by The Wit
‘I’d be minding the whole time if I minded that, sarge,’ said Corporal Nobbs cheerfully.
‘Right. Right! And I don’t mind what people call me, neither’ Colon scratched his head. ‘Don’t make sense, really. I reckon Sir Sam is missing too much sleep.’
‘He’s a very busy man, Fred.’
‘Trying to do everything, that’s his trouble. And … Nobby?’
‘Yes?’
‘It’s Sergeant Colon, thanks.’
*
There was sherry. There was always sherry at these occasions. Sam Vimes had heard they made sherry by letting wine go rotten. He couldn’t see the point of sherry.
*
Vimes stood up. ‘You know what I always say’ he said.
Carrot removed his helmet and polished it with his sleeve. Yes, sir.
“Everyone’s guilty of something, especially the ones that aren’t,” sir’
‘No, not that one …’
‘Er … “Always take into consideration the fact that you might be dead wrong,” sir?’
‘No, nor that one either’
‘Er … “How come Nobby ever got a job as a watchman?”, sir? You say that a lot.’
‘No! I meant “Always act stupid,” Carrot.’
‘Ah, right, sir. From now on I shall remember that you always said that, sir’
*
‘Colon and Nobbs are investigating this?’ said the Patrician. ‘Really?’
‘Yes, sir’
‘If I were to ask you why, you’d pretend not to understand?’
Vimes let his forehead wrinkle in honest perplexity. ‘Sir?’
‘If you say “Sir?” again in that stupid voice, Vimes, I swear there will be trouble.’
‘They’re good men, sir’
‘However, some people might consider them to be unimaginative, stolid and … how can I put this? … possessed of an inbuilt disposition to accept the first explanation that presents itself and then bunk off somewhere for a quiet smoke? A certain lack of imagination? An ability to get out of their depth on a wet pavement?’
*
Vetinari peered at a small heap of bent and twisted metal.
‘What was it, Leonard?’ he said.
‘An experimental device for turning chemical energy into rotary motion,’ said Leonard. ‘The problem, you see, is getting the little pellets of black powder into the combustion chamber at exactly the right speed and one at a time. If two ignite together, well, what we have is the external combustion engine.’
‘And, er, what would be the purpose of it?’ said the Patrician.
‘I believe it could replace the horse,’ said Leonard proudly.
They looked at the stricken thing.
‘One of the advantages of horses that people often point out,’ said Vetinari, after some thought, ‘is that they very seldom explode.’
*
Leonard’s incredible brain sizzled away alarmingly, an overloaded chip pan on the Stove of Life. It was impossible to know what he would think of next, because he was constantly reprogrammed by the whole universe. The sight of a waterfall or a soaring bird would send him spinning down some new path of practical speculation that invariably ended in a heap of wire and springs and a cry of ‘I think I know what I did wrong.’ He’d been a member of most of the craft guilds in the city but had been thrown out for getting impossibly high marks in the exams or, in some cases, correcting the questions. It was said that he’d accidentally blown up the Alchemists’ Guild using nothing more than a glass of water, a spoonful of acid, two lengths of wire and a ping-pong ball.
*
Nobby and Colon go on a call - in plain clothes:
‘Come on, open up! Watch business!’
Corporal Nobbs pulled at Sergeant Colon’s sleeve and whispered in his ear.
‘Not Watch business!’ said Colon, pounding the door again. ‘Nothing to do with the Watch at all! We are just civilians, all right?’
The door opened a crack.
‘Are you the Watch?’ said a voice.
‘No! I think I just made that clear—’
‘Piss off, copper!’
The door slammed.
‘You sure this is the right place, sarge?’
‘Don’t call me sarge when we’re in plain clothes!’
‘Right you are, Fred.’
‘That’s—’ Colon hesitated in an agony of status. ‘Well, that’s Frederick to you, Nobby’
‘Right, Frederick. And that’s Cecil, thank you.’
‘Cecil?’
‘That is my name,’ said Nobby coldly.
