Truth! Justice! Reasonably Priced Love! Freedom!
And a hard-boiled egg!
Commander Sam Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch had it all. But now he's back in his own rough, tough past without even the clothes he was standing up in when the lightning struck.
Living in the past is hard. Dying in the past is incredibly easy. But he must survive, because he has a job to do. He must track down a murderer, teach his younger self how to be a good copper and change the outcome of bloody rebellion. There's a problem: if he wins, he's got no wife, no child, no future.
A Discworld Tale of One City, with a full chorus of street urchins, ladies of negotiable affection, rebels, secret policemen and other children of the revolution.
...in the old cesspit behind the gardener's shed, a young man was treading water.
Well... treading, anyway.
* * *
Vimes: "So why were you sent, then?"
Jocasta: "Miss Band sent me as an exercise. I say, these bricks really are jolly tricky, aren't they?"
Vimes: "Yes, they are. Have you been rude to Miss Band lately? Upset her in any way?"
* * *
Vimes took a deep breath. "You see, Miss Wiggs, quite a few of your chums have tried to kill me at home in recent years. As you might expect, I take a dim view of this."
"Easy to see why, sir," said Jocasta, in the voice of one who knows that their only hope of escaping from their present predicament is reliant on the goodwill of another person who has no pressing reason to have any.
* * *
Besides, the Assassins' Guild was easy to outwit. They had strict rules, which they followed quite honourably, and this was fine by Vimes, who, in certain practical areas, had no rules whatsoever.
* * *
...the helmet had gold decoration, and the bespoke armourers had made a new, gleaming breastplate with useless gold ornamentation on it. Sam Vimes felt like a class traitor every time he wore it. He hated being thought of as one of those people that wore stupid ornamental armour. It was gilt by association.
* * *
"What do you mean, tough?" said Corporal Nobbs, possibly the best living demonstration that there was some smooth evolution between humans and animals.
* * *
"...when there's a kid on the way, well, suddenly a man sees it different. He thinks: my kid's going to have to grow up in this mess. Time to clean it up. Time to make it a Better World."
* * *
Vimes was used to the other kinds of nut jobs, the ones that acted quite normally right up to the point where they hauled off and smashed someone with a poker for blowing their nose noisily. But Carcer was different. He was in two minds, but instead of them being in conflict, they were in competition. He had a demon on both shoulders, urging one another on.
* * *
It was hard for the average copper to deal with people like that. They expected people, when heavily outnumbered, to give in or try to deal or at least just stop moving. They didn't expect people to kill for a five-dollar watch. (A hundred dollar watch, now, that'd be different. This was Ankh-Morpork, after all.)
* * *
"Sammies" meant watchmen who could think without their lips moving, who didn't take bribes -- much, and then only at the level of beer and doughnuts, which even Vimes recognized as the grease that helps the wheels run smoothly -- and were, on the whole, trustworthy. For a given value of "trust", at least.
* * *
"Now we sing dis stupid song!
Sing it as we run along!
Why we sing dis we don't know!
We can't make der words rhyme prop'ly!"
"Sound off!"
"One! Two!"
"Sound off!"
"Many! Lots!"
"Sound off!"
"Er ... what?"
-- Detritus' jody
* * *
"Those are the rules, Igor. Thanks all the same. We know your heart is in the right place--"
"They are in the right places, sir," said Igor reproachfully.
"That's what I meant," Vimes said, without missing a beat, just as Igor never did.
* * *
"Igor, there are some areas where... Look, do you know anything about... women and babies?"
"Not in so many wordth, sir, but I find that once I've got someone on the slab and had a good, you know, rummage around, I can thort out most thingth--"
Vimes's imagination actually shut down at this point.
* * *
The cemetery of Small Gods was for the people who didn't know what happened next. They didn't know what they believed in or if there was life after death and, often, they didn't know what hit them. They'd gone through life being amiably uncertain, until the ultimate certainty had claimed them at the last. Among the city's bone orchards the cemetery was the equivalent of the drawer marked Misc, where people were interred in the glorious expectation of nothing very much.
* * *
Policemen, after a few years, found it hard enough to believe in people, let alone anyone they couldn't see.
* * *
Colon: "If I had a dollar for every copper's funeral I've attended up here, I'd have... nineteen dollars and fifty pence."
Nobby: "Fifty pence?"
Colon: "That was when Corporal Hildebiddle woke up just in time and banged on the lid."
* * *
Because of pressure of space, bones in the crypt were stored by size, not by owner. ... If some of the religions were right and there really was bodily resurrection one day, Fred mused, there was going to be an awful lot of confusion and general milling about.
* * *
"Just because you're a zombie doesn't mean you're a bad person."
* * *
Nobby: "I've always wondered about his name. I mean... Legitimate?"
Colon: "Can't blame a mother for being proud, Nobby."
* * *
The Black Ribboners: The Uberwald League of Temperance, made up of former vampires who now wore black ribbons to show that they had completely sworn off the sticky stuff, my vord yes, and much preferred a good singsong and a healthy game of table-tennis.
* * *
Vimes: "What kind of refugees are we talking about here?"
Carrot: "Mostly human, sir."
Vimes: "Do you mean that most of them will be human, or that each individual will be mostly human?"
* * *
Carrot: "You know the Hooms? The street gang?"
Vimes: "What about them?"
Carrot: "They've initiated their first troll member."
Vimes: "What? I thought they went around beating up trolls! I thought that was the whole point!"
Carrot: "Well, apparently young Calcite likes beating up trolls, too."
Vimes: "And that's good?"
Carrot: "In a way, sir, I suppose it's a step forward."
Vimes: "United in hatred, you mean?"
* * *
I never stand all night in the rain, or fight for my life rolling in the gutter with some thug, and I never move above a walk. That's all been taken away. And for what?
Comfort, power, money and a wonderful wife...
...er...
* * *
Vimes: "She'll do it by the book!"
Vetinari: "Shouldn't she?"
Vimes: "No. Carcer needs an arrow in his leg just to get his attention. You shoot first--"
Vetinari: "--and ask questions later?"
Vimes: "There's nothing I want to ask him."
* * *
Buggy had tamed [the heron] in the usual gnome way; you painted yourself green like a frog and hung out in the marshes, croaking, and then when a heron tried to eat you, you ran up its beak and nutted it.
* * *
...Detritus carried a siege crossbow that three men couldn't lift. and had converted it to fire a thick sheaf of arrows all at once. ... Vimes had banned him from using it on people, but it was a damn good way of getting into buildings. It could open the front door and the back door at the same time.
* * *
Admittedly, it would be Detritus doing the shooting, and while with that bow it was technically possible to shoot to wound, the people you were wounding would probably be in the building next door.
* * *
In Baker Street a couple who had never met before became electrically attracted to one another and were forced to get married after two days for the sake of public decency.
* * *
In the Assassins' Guild, the chief armourer became hugely, and since he was in the armoury at the time, tragically attractive to metal.
