Pock.
Splinters flew up from a point on the floor where it would undoubtedly have severely inconvenienced anyone lying on the boards cautiously raising a decoy helmet on a stick.
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.
He dropped the pole, picked up the crossbow, spun past the window, fired at an indistinct shape on the opera house roof opposite as if the bow could possibly carry across that range, leapt across the room and wrenched at the door. Something smashed into the doorframe as the door swung to behind him.
Then it was down the back stairs, out of the door, over the privy roof, into Knuckle Passage, up the back steps of Zorgo{35} the Retrophrenologist,[15] into Zorgo’s operating room and over to the window.
Zorgo and his current patient looked at him curiously.
Pugnant’s roof was empty. Vimes turned back and met a pair of puzzled gazes.
‘’Morning, Captain Vimes,’ said the retrophrenologist, a hammer still upraised in one massive hand.
Vimes smiled manically.
‘Just thought—’ he began, and then went on, ‘—I saw an interesting rare butterfly on the roof over there.’
Troll and patient stared politely past him.
‘But there wasn’t,’ said Vimes.
He walked back to the door.
‘Sorry to have bothered you,’ he said, and left.
Zorgo’s patient watched him go with interest.
‘Didn’t he have a crossbow?’ he said. ‘Bit odd, going after interesting rare butterflies with a crossbow.’
Zorgo readjusted the fit of the grid on his patient’s bald head.
‘Dunno,’ he said, ‘I suppose it stops them creating all these damn thunderstorms.’ He picked up the mallet again. ‘Now, what were we going for today? Decisiveness, yes?’
‘Yes. Well, no. Maybe.’
‘Right.’ Zorgo took aim. ‘This,’ he said with absolute truth, ‘won’t hurt a bit.’
It was more than just a delicatessen. It was a sort of dwarf community centre and meeting place. The babble of voices stopped when Angua entered, bending almost double, but started up again with slightly more volume and a few laughs when Carrot followed. He waved cheerfully at the other customers.
Then he carefully removed two chairs. It was just possible to sit upright if you sat on the floor.
‘Very … nice,’ said Angua. ‘Ethnic.’
‘I come in here quite a lot,’ said Carrot. ‘The food’s good and, of course, it pays to keep your ear to the ground.’
‘That’d certainly be easy here,’ said Angua, and laughed.
‘Pardon?’
‘Well, I mean, the ground is … so much … closer …’
She felt a pit opening wider with every word. The noise level had suddenly dropped again.
‘Er,’ said Carrot, staring fixedly at her. ‘How can I put this? People are talking in Dwarfish … but they’re listening in Human.’
‘Sorry.’
Carrot smiled, and then nodded at the cook behind the counter and cleared his throat noisily.
‘I think I might have a throat sweet somewhere—’ Angua began.
‘I was ordering breakfast,’ said Carrot.
‘You know the menu off by heart?’
‘Oh, yes. But it’s written on the wall as well.’ Angua turned and looked again at what she’d thought were merely random scratches.
‘It’s Oggham,’{36} 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{37}
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. ‘Anyway, I ordered you dwarf bread. Have you ever eaten dwarf bread?’
‘No.’
‘Everyone should try it once,’ said Carrot. He appeared to consider this. ‘Most people do,’ he added.[16]
Three and a half minutes after waking up, Captain Samuel Vimes, Night Watch, staggered up the last few steps to the roof of the city’s opera house, gasped for breath and threw up allegro ma non troppo.
Then he leaned against the wall, waving his crossbow vaguely in front of him.
There wasn’t anyone else on the roof. There were just the leads, stretching away, drinking up the morning sunlight. It was already almost too hot to move.
When he felt a bit better he poked around among the chimneys and skylight. But there were a dozen ways down, and a thousand places to hide.
He could see right into his room from here. Come to that, he could see into the rooms of most of the city.
Catapult … no …
Oh, well. At least there’d been witnesses.
He walked to the edge of the roof, and peered over.
‘Hello, there,’ he said. He blinked. It was six storeys down, and not a sight to look at on a recently emptied stomach.
‘Er … could you come up here, please?’ he said.
‘’Ight oo are.’
Vimes stood back. There was a scrape of stone and a gargoyle pulled itself laboriously over the parapet, moving like a cheap stop-motion animation.
He didn’t know much about gargoyles. Carrot had said something once about how marvellous it was, an urban troll species that had evolved a symbiotic relationship with gutters, and he had admired the way they funnelled run-off water into their ears and out through fine sieves in their mouths. They were probably the strangest species on the Disc.[17] You didn’t get many birds nesting on buildings colonized by gargoyles, and bats tended to fly around them.
‘What’s your name, friend?’
‘’ornice-oggerooking-Oardway.’
Vimes’ lips moved as he mentally inserted all those sounds unobtainable to a creature whose mouth was stuck permanently open. Cornice-overlooking-Broadway. A gargoyle’s personal identity was intimately bound up with its normal location, like a limpet.
‘Well now, Cornice,’ he said, ‘do you know who I am?’
‘Oh,’ said the gargoyle sullenly.
Vimes nodded. It sits up here in all weather straining gnats through its ears, he thought. People like that don’t have a crowded address book. Even whelks get out more.
‘I’m Captain Vimes of the Watch.’
The gargoyle pricked up its huge ears.
‘Ar. Oo erk or Ister Arrot?’
Vimes worked this one out, too, and blinked.
‘You know Corporal Carrot?’
‘Oh, Ess. Air-ee-un owes Arrot.’
Vimes snorted. I grew up here, he thought, and when I walk down the street everyone says, ‘Who’s that glum bugger?’ Carrot’s been here a few months and everyone knows him. And he knows everyone. Everyone likes him. I’d be annoyed about that, if only he wasn’t so likeable.
‘You live right up here,’ said Vimes, interested despite the more pressing problem on his mind, ‘how come you know Arrot … Carrot?’
‘Ee cuns uk ere um-imes an awks oo ugg.’
‘Uz ee?’
‘Egg.’
‘Did someone else come up here? Just now?’
‘Egg.’
‘Did you see who it was?’
‘Oh. Ee oot izh oot on i ed. Ang et ogg a ire-erk. I or ing un ah-ay a-ong Or-oh-Erns Eet.’
15
It works like this. 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
16
Rat and cream cheese is only one of the famous Discworld dishes available in cosmopolitan Ankh-Morpork. According to the Guild of Merchants’ publication
* Not to be confused with the Scottish Clootie Dumpling, which is a kind of suet pudding full of fruit. The Ankh-Morpork version sits on the tongue like finest meringue, and on the stomach like a concrete bowling ball.
17
Wrong. Vimes didn’t travel much except on foot, and knew little of the Lancre Suicide Thrush, for example, or the Shadowing Lemma, which exists in only two dimensions and eats mathematicians, or the quantum weather butterfly. But 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.
{*} Our real world’s hermit crab (which can be found on islands like Bermuda) behaves similarly: it has no protective shell of its own, so it utilises the shells of dead land snails. The reason why the hermit crab is one of the sadder species in our world as well is given in Stephen Jay Gould’s essay ‘Nature’s Odd Couples’ (published in his collection