Men at Arms (24 page)

“Dlog, glod, Dlog, glod—”

“Listen, you…troll! It’s the simplest song there is. Look, like this ‘Gold, Gold, Gold, Gold’?”

“Gold, Gold, Gold, Gold—”

“No! That’s the
second
verse!”

There was also the rhythmical sound of dirt being shovelled and rubble being moved.

The Librarian considered matters for a while. So…a dwarf and a troll. He preferred both species to humans. For one thing, neither of them were great readers. The Librarian was, of course, very much in favor of reading in general, but readers in particular got on his nerves. There was something, well,
sacrilegious
about the way they kept taking books off the shelves and wearing out the words by reading them. He liked people who loved and respected books, and the best way to do that, in the Librarian’s opinion, was to leave them on the shelves where Nature intended them to be.

The muffled voices seemed to be getting closer.

“Gold, gold, gold—”

“Now you’re singing the chorus!”

On the other hand, there were proper ways of entering a library.

He waddled over to the shelves and selected Humptulip’s seminal work
How to Kille Insects
. All 2,000 pages of it.

Vimes felt quite light-hearted as he walked up Scoone Avenue. He was aware that there was an inner Vimes screaming his head off. He ignored him.

You couldn’t be a real copper in Ankh-Morpork and stay sane. You had to
care
. And caring in Ankh-Morpork was like opening a tin of meat in the middle of a piranha school.

Everyone dealt with it in their own way. Colon never thought about it, and Nobby didn’t worry about it, and the new ones hadn’t been in long enough to be worn down by it, and Carrot…was just himself.

Hundreds of people died in the city every day, often of suicide. So what did a few more matter?

The Vimes inside hammered on the walls.

There were quite a few coaches outside the Ramkin mansion, and the place seemed to be infested with assorted female relatives and Interchangeable Emmas. They were baking things and polishing things. Vimes strolled through, more or less unregarded.

He found Sybil out in the dragon house, in her rubber boots and protective dragon armor. She was mucking out, apparently blissfully unaware of the controlled uproar in the mansion.

She looked up as the door shut behind Vimes.

“Oh, there you are. You’re home early,” she said. “I couldn’t stand the fuss, so I came out here. But I’ll have to go and change soon—”

She stopped when she saw his expression. “There’s something wrong, isn’t there?”

“I’m not going back,” said Vimes.

“Really? Last week you said you’d do a full watch. You said you were looking forward to it.”

Not much gets past old Sybil, Vimes thought.

She patted his hand.

“I’m glad you’re out of it,” she said.

Corporal Nobbs darted into the Watch House and slammed the door behind him.

“Well?” said Carrot.

“It’s not good,” said Nobby. “They say the trolls are planning to march to the Palace to get Coalface out. There’s gangs of dwarfs and trolls wandering around looking for trouble.
And
beggars. Lettice was very popular. And there’s a lot of Guild people out there, too. The city,” he said, importantly, “is def’nitely a keg of No. I Powder.”

“How do you like the idea of camping out on the open plain?” said Colon.

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“If anyone puts a match to anything tonight, it’s goodbye Ankh,” said the sergeant morosely. “Usually we can shut the city gates, right? But there’s hardly more’n a few feet of water in the river.”

“You flood the city just to put out fires?” said Angua.

“Yep.”

“Another thing,” said Nobby. “People threw stuff at me!”

Carrot had been staring at the wall. Now he produced a small, battered black book from his pocket, and started to thumb through the pages.

“Tell me,” he said, in a slightly distant voice, “has there been an irretrievable breakdown of law and order?”

“Yeah. For about five hundred years,” said Colon. “Irretrievable breakdown of law’n’order is what Ankh-Morpork is all about.”

“No, I mean more than usual. It’s important.” Carrot turned a page. His lips moved silently as he read.

“Throwing stuff at me sounds like a breakdown in law and order,” said Nobby.

He was aware of their expressions.

“I don’t think we could make that stick,” said Colon.

“It stuck all right,” said Nobby, “
and
some of it went down my shirt.”

“Why throw things at you?” said Angua.

“It’s ’cos I was a Watchman,” said Nobby. “The dwarfs don’t like the Watch ’cos of Mr. Hammerhock, and the trolls don’t like the Watch ’cos of Coalface being arrested, and people don’t like the Watch ’cos of all these angry dwarfs and trolls around.”