* * *
Ridcully: "Well, they can't just run in here without askin'. What do we pay our taxes for, after all?"
Ponder: "Er, we don't actually pay taxes, sir. The system is that we promise to pay taxes if the city ever asks us to, provided the city promises never to ask us, sir."
* * *
"Ook," said the librarian.
[Footnote: Who was an orangutan, changed from his former human shape as a result of a long-forgotten magical accident. It was so forgotten. in fact, that now people were forgetting he was an oranguan. This might seem quite hard to do, given that even a small orangutan is quite capable of filling all immediately available space, but to the wizards and most of the citizens he was now just the Librarian, and that was that. In fact, if someone ever reported that there was an orangutan in the library, the wizards would probably go and ask the Librarian if he'd seen it.]
* * *
Ponder was impressed. He hadn't been brought up to believe that watchmen were clever.
* * *
"I'll escort you, shall I?" said the woman, handing him a badly styled coat and a pair of antique boots. "I wouldn't like you to be attacked by anything. A sudden loss of memory, for example."
* * *
...you never quite knew where you were with the Agony Aunts. Of course, that's what made them so useful. Any customer disturbing the peace in one of the local houses of good repute feared the threat of the Aunts far more than he did the Watch. The Watch had rules. And the Watch didn't have Dotsie's handbag. And Sadie could do terrible things with a parrot-headed umbrella.
* * *
Rosie: "But I can tell you've impressed them."
Vimes: "How?"
Rosie: "You're not bent double and making bubbling noises."
* * *
Vimes couldn't remember if his wife had ever learned to fence, but several feet of edged weapon is quite threatening enough when wielded by an angry amateur. Amateurs sometimes get lucky.
* * *
A figure detached itself from the damp shadows of the street, and walked towards him. Vimes couldn't make out the face, but that didn't matter. He knew it would be smiling that special smile of the predator who knows he has the prey under his paw, and knows that the prey knows this too, and also knows that the prey is desperately going to act as if they're having a perfectly friendly conversation, because the prey wants, so much, for this to be the case...
* * *
Two types of people laugh at the law: those that break it and those that make it.
* * *
"I want to make a complaint, sergeant," said Vimes.
"What about?"
"You," said Vimes. "And the Brothers Grin here. You're not doing it right. If you're going to arrest someone, you take charge right away. You've got a badge and a weapon, yes? And he's got his hands up, and a guilty conscience. Everyone's got a guilty conscience. So he's wondering what you know and what you're going to do, and what you do is fire off the questions, sharply. You don't make silly jokes 'cos that makes you too human and you keep him off balance so he can't quite think a clear sentence and above all you don't let him move like this and grab your arm and pull it up so it almost breaks like this and grab your sword and hold it to your throat like this."
* * *
The cluttered desk of Vimes's memory finally unearthed the inadvertent coffee mat of recollection from under the teacup of forgetfulness.
* * *
Vimes had mixed memories of Captain Tilden. He had been a military man before being given this job as a kind of pension, and that was a bad thing in a senior copper. It meant he looked to Authority for orders and obeyed them, whereas Vimes found it better to look to Authority for orders and then filter those orders through a fine mesh of common sense, adding a generous scoop of creative misunderstanding and maybe even incipient deafness if circumstances demanded, because Authority rarely descended to street level.
* * *
He'd been a successful soldier, as these things went; he'd generally been on the winning side, and had killed more of the enemy by good if dull tactics than his own men by bad but exciting ones.
* * *
Now Tilden was giving him the Long Stare With Associated Paperwork. It was supposed to mean: we know all about you, so why don't you tell us all about yourself?
* * *
"Well done," said a voice somewhere behind him. "Consciousness to sarcasm in five seconds!"
* * *
"This is called a Procrastinator," said the monk, "and it's a tiny version of the ones over there, the ones that look like your granny's mangle. I'm not going to get technical, but when it's spinning it moves time around you. Did you understand what I just said?"
"No!"
"All right, it's a magic box. Happier?"
* * *
Lu-Tze: "We're the Monks of History, Mister Vimes. We see that it happens."
Vimes: "I've never heard of you, and I know this city like the back of my hand."
Lu-Tze: "Right. And how often do you really look at the back of your hand, Mister Vimes?"
* * *
Vimes: "What? Those loony monks in the funny foreign building between the pawnbrokers and the shonky shop? The ones who go dancing round the street banging drums and shouting?"
Lu-Tze: "Well done, Mister Vimes. It's funny how secretly you can move when you're a loony monk dancing through the streets banging a drum."
* * *
When you got right down to the bottom of the ladder the rungs were very close together and, oh my, weren't the women careful about them. In their own way, they were as haughty as any duchess. You might not have much, but you could have Standards. Clothes might be cheap and old but at least they could be scrubbed. There might be nothing behind the front door worth stealing but at least the doorstep could be clean enough to eat your dinner off, if you could've afforded dinner. And no one ever bought their clothes from the pawn shop. You'd hit bottom when you did that. No, you bought them from Mr Sun at the shonky shop, and you never asked where he got them from.
* * *
The garden didn't get much proper light. Gardens like this never did. You got second-hand light once the richer folk in the taller buildings had finished with it.
* * *
Vimes stared blankly at [the garden] in front of them. "Okay," he said. "The gravel and rocks, yes, I can see that. Shame about all the rubbish. It always turns up, doesn't it..."
"Yes," said Lu-Tze. "It's part of the pattern."
"What? The old cigarette packet?"
"Certainly. That invokes the element of air," said Sweeper.
"And the cat doings?"
"To remind us that disharmony, like a cat, gets everywhere."
* * *
"Sonky": Named after Wallace Sonky. a man without whose experiments with thin rubber the pressure on housing in Ankh-Morpork would have been a good deal more pressing.
* * *
He remembered once when he'd been stabbed and would've bled to death if Sergeant Angua hadn't caught, up with him, and how, as he lay there, he'd found himself taking a very intense interest in the pattern of the carpet. The senses say: we've only got a few minutes, let's record everything, in every detail...
* * *
Vimes: "But sometimes you can't help wondering: what would have happened if I'd done something dfferent--"
Lu-Tze: "Like when you killed your wife?"
Vimes: "This is a test, right?"
Lu-Tze: "You're a quick study, Mister Vimes."
Vimes: "But in some other universe, believe me, I hauled off and punched you one."
-- Learning about alternate realities
* * *
What had Sam Vimes learned from Keel? To stay alert, to think for himself, to keep a place in his head free from the Quirkes and Knocks of the world, and not to hesitate about fighting dirty today if that was what it took to fight again tomorrow.
* * *
The Abbot had taken thousand-year-old ideas and put them through his mind in a new way, and as a result the multiverse had opened for him like a flower. Qu, on the other hand, had taken the ancient technology of the Procrastinators, that could save and restore time, and had harnessed it to practical, everyday purposes, such as, yes, blowing people's heads off.
* * *
[Blowing people's heads off] was something that Lu-Tze tried to avoid. There were better things to do with people's heads.
