Men-At-Arms

Terry Pratchett

Summary

But what it's got includes Corporal Carrot (technically a dwarf), Lance-constable Cuddy (really a dwarf), Lance-constable Detritus (a troll), Lance-constable Angua (a woman ... most of the time) and Corporal Nobbs (disqualified from the human race for shoving).

And they need all the help they can get. Because there's evil in the air and murder afoot and something very nasty in the streets.

It'd help if it could all be sorted out by noon, because that's when Captain Vimes is officially retiring, handing in his badge and getting married.

And since this is Ankh-Morpork, noon promises to be not just high, but stinking.

Quotes

Carrot stared out of the window again. His big honest forehead wrinkled with effort as he tried to think of something positive to say about Corporal Nobbs.

It was said later that he came under bad influences at this stage. But the secret of the history of Edward d'Eath was that he came under no outside influences at all ... He just came under the influence of himself.

Carrot was two metres tall but he was brought up as a dwarf, and then further up as a human.

And this was right. And it was fate that had let Edward recognize this just when he'd got his Plan. And it was right that it was Fate, and the city would be Saved from its ignoble present by its glorious past. He had the Means, and he had the end. And so on... Edward's thoughts often ran like this.

He could think in italics. Such people need watching.

Preferably from a safe distance.

"I don't mind Telling You that although, I am very happy here I miss the Good Times back Home. Sometimes on my day Off I go and, sit in the Cellar and hit my head with an axe handle but, it is Not the Same."

-- Corporal Carrot gets homesick

Dwarfs are very attached to gold. Any highwayman demanding "Your money or your life" had better bring a folding chair and packed lunch and a book to read while the debate goes on.

It took several minutes for everyone to examine it. They were naturally suspicious people. They were all descendants of people for whom suspicion and paranoia had been prime survival traits.

Because they were all aristocrats. Not one among them did not know the name of his or her great-great-great-grandfather and what embarrassing disease he'd died of.

Young Edward thinks that there is no lake of blood too big to wade through to put a rightful king on a throne, no deed too base in defence of a crown. A romantic, in fact.

"But this man has you mesmerized! I assure you he is flesh and blood, a mere mortal! No-one dares remove him because they th-ink it will make things a little worse for themselves! Ye g-ods!"

His audience looked glum. It was all true, of course ... if you put it that way. And it didn't sound any better coming from a wild-eyed, pompous young man.

"Anyway, I've always been a bit puzzle about that story. What's so hard about pulling a sword out of a stone? The real work's already been done. You ought to make yourself useful and find the man who put the sword in the stone in the first place, eh?"

In fact it did end there, in millions of universes. Edward d'Eath grew older and obsession turned to a sort of bookish insanity of the gloves-with-the-fingers-cut-out and carpet slippers variety, and became an expert on royalty although no-one ever knew this because he seldom left his rooms. Corporal Carrot became Sergeant Carrot and, in the fullness of time, died in uniform aged seventy in an unlikely accident involving an anteater.

In a million universes, Lance-Constables Cuddy and Detritus didn't fall through the hole. In a million universes, Vimes didn't find the pipes. (In one strange but theoretically possible universe the Watch House was redecorated in pastel colours by a freak whirlwind, which also repaired the door latch and did a few other odd jobs around the place.) In a million universes, the Watch failed. In a million universes, this was a very short book.

And visitors [to Ankh-Morpork] say: how does such a big city exist? What keeps it going? Since it's got a river you can chew, where does the drinking water come from? What is, in fact, the basis of its civic economy? How come it, against all probability, works?

Actually, visitors don't often say this. They usually say things like "Which way to the, you know, the ... er ... you know, the young ladies, right?"

The Patrician of Ankh-Morpork sat back on his austere chair with the sudden bright smile of a very busy person at the end of a crowded day who's suddenly found in his schedule a reminder saying: 7.00-7.05, Be Cheerful and Relaxed and a People Person.

"Try it one more time, Lance-Constable Detritus," he said. "The trick is, you stops your hand just above your ear. Now, just get up off the floor and try salutin' one more time."

Constable Angua had mastered saluting first go. She wouldn't have a full uniform yet, not until someone had taken a, well, let's face it, a breastplate along to old Remitt the armourer and told him to beat it out really well here and here, and no helmet in the world would cover all that mass of ash-blond hair but, it occurred to Carrot, Constable Angua wouldn't need any of that stuff really. People would be queuing up to get arrested.

"Sergeant Colon," said Angua. "He was the fat one, yes?"

"That's right."

"Why has he got a pet monkey?"

"Ah," said Carrot, "I think it is Corporal Nobbs to whom you refer..."

Mr. Flannel looked Angua up and down. Men seldom missed the opportunity.

"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."

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?

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

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.

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

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 [the swamp dragons'] habit of exploding violently when angry, excited, frightened or merely plain bored is a developed survival trait to discourage predators. Eat dragons, it proclaims, and you'll have a case of indigestion to which the term "blast radius" will be appropriate.

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.

"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.

"Worst thief in the world," he said.

"He doesn't look that good," said Angua.

"No, I mean the worst," said Colon. "As in 'not good at it'."

"Remember when he was going to go all the way up to Dunnmanifestin to steal the Secret of Fire from the gods?" said Nobby.

"And I said, 'but we've got it, Here'n'now, we've had it for thousands of years,'" said Carrot. "And he said, 'that's right, so it has antique value.'"

Fingers-Mazda, the first thief in the world, stole fire from the gods. But he was unable to fence it. It was too hot. [Footnote: He got really burned on that deal.]

"Dwarfs and trolls get along like a house on fire," said Nobby. "Ever been in a burning house, miss?"

To understand why dwarfs and trolls don't like each other you have to go back a long way. ... Dwarfs make a living by smashing up rocks with valuable minerals in them and the silicon-based lifeform known as trolls are, basically, rocks with valuable minerals in them. In the wild they also spend most of the daylight hours dormant, and that's not a situation a rock containing valuable minerals needs to be in when there are dwarfs around. And dwarfs hate trolls because, after you've just found an interesting seam of valuable minerals, you don't like rocks that suddenly stand up and tear your arm off because you've just stuck a pick-axe in their ear.

[Dwarfs and trolls] get along like chalk and cheese. Very like chalk and cheese, really. One is organic, the other isn't, and also smells a bit cheesy.

The Battle of Koom Valley is the only one known to history where both sides ambushed each other.

"Don't worry, miss," said Colon. "He--"

"Lance-Constable," said Angua.

"What?"

"Lance-Constable," she repeated. "Not miss. Carrot says I don't have any sex while I'm on duty."

Carrot often struck people as simple. And he was.

Where people went wrong was thinking that simple meant the same thing as stupid.

"I could take you with one hand tied behind my back!"

"You get opportunity! I tie BOTH hands behind you back!"

Sergeant Colon had been happily married for years, perhaps because he and his wife arranged their working lives so that they only met occassionally, normally on the doorstep. But she left him decent meals in the oven, and there was clearly something there; they'd got grandchildren, even, so obviously there had been times when they'd been unable to avoid each other.

