Guards! Guards! (Discworld 8)

“What's it mean?”

Harga scratched his head with a ladle. “What it means is,” he said, “if the king comes in here, he'll like it.”

“Have you got anything that isn't too aristocratic for me to eat, then?” said Vimes sourly, and settled for a slice of plebeian fried bread and a proletarian steak cooked so rare you could still hear it bray. Vimes ate it at the counter.

A vague scraping noise disturbed his thoughts. “What're you doing?” he said.

Harga looked up guiltily from his work behind the counter.

“Nothing, Cap'n,” he said. He tried to hide the evidence behind him when Vimes glared over the knife-chewed woodwork.

“Come on, Sham. You can show me.”

Harga's beefy hands came reluctantly into view.

“I was only scraping the old fat out of the pan,” he mumbled.

“I see. And how long have we known each other, Sham?” said Vimes, with terrible kindness.

“Years, Cap'n,” said Harga. “You bin coming in here nearly every day, reg'lar. One of my best customers.”

Vimes leaned over the counter until his nose was level with the squashy pink thing in the middle of Har-ga's face.

“And in all that time, have you ever changed the fat?” he demanded.

Harga tried to back away. “Well-”

“It's been like a friend to me, that old fat,” said Vimes. “There's little black bits in there I've grown to know and love. It's a meal in itself. And you've cleaned out the coffee jug, haven't you. I can tell. This is love-in-a-canoe coffee if ever I tasted it. The other stuff had flavour. ”

“Well, I thought it was time-”

“Why?”

Harga let the pan fall from his pudgy fingers. “Well, I thought, if the king should happen to come in-”

“But, Cap'n-”

Vimes's accusing finger buried itself up to the second joint in Harga 's expansive vest.

“You don't even know the wretched fellow's name!” he shouted.

Harga rallied. “I do, Cap'n,” he stuttered. “Course I do. Seen it on the decorations and everything. He's called Rex Vivat.”

Very gently, shaking his head in despair, crying in his heart for the essential servility of mankind, Vimes let him go.

...

In another time and place, the Librarian finished reading. He'd reached the end of the text. Not the end of the book-there was plenty more book. It had been scorched beyond the point of legibility, though.

Not that the last few unburned pages were very easy to read. The author's hand had been shaking, he'd been writing fast, and he'd blotted a lot. But the Librarian had wrestled with many a terrifying text in some of the worst books ever bound, words that tried to read you as you read them, words that writhed on the page. At least these weren't words like that. These were just the words of a man frightened for his life. A man writing a dreadful warning.

It was a page a little back from the burned section that drew the Librarian's eye. He sat and stared at it for some time.

Then he stared at the darkness.

It was his darkness. He was asleep out there somewhere. Somewhere out there a thief was heading for this place, to steal this book. And then someone would read this book, read these words, and do it anyway.

His hands itched.