"Not yet."
"I, I"m, I"m sorry, I was expecting someone more, er..."
"Do go on."
"... someone more... kingly."
The Low King sighed.
"I meant... I mean, you look just like an ordinary dwarf," said Vimes weakly.
This time the King smiled. He was slightly shorter than average for dwarfs, and dressed in the usual almost-uniform of leather and home-forged chain-mail. He looked old, but dwarfs started looking old around the age of five years and were still looking old three hundred years later, and he had that musical cadence to his speech that Vimes associated with Llamedos. If he"d asked Vimes to pass the ketchup in Gimlet"s Whole Food Delicatessen, Vimes wouldn"t have given him a second look.
"This diplomacy business," said the King, "Are you getting the hang of it, do you think?"
"It doesn"t come easy, I must admit... er, your majesty."
"I believe you have been, until now, a watchman in Ankh-Morpork?"
"Er, yes."
"And you had a famous ancestor, I believe, who was a regicide?"
Here it comes, thought Vimes. "Yers, Stoneface Vimes," he said, as levelly as possible. "I"ve always thought that was a bit unfair, though. It was only one king. It wasn"t as if it was a hobby."
"But you don"t like kings," said the dwarf.
"I don"t meet many, sir," said Vimes, hoping that this would pass for a diplomatic answer. It seemed to satisfy the King.
"I went to Ankh-Morpork once, when I was a young dwarf," he said, walking towards a long table piled high with scrolls.
"Er, really?"
"Lawn ornament, they called me. And... what was it... ah, yes... shortarse. Some children threw stones at me."
"I"m sorry."
"I expect you"ll tell me that sort of thing doesn"t happen any more."
"It doesn"t happen as much. But you always get idiots who don"t move with the times."
The King "gave Vimes a piercing glance. "Indeed. The times... But now they"re always Ankh-Morpork"s times, see?"
"I"m sorry?"
"When people say "We must move with the times," they really mean "You must do it my way." And there are some who would say that Ankh-Morpork is... a kind of vampire. It bites, and what it bites it turns into copies of itself. It sucks, too. It seems all our best go to Ankh-Morpork, where they live in squalor. You leave us dry."
Vimes was at a loss. It was clear that the little figure now sitting at the long table was a lot brighter than he was, although right now he felt as dim as a penny candle in any case. It was also clear that the King hadn"t slept for quite some time. He decided to go for honesty.
"Can"t really answer that, sir," he said, adopting a variant on his talking-to-Vetinari approach. "But..."
"Yes?"
"I"d wonder... you know, if I was a king... I"d wonder why people were happier living in squalor in Ankh-Morpork than staying back home... sir."
"Ah. You"re telling me how I should think, now?" "No, sir. Just how I think. There"s dwarf bars all over Ankh-Morpork, and they"ve got mining tools wired to the wall, and there"s dwarfs in "em every night quaffing beer and singing sad songs about how they wish they were back in the mountains digging for gold. But if you said to them, fine, the gate"s open, off you go and send us a postcard, they"d say, "Oh, well, yeah I"d love to, but we"ve just got the new workshop finished... Maybe next year we"ll go to Uberwald." "
"They come back to the mountains to die," said the King.