Men at Arms (Discworld 15)

'There are—'

'I should give it a rest now. You don't want to wear everything out by counting—'

'There are – one running man . . .'

'What? Where?'

Sham Harga's coffee was like molten lead, but it had this in its favour: when you'd drunk it, there was this overwhelming feeling of relief that you'd got to the bottom of the cup.

'That,' said Vimes, 'was a bloody awful cup of coffee, Sham.'

'Right,' said Harga.

'I mean I've drunk a lot of bad coffee in my time but that, that was like having a saw dragged across my tongue. How long'd it been boiling?'

'What's today's date?' said Harga, cleaning a glass. He was generally cleaning glasses. No-one ever found out what happened to the clean ones.

August the fifteenth.'

'What year?'

Sham Harga smiled, or at least moved various muscles around his mouth. Sham Harga had run a successful eatery for many years by always smiling, never extending credit, and realizing that most of his customers wanted meals properly balanced between the four food groups: sugar, starch, grease and burnt crunchy bits.

'I'd like a couple of eggs,' said Vimes, 'with the yolks real hard but the whites so runny that they drip like treacle. And I want bacon, that special bacon all covered with bony nodules and dangling bits of fat. And a slice of fried bread. The kind that makes your arteries go clang just by looking at it.'

'Tough order,' said Harga.

'You managed it yesterday. And give me some more coffee. Black as midnight on a moonless night.'

Harga looked surprised. That wasn't like Vimes.

'How black's that, then?' he said.

'Oh, pretty damn black, I should think.'

'Not necessarily.'

'What?'

'You get more stars on a moonless night. Stands to reason. They show up more. It can be quite bright on a moonless night.'

Vimes sighed.

'An overcast moonless night?' he said.

Harga looked carefully at his coffee pot.

'Cumulus or cirro-nimbus?'

'I'm sorry? What did you say?'

'You gets city lights reflected off cumulus, because it's low lying, see. Mind you, you can get high-altitude scatter off the ice crystals in—'

'A moonless night,' said Vimes, in a hollow voice, 'that is as black as that coffee.'

'Right!'

'And a doughnut.' Vimes grabbed Harga's stained vest and pulled him until they were nose to nose. 'A doughnut as doughnutty as a doughnut made of flour, water, one large egg, sugar, a pinch of yeast, cinnamon to taste and a jam, jelly or rat filling depending on national or species preference, OK? Not as doughnutty as something in any way metaphorical. Just a doughnut. One doughnut.'