[Corporal Nobbs] was said to have the body of a twenty-five year old, although no-one knew where he kept it.

The point was that everyone else had someone, even if in Nobby's case it was probably against their will.

And then her gaze met that of a small, non-descript mongrel dog watching her very intently from under a cart. In fact non-descript was not what it was. It was very easy to descript. It looked like halitosis with a wet nose.

"Hah! Your uniform doesn't scare me," [the Assassin] said.

Vimes looked down at his battered breastplate and worn mail.

"You're right," he said. "This is not a scary uniform. I'm sorry. Forward, Corporal Carrot and Lance-Constable Detritus."

The Assassin was suddenly aware of the sunlight being blocked out.

"Now these, I think you'll agree," said Vimes, from somewhere behind the eclipse, "are scary uniforms."

[The Assassin] had, tucked away in his exquisitely tailored black clothes, at least eighteen devices for killing people, but he was becoming aware that Lance-Constable Detritus had one on the end of each of his arms. Closer, as it were, to hand.

Vimes would be the first to admit that he wasn't a good copper, but he'd probably be spared the chore because lots of other people would happily admit it for him.

"The cook always does a mixed grill of a Wednesday night. No-one ever eats the black pudding. So it's round the kitchens, see, woof woof, beg beg, who's a good boy then, look at the little bugger, he looks as though he understands every word I'm sayin', let's see what we've got here for a good doggy..."

He looked embarrassed for a moment.

"Pride is all very well, but a sausage is a sausage," he said.

...Assassins did have a certain code, after all. It was dishonourable to kill someone if you weren't being paid.

Cheery sporting prints lined the walls [of the Assassins' Guild], although the quarry was not, when you looked closely, stags or foxes.

If you spent any time in Lady Ramkin's company, you soon found out what dragons smelled like. If something put its head in your lap while you were dining, you said nothing, you just kept passing it tidbits and hoped like hell it didn't hiccup.

Vimes: "A monarch's an absolute ruler, right? The head honcho--"
Carrot: "Unless he's a queen."
Vimes: "OK, or the head honchette--"
Carrot: "No, that'd only apply if she was a young woman. Queens tend to be older. She'd have to be a ... a honcharina? No, that's for very young princesses. No. Um. A honchesa, I think."

If the Creator had said, "Let there be light" in Ankh-Morpork, he'd have got no further because of all the people saying "What colour?"

"The supreme ruler, OK," he said, starting to stroll forward again.

"OK."

"But that's not right, see? One man with the power of life and death."

"But if he's a good man--" Carrot began.

"What? What? OK. OK. Let's believe he's a good man. But his second-in-command -- is he a good man too? You'd better hope so. Because he's the supreme ruler, too, in the name of the king. And the rest of the court... they've got to be good men. Because if just one of them's a bad man the result is bribery and patronage."

...almost all dogs don't talk. Ones that do are merely a statistical error, and can therefore be ignored.

The most dangerous man in the world should be introduced.

He has never, in his entire life, harmed a living creature. He has dissected a few, but only after they were dead, and had marvelled at how well they'd been put together considering it had been done by unskilled labour.

Dissecting people when they were still alive tended to be a priestly preoccupation; they thought mankind had been created by some sort of divine being and wanted to have a closer look at His handiwork.

Many great landscape gardeners have gone down in history and been remembered ... In Ankh-Morpork, there was Bloody Stupid Johnson.

Bloody Stupid "It Might Look A Bit Messy Now But Just You Come Back In Five Hundred Years' Time" Johnson. Bloody Stupid "Look, The Plans Were The Right Way Round When I Drew Them" Johnson. Bloody Stupid Johnson, who had 2,000 tons of earth built into an artificial hillock in front of Quirm Manor because "It'd drive me mad to have to look at a bunch of trees and mountains all day long, how about you?"

The maze was so small that people got lost looking for it.

A great many rulers, good and bad and quite often dead, know what happened; a rare few actually manage, by dint of much effort, to know what's happening. Lord Vetinari considered both types to lack ambition.

That was the thing about death. When it happened to you, you were among the first to know.

There were such things as dwarf gods. Dwarfs were not a naturally religious species, but in a world where pit props could crack without warning and pockets of fire damp could suddenly explode they'd seen the need for gods as the sort of supernatural equivalent of a hard hat. Besides, when you hit your thumb with an eight-pound hammer it's nice to be able to blaspheme. It takes a very special and straong-minded kind of atheist to jump up and down with their hand clasped under their other armpit and shout, "Oh, random-fluctuations-in-the-space-time-continuum!" or "Aaargh, primitive-and-outmoded-concept on a crutch!"

Bjorn: "I believe in reincarnation."
Death: I KNOW.
Bjorn: "I tried to live a good life. Does that help?"
Death: THAT IS NOT UP TO ME. OF COURSE ... SINCE YOU BELIEVE IN REINCARNATION ... YOU'LL BE BJORN AGAIN.

Dwarfs are known for their sense of humour, in a way. People point them out and say: "Those little devils haven't got a sense of humour."

Colon: "Hright, this, men, is your truncheon, also nomenclatured your night stick or baton of office. Hand you will look after hit. You will eat with hit, you will sleep with hit, you--"
Cuddy: "'Scuse me."
Colon: "Yes, pilgrim?"
Cuddy: "How do we eat with it, sergeant?"
Colon: "What?"
Cuddy: "Well, do we use it as a knife or a fork or cut in half for chopsticks or what?"
Colon: "What are you talking about?"
Angua: "Excuse me, sergeant?"
Colon: "What is it, Lance-Constable Angua?"
Angua: "How exactly do we sleep with it, sir?"

"Forward, Lance-Constable Angua. Tell me, Lance-Constable, do you think you could kill a man?"

"How long will I have?"

There was a pause while they picked up Corporal Nobbs and patted him on the back until he settled down.

"We're dealing here," said Vimes, "with a twisted mind."

"Oh, no! You think so?"

"Yes."

"But ... no ... you can't be right. Because Nobby was with us all the time."

"There's stranger people in this world than Corporal Nobbs, my lad."

Carrot's expression slid into a rictus of intrigued horror.

By the time [Cuddy] reached the virginal target he was a blur. There was a rip and the dummy exploded like a nuclear haystack.

The other two wandered up and inspected the result, as pieces of chaff gently drifted to the ground.

"Yes, all right," said Angua. "But he did say you're supposed to be able to ask them questions afterwards."

"He didn't say they've got to be able to answer them," said Cuddy grimly.

"You know," said Detritus, after a while, "that look like that dwarf who make weapons in Rime Street."

"Bjorn Hammerhock?" said Cuddy.

"That the one, yeah."

"It looks a bit like him," Cuddy conceded, still talking in a cold flat voice, "but not exactly like him."

"What d'you mean?" said Angua.

"Because Mr. Hammerhock," said Cuddy, "didn't have such a great big hole where his chest should be."

The Guard seldom drank in Ankh-Morpork's more cheerful taverns when they were off duty. It was too easy to see something that would put them back on duty again.

No-one drinks like a copper who has seen too much to stay sober.

