Night Watch

to check that he's still got 'em. Tell Detritus what I'm doing, 'cos I don't want to end up as 160lbs of cocktail delicacies. No, don't keep opening your mouth like that. By the time we've sorted out backup and armour and got everyone lined up he'll have dug in somewhere else.”

The last words were delivered at a run.

Vimes reached a door and darted inside. New Hall was student accommodation, but it was still only half past ten so most of them would be in bed. A few faces looked around doors as Vimes trotted along the corridor and reached the stairwell at the far end. That took him—walking now, and rather less sure of his future—to the top floor. Let's see, he'd been here before…yes, there was a door ajar, and a glimpse of mops and buckets suggested that this was a janitor's cupboard.

With, at the far end, a ladder leading up to the roof.

Vimes carefully cocked the crossbow.

So Carcer had a Watch crossbow, too. They were good classic single-shot models, but they took a while to reload. If he fired at Vimes and missed, then that was the only shot he'd get. After that…you couldn't plan.

Vimes climbed the ladder, and the song came back.

“They rise feet up, feet up, feet up…” he hissed under his breath.

He stopped just below the edge of the open trapdoor on to the leads. Carcer wouldn't fall for the old “helmet on stick” trick, not with only one shot available. He'd just have to risk it.

Vimes thrust his head up, turned it quickly, ducked out of sight for a moment and then came through the opening in a rush. He rolled clumsily when he hit the leads, and rose into a crouch. There was no one else there. He was still alive. He breathed out.

A sloping, gabled roof rose up beside him. Vimes crept along, wedged himself against a chimneystack peppered with splinters of wood, and glanced up at the tower.

The sky above it was livid blue-black. Storms picked up a lot of personality as they rolled across the plains, and this one looked like a record breaker. But brilliant sunlight picked out the Tower of Art and, at the top, the tiny dots of Buggy's frantic signal…

O…O…O…

Officer In Trouble. A brother is hurtin'.

Vimes spun around. There was no one creeping up on him. He eased himself around the chimneys and there, tucked between another couple of stacks and out of sight of everyone except Vimes and the celestial Buggy, was Carcer.

He was taking aim.

Vimes turned his head to spot the target.

Fifty yards away, Carrot was picking his way across the top of the University's High Energy Magic building.

The bloody fool was never any good at concealment. Oh, he ducked and crept, and against all logic that made him more noticeable. He didn't understand the art of thinking himself invisible. And there he was, furtively shlepping through the debris on the roof and looking as visible as a big duck in a small bathtub. And he'd come up without backup.

The fool…

Carcer was aiming carefully. The roof of the HEM was a maze of abandoned equipment and Carrot was moving along behind the raised platform that held the huge bronze spheres known throughout the city as The Wizards' Balls, which discharged surplus magic if—or more usually when—experiments in the hall below fouled up. Carrot, screened by all that, was not making such a good target.

Vimes raised his crossbow.

Thunder…rolled. It was the roll of a giant iron cube down the stairways of the gods, a crackling, thudding crash that tore the sky in half and shook the building.

Carcer glanced up, and saw Vimes.

“Wotcha doin', mifter?”

Buggy didn't budge from the telescope. A crowbar wouldn't have separated him at this point.

“Shut up, ye daft corbies!” he muttered.

Both men below had fired, and both men had missed because they were trying to fire and dodge at the same time.

Something hard prodded Buggy's shoulder.

“Wot's happ'nin', mifter?” said the insistent voice.

He turned. There were a dozen bedraggled ravens behind him, looking like old men in ill-fitting black cloaks. They were Tower of Art birds. Hundreds of generations of living in a highly charged magical environment had raised the intelligence level of what had been bright creatures to begin with. But, although the ravens were intelligent, these ones weren't hugely clever. They just had a more persistent kind of stupidity, as befitted birds for whom the exciting panorama of the city below was a kind of daytime TV.

“Push off!” shouted Buggy, and turned back to the telescope. There was Carcer, running, and Vimes running after him, and here came the hail…

It turned the world white. It thudded around him and made his helmet ring. Hailstones as big as his head bounced on the stone and hit Buggy from underneath. Cursing, and shielding his face with his arms, and hammered all the time by shattering crystal balls, each one predicting a future of pain, he skidded and slid across the rolling ice. He reached an ivy-hung arch between two lesser turrets, where the heron had already taken refuge, and fell inside. Frozen shrapnel still ricocheted in and stung him, but at least he could see and breathe.

A beak prodded him sharply in the back.

“Wot's happ'nin' now, mifter?”

Carcer landed heavily on the arch between the student hall and the main buildings, almost lost his footing on the tiles, and hesitated. An arrow from a watchman below grazed his leg.

Vimes dropped down behind him, just as the hail hit.

Cursing and slipping, one man followed the other across the arch. Carcer reached a mass of ivy that led up on to the roof of the Library and scrambled up it, scattering ice below.

Vimes grabbed the ivy just as Carcer disappeared on to the flat roof. He looked round at a crash behind him, and saw Carrot trying to make his way along the wall from the High Energy Magic building. The hail was forming a halo of ice fragments around him.

“Stay there!” Vimes bellowed.

Carrot's reply was lost in the noise.

Vimes waved his arms and then grabbed at the ivy as a foot slipped. “Bloody stay there!” he yelled. “That is an order! You'll go over!”

He turned and started up the wet, cold vines.

The wind dropped, and the last few hailstones bounced off the roof.

Vimes stopped a few feet from the top of the ivy, worked his feet firmly into footholds in the ancient, knotted stems, and reached up for a decent hold.

Then he thrust himself up, left hand ready, caught the boot that swung towards him and carried on rising, pushing Carcer off balance. The man sprawled backwards on the slippery hail, tried to get to his feet, and slipped again. Vimes tugged himself on to the roof, stepped forward, and found his legs skidding away beneath him. Both he and Carcer got up, tried to move, and fell over again.

From a prone position the man landed a kick on Vimes's shoulder, sending both of them sliding away in opposite directions, and then turned over and scuttled on all fours around the Library's big glass and metal dome. He grabbed the rusty frame, hauled himself upright, and pulled out a knife.

“Come and get me, then,” he said. There was another roll of thunder.

“I don't have to,” said Vimes. “I just have to wait.” At least until I get my breath back, he thought.

“Why're you picking on me? What'm I supposed to have done?”