 'cos humans made dogs. I knows this. I wish I didn't, but there it is. That's the Power, knowin'. I've read books, I have. Well, chewed books.”