Night Watch

A sense of duty told him there was an officer waiting to see him. He overruled it. It was not in possession of all the facts.

Vimes reached the entrance to the Watch House, and stopped. He shut his eyes. If anyone had bothered to look at him, they'd have seen a man apparently trying to grind two cigarette stubs into the road, one with each foot. Thank you, Rosie, for those cardboard soles. He smiled.

He thought with the brains in his feet. And as young Sam had noticed, the feet had a memory of their own…

Rounded cathead cobbles, the usual kind. They hadn't been well set in this part of the city and moved very slightly underfoot…then twice before getting to the Watch House his feet had felt larger cobbles, narrow bands of them, where the road surface had been replaced after drains had been laid. And before that, there'd been a similar band but of soft brick rubble, so crushed by cartwheels that it was practically a gully.

A few dozen steps earlier they'd twirled him round a couple of times, but the last surface before that had been…mud.

Vimes, who had been walking with his eyes shut, bumped into a cart.

Mud, he thought, getting up and ignoring the strange looks of passers-by. That meant an alley. Let's see… ah, yes, over there…

It took twenty minutes.

People turned as he walked through the streets, closing his eyes when he dared so that his feet could see better. Sometimes he did look around, though, and there it was again, the thunderstorm sensation of tensions building up, waiting for the first little thing. People were uneasy—the herd was restless —and they didn't quite know why. Everyone he looked at returned his gaze blankly.

He stepped onwards. Rough flagstones between two stretches of the ancient cobbles they called trollheads…the only place where you got that in this part of the city was here, where Pewter Street crossed Elm, and before that it had been…yeah, big stones, some of the most ancient in the city, rutted by hundreds and hundreds of years of iron-bound cartwheels, that was a road that had been right behind a city wall…yes; he crossed the Pitts, still on Elm, and then lost his thread. A metal grating on the pavement gave it back to him. Cellar grating. Cool cellar. Coat of arms on it, worn down. Buttermarket. Yeah. Go, feet!

The monks had turned him again here but…long bricks, hard-fired in the kiln, and a stretch of quite modern flagstones, well dressed and fitted. It could trick you if you didn't know you were in…yeah, Masons Road, and there were masons here and they looked after the surface. Now find an alley, mud but with a lot of gravel in it, because the stonemasons dumped their waste here but this one has occasional hummocks across it, where pipes have been laid. Yeah. Now find square-head cobbles…

He opened his eyes.

Yeah.

Away on his left, on Clay Lane, was a block of three buildings. A temple sandwiched between two cheapjack corner shops. It was…just a temple, slightly foreign-looking, but weren't they all? It looked High Hublandish, where everyone lived on yaks or something.

The temple doors were locked. He rattled the handle impotently, and then hammered on the woodwork with his sword. It had no effect. He didn't even leave a mark on the wood.

But the door of the shonky shop next door was open. It was a familiar place. Once upon a time, it was his tailor and bootmaker. And, like a pawn shop, a shonky shop was always open. Vimes stepped inside, and was immediately enveloped in dusty darkness.

It was a cave of cloth. Racks of old suits hung from the ceiling. Ancient shelves bent under piles of shirts and vests and socks. Here and there old boxes loomed in the gloom and caught his knees. Piles of derelict boots slipped and slid under his feet. And there was the smell. If poverty had a smell, this was it. If humbled pride had a smell, this was it. And there was a touch of disinfectant as well.

Within a few feet of the door, Vimes was already lost. He turned and shoved his way through grey aisle after grey aisle of suffocating cloth and wondered if anyone had ever died in here and how anyone could ever find out. He pulled aside a hanger containing a greasy, threadbare suit—

“You want?”

He turned.

There was no one there, until his gaze fell slightly and met that of a small, glossy little man, totally bald, very small and thin, and wearing some vague clothing that presumably even a shonky shop hadn't been able to unload on a customer. Who was he? who was he?…surprisingly, the name seemed quite fresh in the memory…

“Ah, er, yeah…Mr Shine—”

“Soon Shine Sun,” said Mr Soon. He grabbed the suit Vimes was still holding. “Good eye, good eye, lovely cloth, lovely cloth, owned by priest, very good, fifty pence to you, shame to sell it, times are hard.”

Vimes hastily put the suit back on the rack and pulled out his badge. Soon glared at it.

“I pay already other copper,” he said. “One dollar, one month, no trouble. Already I pay other copper.”

“Pay?” said Vimes.

'Two-stripe copper already I pay. One dollar, one month, no trouble!”

“Corporal Quirke,” muttered Vimes. “You don't have to pay coppers, Mr Soon. We're here for your protection.”

Despite his barely basic grasp of the language, Mr Soon's expression suggested very clearly that the three-stripe, one-crown copper in front of him had dropped in from the planet Idiot.

“Look, I haven't got time for this,” said Vimes. “Where's the back door? This is Watch business!”

“I pay! I pay protection! One month, no trouble!”

Vimes grunted and set off along another narrow, cloth-lined tunnel.

A glint of glass caught his eye, and he sidled crabwise up a choked aisle until he found a counter. It was piled with more hopeless merchandise, but there was a bead-curtained doorway behind it. He half clambered, half swam over the piles and scrambled into the tiny room beyond.

Mr Soon pushed his way to an ancient tailor's dummy; it was so scratched, chipped and battered it looked like something dug up from the volcanic ash of an ancient city.

He pulled on an arm, and the eyes lit up.

“Number Three here,” he said, into its ear. “He's just gone through. And boy, is he angry…”

The back door was locked but yielded under the weight of Vimes's body. He staggered into the yard, looked up at the wall separating this greasy space from the temple's garden, jumped, scrabbled his boots on the brickwork and dragged himself on to the top, feeling a couple of bricks crumble away underneath him.

He landed on his back, and looked up at a thin, robed figure sitting on a stone seat.

“Cup of tea, commander?” said Sweeper cheerfully.

“I don't want any damn tea!” shouted Vimes, struggling to his feet.

Sweeper dropped a lump of rancid yak butter in the tea bowl beside him.

“What do you want, then, Mister Vimes with the very helpful feet?”

“I can't deal with this! You know what I mean!”

“You know, some tea really would calm you down,” said Sweeper.

“Don't tell me to be calm! When are you going to get me home?”

A figure stepped out of the temple. He was a taller, heavier man than Sweeper, white-haired and with the look of a good-natured bank manager about him. He held out a cup.

Vimes hesitated a moment, and then took the cup and poured the tea out on to the ground.

“I don't trust you,” he said. “There could be anything in this.”

“I can't imagine what we could put in tea that would make it any worse than the way you normally drink it,” said Sweeper calmly. “Sit down, your grace. Please?”

Vimes sagged on to the seat. The rage that had been driving him sank a little, too, but he could feel it bubbling. Automatically, he pulled out a half-smoked cigar and put it in his mouth.

“Sweeper said you'd find us, some way or other,” said the other monk, and sighed. “So much for secrecy.”

“Why should you worry?” said Vimes, lighting the stub. “You can just play around with time and it won't have happened, right?”

“We don't intend to do that,” said the other monk.