Murder was in fact a fairly uncommon event in Ankh-Morpork, but there were a lot of suicides. Walking in the night-time alleyways of The Shades was suicide. Asking for a short in a dwarf bar was suicide. Saying "Got rocks in your head?" to a troll was suicide. You could commit suicide very easily, if you weren't careful.

"That's three beers, one milk, one molten sulphur on coke with phosphoric acid--"

"With umbrella in it," said Detritus.

"--and A Slow Comfortable Double-Entendre with lemonade."

"With a fruit salad in it," said Nobby.

Carrot: "Can't go thieving in Ankh-Morpork without a [Thieves'] Guild permit. Not unless you've got a special talent."
Angua: "Why? What happens? What talent?"
Carrot: "Well, like being able to survive being hung upside down from one of the gates with your ears nailed to your knees."

Very slowly, like a mighty sequoia beginning the first step towards resurrection as a million Save The Trees leaflets, Detritus toppled backwards with his mug still in his hand.

"Don't stick your nose where someone can pull it off and eat it."

A survey by the Ankh-Morpork Guild of Merchants of tradespeople in the dock areas of Ankh-Morpork found 987 women who gave their profession as "seamstress." Oh ... and two needles.

Had your husband any enemies? Yes, someone put a huge great hole in him, but apart from that, did he have any enemies?

[Vimes had] faced trolls and dwarfs and dragons, but now he was having to meet an entirely new species. The rich.

Angua: "You're asking for a bite."
Gaspode: "Oh, yeah. Yeah, you'll bite me. Aaargh. Oh, yes, that'll really worry me, that will. I mean, think about it. I've got so many dog diseases I'm only alive 'cos the little buggers are too busy fighting among 'emselves. I mean, I've even got Licky End, and you only get that if you're a pregnant sheep. Go on. Bite me. Change my life. Every time there's a full moon, suddenly I grow hair and yellow teeth and have to go around on all fours. Yes, I can see that making a big difference to my ongoing situation. Actually, I'm definitely on a losing streak in the hair department, so maybe a, you know, not the whole bite, maybe just a nibble--"

[Vimes] hated being sober. It meant he started to think. One of the thoughts jostling for space was that there was no such thing as a humble opinion.

Owning a hundred slum properties wasn't a crime, although living in one was, almost... If you had enough money, you could hardly commit crimes at all. You just perpetrated amusing little peccadilloes.

...ten thousand dwarfs eating continuously with knife, fork and shovel wouldn't make a dent in Ankh-Morpork's rat population. It was a major feature in dwarfish letters back home: come on, everyone, and bring the ketchup.

"You know," Vimes shook his head, "you know, that's what's so damn annoying, isn't it? The way they can be so incapable of any rational thought and so bloody shrewd at the same time."

-- Skewering racism

Sybil: "I can't stand the man, actually. But you were making him look foolish."
Vimes: "He was making himself look foolish. I was merely helping."

Carrot: "Every dwarf is buried with a weapon. You know? To take with him to... wherever he's going."
Vimes: "But it's fine workmanship! And it's got an edge like-- aargh -- like a razor."
Carrot: "Of course. It'd be no good him facing them with an inferior weapon."
Vimes: "What them are you talking about?"
Carrot: "Anything bad he encounters on his journey after death."
Vimes: "Ah.... I thought dwarfs didn't believe in devils and demons and stuff like that."
Carrot: "That's true, but ... we're not sure if they know."

They proceeded to the Brass Bridge, quite slowly, because Carrot cheerfully acknowledged everyone they met. Hard-edged ruffians, whose normal response to a remark from a Watchman would be genteelly paraphrased by a string of symbols generally found on the top row of a typewriter's keyboard, would actually smile awkwardly and mumble something harmless in response to his hearty, "Good evening, Masher! Mind how you go!"

Vimes: "Do you think there's such a thing as a criminal mind?"
Carrot: "What ... you mean like ... Mr. Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler, sir?"
Vimes: "He's not a criminal."
Carrot: "You have eaten one of his pies, sir?"

There were people who'd steal money from people. Fair enough. That was just theft. But there were people who, with one easy word, would steal the humanity from people. That was something else.

Doctrine of signatures, thought Vimes. That's what the herbalists call it. It's like the gods put a "Use Me" label on plants. If a plant looks like a part of the body, it's good for ailments peculiar to that part. There's teethwort for teeth, spleenwort for... spleens, eyebright for eyes... there's even a toadstool called Phallus impudicus, and I don't know what that's for but Nobby is a big man for mushroom omelettes.

The river Ankh is probably the only river in the universe on which the investigators can chalk the outline of the corpse.

The Alchemist's Guild is opposite the Gambler's Guild. Usually. Sometimes it's above it, or below it, or falling in bits around it.

In fact, trolls traditionally count like this: one, two, three... many, and people assume this means they can have no grasp of higher numbers. They don't realize that many can be a number. As in: one, two, three, many, many-one, many-two, many-three, many many, many-many-one, many-many-two, many-many-three, many many many, many-many-many-one, many-many-many-two, many-many-many-three, LOTS.

"Haven't you ever seen his portrait of the Mona Ogg? ... The teeth followed you around the room. Amazing. In fact some people say they followed them out of the room and all the way down the street."

[The knocker] was shaped like a pair of artificial breasts, the sort that are highly amusing to rugby players and anyone whose sense of humour has been surgically removed.

The rooftops of the Assassins' Guild adjoined the Fools' Guild. It didn't do to upset neighbours like that, especially when the only weapon you had was a custard pie edged with short-crust pastry.

The jesters, jokers and clowns were going about their business, getting stuck in doorways along the way. There was much pushing and shoving and honking of noses and falling of prats. It was a scene to make a happy man slit his wrists on a fine spring morning.

The point of clowns was that, after watching them, anything else that happened seemed enjoyable. It was nice to know there was someone worse off than you. Someone had to be the butt of the world.

At least the Assassins were supposed to be unpleasant. Clowns, were only one step away from mime artists, too.

"Well, Nobby, you're what I might call a career soldier, right?"

"'s'right, Fred."

"How many dishonourable discharges have you had?"

"Lots," said Nobby, proudly. "But I always puts a poultice on 'em."

In many a faraway battlefield the last thing many a mortally wounded foeman ever saw was Corporal Nobbs heading towards him with a sack, a knife and a calculating expression.

Nobby: "You been reading books again, Fred?"
Colon: "Got to improve my mind, Nobby. It's these new recruits. Carrot's got his nose in a book half the time, Angua knows words I has to look up, even the shortarse is brighter'n me. They keep on extracting the urine. I'm definitely a bit under-endowed in the head department."
Nobby: "You're brighter than Detritus."
Colon: "That's what I tell myself. I say, 'Fred, whatever happens, you're brighter than Detritus.' But then I say, 'Fred ... so's yeast.'"

Clothes! That was always the trouble! At least a male werewolf only had to worry about a pair of shorts and pretend he'd been on a brisk run.

...Mrs. Cake had a very understanding approach to people who lived slightly unusual lives and had, for example, an aversion to garlic.

Vimes smiled. Someone was trying to kill him, and that made him feel more alive than he had done for days.