* * *
"All right, someone please go and fetch Brother Kai, will you? Start looking around, oh, two centuries ago."
* * *
The History Monks (the Men In Saffron, No Such Monastery... they had many names)
* * *
"Y'know," he said, "it's very hard to talk quantum using a language originally designed to tell other monkeys where the ripe fruit is."
* * *
The safe had still been there when he made captain, and by then everyone knew the combination was 4-4-7-8 and that no one seemed to know how to change it. The only things worth keeping in it had been the tea and sugar and anything you particularly wanted Nobby to read.
* * *
"I comma square bracket recruit's name square bracket comma do solemnly swear by square bracket recruit's deity of choice square bracket to uphold the Laws and Ordinances of the city of Ankh-Morpork comma serve the public truft comma and defend the fubjects of His ftroke Her bracket delete whichever is inappropriate bracket Majefty bracket name of reigning monarch bracket without fear comma favour comma or thought of perfonal fafety semi-colon to purfue evildoers and protect the innocent comma laying down my life if necefsary in the caufe of said duty comma so help me bracket aforesaid deity bracket full stop Gods Save the King stroke Queen bracket delete whichever is inappropriate bracket full stop."
-- Ankh-Morpork Night Watch oath
* * *
And [Lord Winder] saw plots and spies everywhere throughout his waking hours, and had men root them out, and the thing about rooting out plots and spies everywhere is that, even if there are no real plots to begin with, there are plots and spies galore very soon.
* * *
Dr. Lawn: "I don't do anything illegal, you know."
Vimes: "Then you've got nothing to fear."
Dr. Lawn: "Really? That proves you're not from round here."
* * *
"Well, I trained in Klatch. They have some novel ideas about medicine over there. They think it's a good idea to get patients better, for one thing."
* * *
Vimes knew them in his soul. They were in the Night Watch because they were too scruffy ugly, incompetent, awkwardly shaped or bloody-minded for the Day Watch. They were honest, in that special policeman sense of the word. That is, they didn't steal things too heavy to carry. And they had the morale of damp gingerbread.
* * *
They might be very bad at it but they were coppers, and coppers did not respond well to the Happy Families approach: "Hello, chaps, call me Christopher, my door is always open, I'm sure if we all pull together we shall get along splendidly like one big happy family." They'd seen too many families to fall for that rubbish.
* * *
Corporal Quirke always had a private income from bribes; he'd been like Nobby Nobbs without the latter's amiable incompetence.
* * *
"They're crying out for good men in the Day Watch, but if you don't stand too close to the light you might pass."
* * *
His glare ran from face to face, causing most of the squad to do an immediate impression of the Floorboard and Ceiling Inspectors Synchronized Observation Team.
* * *
Quirke had just committed suicide. You hung together against officers, fair enough, but when the jig was up you did not Drop Someone In The Cacky. They'd laugh at the idea of a watchman's honour, but it did exist in a blackened, twisty way. You Did Not Drop Your Mates In The Cacky.
* * *
Knock stepped forward, not quite managing to conceal his nervousness. After all, his immediate superior now was a man who, last night, he had kicked in the nadgers. People could hold a grudge about a thing like that.
* * *
Knock's face showed a man contemplating an immediate future that contained fewer opportunities for personal gain and a greatly raised risk of being shouted at.
* * *
Vimes: "When we get back, just you swap it for someone else's. Doesn't matter whose. No one'n say "anything."
Sam: "Yes, sarge. Why, sarge? A bell's a bell."
Vimes: "Not that one. That's three times the weight of the normal bell. They give it to rookies to see what they do. Did you complain?"
Sam: "No, sarge."
Vimes: "That's the way. Keep quiet, and pass it on to some other sucker when we get back. That's the coppers' way."
* * *
Tax farming. What a clever invention. ... Because a) you saved the cost of tax collectors and the whole revenue system, b) you got a wagonload of cash up front. And c) the business of tax gathering then became the business of groups of powerful yet curiously reticent people who kept out of the light. However, they employed people who not only went out in the light but positively blocked it, and it was amazing what those people found to tax, up to and including Looking At Me, Pal.
-- Outsourcing explained
* * *
What was it Vetinari had said once? "Taxation is just a sophisticated way of demanding money with menaces"?
* * *
Vimes: "Put it like this, lance-constable. Would you let a murderer off for a thousand dollars?"
Sam: "No, sir!"
Vimes: "'A thousand dollars'd set your mum up in a nice place in a good part of town, though."
Sam: "Knock it off, sarge, I'm not like that."
Vimes: "You were when you took that dollar. Everything else is just a haggling over the price."
* * *
Snapcase is the man to save us, he thought glumly. Yeah, I used to believe that. A lot of people did. Just because he rode around in an open carriage occasionally and called people over and talked to them, the level of the conversation being on the lines of: "So you're a carpenter, are you? Wonderful! What does that job entail?" Just because he said publicly that perhaps taxes were a bit on the high side. Just because he waved.
* * *
"And don't you eyeball me. I've been eyeballed by experts, and you look as if you're desperate for the privy."
* * *
"Yeah, all right, but everyone knows they torture people," mumbled Sam.
"Do they?" said Vimes. "Then why doesn't anyone do anything about it?'
"'cos they torture people."
* * *
Aloud, he said: "Yes, sir." It was a good phrase. It could mean any of a dozen things, or nothing at all. It was just punctuation until the man said something else.
* * *
For some reason, the Unmentionables both loved and feared paperwork. They certainly generated a lot of it. They wrote everything down. They didn't like appearing on other people's paperwork, though.
* * *
Like petty criminals everywhere, the watchmen prided themselves that there were some depths to which they would not sink. There had to be some things below you, even if it was only mudworms.
* * *
"When I die," said Lawn, inspecting the patient, "I'm going to instruct them to put a bell on my tombstone, just so's I can have the pleasure of not getting up when people ring."
* * *
Dr. Lawn: "Sergeant, there are no circumstances where the things you're holding could possibly be used on you. They are... of a feminine nature."
Vimes: "For the seamstresses?"
Dr. Lawn: "Those things? No, the ladies of the night take pride these days in never requiring that sort of thing. My work with them is more of, shall we say, a preventative nature."
Vimes: "Teaching them to use thimbles, that sort of thing?"
Dr. Lawn: "Yes, it's amazing how far you can push a metaphor, isn't it..."
* * *
Lawn looked down at his patient. "In the words of the philosopher Scepturn, the founder of my profession: am I going to get paid for this?"
* * *
"I got a message that Rosie Palm wants to see you. Well, I assume she meant you. 'That ungrateful bastard' was the actual term she used."
* * *
"Hasn't it ever occurred to you, sergeant, that sometimes people go to a massage parlour for a real massage, for example? There's ladies all over this city with discreet signs up that say things like 'Trousers repaired while you wait' and a small but significant number of men make the same mistake as Sandra. There's lots of men work here in the city and leave their wives back home and sometimes, you know, a man feels these... urges. Like, for a sock without holes and a shirt with more than one button."