‘Have it your way’ said Colon. ‘Just remember who’s the superior civilian around here, all right?’
He hammered on the door again.
‘We hear you’ve got a room to let, missus!’ he yelled.
‘Brilliant, Frederick,’ said Nobby. ‘That was bloody brilliant!’
‘Well, I am the sergeant, right?’ Colon whispered.
‘No.’
‘Er … yeah … right … well, just you remember that, right?’
*
‘Sam?’
Vimes looked up from his reading.
‘Your soup will be cold,’ said Lady Sybil from the far end of the table. ‘You’ve been holding that spoonful in the air for the last five minutes by the clock.’
‘Sorry dear.’
Belatedly, his nuptial radar detected a certain chilliness from the far side of the cruet.
‘Is, er, there something wrong, dear?’ he said.
‘Can you remember when we last had dinner together, Sam?’
‘Tuesday, wasn’t it?’
‘That was the Guild of Merchants’ annual dinner, Sam.’
Vimes’s brow wrinkled. ‘But you were there too, weren’t you?’
*
Ankh-Morpork no longer had a fire brigade. The citizens had a rather disturbingly direct way of thinking at times, and it did not take long for people to see the rather obvious flaw in paying a group of people by the number of fires they put out. The penny really dropped shortly after Charcoal Tuesday.
Since then they had relied on the good old principle of enlightened self-interest. People living close to a burning building did their best to douse the fire, because the thatch they saved might be their own.
‘Mr Vimes saved the day!’ said Sergeant Colon excitedly.
‘Just went straight in and saved everyone, in the finest tradition of the Watch!’
‘Fred?’ said Vimes, wearily.
Yessir?’
‘Fred, the finest tradition of the Watch is having a quiet smoke somewhere out of the wind at 3 a.m. Let’s not get carried away, eh?’
Colon rummaged in a pocket and produced a very small book, which he held up for inspection.
‘This belonged to my great-grandad,’ he said. ‘He was in the scrap we had against Pseudopolis and my great-gran gave him this book of prayers for soldiers, ‘cos you need all the prayers you can get, believe you me, and he stuck it in the top pocket of his jerkin, ‘cos he couldn’t afford armour, and next day in battle - whoosh, this arrow came out of nowhere, wham, straight into this book and it went all the way through to the last page before stopping, look. You can see the hole.’
‘Pretty miraculous,’ Carrot agreed.
‘Yeah, it was, I s’pose,’ said the sergeant. He looked ruefully at the battered volume. ‘Shame about the other seventeen arrows, really.’
Another little memory burst open as silently as a mouse passing wind in a hurricane.
‘He is a D’reg!’
‘Dreg?’ said Angua.
‘A warlike desert tribe,’ said Carrot. ‘Very fierce. Honourable, though. They say that if a D’reg is your friend he’s your friend for the rest of your life.’
‘And if he’s not your friend?’
‘That’s about five seconds.’
*
‘Everything’s gone all to pot these days.’
‘Not like when we were ki
ds, sarge.’
‘Not like when we were kids indeed, Nobby’
‘People trusted one another in them days, didn’t they, sarge?’
‘People trusted one another, Nobby.’
Yes, sarge. I know. And people didn’t have to lock their doors, did they?’
‘That’s right, Nobby. And people were always ready to help. They were always in and out of one another’s houses.’
“sright, sarge,’ said Nobby vehemently. ‘I know no one ever locked their houses down our street.’
‘That’s what I’m talking about. That’s my point.’
‘It was ‘cos the bastards even used to steal the locks.’
Colon considered the truth of this.
Yes, but at least it was each other’s stuff they were nicking, Nobby’
*
Lord Rust’s expression would have preserved meat for a year.
‘You, Vimes, certainly are no knight. Before a knight is created he must spend a night’s vigil watching his armour—’
‘Practically every night of my life,’ said Vimes. ‘A man doesn’t keep an eye on his armour round here, that man’s got no armour in the morning.’