And they were also slightly less intelligent than he was. This is a quality you should always pray for in your would-be murderer.

Phrenology, as everyone knows, is a way of reading someone's character, aptitude and abilities by examining the bumps and hollows on their head. Therefore -- according to the kind of logical thinking that characterizes the Ankh-Morpork mind -- it should be possible to mould someone's character by giving them carefully graded bumps in the right places. You can go to a shop and order an artistic temperament with a tendency to introspection and a side order of hysteria. What you actually get is hit on the head with a selection of different size mallets, but it creates employment and keeps the money in circulation, and that's the main thing.

Patient: "Bit odd, going after interesting rare butterflies with a crossbow."
Zorgo: "Dunno. I suppose it stops them creating all these damn thunderstorms."

"It's Oggham," said Carrot. "An ancient and poetic runic script whose origins are lost in the mists of time but it's thought to have been invented even before the Gods."

"Gosh. What does it say?"

Carrot really cleared his throat this time.

"Soss, egg, beans and rat 12p
Soss, rat and fried slice 10p
Cream-cheese rat 9p
Rat and beans 8p
Rat and ketchup 7p
Rat 4p"

"Why does ketchup cost almost as much as the rat?" said Angua.

"Have you tried rat without ketchup?" said Carrot.

Not to be confused with the Scottish Clootie Dumpling, which is a kind of suet pudding filled with fruit. The Ankh-Morpork version sits on the tongue like the finest meringue, and on the stomach like a concrete bowling ball.

...it is possible that the strangest, and possibly saddest, species on Discworld is the hermit elephant. This creature, lacking the thick hide of its near relatives, lives in huts, moving up and building extensions as its size increases. It's not unknown for a traveller on the plains of Howondaland to wake up in the morning in the middle of a village that wasn't there the night before.

For every murder solved by the careful discovery of a vital footprint or a cigarette end, a hundred failed to be resolved because the wind blew some leaves the wrong way or it didn't rain the night before. So many crimes are solved by a happy accident -- by the random stopping of a car, by an overheard remark, by someone of the right nationality happening to be within five miles of the scene of the crime without an alibi...

"And this," said Corporal Carrot, "is the famous commemorative arch celebrating the Battle of Crumhorn. We won it, I think. It's got over ninety statues of famous soldiers. It's something of a landmark."

"Should have put up a stachoo to the accountants," said a doggy voice behind Angua. "First battle in the universe where the enemy were persuaded to sell their weapons."

"I'm afraid that for Mr. [Bloody Stupid] Johnson accurate measurements were something that happened to other people... He also did the Quirm Memorial, the Hanging Gardens of Ankh, and the Colossus of Morpork," said Carrot.

"The Colossus of Morpork?" said Angua.

Mr. Scant held up a skinny finger. "Ah," he said, "Don't go away." He started to pat his pockets. "Got 'im here somewhere."

Angua: "Didn't the man ever design anything useful?"
Carrot: "Well, he did design an ornamental cruet set for Mad Lord Snapcase."
Angua: "He got that right?"
Carrot: "Not exactly. But here's an interesting fact, four families live in a salt shaker and we use the pepper pot for storing grain."

She vaguely suspected that Carrot was trying to court her. But, instead of the usual flowers or chocolate, he seemed to be trying to gift-wrap a city.

You expected [Carrot] any moment to break into the kind of song that has suspicious rhymes and phrases like "my kind of town" and "I wanna be a part of it" in it; the kind of song where people dance in the street and give the singer apples and join in and a dozen lowly matchgirls suddenly show amazing choreo-graphical ability and everyone acts like cheery lovable citizens instead of the murderous, evil-minded, self-centred individuals they suspect themselves to be.

Angua knelt beside the body. It was very clearly a body now. It certainly wasn't a person. A person normally had more head on their shoulders.

For once, Angua noted, someone wasn't surprised to find a female in the Watch. Queen Molly nodded at her as one working woman to another. The Beggar's Guild was an equal-opportunity non-employer.

"You know," said Cuddy, subjecting the troll to a long critical stare, "you might not be as stupid as you look. This is not hard. Let's think about this. I mean... I'll think about this, and you can join in when you know the words."

"If you can count to two, you can count to anything!"

Sham Harga's coffee was like molten lead, but it had this in its favour: when you'd drunk it, there was this overwhelming feeling of relief that you'd got to the bottom of the cup.

Vimes: "I mean I've drunk a lot of bad coffee in my time but that, that was like having a saw dragged across my tongue. How long'd it been boiling?"
Harga: "What's today's date?"
Vimes: "August the fifteenth."
Harga: "What year?"

Sham Harga had run a succesful eatery for many years by always smiling, never extending credit, and realizing that most of his customers wanted meals properly balanced between the four food groups: sugar, starch, grease and burnt crunchy bits.

"I'd like a couple of eggs," said Vimes, "with the yolks really hard but the whites so runny that they drip like treacle. And I want bacon, that special bacon all covered with bony nodules and dangling bits of fat. And a slice of fried bread. The kind that makes your arteries go clang just by looking at it."

"Tough order," said Harga.

"You managed it yesterday."

Vimes: "And give me some more coffee. Black as midnight on a moonless night."
Harga: "How black's that, then?"
Vimes: "Oh, pretty damn black, I should think."
Harga: "Not necessarily."
Vimes: "What?"
Harga: "You get more stars on a moonless night. Stands to reason. They show up more. It can be quite bright on a moonless night."
Vimes: "An overcast moonless night?"
Harga: "Cumulus or cirro-nimbus?"

"Stop! In the name of the law!"

"What the law's name, then?"

Cuddy had only been a guard for a few days, but already he had absorbed one important and basic fact: it is almost impossible for anyone to be in a street without breaking the law.

It occurred briefly to him that anyone not making a dash for it when they saw Detritus knuckling along at high speed behind them was probably guilty of contravening the Being Bloody Stupid Act of 1581.

"Captain Vimes, this herewith is the chronicle of me, Lance-Constable Cvddy. Bright was the morning and high ovr hearts when we proceeded to the Alchemists Gvild, where events eventvated as I shall now sing. These inclvded exploding balls. As to the qvest vpon which we were sent, we were informed that the attached piece of paper [attached] is in the handwriting of Leonard of Qvirm, who vanished in mysteriovs circvmstances. It is how to make a powder called No. 1 powder, which is vsed in fireworks. Mr Silverfish the alchemist says any alchemists knows it. Also, in the margin of the paper, is a drawing of The Gonne, becavse I asked my covsin Grabpot abovt Leonard and he vsed to sell paints to Leonard and he recognized the writing and said Leonard always wrote backwards becavse he was a genivs. I have copied same herewith."

-- Dwarf police report

Six little pipes, six shots. And you could carry a pocketful of these things. You could shoot further, faster, more accurately than anyone else with any other kind of weapon ... And a few senior Assassins would know about it. They'd pass on the secret: beware of things like this...

Unlicensed thieves had nothing to fear from the Watch, since they'd saved up all their fear for the Thieves' Guild.

The axiom "Honest men have nothing to fear from the police" is currently under review by the Axioms Appeal Board.