* * *
Dr. Lawn: "About how long will you want him to lie still for?"
Vimes: "You can do that?"
Dr. Lawn: "Oh, yes. It's not accepted Ankh-Morpork medical practice, but since Anhk-Morpork medical practice would consist of hitting him on the head with a mallet he's probably getting the best of the deal."
* * *
"You're an interesting man, sergeant. You make enemies like a craftsman."
* * *
Confiscate all weapons, and crime would go down. It made sense. It would have worked, too, if only there had been enough coppers -- say, three per citizen.
* * *
...criminals don't obey the law. It's more or less a requirement for the job.
* * *
The average copper, when he's been kicked in the nadgers once too often and has reason to believe that his bosses don't much care, has an understandable tendency to prefer to arrest those people who won't instantly try to stab him, especially if they act a bit snotty and wear more expensive clothes than he personally can afford.
* * *
It wasn't that the city was lawless. It had plenty of laws. It just didn't offer many opportunities not to break them.
* * *
Everyone was guilty of something. Vimes knew that: Every copper knew it. That was how you maintained your authority -- everyone, talking to a copper, was secretly afraid you could see their guilty secret written on their forehead. You couldn't, of course. But neither were you supposed to drag someone off the street and smash their fingers with a hammer until they told you what it was.
* * *
There was the People's Republic of Treacle Mine Road (Truth! Justice! Freedom! Reasonably priced Love! And a Hard-Boiled Egg!)
* * *
Vimes: "Trouble?"
Dr. Lawn: "Not too bad. Slidey Harris was unlucky at cards last night, that's all. Played an ace."
Vimes: "That's an unlucky card?"
Dr. Lawn: "It is if Big Tony knows he didn't deal it to you."
* * *
...here was something about the expression, as of a rat who was expecting cheese right around the next corner, and had been expecting cheese around the last corner too, and the corner before that, and, although the world had turned out so far to be full of corners yet completely innocent of any cheese at all, was nevertheless quite certain that, just around the corner, cheese awaited.
-- Meet Mr. Dibbler
* * *
Dibbler: "Ah, sergeant... Hey, what's the little crown mean?"
Vimes: "Sergeant-at-arms. That's like 'sergeant with all the trimmings'."
* * *
"Well, sergeant, could I interest you in a very special sausage inna bun? Guaranteed no rat? One hundred per cent organic? All pork shaved before mixing?"
Why not? thought Vimes. And his stomach, liver, kidneys and lengths of intestine all supplied reasons, but he fumbled in his pocket for some change anyway.
* * *
Dibbler's pies quite often looked appetizing. Therein lay their one and only charm.
* * *
"I think it's quite possible no one else makes pies like you do, Mr. Dibbler," he said, licking his fingers in case he might want to shake hands with someone later on.
* * *
Swordfish? Every password was swordfish! Whenever anyone tried to think of a word that no one would ever guess, they always chose swordfish.
* * *
A boy stared up at him. It had to be a boy. Nature would not have been so cruel as to do that to a girl.
* * *
"Look, tell you what, mister, you tell me where you're going and I'll stop following you, have we got a deal? Cost you no more'n a penny and that's a special price. Some people pay me a lot more'n that to stop following' em."
* * *
'Why're you following me, Nobby Nobbs?' I said Vimes.
The urchin held out a grubby hand. Some street language never changes.
* * *
Street urchin, he thought. Urchin sounds about right -- spiky, slimy and smelling slightly of rotting seaweed.
* * *
There were plenty of hot-chair eating places like the one vimes headed for now. It sold plain food for plain men. There wasn't a menu. You ate what was put in front of you, you ate it quick, and you were glad to get it. If you didn't like it, there were plenty who did. The dishes had names like Slumgullet, Boiled Eels, Lob Scouse, Wet Nellies, Slumpie and Treacle Billy -- good, solid stuff that stuck to the ribs and made it hard to get up out of the seat.
* * *
Nobby would nick anything and dodge anything but he wasn't bad. You could trust him with your life, although you'd be daft to trust him with a dollar.
* * *
Knock: "Bit of a do, sir. Had a break-in last night."
Vimes: "Really? What did they steal?"
Knock: "Did I say they stole anything, sir?"
Vimes: "Well, no, you didn't. That was me jumping to what we call a conclusion. Did they steal anything, then, or did they break in to deliver a box of chocolates and a small complimentary basket of fruit?"
* * *
[The search] did turn up The Amorous Adventurs of Molly Clapper in Corporal Colon's locker, however. Vimes stared at the crude and grubby engravings like a long-lost friend. He remembered that book; it had gone around the Watch House for years, and as a young man he had learned a lot from some of the illustrations, although a good deal of what he'd learned had turned out to be wrong.
* * *
Tilden was nearly seventy. At a time like that, a man learned to treat his memory as only a rough guide to events.
* * *
He'd ridden off under the flag of Ankh-Morpork to fight the Cheese-Eaters of Quirn or Johnny Klatchian or whatever enemies had been selected by those higher up the chain of command with never a second thought about the rightness of the cause, because that sort of thinking could slow a soldier down.
* * *
Tilden had grown up knowing that the people at the top were right. That was why they were at the top. He didn't have the mental vocabulary to think like a traitor, because only traitors thought like that.
* * *
...an Assassin without style, everyone agreed, was just a highly paid arrogant thug.
* * *
The young man's brow furrowed. Assault having failed, he was forced to try scathing wit, which he did not have.
* * *
Apart from the curfew and manning the gates, the Night Watch didn't do a lot. This was partly because they were incompetent, and partly because no one expected them to be anything else.
* * *
He wondered if it was at all possible to give this idiot some lessons in basic politics. That was always the dream, wasn't it? "I wish I'd known then what I know now"? But when you got older you found out that you now wasn't you then. You then was a twerp. You then was what you had to be to start out on the rocky road of becoming you now, and one of the rocky patches on that road was being a twerp.
* * *
"Mums are mums, lance-constable. They don't like to see men managing by themselves, in case that sort of thing catches on."
* * *
"That, sir, is assault upon a Watch officer," said Vimes.
"I'm a Watch officer too, you damn flatfoot! From Cable Street!"
"Where's your uniform?"
"We don't wear uniforms!"
"Where's your badge!"
"And we don't carry badges!"
"Hard to see why I shouldn't think you is a common thief then, sir."
* * *
There must be a dozen of 'em. We're going to get cheesed. [Footnote: Like creamed, but it goes on for a lot longer.]
* * *
We who think we are about to die will laugh at anything.
* * *
"I get it,' said the prisoner. 'Good Cop, Bad Cop, eh?"
"If you like." said Vimes. "But we're a bit short staffed, so if I give you a cigarette would you mind kicking yourself in the teeth?"
* * *
No man drinking a non-alcoholic chocolate beverage had ever been the centre of so much attention.
* * *
Sam: "Sarge, one of them shot at you!"
