Snuff

And Sam Vimes finished his holiday.

Of course it couldn’t be entirely fun, not with the clacks, not with people sending messages like, ‘I don’t want to bother you, but this will only take a moment of your time …’

A great many people didn’t want to bother Sam Vimes, but with a great effort of will they somehow managed to overcome their distaste and do so nevertheless. One of them, and this message did not contain an apology of any sort, came from Havelock, Lord Vetinari, and read, ‘We will talk about this.’

That morning Vimes hired a small boat with its captain and spent a happy time with Young Sam picking periwinkles off the rocks on one of the many small islands off the Quirm coast, and then they gathered driftwood, made a fire, and boiled them and ate them with the help of a pin, racing to be the first to get one wiggly morsel out of its shell, and of course there was brown bread and butter and finally plenty of salt and vinegar, so that the periwinkles tasted of salt and vinegar rather than of periwinkles, which would be a disaster.³⁴

With the boys out of the way, Sybil changed the world in her own quiet way, by sitting at the table in their apartment and writing, in the neat cursive script that she had been taught as a girl, a large number of clacks messages. One of them was to the Director of the Royal Opera House of which her ladyship was a major patron, another was to Lord Vetinari, and three more went to the secretary of the Low King of the dwarfs, the secretary of Diamond King of Trolls and the secretary of Lady Margolotta of Uberwald, ruler of all that country that was above ground.

But it didn’t stop there. No sooner had the maid come back from carrying the first batch to the local tower at the top of the hill than she was sent spinning up there again with all the rest. Lady Sybil was a ferocious writer of letters, and if there was any person of substance on the Plains and beyond who didn’t get a letter from Sybil that day, it was because their name had fallen out of her beautifully bound and obsessively updated little black book, which was, in fact, a delicate pink with tiny embroidered flowers on it, and a small phial of perfume. Nevertheless the only comparable weapon in the entire history of persuasion was probably the ballista.

In the afternoon Lady Sybil took tea with some of her girlfriends, all old girls from the Quirm College for Young Ladies, and had a very satisfactory time talking about other people’s children while silently, driven by messages sleeting across the land with a precision and speed that no wizard would have contemplated, the world began to change its mind.

Concurrently, Vimes took Young Sam to the zoo, where he met the keepers, nearly all of whom had known somebody on the Wonderful Fanny and who opened every door to them, and nearly every cage. The curator himself came along to witness this cheerful six-year-old who was methodically weighing giraffe poo on a pair of ancient snuff scales, dissecting it with a couple of old kitchen knives, and making notes in a notebook with a picture of a goblin on the front. But for Sam Vimes the highlight was the elephant’s delivery that Young Sam had been looking forward to – just as the Vimes party approached, Jumbo obliged and his son was, almost literally, in a hog heaven. Not even the philatelist finding a rare reversed-head blue triangle stamp in an unregarded secondhand stamp collection could have been happier than Young Sam toddling away with his steaming bucket. Young Sam had seen the elephant.

And so had Sam Vimes. The curator had said that Young Sam was incredibly gifted, and seemed to have a natural grasp of the disciplines of natural philosophy, a comment that caused Sam’s father to nod wisely and hope for the best.

They rounded off the day with a visit to the funfair, where Vimes gave the man a dollar for the ride on the upsy-daisy machine and was given change for a quarter-dollar. When he objected the man swore at Vimes, lashed out and was surprised to be caught in a grip of steel, marched through a cheering crowd and handed over to the nearest Quirm copper, who saluted and asked if Vimes could sign his helmet. That was a small thing, but, as Vimes always said, behind small things you often find big things. He also won a coconut, a definite result, and Young Sam got a stick of rock with ‘Quirm’ all the way through, which stuck his teeth together, another memorable occasion.

In the middle of the night Vimes, who had been listening to the pounding of the surf for some time, said, ‘Are you awake, dear?’ And then, because this is how these things are done, raised his voice a little when he got no answer and repeated, ‘Are you awake, dear?’

‘Yes, Sam. I am now.’

Vimes stared at the ceiling. ‘I wonder if it’s all going to work.’

‘Of course it will! People are very enthusiastic about it, you know; they’re intrigued. And I’ve pulled more strings than an elephant’s corset. It will work. What about you?’

There was a gecko on the ceiling; you didn’t get them in Ankh-Morpork. It looked at Vimes with jewelled eyes. He said, ‘Well, it’ll be more or less a standard procedure.’ He shifted uneasily, and the gecko retreated to the corner of the room. ‘I’m a bit worried, though: some things I’ve done come within the law and one or two others are rather ad hoc, as it were.’

‘You were just opening a way for the law to flow in, Sam. The end justifies the means.’

‘I’m afraid a lot of bad men have used that to justify bad things, dear.’

Under the covers Sybil’s hand reached out to touch his. ‘That’s no reason why one good man shouldn’t use it to justify a good thing. Don’t worry, Sam!’

Woman’s logic, Sam thought: everything is going to be all right because it ought to be all right. The trouble is, reality is never as simple as that and doesn’t allow for paperwork.

Vimes dozed comfortably for a while and then heard Sybil say, in a whisper, ‘He’s not going to escape, is he, Sam? You said he’s good with locks.’

‘Well, they have damn good locks on the cells here in Quirm, there’s a guard watching him at all times and he’s going to be taken up to Ankh-Morpork on their hurry-up wagon under armed escort. I can’t imagine the circumstances that would allow him to escape. After all, the Quirm lads want to do this one by the numbers. I bet they’ll have shined up their armour until it looks like silver. They’ll want to impress me, you see? Don’t worry, I’m certain nothing will go wrong.’

They lay there, comfortable, and then Vimes said, ‘The curator of the zoo was very complimentary about Young Sam.’

Sleepily, Sybil murmured, ‘Perhaps he’ll be another Woolsthorpe, but maybe this time with the missing ingredient of common sense.’

‘Well, I don’t know what he’s going to be,’ said Sam Vimes, ‘but I do know he’ll be good at it.’