...a sense of named dread, which is much more specific and terrifying than nameless dread, was stealing over Cuddy. It was similar to the feeling you get when you're playing a high stakes game and your opponent suddenly grins and you realize that you don't know all the rules but you do know you'll be lucky to get out of this with, if you are very fortunate, your shirt.

The extremely low temperatures are caused by the imbalance in the temporal energy flow. At least, that's what the wizards in the High Energy Magic building say. And they've got proper pointy hats and letters after their name, so they know what they're talking about.

From the back, Vetinari looked like a carnivorous flamingo.

Carrot read books in his spare time. Not well. He'd have real difficulty if you cut his index finger off.

"I do believe," said Detritus, "that I am genuinely cogitating. How very interesting!"

Dwarfs were easy enough to cater for. Rat-on-a-stick was simple enough, although it meant a general improvement in Dibbler's normal catering standards.

He'd sought advice about troll food from Chrysoprase, who was also a troll, although you'd hardly know it any more, he'd been around humans so long he wore a suit now and, as he said, had learned all kindsa civilized things, like extortion, money-lending at 300 per cent interest per month, and stuff like that.

Dibbler liked to think of Chrysoprase as a friend; you'd hate to think of him as an enemy.

The chances of a human being eating anything off Dibbler's barrow unless it was stamped flat and pushed under the door after two weeks on a starvation diet was, by now, remote.

"Dolomitic conglomerates! Get chore dolomitic conglomerates heeyar! Manganese nodules! Manganese nodules! Get them while they're... uh... nodule-shaped." He hesitated a bit, and then rallied. "Pumice! Pumice! Tufa a dollar! Roast limestones--"

-- Troll catering

C.M.O.T. Dibbler had a number of bad points, but species prejudice was not one of them. He liked anyone who had money, regardless of the colour and shape of the hand that was proffering it. For Dibbler believed in a world where a sapient creature could walk tall, breathe free, pursue life, liberty and happiness, and step out towards the bright new dawn. If they could be persuaded to gobble something off Dibbler's hot-food tray at the same time, this was all to the good.

"Hole food! Hole food! Rat! Rat! Rat-onna-stick! Rat-in-a-bun! Get them while they're dead! Get chore--"

There was a crash of glass above him, and Lance-Constable Cuddy landed head first in the tray.

"There's no need to rush, plenty for everyone," said Dibbler.

"Pull me out," said Cuddy, in a muffled voice. "Or pass me the ketchup."

Leonard of Quirm knew about inspirations. One of his earliest inventions was an earthed metal nightcap, worn in the hope that the damn things would stop leaving their white-hot trails across his tortured imagination. It seldom worked. He knew the shame of waking up to find the sheets covered with nocturnal sketches of unfamiliar siege engines and novel designs for apple-peeling machines.

Leonard: "People are searching for it, I trust?"
Vetinari: "The Assassins are. But they won't find it. They don't think the right way."
Leonard: "Oh, dear."
Vetinari: "So I am relying on the Watch."
Leonard: "This would be the Captain Vimes you have spoken of."
Vetinari: "Yes."
Leonard: "I hope you have impressed upon him the importance of the task."
Vetinari: "In a way. I've absolutely forbidden him to undertake it. Twice."

Detritus was considered moronic even by city troll standards. But that was simply because his brain was naturally optimized for a temperature seldom reached in Ankh-Morpork even during the coldest winter...

Now his brain was nearing its ideal temperature of operation. Unfortunately, this was pretty close to a troll's optimum point of death.

Part of his brain gave some thought to this. There was a high probability of rescue. That meant he'd have to leave. That meant he'd become stupid again, as sure as

10^-3(M_e/M_p)α⁶α^½ - N ≈ 10N.

The inner walls of the warehouse were covered with numbers. Equations as complex as a neural network had been scraped in the frost. At some point in the calculation the mathematician had changed from using numbers to using letters, and then letters themselves hadn't been sufficient; brackets like cages enclosed expressions which were to normal mathematics what a city is to a map.

Cuddy was being too nice. When a dwarf was nice like that, it meant he was saving up to be nasty later on.

"I count to ten," said Detritus. "Then any troll not going about that troll's business, he a sorry troll."

"You Detritus," said a particularly wide troll. "Everyone know you stupid troll, you join Watch because stupid troll, you can't count to--"

Wham.

"One," said Detritus. "Two... Tree. Four-er... Five. Six..."

"What you think humans say, eh? On, them ethnic, them don't know how to behave in big city, go around waving clubs at the drop of a thing you wear on head."

"What would Corporal Carrot do at a time like this?" said Cuddy.

"He say, you bad people, make me angry, you stop toot sweet."

"And then they'd go away, right?"

"Yeah."

"What would happen if we tried that?"

"We look in gutter for our heads."

"Where this [alley] go?"

"It goes away from the people chasing us!"

Angua: "'C.M.O.T. Dibbler's Genuine Authentic Soggy Mountain Dew.' He's going to die! It says, 'One hundred and fifty per cent proof'!"
Nobby: "Nah, that's just old Dibbler's advertising. It ain't got no proof. Just circumstantial evidence."

"How many fingers am I holding up?"

"Mm?"

How many hands, then?"

"He only drinks when he gets depressed," said Carrot.

"Why does he get depressed?"

"Sometimes it's because he hasn't had a drink."

Klatchian coffee has an even bigger sobering effect than an unexpected brown envelope from the tax man. In fact, coffee enthusiasts take the precaution of getting thoroughly drunk before touching the stuff, because Klatchian coffee takes you back through sobriety and, if you're not careful, out the other side, where the mind of man should not go.

Here and there huge patches of fungi, luminous with decay, cast a faint glow over the ancient stonework.

[Footnote: It didn't need to. Cuddy, belonging to a race that worked underground for preference, and Detritus, a member of a race notoriously nocturnal, had excellent vision in the dark. But mysterious caves and tunnels always have luminous fungi, strangely bright crystals or at a pinch merely an eldritch glow in the air, just in case a human hero comes in and needs to see in the dark. Strange but true.]

"I worked for my brother-in-law, Durance. He's got a good business making fortune rats for dwarf restaurants. But I thought, this isn't a proper job for a dwarf."

"Sound like easy job to me."

"I had the devil of a time getting them to swallow the fortunes."

"In Ankh-Morpork even the shit have a street to itself," said Detritus, awe and wonder in his voice. "Truly, this a land of opportunity."

-- Welcome to the sewers

"Mayonnaise Quirke, we used to call him," said Colon. "He's a pillock."

"Don't tell me," said Angua. "He's rich, thick, and oily, yes?"

"And smells faintly of eggs," said Carrot.

In this he was echoing the Patrician's view of crime and punishment. If there was crime, there should be punishment. If the specific criminal should be involved in the punishment process then this was a happy accident, but if not then any criminal would do, and since everyone was undoubtedly guilty of something, the net result was that, in general terms, justice was done.

Quirke wasn't actually a bad man. He didn't have the imagination. He dealt more in that sort of generalized low-grade unpleasantness which slightly tarnishes the soul of all who come into contact with it. [Footnote: Rather like British Rail.]

