Discworld 08 - Guards! Guards!

The Patrician steepled his hands and looked at Vimes over the top of them.

‘Let me give you some advice, Captain,’ he said.

‘Yes, sir?’

‘It may help you make some sense of the world.’

‘Sir.’

‘I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are the good people and the bad people,’ said the man. ‘You’re wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.’

He shouldered past a row of palace guards and shambled as fast as he could across the flagstones. No-one was paying him much attention at the moment.

He stopped.

It wasn’t a rock, because Ankh-Morpork was on loam. It was just some huge remnant of mortared masonry, probably thousands of years old, from somewhere in the city foundations. Ankh-Morpork was so old now that what it was built on, by and large, was Ankh-Morpork.

‘I wouldn’t put up a fight, if I were you,’ Wonse went on. ‘They’re desperate and uneasy men. But very highly paid.’

Vimes said nothing. Wonse was a gloater. You always stood a chance with gloaters. The old Patrician had never been a gloater, you could say that for him. If he wanted you dead, you never even heard about it.

I can see what the captain means, he thought. No wonder he always has a drink after he thinks about things. We always beat ourselves before we even start. Give any Ankh-Morpork man a big stick and he’ll end up clubbing himself to death.

The beggar wrapped his velvet cloak around him.

‘You couldn’t by any chance spare—’ he paused, calculating a sum in accordance with his station — ‘about three hundred dollars for a twelve-course civic banquet, could you?’

‘No.’

‘Fair enough. Fair enough,’ said the chief beggar amiably. He sighed. It wasn’t a rewarding job, being chief beggar. It was the differentials that did for you. Low-grade beggars made a reasonable enough living on pennies, but people tended to look the other way when you asked them for a sixteen-bedroom mansion for the night.

‘Disgusting, this sort of thing, really,’ mused Sergeant Colon. ‘People goin’ around in coaches like this when there’s people with no roof to their heads.’

‘It’s Lady Ramkin’s coach,’ said Nobby. ‘She’s all right.’

‘Well, yes, but what about her ancestors, eh? You don’t get big houses and carriages without grindin’ the faces of the poor a bit.’

‘You’re just annoyed because your missus has been embroidering crowns on her undies,’ said Nobby.

‘That’s got nothing to do with it,’ said Sergeant Colon indignantly. ‘I’ve always been very firm on the rights of man.’

‘And dwarf,’ said Carrot.

‘Yeah, right,’ said the sergeant uncertainly. ‘But all this business about kings and lords, it’s against basic human dignity. We’re all born equal. It makes me sick.’

‘Never heard you talk like this before, Frederick,’ said Nobby.

‘It’s Sergeant Colon to you, Nobby.’

‘Sorry, Sergeant.’

He looked Carrot up and down. ‘Joining the Watch, are you?’

‘I hope to prove worthy, yes,’ said Carrot.

The guard gave him what could loosely be called an old-fashioned look. It was practically neolithic.

‘What was it you done?’ he said.

‘I’m sorry?’ said Carrot.

‘You must of done something,’ said the guard.

‘My father wrote a letter,’ said Carrot proudly. ‘I’ve been volunteered.’

‘Bloody hellfire,’ said the guard.

Carrot walked steadfastly down the mountain paths, disturbing clouds of bumblebees. After a while he unsheathed the sword and made experimental stabs at felonious tree stumps and unlawful assemblies of stinging nettles.

‘What? A real dragon?’

The Supreme Grand Master’s eyes rolled in the privacy of his hood.

‘Yes, a real one. Not a little pet swamp dragon. The genuine article.’

‘But I thought they were, you know… miffs.’

The Supreme Grand Master leaned forward.

‘They were myths and they were real,’ he said loudly. ‘Both a wave and a particle.’

With the slightly miffed air of one who has run their finger along a daughter-in-law’s top shelf and found against all expectation that it is sparkling clean, the Grand Master got on with it.

What a shower, he told himself. A bunch of incompetents no other secret society would touch with a ten-foot Sceptre of Authority. The sort to dislocate their fingers with even the simplest secret handshake.

But incompetents with possibilities, nevertheless.