‘In prayer,’ said Rust sharply.
‘That’s me,’ said Vimes. ‘Not a night has gone by without me thinking, “Ye gods, I hope I get through this alive.”‘
‘—and he must have proved himself on the field of combat. Against other trained men, Vimes. Not vermin and thugs.’
Vimes started to undo the strap of his helmet.
‘Well, this isn’t the best of moments, my lord, but if someone’ll hold your coat I can spare you five minutes …’
*
‘It is always useful to face an enemy who is prepared to die for his country. This means that both you and he have exactly the same aim in mind.’
*
The Engravers’ Guild was against printing. There was something pure, they said, about an engraved page of text. It was there, whole, unsullied. Their members could do very fine work at very reasonable rates. Allowing unskilled people to bash lumps of type together showed a disrespect for words and no good would come of it.
The only attempt ever to set up a printing press in Ankh-Morpork had ended in a mysterious fire and the death by suicide of the luckless printer. Everyone knew it was suicide because he’d left a note. The fact that this had been engraved on the head of a pin was considered an irrelevant detail.
*
71-hour Ahmed was not superstitious. He was substitious, which put him in a minority among humans. He didn’t believe in the things everyone believed in but which nevertheless weren’t true. He believed instead in the things that were true in which no one else believed. There are many such substi-tions, ranging from ‘It’ll get better if you don’t pick at it’ all the way up to ‘Sometimes things just happen.’
‘So what’re you going to do when we catch the other ship?’
‘Er …’ Vimes hadn’t given this a lot of thought. But he recalled a very bad woodcut he’d once seen in a book about pirates.
‘We’ll swing across on to them with our cutlasses in our teeth?’ he said.
‘Really?’ said Jenkins. ‘That’s good. I haven’t seen that done in years. Only ever seen it done once, in fact.’
‘Oh, yes?’
‘Yes, this lad’d seen the idea in a book and he swung across into the other ship’s rigging with his cutlass clenched, as you say, between his teeth.’
‘Yes?’
‘Topless Harry, we wrote on his coffin.’
Angua was aware that she had a slight advantage over male werewolves in that naked women caused fewer complaints, although the downside was that they got some pressing invitations. Some kind of covering was essential, for modesty and the prevention of inconvenient bouncing, which was why fashioning impromptu clothes out of anything to hand was a lesser-known werewolf skill.
*
‘It’s the waiting that’s the worst part,’ said his sergeant, next to him.
‘It might be the worst part,’ said the commander. ‘Or, there again, the bit where they suddenly rise out of the desert and cut you in half might be the worst part.’
*
Lord Vetinari helped him up. ‘Our very lives depend on your appearing to be a stupid fat idiot,’ he hissed, putting Colon’s fez back on his head.
‘I ain’t very good at acting, sir—’
‘Good!’
*
‘Your predecessor, Lord Snapcase, now he was mental. But, like I’ve always said, people know where they stand with Lord Vetinari…’
‘Well done.’
‘They might not like where they’re standing of course …’
IT’S the Discworld’s last continent and it’s going to die in a few days, except…
Who is this hero striding across the red desert? Sheep shearer, beer drinker, bush ranger, and someone who’ll even eat a Meat Pie Floater when he’s sober.
A man in a hat whose Luggage follows him on little legs. Yes, it’s Rincewind, the inept wizard who can’t even spell wizard. He’s the only hero left.
Still… no worries, eh?
There are some people who have a legend that the whole universe is carried in a leather bag by an old man.
Other people say: hold on, if he’s carrying the entire universe in a sack, right, that means he’s carrying himself and the sack inside the sack, because the universe contains everything. Including him. And the sack, of course. Which contains him and the sack already. As it were.
To which the reply is: well?
All tribal myths are true, for a given value of ‘true’.
*
The Ceremony of the Keys went on every night in every season. Mere ice, wind and snow had never stopped it. You couldn’t stop Tradition. You could only add to it.