There was, on the whole, no real racial prejudice in Ankh-Morpork; when you've got dwarfs and trolls, the mere colour of other humans is not a major item. But Quirke was the kind of man to whom it comes naturally to pronounce the word negro with two gs.

And it also seemed to Angua that although words like halfpint and gritsucker were offensive, they were as terms of universal brotherhood compared to words like "people of their type" in the mouth of men like Quirke.

"It's a long way up," Cuddy said doubtfully.

"But we know the way," said Detritus. "It's either that, or stay down here eating rat for rest of your life."

Cuddy hesitated. The idea had a certain appeal...

"Without ketchup," Detritus added.

"I think I saw a fallen stone just a way back there," said the dwarf.

Captain Quirke looked around the Watch room with the air of one who was doing the scenery a favour by glancing at it.

Consider orang-utans.

In all the worlds graced by their presence, it is suspected that they can talk but choose not to do so in case humans put them to work, possibly in the television industry. In fact they can talk. It's just that they talk in Orang-utan. Humans are only capable of listening in Bewilderment.

The Librarian of Unseen University had unilaterally decided to aid comprehension by producing an Orang-utan/Human Dictionary. He'd been working on it for three months.

It wasn't easy. He'd got as far as "Oook".

[Footnote: Which can mean ... well ... meanings include: "Pardon me, you're hanging from my rubber ring, thank you so very much," "It may be just vital biomass oxygenating the planet to you, but it's home to me," and "I'm sure there was a rainforest around here a moment ago."]

"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!"

The Librarian was, of course, very much in favour of reading in general, but readers in particular got on his nerves. There was something, well, sacreligious 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.

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.

Carrot: "Tell me, has there been an irretrievable breakdown of law and order?"
Colon: "Yeah. For about five hundred years. Irretrievable breakdown of law'n'order is what Ankh-Morpork is all about."
Carrot: "No, I mean more than usual. It's important."
Nobby: "Throwing stuff at me sounds like a breakdown in law and order."
Colon: "I don't think we could make that stick."
Nobby: "It stuck all right, and some of it went down my shirt."

"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."

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."

Carrot: "We're dealing with a sick mind here, men."
Cuddy: "Ah. You suspect Corporal Nobbs, sir?"

Nobby: "What say we have a game of cards?"
Colon: "You won everyone's wages off them yesterday."
Nobby: "Now's the chance to win 'em back, then."
Colon: "Yeah, but there were five kings in your hand, Nobby."

"Nah, [the king] pulled a sword out of a stone," said Nobby.

"How'd he know it was in there, then?" Colon demanded.

"It... it was sticking out, wasn't it?"

"Where anyone could've grabbed it? In this town?"

"Only the rightful king could do it, see," said Nobby.

"Oh, right," said Colon. "I understand. Oh, yes. So what you're saying is, someone'd decided who the rightful king was before he pulled it out? Sounds like a fix to me. Prob'ly someone had a fake hollow stone and some dwarf inside hanging on the other end with a pair of pliers until the right guy came along--"

"A night watchman in crappy armor is about your métier," said Colon, who looked around proudly to see if anyone had noticed the slanty thing over the e.

[Carrot] could lead armies, Angua thought. ... Not because he dreams about marching hordes, or world domination, or an empire of a thousand years. Just because he thinks that everyone's really decent underneath and would get along just fine if only they made the effort, and he believes that so strongly it burns like a flame which is bigger than he is. He's got a dream and we're all part of it, so that it shapes the world around him. And the weird thing is that no-one wants to disappoint him. It'd be like kicking the biggest puppy in the universe.

"You can't trust 'em," said Detritus.

"Who?" said Skully.

"Trolls. Nasty pieces of work in my opinion," said Detritus, with all the conviction of a troll with a badge.

Carrot: "Finally, has there been, in your opinion, rable breakdown of law and order in the city?"
Muldoon: "They turned over Throat Dibbler's barrow and made him eat two of his sausages-inna-bun!"
Colon: "Oh, I say!"
Muldoon: "Without mustard!"
Carrot: "I think we can call that a 'Yes.'"

Dibbler: "They say. You know. They. Everyone. They say the trolls have killed someone up at Dolly Sisters and the dwarfs have smashed up Chalky the troll's all-night pottery and they've broken down the Brass Bridge and--"
Carrot: "You just came over the Brass Bridge."
Dibbler: "Yeah, well ... that's what they say."

"We are armed with the truth. What can harm us if we are armed with the truth?"

"Well, a crossbow bolt can, e.g., go right through your eye and out the back of your head," said Sergeant Colon.

He kicked the door with his steel capped boots, known and feared wherever men were on the floor and in no position to fight back.

"All right, no-one panic, just stop what you're doing, stop what you're doing, please. I'm Corporal Nobbs, Ankh-Morpork City Ordinance Inspection City Audit ... Bureau ... Special ... Audit ... Inspection."

"This little bow scare you?" said Nobby. "No. Right. This is a little bow. A little bow like this wouldn't scare a man like you, because it's such a little bow. It'd need a bigger bow than this to scare a man like you."

Angua would have given a month's pay to see the quartermaster's face from the front. She'd watched as Detritus had lifted down the siege bow, cocked it with one hand and a barely audible grunt, and stepped forward. Now she could imagine the eyeballs swivelling as the coldness of the metal penetrated the back of the armourer's fleshy red neck.

"Now, the one behind you, that's a big bow," said Nobby.

"You wouldn't dare fire that thing in here! That's a siege weapon! It'd go right through the wall!"

"Eventually," said Nobby.

"Oh, wow! A Klatchian fire engine! This is more my meteor! ...And there's oil in the reservoir!" Nobby pumped a handle energetically. "Last I heard, this thing had been banned in eight countries and three religions said they'd excommunicate any soldiers found using it!^* Anyone got a light?"

[Footnote: Five more embraced it as a holy weapon and instructed that it be used on all infidels, heretics, gnostics and people who fidgeted during the sermon.]

Carrot: "You were a quartermaster? In whose army?"
Nobby: "Duke of Pseudopolis, sir."
Carrot: "But Pseudopolis always lost its wars!"
Nobby: "Ah ... well..."

Corporal Nobbs was a kind of mechanical porcupine of blades, bows, points and knobbily things on the ends of chains.

"Swore 'em in, sir," said Detritus. "Used troll oath."

Flint saluted amateurishly.

"He said he'd kick our goohuloog heads in if we didn't join up and do what we're told, sir," he said.

"Very old troll oath," said Detritus.

Carrot stood back. "Now, we don't want people to think we're looking for trouble," he said.

"Oh, dressed like this, sir, we won't have to look for trouble," said Sergeant Colon despondently.

Carrot: "...to start with, we're going to the Fools' Guild to find out why Brother Beano stole the gonne."
Colon: "Did he steal the gonne?"
Carrot: "I think he may have, yes."
Colon: "But he died before the gonne was stolen!"
Carrot: "Yes, I know that."
Colon: "Now that is what I calls an alibi."

Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness.

"It's bad enough barging into Guild property, but we'll get into really serious trouble if we shoot anyone. Lord Vetinari won't stop at sarcasm. He might use" -- Colon swallowed -- "irony."

