Night Watch

everyone and everything, he saw dark assassins in every corner. The rumour was that he woke up sweating every night because they even got into his dreams.

And he saw plots and spies everywhere throughout his waking hours, and had men root them out, and the thing about rooting out plots and spies everywhere is that, even if there are no real plots to begin with, there are plots and spies galore very soon.

At least the Night Watch didn't have to do much of the actual rooting. They just arrested the pieces. It was the special office in Cable Street that was the long hand of his lordship's paranoia.

The Particulars, they were officially, but as far as Vimes could remember they'd revelled in their nickname of the “Unmentionables”. They were the ones that listened in every shadow and watched at every window. That was how it seemed, anyway. They certainly were the ones who knocked on doors in the middle of the night.

Vimes stopped, in the dark. The cheap clothes were soaked through, the boots were flooded, rain was trickling off his chin and he was a long, long way from home. Yet, in a treacherous kind of way, this was home. He'd spent most of his days working nights. Walking through the wet streets of a sleeping city was his life.

The nature of the night changed, but the nature of the beast remained the same.

He reached into the ragged pocket and touched the badge again.

In the darkness where lamps were few and far between, Vimes knocked on a door. A light was burning in one of the lower windows, so Lawn was presumably still awake.

After a while a very small panel slid back and he heard a voice say, “Oh…it's you.” There was a pause, followed by the sound of bolts being released.

The doctor opened the door. In one hand he held a very long syringe. Vimes found his gaze inexorably drawn to it. A bead of something purple dripped off the end and splashed on to the floor.

“What would you have done, injected me to death?” he said.

“This?” Lawn looked at the instrument as if unaware that he'd been holding it. “Oh…just sorting out a little problem for someone. Patients turn up at all hours.”

“I'll bet they do. Er…Rosie said you had a spare room,” said Vimes. “I can pay,” he added quickly. “I've got a job. Five dollars a month? I won't be needing it for long.”

“Upstairs on the left,” said Lawn, nodding. “We can talk about it in the morning.”

“I'm not a criminal madman,” said Vimes. He wondered why he said it, and then wondered who he was trying to reassure.

“Never mind, you'll soon fit in,” said Lawn. There was a whimper from the door leading to the surgery.

“The bed's not aired but I doubt that you'll care,” he said. “And now, if you'll excuse me…”

It wasn't aired, and Vimes didn't care. He didn't even remember getting into it.

He woke up once, in panic, and heard the sound of the big black wagon rattling down the street. And then it just, quite seamlessly, became part of the nightmare.

At ten o'clock in the morning Vimes found a cold cup of tea by his bed and a pile of clothes and armour on the floor outside the door. He drank the tea while he inspected the pile.

He'd read Snouty right. The man survived because he was a weathercock and kept an eye on which way the wind was blowing, and right now the wind was blowing due Vimes. He'd even included fresh socks and drawers, which hadn't been in the specification. It was a thoughtful touch. They probably hadn't been paid for, of course. They had been “obtained”. This was the old Night Watch.

But, glory be, the breathy little crawler had scrounged something else, too. The three stripes for a sergeant had a little gold crown above them. Vimes instinctively disliked crowns, but this was one he was prepared to treasure.

He went downstairs, doing up his belt, and bumped into Lawn coming out of his surgery, wiping his hands on a cloth. The doctor smiled absently, then focused on the uniform. The smile did not so much fade as drain.

“Shocked?” said Vimes.

“Surprised,” said the doctor. “Rosie won't be, I expect. I don't do anything illegal, you know.”

“Then you've got nothing to fear,” said Vimes.

“Really? That proves you're not from round here,” said Lawn. “Want some breakfast? There's kidneys.” This time it was Vimes's smile that drained. “Lamb,” the doctor added.

In the tiny kitchen he prised the lid off a tall stone jar and pulled out a can. Vapour poured off it.

“Ice,” he said. “Get it from over the road. Keeps food fresh.”

Vimes's brow wrinkled. “Over the road? You mean the mortuary?”

“Don't worry, it's not been used,” said Lawn, putting a pan on the stove. “Mr Garnish drops off a lump a few times a week, in payment for being cured of a rather similar medical condition.”

“But mostly you work for the ladies of, shall we say, negotiable affection?” said Vimes. Lawn gave him a sharp look to see if he was joking, but Vimes's expression hadn't changed.

“Not just them,” he said. “There are others.”

“People who come in by the back door,” said Vimes, looking around the little room. “People who for one reason or another don't want to go to the…better known doctors?”

“Or can't afford them,” said Lawn. “People who turn up with no identity. And you had a point… John?”

“No, no, just asking,” said Vimes, cursing himself for walking right into it. “I just wondered where you trained.”

“Why?”

“The kind of people who come in by the back door are the kind of people who want results, I imagine.”

“Hah. Well, I trained in Klatch. They have some novel ideas about medicine over there. They think it's a good idea to get patients better, for one thing,” he turned over the kidneys with a fork. “Frankly, sergeant, I'm pretty much like you. We do what needs doing, we work in, er, unpopular areas and I suspect we both draw the line somewhere. I'm no butcher. Rosie says you aren't. But you do the job that's in front of you, or people die.”

“I'll remember that,” said Vimes.

“And when all's said and done,” said Lawn, “there are worse things to do in the world than take the pulse of women.”

After breakfast Sergeant-at-Arms John Keel stepped out into the first day of the rest of his life.

He stood still for a moment, shut his eyes, and swivelled both feet like a man trying to stub out two cigarettes at once. A slow, broad smile spread across his face. Snouty had found just the right kind of boots. Willikins and Sybil between them conspired to prevent him wearing old, well-worn boots these da—those days, and stole them away in the night to have the soles repaired. It was good to feel the streets with dry feet again. And after a lifetime of walking them, he did feel the streets. There were the cobblestones: catheads, trollheads, loaves, short and long setts, rounders, Morpork Sixes, and the eighty- seven types of paving brick, and the fourteen types of stone slab, and the twelve types of stone never intended for street slabs which had got used anyway, and had their own patterns of wear, and the rubbles and the gravels, and the repairs, and the thirteen different types of cellar cover and twenty types of drain lid—

He bounced a little, like a man testing the hardness of something. “Elm Street,” he said. He bounced again. “Junction with Twinkle. Yeah.”

He was back.

It wasn't many steps to Treacle Mine Road, and as he turned towards the Watch House a flash of colour caught his eye.

And there it was, overhanging a garden wall. Lilac was common in the city. It was vigorous and hard to kill and had to be. The flower buds were noticeably swelling.

He stood and stared, as a man might stare at an old battlefield.

…they rise hands up, hands up, hands up…

How did it go, now? Think of things happening one after the other. Don't assume that you know what's