McAbre, Head Bledlow, with his two escorts, reached the shadows by the main gate. The bledlow on duty was waiting for them.
‘Halt! Who Goes There?’ he shouted.
McAbre saluted. The Arch-chancellor’s Keys!’
‘Pass, The Archchancellor’s Keys!’
The Head Bledlow took a step forward, extended both arms in front of him with his palms bent back towards him, and patted his chest at the place where some bledlow long buried had once had two breast pockets. Pat, pat. Then he extended his arms by his sides and stiffly patted the sides of his jacket. Pat, pat.
‘Damn! Could Have Sworn I Had Them A Moment Ago!’ he bellowed, enunciating each word with a sort of bulldog carefulness.
The gatekeeper saluted. McAbre saluted.
‘Have You Looked In All Your Pockets?’
McAbre saluted. The gatekeeper saluted.
‘I Think I Must Have Left Them On The Dresser. It’s Always The Same, Isn’t It?’
‘You Should Remember Where You Put Them Down!’
‘Hang On, Perhaps They’re In My Other Jacket!’
The young bledlow who was this week’s Keeper of the Other Jacket stepped forward. Each man saluted the other two. The youngest cleared his throat and managed to say:
‘No, I Looked In … There This … Morning!’
McAbre gave him a slight nod to acknowledge a difficult job done well, and patted his pockets again.
‘Hold On, Stone The Crows, They Were In This Pocket After All! What A Muggins I Am!’
‘Don’t Worry, I Do The Same Myself!’
‘Is My Face Red! Forget My Own Head Next! … Here’s The Keys, Then!’ said McAbre.
‘Much Obliged!’ …
‘All Safe And Secure!’ shouted the gatekeeper, handing the keys back.
‘Gods Bless All Present!’
‘Careful Where You Put Them This Time. Ha! Ha! Ha!’
‘Ho! Ho! Ho!’ yelled McAbre. He saluted stiffly, went About Turn with a large amount of foot stamping and, the ancient exchange completed, marched back to the bledlows’ lodge.
*
Light travels slowly on the Disc and is slightly hea
vy, with a tendency to pile up against high mountain ranges. Research wizards have speculated that there is another, much speedier type of light which allows the slower light to be seen, but since this moves too fast to see they have been unable to find a use for it.
*
Ponder Stibbons was one of those unfortunate people cursed with the belief that if only he found out enough things about the universe it would all, somehow, make sense. The goal is the Theory of Everything, but Ponder would settle for the Theory of Something and, late at night, he despaired of even a Theory of Anything.
*
Any true wizard, faced with a sign like ‘Do not open this door. Really. We mean it. We’re not kidding. Opening this door will mean the end of the universe,’ would automatically open the door in order to see what all the fuss was about.
*
‘Hah, I remember when I was a student,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes. ‘Old “Bogeyboy” Swallett took us on an expedition to find the Lost Reading Room. Three weeks we were wandering around. Had to eat our own boots.’
‘Did you find it?’ said the Dean.
‘No, but we found the remains of the previous year’s expedition.’
‘What did you do?’
‘We ate their boots, too.’
*
‘We’re a university! We have to have a library!’ said Ridcully ‘What sort of people would we be if we didn’t go into the Library?’
‘Students,’ said the Senior Wrangler morosely.
… a man whose ability to find water was limited to checking if his feet were wet…
Ridcully was good at doing without other people’s sleep.
*
Unseen University was much bigger on the inside. Thousands of years as the leading establishment of practical magic in a world where dimensions were largely a matter of chance in any case had left it bulging in places where it shouldn’t have places. There were rooms containing rooms which, if you entered them, turned out to contain the room you’d started with, which can be a problem if you are in a conga line.
*
Rincewind had always been happy to think of himself as a racist. The One Hundred Metres, the Mile, the Marathon - he’d run them all. Later, when he’d learned with some surprise what the word actually meant, he’d been equally certain he wasn’t one. He was a person who divided the world quite simply into people who were trying to kill him and people who weren’t.