Sergeant Colon was lost in admiration. He'd seen people bluff on a bad hand, but he'd never seen anyone bluff with no cards.

Nobby: "Er... is it true?"
Cuddy: "What? Oh, yes. Of course. It's nat'ral for a dwarf. Some have got more than others, of course."
Nobby: "That's the case all round."
Cuddy: "I myself, for example, have saved more than seventy-eight dollars."
Nobby: "No! I mean, no. I mean, I don't mean well-endowed with money. I mean..."

-- What they say about dwarfs

"Hang on, lad, you don't know what horrors lie beyond those walls--"

"I'm just having a look to find out."

"It could be a torture chamber or a dungeon or a hideous pit or anything!"

"It's just a student's bedroom, sergeant."

"You see?"

Colon tried to see a message in Carrot's face. He'd got used to simple Carrot. Complicated Carrot was as unnerving as being savaged by a duck.

Angua felt she was beginning to understand the way Carrot asked questions. He asked them by not asking them. He simply told people what he thought or suspected, and they found themselves filling in the details in an attempt to keep up.

Angua leaned against the wall outside [the Fool's Guild]. The air smelled sweeter here, which was an unusual thing to say about Ankh-Morpork air. But at least out here people could laugh without getting paid for it.

Gaspode had a way of turning up silently like a small puff of methane in a crowded room, and with the latter's distressing ability to fill up all available space.

[Colon] was not, as such, a coward. Last year the city had been invaded by a dragon and he'd actually stood on a rooftop and fired arrows at it while it was bearing down on him with its mouth open, although admittedly he'd had to change his underwear afterwards.

Just when she thought she'd been lucky before, she'd found that few men are happy in a relationship where their partner grows hair and howls.

"They say it was only a beggar girl in the Guild."

Well? What of it? She was a target of opportunity. That was not my fault. That was your fault. I am merely the gonne. Gonnes don't kill people. People kill people.

"There's a name that tolls a bell," said Gaspode. "Family used to live up Kingsway. Used to be as rich as Creosote."

"Who was Creosote?"

"Some foreign bugger who was rich."

"...old d'Eath, well, he was sober and clean but lost the rest of the family money on account of having a blind spot when it came to telling the difference between a one and an eleven."

"I can't see how that loses you money."

"It does if you think you can play Cripple Mr. Onion with the big boys."

Gaspode: "You have to put some clothes on when you're human?"
Angua: "Yes."
Gaspode: "Why? I would have thought a nude woman would be at home in any company, no offence meant."

Wolfbane? You didn't need daft old herbs to make your life a problem, if you spent one week every month with two extra legs and four extra nipples.

"What's size got to do with being a dwarf?" Carrot demanded.

"Um ... a lot?" whispered Cuddy.

"Have you got any previous convictions?"

"Well, I dunno... I suppose I used to believe very firmly that a penny saved is a penny earned--"

"You two horrible troll! You raise your hand right now, you repeat troll oath ... I will do what I told--"

"Don't wanna be inna--"

Wham!

"I will do what I told ... otherwise I get my goohuloog head kicked in."

Everyone became aware of a rattling noise. Nobby was spinning the morningstar round and round on the end of its chain, except that because the spiky ball was a very heavy spiky ball, and because the difference between Nobby and a dwarf was species rather than height, it was more a case of both of them orbiting around each other. If he let go, it was an even chance that the target would be hit by a spiky ball or an unexploded Corporal Nobbs. Neither prospect pleased.

Nobby was a terrified blur. When you are swinging a spiky ball on a chain, the only realistic option is to keep moving. Standing still is an interesting but brief demonstration of a spiral in action.

Carrot: "Do you think that comes under the heading of 'minimum necessary force,' sergeant?"
Colon: "Is he still breathing?"
Carrot: "Oh, yes. I pulled the punch."
Colon: "Sounds minimum enough to me, sir."

Being a werewolf meant having the dexterity and jaw power to instantly rip out a man's jugular. It was a trick of her father's that had always annoyed her mother, especially when he did it just before meals.

"Spiritually, all dogs are wolves," said the poodle, "but cynically and cruelly severed from their true destiny by the manipulations of so-called humanity."

-- Radical dog dogma

"That damn troll just happened to save my life today," shouted Cuddy.

"What for?"

"What for? What for? 'Cos it was my life, that's what for! I happen to be very attached to it!"

"You just shut up, Abba Stronginthearm! What do you know about anything, you civilian! Why're you so stupid? Aargh! I'm too short for this shit!"

"Ain't gonna be in no Watch," growled Coalface.

Carrot leaned towards him. "There's a hundred dwarfs over there. With great big axes," he whispered.

Coalface blinked.

"I'll join."

"You listen up good right now! You in the Watch, boy! It a job with opportunity!" said Detritus. "I only been doin' it ten minute and already I get promoted! Also got education and training for a good job in Civilian Street!

"This your club with a nail in it. You will eat it. You will sleep on it! When Detritus say Jump, you say ... what colour! We goin' to do this by the numbers! And I got lotsa numbers!"

"He's mad, isn't he?"

"No, mad's when you froth at the mouf," said Gaspode. "He's insane. That's when you froth at the brain."

The window was resolutely shut.

"But she always leaves it open," Angua whined.

"Must have shut it tonight," said Gaspode. "There's a lot of strange people about."

"But she knows about strange people," said Angua. "Most of them live in her house!"

"And your name, mister?"

"SILAS! CUMBERBATCH!"

"Didn't you used to be town crier?"

"THAT'S RIGHT!"

Colon: "Reminds me of the drill sergeant we had when I was first in the army."
Nobby: "Tough, was he?"
Colon: "Tough? Tough? Blimey! Thirteen weeks of pure misery, that was! Ten-mile run every morning, up to our necks in muck half the time, and him yelling a blue streak and cussin' us every living moment! One time he made me stay up all night cleaning the lavvies with a toothbrush! He'd hit us with a spiky stick to get us out of bed! We had to jump through hoops for that man, we hated his damn guts, we'd have stuck one on him if any of us had the nerve but, of course, none of us did. He put us through three months of living death. But ... y'know ... after the passing-out parade ... us looking at ourselves all in our new uniforms an' all, real soldiers at last, seein' what we'd become ... well, we saw him in the bar, and well ... I don't mind telling you ... Me and Tonker Jackson and Hoggy Spuds waited for him in the alley and beat seven kinds of hell out of him, it took three days for my knuckles to heal. Happy days..."

When you were a Watchman, you were a Watchman all the time, which was a bit of a bargain for the city since it only paid you to be a Watchman for ten hours of every day.

The door was still ajar, but there was a tentative tap on it which said, in a kind of metaphorical morse code, that the tapper could see very well that Carrot was in his room with a scantily clad woman and was trying to knock without actually being heard.

Sergeant Colon coughed. The cough had a leer in it.

"People ought to think for themselves, Captain Vimes says. The problem is, people only think for themselves if you tell them to."

"How do you spell 'eventually'?"

"I don't."

"Don't say anything," [Angua] said. "And it might be all right."

After a while the bedsprings went glink.

