Night Watch

“Yeah, an' he can have you shot, hnah, how d'you like them bananas?”

The cluttered desk of Vimes's memory finally unearthed the inadvertent coffee mat of recollection from under the teacup of forgetfulness.

“You're Snouty,” he said. “Right? Some bloke broke your nose and it never got set properly! And your eyes water all the time which is why they gave you permanent jail duty—”

“Do I know you, mister?” said Snouty, peering at Vimes through suspicious, running eyes.

“Me? No. No!” said Vimes hastily. “But I've heard people talk about you. Practically runs the Watch House, they said. Very fair man, they said. Firm but fair. Never spits in the gruel, never widdles in the tea. And never confuses his fruit, either.”

The visible parts of Snouty's face contorted into the resentful scowl of someone who can't quite keep up with the script.

“Oh yeah?” he managed. “Well, hnah, I've always kept a clean cell, that's very true.” He looked a little nonplussed at the development, but managed another scowl. “You stay there, mister, and I'll go an' tell the captain you woke up.”

Vimes went back and lay on the bunk, staring at the badly spelled and anatomically incorrect graffiti on the ceiling. For a while there was a raised voice from upstairs, with an occasional intrusive “hnah!” from Snouty.

Then he heard the jailer's footsteps on the stairs again.

“Well, well, well,” he said, with the tone of someone looking forward to seeing a third party get what was coming to them. “Turns out the captain wants to see you right away. Now, are you gonna let me shackle you, hnah, or do I call the lads down?”

Gods protect you, Vimes thought. Maybe it was true that the blow that had spread Snouty's nose across his face had scrambled his brain. You had to be a special kind of idiot to try to handcuff a dangerous prisoner all by yourself. If he'd tried it with Carcer, for example, he'd have been a dead idiot five minutes ago.

The jailer opened the door. Vimes stood up and presented his wrists. After a second's hesitation, Snouty handcuffed him. It always paid to be nice to a jailer; you might not get handcuffed behind your back. A man with both hands in front of him had quite a lot of freedom.

“You go up the stairs first,” said Snouty, and reached down and picked up an efficient looking crossbow. “And if you even try to walk fast, mister, I'll shoot you, hnah, where you die slow.”

“Very fair,” said Vimes. “Very fair.”

He walked up the steps very carefully, hearing Snouty's heavy breathing right behind him. Like many people of limited intellectual scope, Snouty took what he could do very seriously. He'd show a refreshing lack of compunction about pulling that trigger, for one thing.

Vimes reached the top of the stairs and remembered to hesitate.

“Hnah, turn left, you,” said Snouty behind him. Vimes nodded to himself. And then first on the right. It was all coming back to him, in a great wave. This was Treacle Mine Road. This was his first Watch House. This was where it all began.

The captain's door was open. The tired-looking old man behind the desk glanced up.

“Be seated,” said Tilden coldly. “Thank you, Snouty.”

Vimes had mixed memories of Captain Tilden. He had been a military man before being given this job as a kind of pension, and that was a bad thing in a senior copper. It meant he looked to Authority for orders and obeyed them, whereas Vimes found it better to look to Authority for orders and then filter those orders through a fine mesh of common sense, adding a generous scoop of creative misunderstanding and maybe even incipient deafness if circumstances demanded, because Authority rarely descended to street level. Tilden set too great a store by shiny breastplates and smartness on parade. You had to have some of that stuff, that was true enough. You couldn't let people slob around. But although he'd never voice the view in public, Vimes liked to see a bit of battered armour around the place. It showed that someone had been battering it. Besides, when you were lurking in the shadows you didn't want to gleam…

There was an Ankh-Morpork flag pinned to one wall, the red faded to threadbare orange. Rumour had it that Tilden saluted it every day. There was also a very large silver inkstand, with a gilt regimental crest on it, occupying quite a lot of the desk; Snouty polished it every morning and it shone. Tilden had never quite left the army behind.

Still, Vimes retained a soft spot for the old man. He'd been a successful soldier, as these things went; he'd generally been on the winning side, and had killed more of the enemy by good if dull tactics than his own men by bad but exciting ones. He'd been, in his own way, kind and reasonably fair; the men of the Watch had run rings around him, without his ever noticing.

Now Tilden was giving him the Long Stare With Associated Paperwork. It was supposed to mean: we know all about you, so why don't you tell us all about yourself? But he really wasn't any good at it.

Vimes returned it blankly.

“What is your name again?” said Tilden, aware that Vimes was the better starer.

“Keel,” said Vimes. “John Keel.” And…what the hell… “Look,” he said, “you've only got one piece of paper there that means anything, and that's the report from that sergeant, assuming he can write.”

“As a matter of fact I have two pieces of paper,” said the captain. “The other one concerns the death of John Keel, what?”

“What? For a scrap with the Watch?”

“In the current emergency, that would be quite sufficient for the death penalty,” said Tilden, leaning forward. “But, ha, perhaps it won't be necessary in this case, because John Keel died yesterday. You beat him up and robbed him, what? You took his money but you didn't bother with the letters, because your sort can't read, what? So you wouldn't have known that John Keel was a policeman, what?”

“What?”

Vimes stared at the skinny face with its triumphantly bristling moustache and the little faded blue eyes.

And then there was the sound of someone industriously sweeping the floor in the corridor outside. The captain looked past him, growled, and hurled a pen.

“Get him out of here!” he barked. “What's the little devil doing here at this time of night, anyway?”

Vimes turned his head. There was a skinny, wizened-looking man standing in the doorway, bald as a baby. He was grinning stupidly, and holding a broom.

“He's cheap, sir, hnah, and it's best if he comes in when it's, hnah, quiet,” Snouty murmured, grabbing the little man by a stick-thin elbow. “C'mon, out you get, Mister Lousy—”

So now the crossbow wasn't pointing at Vimes. And he had several pounds of metal on his wrists or, to put it another way, his arms were a hammer. He went to stand up…

Vimes woke up and stared at the ceiling. There was a deep rumbling somewhere near by. Treadmill? Watermill?

It was going to be a corny line, but some things you had to know.

“Where am I?” he said. And then he added: “This time?”

“Well done,” said a voice somewhere behind him. “Consciousness to sarcasm in five seconds!”

The room was large, by the feel of the air, and the play of light on the walls suggested there were candles alight behind Vimes.

The voice said: “I'd like you to think of me as a friend.”

“A friend? Why?” said Vimes. There was a smell of cigarette smoke in the air.

“Everyone ought to have a friend,” said the voice. “Ah, I see you've noticed you're still handcuffed—”

The voice said this because in one movement Vimes had swung himself off the table and plunged forward —

Vimes woke up and stared at the ceiling. There was a deep rumbling somewhere near by. Treadmill? Watermill? Then his thoughts knotted themselves most unpleasantly.

“What,” he said, “just happened?”