Someone thumped at the door.

“That’s probably an angry mob right now,” said Nobby.

Carrot opened the door.

“It’s not an angry mob,” he announced.

“Ook.”

“It’s an orangutan carrying a stunned dwarf followed by a troll. But he is quite angry, if that’s any help.”

Lady Ramkin’s butler, Willikins, had filled him a big bath. Hah! Tomorrow it’d be his butler, and his bath.

And this wasn’t one of the old hip baths, drag-it-in-front-of-the-fire jobs, no. The Ramkin mansion collected water off the roof into a big cistern, after straining out the pigeons, and then it was heated by an ancient geyser
^*
and flowed along drumming, groaning lead pipes to a pair of mighty brass taps and then into an enamelled tub. There were things laid out on a fluffy towel beside it—huge scrubbing brushes, three kinds of soap, a loofah.

Willikins was standing patiently beside the bath, like a barely heated towel rail.

“Yes?” said Vimes.

“His lordship…that is, her ladyship’s father…he required to have his back scrubbed,” said Willikins.

“You go and help the old geyser stoke the furnace,” said Vimes firmly.

Left alone, he struggled out of his breastplate and threw it in the corner. The chainmail shirt followed it, and the helmet, and the money pouch, and various leather and cotton oddments that came between a Watchman and the world.

And then he sank, gingerly at first, into the suds.

“Try soap. Soap’ll work,” said Detritus.

“Hold still, will you?” said Carrot.

“You’re twisting my head off!”

“Go on, soap him head.”

“Soap your own head!”

There was a
thung
noise and Cuddy’s helmet came free.

Cuddy emerged, blinking, into the light. He focused on the Librarian, and growled.

“He hit me on the
head
!”

“Oook.”

“He says you came up through the floor,” said Carrot.

“That’s no reason to hit me on the
head
.”

“Some of the things that come up through the floor at Unseen University don’t even have a head,” said Carrot.

“Oook!”

“Or they have hundreds. Why were you digging down there?”

“We weren’t digging down. We were digging up…”

Carrot sat and listened. He interrupted only twice.

“
Shot
at you?”

“Five time,” said Detritus, happily. “Have to report damage to breastplate but not to backplate on account of fortunately my body got in way, saving valuable city property worth three dollars.”

Carrot listened some more.

“Sewers?” he said, eventually.

“It’s like the whole city, underground. We saw crowns and stuff carved on the walls.”

Carrot’s eyes sparkled. “That means they must date right back to the days when we had kings! And then when we kept on rebuilding the city we forgot they were down there…”

“Um. That’s not all that’s down there,” said Cuddy. “We…found something.”

“Oh?”

“Something bad.”

“You won’t like it at all,” said Detritus. “Bad, bad, bad. Even worse.”

“We thought it would be best to leave it there,” said Cuddy, “on account of it being Evidence. But you ought to see it.”

“It’s going to upset everything,” said the troll, warming to the part.

“What was it?”

“If we tell you, you say, stupid ethnic people, you pulling my leg off,” said Detritus.

“So you’d better come and see,” said Cuddy.

Sergeant Colon looked at the rest of the Watch.

“All of us?” he said, nervously. “Er. Shouldn’t a couple of senior officers stay up here? In case anything happens?”

“Do you mean in case anything happens up here?” said Angua, tartly. “Or in case anything happens down there?”

“I’ll go with Lance-Constable Cuddy and Lance-Constable Detritus,” said Carrot. “I don’t think anyone else ought to come.”

“But it could be dangerous!” said Angua.

“If I find who’s been shooting at Watchmen,” said Carrot, “it will be.”

Samuel Vimes reached up with a big toe and turned on the hot tap.

There was a respectful knock at the door, and Willikins old-retainer’d in.

“Would sir be wanting anything?”

Vimes thought about it.

“Lady Ramkin said you wouldn’t be wanting any alcohol,” said Willikins, as if reading his thoughts.

“Did she?”

“Emphatically, sir. But I have here a very fine cigar.”

He winced as Vimes bit the end off and spat it over the side of the bath, but produced some matches and lit it for him.