And shortly after that, for Corporal Carrot, the Discworld moved. And didn't even bother to stop to cancel the bread and newspapers.

Besides, some of the Watch had got it into their heads that the way you got promoted was to conscript half a dozen other guards. At Detritus' current rate of progress, he was going to be High Supreme Major General by the end of the month.

"Dogs don't talk," said Gaspode, hurriedly. "Listen, I should know. I am one."

"If you don't start looking right away," said Carrot, "I will personally--" He hesitated. He'd never been cruel to an animal in his life.

"I'll turn the matter over to Corporal Nobbes," he said.

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.

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.

"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."

Carrot: "Did you know she was a werewolf?"
Colon: "Um ... Captain Vimes kind of hinted, sir..."
Carrot: "How did he hint?"
Colon: "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."

[Vimes] 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...

Despite his deep distrust of magic, [Vimes] 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.

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 [wedding] 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."

"It's got three keyboards and a hundred extra knobs, including twelve with '?' on them."

-- The Unseen University Organ, as designed by B. S. Johnson

The Librarian liked being best man. You were allowed to kiss bridesmaids, and they weren't allowed to run away.

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

Detritus: "Corporal Carrot says there's some good buried somewhere in everyone."
Vimes: "And what's your job, Detritus?"
Detritus: "Engineer in charge of deep mining operations, sah!"

"Now, are you going to come on out or have I got to come in there and be brutally savaged?"

"SIT!" said Gaspode, in passable Human.

The command bounced back and forth around the alley, and fifty per cent of the animals obeyed. In most cases, it was the hind fifty per cent. Dogs in mid-spring found their treacherous legs coiling under them--

"BAD DOG!"

--and this was followed by an overpowering sense of racial shame that made them cringe automatically, a bad move in mid-air.

-- Gaspode welds The Power

Dogs are not like cats, who amusingly tolerate humans only until someone comes up with a tin opener that can be operated with a paw.

Men made dogs, they took wolves and gave them human things -- unnecessary intelligence, names, a desire to belong, and a twitching inferiority complex.

Cuddy: "My dad made that axe for me! A fine weapon to take into the afterlife, I don't think!"
Death: IS THAT SOME KIND OF BURIAL CUSTOM?
Cuddy: "Don't you know? You are Death, aren't you?"
Death: THAT DOESN'T MEAN I HAVE TO KNOW ABOUT BURIAL CUSTOMS. GENERALLY, I MEET PEOPLE BEFORE THEY'RE BURIED. THE ONES I MEET AFTER THEY'VE BEEN BURIED TEND TO BE A BIT OVER-EXCITED AND DISINCLINED TO DISCUSS THINGS.

"My word," said the Patrician. He was feeling a little light-headed from loss of blood. The Archchancellor had also given him a long drink of something he said was a marvellous remedy, although he'd been unspecific as to what it cured. Verticality, apparently.

Detritus stood up. There was something about the way he did it, some hint of a mighty continent beginning a tectonic movement that would end in the fearsome creation of some unscalable mountain range, which made people stop and look. Not one of the watchers was familiar with the experience of watching mountain building, but now they had some vague idea of what it was like: it was like Detritus standing up, with Cuddy's twisted axe in his hand.

Colon looked around at the guard. "Lance-Constable Bauxite! Lance-Constable Coalface! Apprehend Acting-Constable Detritus!"

The two trolls looked first at the retreating form of Detritus, then at one another, and finally at Sergeant Colon.

Bauxite managed a salute.

"Permission for leave to attend grandmother's funeral, sir?"

"Why?"

"It her or me, sarge."

"I know that being dead isn't always a barrier to quiet enjoyment in this city, but I don't think young Edward has been up and about much."

If you have to look along the shaft of an arrow from the wrong end, if a man has you entirely at his mercy, then hope like hell that man is an evil man. Because the evil like power, power over people, and they want to see you in fear. They want you to know you're going to die. So they'll talk. They'll gloat.

They'll watch you squirm. They'll put off the moment of murder like another man will put off a good cigar.

"I've got you," Vimes panted. "You're under arrest. Be under arrest, will you?"

Vimes: "He killed Angua. Doesn't that mean anything to you?"
Carrot: "Yes. But personal isn't the same as important."

It called out to something deep in the soul. Hold it in your hand, and you had power. More power than any bow or spear -- they just stored up your muscles' power, when you thought about it. But the gonne gave you power from outside. You didn't use it, it used you.

It dawned on the smarter Assassins that there was nothing in their armoury that could kill a troll. They had fine stiletto knives, but they needed sledgehammers. They had darts armed with exquisite poisons, none of which worked on a troll. No-one had ever thought trolls were important enough to be assassinated. Suddenly, Detritus was very important indeed.

Vimes: "We shouldn't be too hard on Cruces. ... I know what the gonne does to people. We're all the same, to the gonne. I'd have been just like him."
Carrot: "No, Captain. You put it down."

He was a good copper. This had got said at every guard funeral Vimes had ever attended. It'd probably be said even at Corporal Nobbs' funeral, although everyone would have their fingers crossed behind their backs.

"--a department for, well, we haven't got a name for it yet, but for looking at clues and things like dead bodies, e.g., how long they've been dead, and to start with we'll need an alchemist and possibly a ghoul provided they promise not to take anything home and eat it; a special unit using dogs, which could be very useful, and Lance-Constable Angua can deal with that since she can, um, be her own handler a lot of the time; a request here from Corporal Nobbs that Watchmen be allowed all the weapons they can carry, although I'd be obliged if you said no to that; a--"

Vetinari: "And you, I think, should be promoted to Captain."
Carrot: "Ye-es. I agree, sir. That would be a good thing for Ankh-Morpork. But I will not command the Watch, if that's what you mean."
Vetinari: "Why not?"
Carrot: "Because I could command the Watch. Because... people should do things because an officer tells them. They shouldn't do it just because Corporal Carrot says so. Just because Corporal Carrot is... good at being obeyed."

"But, you see, captain, the trouble with Sam Vimes is that he upsets a lot of important people. And I think that a Commander of the Watch would have to move in very exalted circles, attend Guild functions..."

They exchanged glances. The Patrician got the best of the bargain, since Carrot's face was bigger. Both of them were trying not to grin.

"An excellent choice, in fact," said the Patrician.

"Perhaps the city does need a king, though. Have you considered that?"

"Like a fish needs a ... er ... a thing that doesn't work underwater, sir."

"I gather that you and, er, Constable Angua are getting along well?"

"We have a very good Understanding, sir. Of course, there will be minor difficulties," said Carrot, "but, to look on the positive side, I've got someone who's always ready for a walk around the city."

"You mean you could have vampires in the Watch?"

"Very good on night duty, sir. And aerial surveillance."

Carrot stared straight ahead of him with glistening air of one dusting with duty and efficiency and an absolute resolve to duck and doge any direct questions put to him.

"You've got a strength of fifty-six, nominal, OK? But you're taking over day watch too, plus you've got to allow for days off, two grandmother's funerals per year per man -- gods know how your undead'll sort out that one, maybe they get time off to go to their own funerals--"