Vimes: "Really? Who says the man on the roof was one of them? That's an expensive bow. And he didn't have anything in his pockets. Nothing. Not so much as a used hanky."
Sam: "Very odd, sarge."
Vimes: "Especially since I was expecting a piece of paper saying something like 'I am definitely a member of a revolutionary cadre, trust me on this'."
* * *
Dr. Lawn: "How do you know he's dead? I realize that I may regret asking that question."
Vimes: "He's got a broken neck from falling off a roof and I reckon he fell off because he got a steel crossbow boIt in his brain."
Dr. Lawn: "Ah. That sounds like dead, if you want my medical opinion. Did you do it?"
Vimes: "No!"
Dr. Lawn: "Well, you're a busy man, sergeant. You can't be everywhere."
* * *
The Assassin moved. quietly from roof to roof until he was well away from the excitement around the Watch House.
His movements could be called cat-like, except that he did not stop to spray urine up against things.
* * *
Ninety per cent of most magic merely consists of knowing one extra fact.
* * *
Madam: "And you never attended his lessons [in stealth], he said."
Havelock: "Oh, I did. Religiously."
Madam: "He says he never saw you at any of them."
Havelock: "And your point, Madam...?"
* * *
He felt instinctively that if you were going to fondle a cat while discussing matters of intrigue, then it should be a long-haired white one. It shouldn't be an elderly street tom with irregular bouts of flatulence.
* * *
Vimes picked up the bottle of Mrs. Arbiter's best ginger beer. He remembered it. It was as gassy as hell and therefore hugely popular. A young boy could, with encouragement and training, eventually manage to belch the whole first verse of the national anthem after just one swig. This is an important social attribute when you're eight years old.
* * *
It wasn't that what he was planning was illegal, as such, it was just that it had the same colour and smell as something illegal and Vimes didn't want to have to explain.
* * *
"No! Pleasel I'll tell you whatever you want to know!" the man yelled.
"Really?" said Vimes. "What's the orbital velocity of the moon?"
* * *
At last it dawned on Ferret that he should stop talking. It was about half an hour too late.
* * *
"Winder is a madman, and that's not good for business. His cronies are criminals, and that's not good for business. A new Patrician will need new friends, far-sighted people who want to be part of a wonderful future. One that's good for business. That's how it goes. Meetings in rooms. A little diplomacy, a little give and take, a promise here, an understanding there. That's how real revolutions happen. All that stuff in the streets is just froth..."
* * *
Madam: "The world does not deal well with those who don't pick a side."
Vimes: "I like the middle."
Madam: "That gives you two enemies. I'm amazed that you can afford so many, on a sergeant's pay."
* * *
"You're walking around, Sam, with a weapon you don't know how to use. That's worse than walking around knowing how to use a weapon and not having one. A man with a weapon he doesn't know how to use is likely to have it shoved where the sun does not shine."
* * *
After a few drinks, though, it was hard to know what Two Grins was fighting. He'd fight the man next to him simply as a substitute for kneeing the whole universe in the groin.
* * *
He'd always had an allergy to edged weapons too near his face.
* * *
"And for close-up fighting, as your senior sergeant I explicitly forbid you to investigate the range of coshes, blackjacks and brass knuckles sold by Mrs. Goodbody at No. 8 Easy Street, at a range of prices and sizes to suit all pockets, and should any of you approach me privately I absolutely will not demonstrate a variety of specialist blows suitable for these useful yet tricky instruments."
* * *
You needed someone like Detritus bellowing at them for six weeks, and lectures about duty and prisoners' rights and the "service to the public". And then you could hand them over to the street monsters who told them all the other stuff, like how to hit someone where it wouldn't leave a mark and when it was a good idea to stick a metal soup-plate down the front of your trousers before attending to a bar brawl.
* * *
Swing: "I, onthecontrary ... believe that you are a man of iron adherence to the law and, while this hasledto ... elements of friction because of your lack of full understanding of the exigencies of the situation, I know that you are a man after my own heart."
Vimes: "That would be broadly correct, sir, although I would not aspire that high."
* * *
A dozen crossed the line, the last few with the reluctance caused by a battle between peer pressure and a healthy regard for their skin.
* * *
Coates: "What'll you do when the new captain comes in, eh? And who're you doing this for? The people? They attacked the other Houses, and what's the Night Watch ever done to hurt them?"
Vimes: "Nothing."
Coates: "There you are, then."
Vimes: "I mean the Watch did nothing, and that's what hurt them."
* * *
Coates: "What could you do, then? Arrest [Lord] Winder?"
Vimes: "Of course we can't, but we ought to be able to. Maybe one day we will. If we can't then the law isn't the law, it's just a way of keeping people down."
* * *
[The crowd] was just waiting for some idiot to do the wrong thing, and Nature is bountiful where idiots are concerned.
* * *
"But here's some advice, boy. Don't put your trust in revolutions. They always come around again. That's why they're called revolutions."
* * *
"Corporal Quirke," muttered Vimes. "You don't have to pay coppers, Mr. Soon. We're here for your protection."
Despite his barely basic grasp of the language, Mr. Soon's expression suggested very clearly that the three-stripe, one-crown copper in front of him had dropped in from the planet Idiot.
* * *
Vimes: "I've been talking to people today who are going to die. How do you think that makes me feel? Do you know what that feels like?"
Qu: "Er... yes."
Lu-Tze: "'We do. Everyone we talk to is going to die. Everyone you talk to is going to die. Everyone dies."
* * *
Vimes: "I mean, doesn't it change history even if you just tread on an ant?"
Qu: "For the ant, certainly."
* * *
...it was indeed the Hon. Ronald Rust, the gods' gift to the enemy, any enemy, and a walking encouragement to desertion.
* * *
The Rust family had produced great soldiers, by the undemanding standards of "Deduct your own casualties from those of the enemy, and if the answer is a positive number, it was a glorious victory" school of applied warfare. But Rust's lack of any kind of military grasp was matched only by his high opinion of the talent he in fact possessed only in negative amounts.
* * *
"Are you eyeballing me, Keel?"
"No, sir. I am wearing an expression of honest doubt, sir. 'Eyeballing' is four steps up, right after 'looking at you in a funny way', sir. By standard military custom and practice, sir, sergeants are allowed to go all the way up to an expression of acute--"
* * *
Good old Rust. Good young Rust. The same unthinking rudeness masquerading as blunt speaking, the same stiffneckedness, the same petty malice.
* * *
Rust was a fool. But at the moment he was a young fool, which is more easily excused. Maybe it was just possible, if caught early enough, that he could be upgraded to idiot.
* * *
Troops always drew an audience: impressionable kids, the inevitable Ankh-Morpork floating street crowd and, of course, the ladies whose affection was extremely negotiable.
* * *
Vlimes had spent his life on the streets, and had met decent men and fools and people who'd steal a penny from a blind beggar and people who performed silent miracles or desperate crimes every day behind the grubby windows of little houses, but he'd never met The People.
* * *
As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn't measure up.