“Thank you, Willikins. What’s your first name?”

“First name, sir?”

“I mean, what do people call you when they’ve got to know you better?”

“Willikins, sir.”

“Oh, Right, then. Well. You may go, Willikins.”

“Yes, sir.”

Vimes lay back in the warm water. The inner voice was still in there somewhere, but he tried not to pay any attention. About now, it was saying, you’d be proceeding along the Street of Small Gods, just by the bit of old city wall where you could stop and smoke a rollup out of the wind…

To drown it out, he started to sing at the top of his voice.

The cavernous sewers under the city echoed with human and near-human voices for the first time in millennia.

“Hi-ho—”

“—hi-ho—”

“Oook oook oook oook ook—”

“You all
stupid
!”

“I can’t help it. It’s my nearly-dwarfish blood. We just like singing underground. It comes naturally to us.”

“All right, but why
him
singing? Him
ape
.”

“He’s a people person.”

They’d brought torches. Shadows jumped among the pillars in the big cavern, and fled along the tunnels. Whatever the possible lurking dangers, Carrot was beside himself with the joy of discovery.

“It’s amazing! The Via Cloaca is mentioned in some old book I read, but everyone thought it was a lost street! Superb workmanship. Lucky for you the river was so low. It looks as though these are normally full of water.”

“That’s what I said,” said Cuddy. “Full of water, I said.”

He glanced cautiously at the dancing shadows, which made weird and worrying shapes on the far wall—strange biped animals, eldritch underground things…

Carrot sighed.

“Stop making shadow pictures, Detritus.”

“Oook.”

“What him say?”

“He said ‘Do Deformed Rabbit, it’s my favorite’,” Carrot translated.

Rats rustled in the darkness. Cuddy peered around. He kept imagining figures, back there, sighting along some kind of pipe…

There were a disturbing few moments when he lost sight of the tracks on the wet stone, but he picked them up again near a mold-hung wall. And then, there was the particular pipe. He’d made a scratch on the stones.

“It’s not far along,” he said, handing Carrot the torch.

Carrot disappeared.

They heard his footsteps in the mud, and then a whistle of surprise, and then silence for a while.

Carrot reappeared.

“My word,” he said. “You two know who this is?”

“It
looks
like—” Cuddy began.

“It looks like trouble,” said Carrot.

“You see why we didn’t bring it back up?” said Cuddy. “Carrying a human’s corpse through the streets right now would not be a good idea, I thought. Especially this one.”

“I thought some of that, too,” Detritus volunteered.

“Right enough,” said Carrot. “Well done, men. I think we’d better…leave it for now, and come back with a sack later on. And…don’t tell anyone else.”

“Except the sergeant and everyone,” said Cuddy.

“No…not even them. It’d make everyone very…jumpy.”

“Just as you say, Corporal Carrot.”

“We’re dealing with a sick mind here, men.”

Underground light dawned on Cuddy.

“Ah,” he said. “You suspect Corporal Nobbs, sir?”

“This is worse. Come on, let’s get back up.” He looked back toward the big pillar-barred cavern. “Any idea where we are, Cuddy?”

“Could be under the Palace, sir.”

“That’s what I reckoned. Of course, the tunnels go everywhere…”

Carrot’s worried train of thought faltered away on some distant track.

There was water in the sewers, even in this drought. Springs flowed into them, or water filtered down from far above. Everywhere was the drip and splash of water. And cool, cool air.

It would almost be pleasant were it not for the sad, hunched corpse of someone that looked for all the world like Beano the clown.

Vimes dried himself off. Willikins had also laid out a dressing gown with brocade on the sleeves. He put it on, and wandered into his dressing room.

That was another new thing. The rich even had rooms for dressing in, and clothes to wear while you went into the dressing rooms to get dressed.

Fresh clothes had been laid out for him. Tonight there was something dashing in red and yellow…

…
about now he’d be patrolling Treacle Mine Road
…

…and a hat. It had a feather in it.

Vimes dressed himself, and even wore the hat. And he seemed quite normal and composed, until you realized that he avoided meeting his own gaze in the mirror.

The Watch sat around the big table in the guardroom and in deep gloom. They were Off Duty. They’d never really been Off Duty before.