Night Watch

Then, gripping the sides of the bath, the Archchancellor stood up. Foaming water cascaded off him, as it would off some ancient leviathan erupting from the abyssal sea.

“Mister _ Stibbons!” he bellowed, his voice bouncing off the imposing walls, “Where the _ is my _ hat?”

He sat down again and waited.

There were a few minutes of silence, and then Ponder Stibbons, Head of Inadvisably Applied Magic and Praelector of Unseen University, came running out of the main door carrying Ridcully's pointy hat.

The Archchancellor snatched at it and rammed it on his head.

“Very well,” he said, standing up again. “Now, will care to _ tell m _ at the _ is going on? And why _ Old Tom _ ing repeatedly?”

“_ been a _ of magic, sir! I _ someone up _ the mechanism!” Ponder shouted, above the sound-destroying silences.3

There was a dying metallic noise from the big clock tower. Ponder and Ridcully waited a few moments, but the city stayed full of normal noise, like the collapse of masonry and distant screams.

“Right,” said Ridcully, as if grudgingly awarding the world a mark for trying. “What was that all about, Stibbons? And why are there policemen in the Library?”

“Big magical storm, sir. Several thousand gigathaums. I believe the Watch is chasing a criminal.”

“Well, they can't just run in here without askin',” said Ridcully, stepping out of the bath and striding forward. “What do we pay our taxes for, after all?”

“Er, we don't actually pay taxes, sir,” said Ponder, running after him. “The system is that we promise to pay taxes if the city ever asks us to, provided the city promises never to ask us, sir. We make a voluntary—”

“Well, at least we have an arrangement, Stibbons.”

“Yes, sir. May I point out that you—”

“And that means they have to ask permission. The essential decencies must be maintained,” said Ridcully firmly. “And I am the Master of this college!”

“On the subject of, er, decencies, sir, you are not in fact wearing—”

Ridcully strode through the open doors of the Library.

“What is going on here?” he demanded.

The watchmen turned, and stared. A large blob of foam, which up until that point had been performing sterling service in the cause of the essential decencies, slipped slowly to the floor.

“Well?” he snapped. “Haven't you lot seen a wizard before?”

A watchman snapped to attention and saluted. “Captain Carrot, sir. We've, er, never seen so much of a wizard, sir.”

Ridcully gave him the slow blank stare used by those with acute uptake-grasping deficiency.

“What's he talkin' about, Stibbons?” he said out of the corner of his mouth.

“You're, er, insufficiently dressed, sir.”

“What? I've got my hat on, haven't I?”

“Yes, sir—”

“Hat = wizard, wizard = hat. Everything else is frippery. Anyway, I'm sure we're all men of the world,” Ridcully added, looking around. For the first time he took in other details about the watchmen. “And dwarfs of the world…ah…trolls of the world too, I see…and…women of the world too, I note…er…” The Archchancellor lapsed into a moment's silence, and then said, “Mr Stibbons?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Would you be so kind as to run up to my rooms and fetch my robe?”

“Of course, sir.”

“And, in the meantime, please be so good as to lend me your hat…”

“But you do actually have your hat on, sir,” said Ponder.

“Quite so, quite so,” said Ridcully, slowly and carefully through his fixed grin. “And now, Mister Stibbons, in addition, right now, I wish you, in fact, to lend, to me, your hat, please.”

“Oh,” said Ponder. “Er…yes…”

A few minutes later a thoroughly clean and decent and clothed Archchancellor was standing in the very centre of the Library, staring up at the damaged dome, while beside him Ponder Stibbons—who for some reason had elected to continue to remain hatless, even though his hat had been handed back to him—stared glumly at some magical instruments.

“Nothing at all?” said Ridcully.

“Ook,” said the Librarian.4

“You've searched everywhere?”

“He can't search everywhere in this library, sir,” said Ponder. “That would take more time than actually could possibly exist. But all the mundane shelves, certainly. Um.”

Carrot turned to Ponder. “What was the ‘um’ for, please, sir?”

“You understand that this is a magical library? And that means that even in normal circumstances there is an area of high magical potential above the bookshelves?”

“I have been in here before,” said Carrot.

“Then you know that time with libraries is…somewhat more flexible?” said Ponder. “Given the additional power of the storm, it might just be possible that—”

“Are you going to tell me he's been moved in time?” said the watchman.

Ponder was impressed. He hadn't been brought up to believe that watchmen were clever. However, he took care not to show it.

“Would that it were that simple,” he said. “However, um, the lightning appears to have added a random lateral component—”

“A what?” said Ridcully.

“You mean in time and space?” said Carrot. Ponder felt himself getting rattled. Non-wizards shouldn't be that quick.

“Not…exactly,” he said, and gave up. “I'm really going to have to work on this, Archchancellor. Some of the readings I'm getting can't possibly be real.”

Vimes knew that he had woken up. There had been darkness and rain and a terrible pain in his face.

Then there had been another flowering of pain on the back of his neck, and a feeling of being pulled this way and that.

And now there was light.

He could see it through his eyelids. His left eyelid, anyway. Nothing but pain was happening on the other side of his face. He kept the eye shut, and strained his hearing instead.

Someone was moving about. There was a clink of metal. A woman's voice said, “He's awake.”

“Are you sure?” said a man's voice. “How can you tell?”

“Because I'm good at telling if a man is asleep,” said the woman.

Vimes opened his eye. He was lying on a bench or table of some sort. A young woman was leaning against the wall next to him, and her dress and bearing and the way she leaned filed her immediately in Vimes's policeman brain as: seamstress, but one of the bright ones. The man had a long black robe and silly floppy hat that got filed under: help, I'm in the hands of a doctor!

He sat bolt upright.

“You lay one hand on me and I'll thump you!” he yelled, trying to swing his legs off the table. Half his head burst into flame.

“I should take it easy, if I was you,” said the doctor, gently pushing him back. “That was a very nasty cut. And don't touch the eyepatch!”

“Cut?” said Vimes, his hand brushing the stiff cloth of an eye-patch. Memories interlocked. “Carcer! Did anyone get him?”

“Whoever attacked you got away,” said the doctor.