* * *
"I wish to address the men in order to inspire them and stiffen their resolve. They must understand the political background to the current crisis."
"Oh, we know all about Lord Winder being a loony, sir," said Wiglet cheerfully.
* * *
The watchmen marched out into the afternoon sunshine, and did so badly. They were not used to marching. Their normal method of progress was the stroll, which is not a recognized military manoeuvre, or the frantic withdrawal, which is.
* * *
Then a voice shouted, "Death to the Fascist Oppressors!"
This time the argument was more frantic. He heard someone say "oh, all right", and then "Death to the Fascist Oppressors, Present Company Excepted! There, is everyone happy now?"
* * *
You realized that people like Carcer were not mad. They were incredibly sane. They were simply men without a shield. They'd looked at the world and realized that all the rules didn't have to apply to them, not if they didn't want them to.
* * *
Coppers liked to say that people shouldn't take the law into their own hands, and they thought they knew what they'meant. They were thinkng about the normal times, and men who went round to sort out a neighbour with a club because his dog had napped once too often on their doorstep. But at times like this, who did the law belong to? If it shouldn't be in the hands of people, where the hell should it be?
* * *
"First man that fires, I will personally cut that man down," said Vimes. He didn't shout. It was a simple, confident statement of precisely what the future would hold.
* * *
"You will not shoot me, you young idiot. That would be murder," said the captain calmly.
"Not where I'm aiming, sir."
* * *
Keep the peace. That was the thing. People often failed to understand what that meant. You'd go to some life-threatening disturbance like a couple of neighbours scrapping in the street over who owned the hedge between their properties, and they'd both be bursting with aggrieved self-righteousness, both yelling, their wives would either be having a private scrap on the side or would have adjourned to a kitchen for a shared pot of tea and a chat, and they all expected you to sort it out.
And they could never understand that it wasn't your job. Sorting it out was a job for a good surveyor and a couple of lawyers, maybe. Your job was to quell the impulse to bang their stupid fat heads together, to ignore the affronted speeches of dodgy self-justification, to get them to stop shouting and to get them off the street. Once that had been achieved, your job was over.
* * *
"You're an officer of the law, not a soldier of the government."
* * *
"Coppers were always outnumbered, so being a copper only worked when people let it work. If they refocused and realized you were just another standard idiot with a pennyworth of metal for a badge, you could end up a smear on the pavement.
* * *
Yes, he had that furtive look of a timid domestic poisoner about him, the kind of man who'd be appalled at the idea of divorce but would plot womanslaughter every day.
* * *
"What are you intending to do about us being murdered in our beds?" she demanded.
"Well, it's not four o'clock yet, ma'am, but if you'll let me know when you want to retire--"
* * *
Mrs. Rutherford: "Some of that furniture looks very dirty. And aren't those beer barrels?"
Vimes: "Yes, ma'am, but they're empty ones."
Mrs. Rutherford: "Are you sure? I refuse to cower behind alcohol! I have never approved of alcohol, and neither has Rutherford!"
Vimes: "I can assure you, ma'am, that any beer barrel in the presence of my men for any length of time will be empty. You may rest assured on that score."
Mrs. Rutherford: "And are your men sober and clean-living?"
Vimes: "Whenever no alternative presents itself, ma'am."
* * *
He wanted to add: you're a cell of one, Reg. The real revolutionaries are silent men with poker-player faces and probably don't know or care if you live or die. You've got the shirt and the haircut and the sash and you know all the songs, but you're no urban guerrila. You're an urban dreamer. You turn over rubbish bins and scrawl on walls in the name of The People, who'd clip you round the ear if they found you doing it.
* * *
"Rebel songs, sir!" said trooper number one.
The captain sighed. "If you listen, Hepplewhite, you might note that it is the national anthem sung very badly," he said.
"We can't allow rebels to sing that, sir!"
Vimes saw the captain's expression. It had a lot to say about idiots.
* * *
Colon: "There's lots of people coming across the Pon's bridge. There's things happening everywhere, they say. Shall we let 'em in?"
Vimes: "Any soldiers?"
Colon: "I don't reckon so, sarge. It's mostly old people and kids. And my granny."
Vimes: "Trustworthy?"
Colon: "Not when she's had a few pints."
* * *
Colon: "Are we taking the law into our own hands again, sarge?"
Vimes: "'Yes, Fred. Only this time we're going to squeeze."
* * *
The key to winning, as always, was looking as if you had every right, nay, duty to be where you were. It helped if you could also suggest in every line of your body that no one else had any rights to be doing anything, anywhere, whatsoever. It came easily to an old copper.
* * *
"Oh, people are getting restless," said Vimes. "Getting very bad across the river, they say. That's why we've come for the prisoners in the cells."
"Yeah? On whose authority?"
Vimes swung his crossbow up. "Mr. Burleigh and Mr. Stronginthearm," he said, and grinned.
The two guards exchanged glances. "Who the hell are they?" said one.
There was a moment of silence followed by Vimes saying, out of the corner of his mouth: "Lance-Constable Vimes?"
"Yessir?"
"What make are these crossbows?"
"Er... Hines Brothers, sir. They're Mark Threes."
"Not Burleigh and Stronginthearm?"
"Never heard of them, sir."
Damn. Five years too early, thought Vimes.
* * *
The little man was suddenly clairvoyant. One look at Vimes's eyes told him how short his future might be.
* * *
"Now, sir, I'm just handcuffing you to this desk for a moment, sir, for your protection."
"'Who... who from?"
"Me. I'll kill you if you try to run away, sir."
* * *
"We just handed people over and went back to the Watch House for cocoa, sarge!"
"Well, you'd had orders..." said Vimes, for what good that did.
"We didn't know!"
Not exactly, thought Vimes. We didn't ask. We just shut our minds to it. People went in through that front door and some of the poor devils came out through the secret door, not always in one box.
* * *
"You don't bash a man's brains out when he's tied to a chair!"
"He did!"
"And you don't. That's because you're not him!"
* * *
If you were an Assassin, being killed in the pursuit of your craft was all part of the job, albeit the last part.
* * *
Of course, he'd be expelled from the Guild if caught wearing such clothing. He'd reasoned that this was much better than being expelled from the land of the upright and breathing. He'd rather not be cool than be cold.
* * *
"You cannot fight for 'reasonably priced love'."
"You can if you want me and the rest of the girls on board," said Rosie. "'Free' is not a word we wish to see used in these circumstances."
"Oh, very well," said Reg, making a note on a clipboard. "We're all happy with Truth, Justice and Freedom, are we?"
* * *
"Well, at least we can agree on Truth, Freedom and Justice, yes?"
There was a chorus of nods. Everyone wanted those. They didn't cost anything.
* * *
Reg Shoe: "You'd like Freedom, Truth and Justice, wouldn't you, comrade sergeant?"
Vimes: "I'd like a hard-boiled egg."
