Guards! Guards! (Discworld 8)

What? They didn't seem to be frightened. Just very, very attentive. It was like a vigil. They were waiting for something to happen.

The thunder muttered again.

A couple of minutes later she was on her way down into the damp city.

...

There are some songs which are never sung sober. “Nellie Dean” is one. So is any song beginning “As I was a walking ...” In the area around Ankh-Morpork, the favoured air is “A Wizard's Staff Has A Knob On The End”.

The rank were drunk. At least, two out of three of the rank were drunk. Carrot had been persuaded to try a shandy and hadn't liked it much. He didn't know all the words, either, and many of the ones he did know he didn't understand.

“Oh, I see,” he said eventually. “It's a sort of humorous play on words, is it?”

“You know,” said Colon wistfully, peering into the thickening mists rolling in off the Ankh, “s'at times like this I wish old-”

“You're not to say it,” said Nobby, swaying a little. “You agreed, we wouldn't say nothing, it's no good talking about it.”

“It was his favourite song,” said Colon sadly. “He was a good light tenor.”

“Now, Sarge-”

“He was a righteous man, our Gaskin,” said Colon.

“We couldn't of helped it,” said Nobby sulkily.

“We could have,” said Colon. “We could have run faster.”

“What happened, then?” said Carrot.

“He died,” said Nobby, “in the hexecution of his duty.”

“I told him,” said Colon, taking a swig at the bottle they had brought along to see them through the night, “I told him. Slow down, I said. You'll do yourself a mischief, I said. I don't know what got into him, running ahead like that.”

“I blame the Thieves' Guild,” said Nobby. “Allowing people like that on the streets-”

“There was this bloke we saw done a robbery one night,” said Colon miserably. “Right in front of us! And Captain Vimes, he said Come On, and we run, only the point is you shouldn't run too fast, see. Else you might catch them. Leads to all sorts of problems, catching people-”

“They don't like it,” said Nobby. There was a mutter of thunder, and a flurry of rain.

“They don't like it,” agreed Colon. “But Gaskin went and forgot, he ran on, went around the corner and, well, this bloke had a couple of mates waiting-”

“It was his heart really,” said Nobby.

“Well. Anyway. And there he was,” said Colon. “Captain Vimes was very upset about it. You shouldn't run fast in the Watch, lad,” he said solemnly. "You can be a fast guard or you can be an old guard, but you can't be a fast old guard. Poor old Gaskin.''

“It didn't ought to be like that,” said Carrot.

Colon took a pull at the bottle.

“Well, it is,” he said. Rain bounced on his helmet and trickled down his face.

“But it didn't ought to be,” said Carrot flatly.

“But it is,” said Colon.

...

Someone else in the city was also ill at ease. He was the Librarian.