'Why not?' said Vimes. 'Everyone else will.'
From the palace came the muffled sounds of complicated destruction . . .
Errol pulled a broomstick across the floor with his mouth and, whimpering with effort, hauled it upright. After a lot more whimpering and several false starts he managed to winkle the end of it between the wall and the big jar of lamp oil.
He paused for a moment, breathing like a bellows, and pushed.
The jar resisted for a moment, rocked back and forth once or twice, and then fell over and smashed on the flagstones. Crude, very badly-refined oil spread out in a black puddle.
Errol's huge nostrils twitched. Somewhere in the back of his brain unfamiliar synapses clicked like telegraph keys. Great balks of information flooded down the thick nerve cord to his nose, carrying inexplicable information about triple bonds, alkalines and geometric isomerism. However, almost all of it missed the small part of Errol's brain that was used for being Errol.
All he knew was that he was suddenly very, very thirsty.
Something major was happening in the palace. There was the occasional crash of a floor or thump of a falling ceiling ...
In his rat-filled dungeon, behind a door with more locks than a major canal network, the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork lay back and grinned in the darkness.
Outside, bonfires flared in the dusk.
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