Reg Shoe: "In the circumstances, sergeant, I think we should set our sights a little higher--"
Vimes: "Well, yes, we could. But... well, Reg, tomorrow the sun will come up again, and I'm pretty sure that whatever happens we won't have found Freedom, and there won't be a whole lot of Justice, and I'm damn sure we won't have found Truth. But it's just possible that I might get a hard-boiled egg."
* * *
When he was a boy he'd read books about great military campaigns, and visited the museums and looked with patriotic pride at the paintings of famous cavalry charges, last stands and glorious victories. It had come as rather a shock, when he later began to participate in some of these, to find that the painters had unaccountably left out the intestines.
* * *
"I'd be very worried if I saw a man singing the national anthem and waving the flag, sir. It's really a thing foreigners do."
"Really? Why?"
"We don't need to show we're patriotic, sir. I mean, this is Ankh-Morpork. We don't have to make a big fuss about being the best, sir. We just know."
* * *
Hero worship, he thought. That sort of thing can turn you blind.
* * *
I don't believe this. I'm standing over there now, a kid who's still clean and pink and full of ideals, looking at me as if I'm some kind of hero. I don't dare not be. I'm going to make the stupid decision because I don't want to look bad in front of myself. Try explaining that to anyone who hasn't had a couple of drinks.
* * *
...they were strongly against swearing, which is a real handicap in a sergeant. Or would be, if sergeants weren't so good at improvising.
* * *
This was, after all, the area of small traders, porters, butchers and longshoremen. And so standing in raggedy lines in front of Vimes were men who, every day, peacefully and legally, handled things with blades and spikes that made a mere sword look like a girl's hatpin.
* * *
"It's an old soldiers' song," he said.
"Really, sarge? But it's about angels."
Yes, thought Vimes, and it's amazing what bits those angels cause to rise up as the song progresses. It's a real soldiers' song: sentimental, with dirty bits.
* * *
"...I rode up to the one in Heroes Street, with me helmet off and looking off-duty, sort of thing, and I asked what it was all about. A man shouted down that everything was all right, thank you very much, and they'd finished all the barricades for now. I said what about law and order, and they said we've got plenty, thank you."
* * *
...most of the people were engaging in Ankh-Morpork's traditional pastime, which was hanging around to see what'd happen next.
* * *
Vimes: "What's in it?"
Dibbler: "It's stew. Strong enough to put hairs on your chest."
Vimes: "Yes, I can see that some of those bits of meat have got bristles on them already."
* * *
If they'd [the rebels] fired on Gabitass, or thrown things, that would have made it so much easier. Instead they were acting... well... decently. That was no way for enemies of the state to behave!
* * *
Major Mountjoy-Standfast: "Have you no interest in honour? Glory? Love of city?"
Nobby: "Dunno. Can you get much for 'em?"
Major Mountjoy-Standfast: "They are priceless!"
Nobby: "Oh, well, in that case I'll stick with the boots, if it's all the same to you."
* * *
"Look at Trooper Gabitass there!" said the major, now quite upset. "Twenty years' service, a fine figure of a soldier! He wouldn't stoop to stealing the boots of a fallen enemy, would you, trooper?"
"No, sir! Mug's game, sir!" said Trooper Gabitass.
[Footnote: And this was true. Don't bother with the boots, would have been Trooper Gabitass's advice, had he been inclined to part with it. You need to bribe someone on the baggage carts to build up stock and when all's said and done you'll only make a few dollars. Stick to jewellery. It's portable. Trooper Gabitass had seen too many battlefields up close to use the word 'glory' without wincing.]
* * *
The important thing was not to let the other person have a chance to say "But--", let alone "Who the hell do you think you are?"
* * *
Vimes counted under his breath, and had only reached two when a cartwheel rolled out of the smoke and away down the road. This always happens.
* * *
There was a cheer from the crowd, and a general struttiness about the armed men. We'd shown them, eh? They don't like the taste of cold steel, those... er... other people from Ankh-Morpork! We'll show 'em, eh?
* * *
People said things like "quite possibly we shall never know the truth" which meant, in Vimes's personal lexicon, "I know, or think I know what the truth is, and hope like hell it doesn't come out, because things are all smoothed over now."
* * *
He wanted to go home. He wanted it so much that he trembled at the thought. But if the price of that was selling good men to the night, if the price was filling those graves, if the price was not fighting with every trick he knew... then it was too high.
* * *
Every day, maybe a hundred cows died for Ankh-Morpork. So did a flock of sheep and a herd of pigs and the gods alone knew how many ducks, chickens and geese. Flour? He'd heard it was eighty tons, and about the same amount of potatoes and maybe twenty tons of herring. He didn't particularly want to know this kind of thing, but once you started having to sort out the everlasting traffic problem these were facts that got handed to you.
Every day, forty thousand eggs were laid for the city. Every day, hundreds, thousands of carts and boats and barges converged on the city with fish and honey and oysters and olives and eels and lobsters. And then think of the horses dragging this stuff, and the windmills... and the wool coming in, too, every day, the cloth, the tobacco, the spices, the ore, the timber, the cheese, the coal, the fat, the tallow, the hay EVERY DAMN DAY...
* * *
"The best place for urban fighting is right out in the countryside, sir, where there's nothing else in the way."
* * *
Their families cordially detested one another. Lord Albert wasn't sure, now, what event in history had caused the rift, but it must have been important, obviously, otherwise it would be silly to go on like this.
* * *
"This is a party," said Albert.
"Indeed. I see you are standing upright."
"Indeed. So are you, I see."
"Indeed. Indeed. On that subject, I notice many others are doing the same thing."
"Which is not to say that the horizontal position does not have its merits when it comes to, for example, sleeping," said Albert.
"Quite so. Obviously that would not be done here."
"Oh, indeed. Indeed."
[Footnote: The Selachii and the Venturi made a point, on occasions like this, to talk only about things on which there was no possibility of disagreement. Given the history of the two families, this had become a very small number of things.]
* * *
Selachii followed morosely, being of the opinion that when respectable women called themselves Bobbi the world was about to end, and ought to.
* * *
...Miss Rosemary Palm was debating with herself as to whether the future should contain strange pastry things with a green filling that hinted mysteriously of prawn.
* * *
"Major Mountjoy-Standfast can't out-think a bunch of gormless watchmen and civilians and some veterans with garden forks?" said Lord Venturi, who had no idea of how much damage a garden fork could do if hurled straight down from an elevation of twenty feet.
* * *
The messenger, who was a sub-lieutenant and very nervous, couldn't find the right words to explain that "unarmed civilian" was stretching a point when it was a 200lb slaughterhouse man with a long hook in one hand and a flensing knife in the other.
* * *
When you had a Guild of Assassins, there had to be rules which everyone knew and which were never, ever broken. [Footnote: Sometimes, admittedly, for a given value of "never".]
* * *
An Assassin, a real Assassin, had to look like one -- black clothes, hood, boots and all. If they could wear any clothes, any disguise, then what could anyone do but spend all day sitting in a small room with a loaded crossbow pointed at the door?
