'I'm not bloody well going to have it, understand?' Vimes shouted, shaking the ape back and forth.
'Oook,' the Librarian pointed out, patiently.
'What? Oh. Sorry.' Vimes lowered the ape, who wisely didn't make an issue of it because a man angry enough to lift 300lbs of orangutan without noticing is a man with too much on his mind.
Now he was staring around the courtyard.
'Any way out of here?' he said. 'Without climbing the walls, I mean.'
He didn't wait for an answer but loped around the walls until he reached a narrow, grubby door, and kicked it open. It hadn't been locked anyway, but he kicked it just the same. The Librarian trailed along behind, swinging on his knuckles.
The kitchen on the other side of the door was almost deserted, the staff having finally lost their nerve and decided that all prudent chefs refrained from working in an establishment where there was a mouth bigger than they were. A couple of palace guards were eating a cold lunch.
'Now,' said Vimes, as they half-rose, 'I don't want to have to…'
They didn't seem to want to listen. One of them reached for a crossbow.
'Oh, the hell with it.' Vimes grabbed a butcher's knife from a block beside it and threw it.
There is an art in throwing knives and, even then, you need the right kind of knife. Otherwise it does just what this one did, which is miss completely.
The guard with the bow leaned sideways, righted himself, and found that a purple fingernail was gently blocking the firing mechanism. He looked around. The Librarian hit him right on top of his helmet.
The other guard shrank back, waving his hands frantically.
'Nonono!' he said. 'It's a misunderstanding! What was it you said you didn't want to have to do? Nice monkey!'
'Oh, dear,' said Vimes. 'Wrong!'
He ignored the terrified screaming and rummaged through the debris of the kitchen until he came up with a cleaver. He'd never felt really at home with swords, but a cleaver was a different matter. A cleaver had weight. It had purpose. A sword might have a certain nobility about it, unless it was the one belonging for example to Nobby, which relied on rust to hold it together, but what a cleaver had was a tremendous ability to cut things up.
He left the biology lesson-that no monkey was capable of bouncing someone up and down by their ankles-found a likely door, and hurried through it. This took him outside again, into the big cobbled area that surrounded the palace. Now he could get his bearings, now he could . . .
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