in the city but had been thrown out for getting impossibly high marks in the exams or, in some cases, correcting the questions. It was said that he’d accidentally blown up the Alchemists’ Guild using nothing more than a glass of water, a spoonful of acid, two lengths of wire and a ping-pong ball.
*
Nobby and Colon go on a call - in plain clothes:
‘Come on, open up! Watch business!’
Corporal Nobbs pulled at Sergeant Colon’s sleeve and whispered in his ear.
‘Not Watch business!’ said Colon, pounding the door again. ‘Nothing to do with the Watch at all! We are just civilians, all right?’
The door opened a crack.
‘Are you the Watch?’ said a voice.
‘No! I think I just made that clear—’
‘Piss off, copper!’
The door slammed.
‘You sure this is the right place, sarge?’
‘Don’t call me sarge when we’re in plain clothes!’
‘Right you are, Fred.’
‘That’s—’ Colon hesitated in an agony of status. ‘Well, that’s Frederick to you, Nobby’
‘Right, Frederick. And that’s Cecil, thank you.’
‘Cecil?’
‘That is my name,’ said Nobby coldly.
‘Have it your way’ said Colon. ‘Just remember who’s the superior civilian around here, all right?’
He hammered on the door again.
‘We hear you’ve got a room to let, missus!’ he yelled.
‘Brilliant, Frederick,’ said Nobby. ‘That was bloody brilliant!’
‘Well, I am the sergeant, right?’ Colon whispered.
‘No.’
‘Er … yeah … right … well, just you remember that, right?’
*
‘Sam?’
Vimes looked up from his reading.
‘Your soup will be cold,’ said Lady Sybil from the far end of the table. ‘You’ve been holding that spoonful in the air for the last five minutes by the clock.’
‘Sorry dear.’
Belatedly, his nuptial radar detected a certain chilliness from the far side of the cruet.
‘Is, er, there something wrong, dear?’ he said.
‘Can you remember when we last had dinner together, Sam?’
‘Tuesday, wasn’t it?’
‘That was the Guild of Merchants’ annual dinner, Sam.’
Vimes’s brow wrinkled. ‘But you were there too, weren’t you?’
*
Ankh-Morpork no longer had a fire brigade. The citizens had a rather disturbingly direct way of thinking at times, and it did not take long for people to see the rather obvious flaw in paying a group of people by the number of fires they put out. The penny really dropped shortly after Charcoal Tuesday.
Since then they had relied on the good old principle of enlightened self-interest. People living close to a burning building did their best to douse the fire, because the thatch they saved might be their own.
‘Mr Vimes saved the day!’ said Sergeant Colon excitedly.
‘Just went straight in and saved everyone, in the finest tradition of the Watch!’
‘Fred?’ said Vimes, wearily.
Yessir?’
‘Fred, the finest tradition of the Watch is having a quiet smoke somewhere out of the wind at 3 a.m. Let’s not get carried away, eh?’
Colon rummaged in a pocket and produced a very small book, which he held up for inspection.
‘This belonged to my great-grandad,’ he said. ‘He was in the scrap we had against Pseudopolis and my great-gran gave him this book of prayers for soldiers, ‘cos you need all the prayers you can get, believe you me, and he stuck it in the top pocket of his jerkin, ‘cos he couldn’t afford armour, and next day in battle - whoosh, this arrow came out of nowhere, wham, straight into this book and it went all the way through to the last page before stopping, look. You can see the hole.’
‘Pretty miraculous,’ Carrot agreed.
‘Yeah, it was, I s’pose,’ said the sergeant. He looked ruefully at the battered volume. ‘Shame about the other seventeen arrows, really.’
Another little memory burst open as silently as a mouse passing wind in a hurricane.
‘He is a D’reg!’
‘Dreg?’ said Angua.
‘A warlike desert tribe,’ said Carrot. ‘Very fierce. Honourable, though. They say that if a D’reg is your friend he’s your friend for the rest of your life.’
‘And if he’s not your friend?’
‘That’s about five seconds.’
*
‘Everything’s gone all to pot these days.’
‘Not like when we were kids, sarge.’
‘Not like when we were kids indeed, Nobby’
‘People trusted one another in them days, didn’t they, sarge?’
‘People trusted one another, Nobby.’
Yes, sarge. I know. And people didn’t have to lock their doors, did they?’
‘That’s right, Nobby. And people were always ready to help. They were always in and out of one another’s houses.’
“sright, sarge,’ said Nobby vehemently. ‘I know no one ever locked their houses down our street.’
‘That’s what I’m talking about. That’s my point.’
‘It was ‘cos the bastards even used to steal the locks.’
Colon considered the truth of this.
Yes, but at least it was each other’s stuff they were nicking, Nobby’
*
Lord Rust’s expression would have preserved meat for a