* * *
And [Assassins] couldn't kill a man incapable of defending himself (although a man worth more than AM$I0,000 a year was considered automatically capable of defending himself or at least of employing people to do it for him).
* * *
It was regrettable how many rulers of the city had been inhumed by the men in black because they didn't recognize a chance when they saw it, didn't know when they'd gone too far, didn't read the signs, didn't know when to walk away after embezzling a moderate and acceptable amount of cash. They didn't realize it when the machine had stopped, when the world was ripe for change, when it was time, in fact, to spend more time with their family in case they ended up spending it with their ancestors.
* * *
"All right, let 'em play. But no trumpets. I 'ate tubes pointed at me."
There was some bewildered conversation at the other end of the hall, and then the bereft trumpeters stood back and whistled as best they could.
* * *
...the party spread out a little as the guests pondered the ancient question of how to hold a plate and a glass and eat at the same time without using one of those little glass-holding things that clip on the side of the plate and make the user look as though they're four years old.
* * *
"He's still breathing, sarge!" said Wiglet.
"Right, right," said Vimes. It was amazing how willing people were to see life in the corpse of a friend.
* * *
...those who filled the grates and dusted the furniture and swept the floors stayed on, as they had stayed on before, because they seldom paid any attention to, or possibly didn't even know, who their lord was, and in any case were too useful and knew where the brooms were kept. Lords come and go, but dust accumulates.
* * *
One thing Vimes was learning fast was the natural vindictiveness of old ladies, who had no sense of fair play when it came to fighting soldiers; give a granny a spear and a hole to jab it through, and young men on the other side were in big trouble.
* * *
But the grannies, oh, the grannies... The neighbourhoods of the Republic were a natural recruiting ground for the regiments. It was also an area of big families and matriarchs whose word was family law. It had almost been cheating, putting them on the parapet with a megaphone during the lulls.
"I knows you're out there, our Ron! This is your Nan! You climb up one more time and you'll feel the back of my hand! Our Rita sends her love and wants you to hurry home. Grandpa is feeling a lot better with the new ointment! Now stop being a silly boy!"
* * *
"Sarge, did you mean that about helping them others with their wounded?" said Sam, who was standing at the bottom of the ladder.
"Well, it makes as much sense as anything else that's been happening," said Vimes. "They're city lads just like us, not their fault they were given the wrong orders." And it messes with their heads, he thought...
* * *
"Exactly, my lord," said the secretary, and he was thinking Exactly, my lord too, because he'd Also found there were things he found it safest not to think, either, and these included phrases like what a little tit.
* * *
The barricade was taking some while to dismantle. ... Since every piece belonged to someone, and Ankh-Morpork people care about that sort of thing, it was being dismantled by collective argument. This was not least because people who had donated a three-legged stool to the common good were trying to take away a set of dining chairs, and similar problems.
* * *
If Ankh-Morpork had a grid, there would have been gridlock. Since it did not it was, in the words of Sergeant Colon, "a case of no one being able to move because of everyone else". Admittedly, this phrase, while accurate, did not have the same snap.
* * *
...the conversation had turned to the kind of questions that follow victory, such as 1) is there going to be any extra money? and 2) are there going to be any medals? With an option on 3) which was never far from the watchmen's thoughts: are we going to get into trouble about this?
* * *
On a day when you couldn't give steak away, some people would still buy a pie from Dibbler. It was a triumph of salesmanship and the city's famously atrophied taste buds.
* * *
"Who are all these people?"
"You said 'in here', sergeant," said a soldier.
"Yeah, and we didn't need telling 'cos it was raining arrows," said another soldier.
"I didn't mean to come but I couldn't swim against the tide," said Dibbler.
"I want to show solidarity," said Reg.
* * *
The old coppers were best at running, having run so much during their lives. As on the battlefield, only the cunning and the fast survived.
* * *
"He's a devious devil, sir!" said Knock, as if this was a character flaw in a copper.
* * *
He held the flag like a banner of defiance. "You can take our lives but you'll never take our freedom!" he screamed.
Carcer's men looked at one another, puzzled by what sounded like the most badly thought-out war cry in the history of the universe.
* * *
He wasn't an enemy, he was a nemesis.
* * *
"Time has stopped for everyone but you," said Sweeper patiently. "Actually that sentence is wrong in every particular, but it's quite a useful lie."
* * *
...you saw things sometimes that made it impossible to believe not only in gods, but also in common humanity and your own eyes.
* * *
Vimes: "And the armour stays here?"
Qu: "Yes, your grace. Everything. Eyepatch, socks, everything."
Vimes: "Boots, too?"
Qu: "Yes. Everything."
Vimes: "What about my drawers?"
Qu: "Yes, those too. Everything."
Vimes: "So I'll arrive in the nuddy?"
Lu-Tze: "The one costume that's in fashion anywhere."
* * *
Ponder: "Er, we have, er, hypothesized that there was some temporal disturbance, which, coupled with the lightning stroke and a resonance in the standing wave of the Library, caused a space-time rupture--"
Vimes: "Yeah, it felt something like that."
* * *
When the thunder had died away Vimes got up and looked around. He hadn't actually liked the shrubbery very much. That was just as well. Nothing remained but some tree trunks, and they were all stripped of bark down one side. There were a few small fires.
"Er, sorry about that, Mister Vimes," said the troll.
"What did I tell you about Mister Safety Catch?" said Vimes weakly.
"When Mister Safety Catch Is Not On, Mister Crossbow Is Not Your Friend," recited Detritus, saluting.
* * *
"--Igor came and offered to help and Lawn took one look and said only if he's been boiled for twenty minutes--"
* * *
Then, with the doctor, [Vimes] went to his bank. This institution was, not surprisingly, willing to open outside normal hours for a man who was a Duke, and the richest man in the city, and the Commander of the City Watch and, not least, quite prepared to kick the door down.
* * *
Vimes: "Quiet down there, was it?"
Reg Shoe: "Very peaceful, sir, very peaceful. I think I'll have to get myself a new coffin before next year, though. They don't last any time at all these days."
Vimes: "I suppose not that many people look for durability, Reg."
-- Zombies have special needs
* * *
Vetinari: "'You know, it has often crossed my mind that those men deserve a proper memorial of some sort."
Vimes: "Oh yes? In one of the main squares, perhaps?"
Vetinari: "Yes, that would be a good idea."
Vimes: "Perhaps a tableau in bronze? All seven of them raising the flag, perhaps?"
Vetinari: "Bronze, yes."
Vimes: "Really? And some sort of inspiring slogan?"
Vetinari: "Yes, indeed. Something like, perhaps, 'They Did The Job They Had To Do'?"
Vimes: "No. How dare you? How dare you! At this time! In this place! They did the job they didn't have to do, and they died doing it, and you can't give them anything. Do you understand? They fought for those who'd been abandoned, they fought for one another, and they were betrayed. Men like them always are. What good would a statue be? It'd just inspire new fools to believe they're going to be heroes. They wouldn't want that. Just let them be. For ever."