The Truth (Discworld 25)

'He's taken a picture of you not letting me into the palace,' said William.

Detritus, although born above the snowline on some distant mountain, a troll who had never seen a human until he was five years old, nevertheless was a policeman to his craggy, dragging fingertips and reacted accordingly.

'He can't do dat,' he said.

William pulled out his notebook and poised his pencil. 'Could you explain to my readers exactly why not?' he said.

Detritus looked around, a little worried. 'Where are dey?'

'No, I mean I'm going to write down what you say.'

Basic policing rushed to Detritus's aid once again. 'You can't do dat,' he said.

Then can I write down why I can't write anything down?' William said, smiling brightly.

Detritus reached up and moved a little lever on the side of his helmet. A barely audible whirring noise became fractionally louder. The troll had a helmet with a clockwork fan, to blow air across his silicon brain when overheating threatened to reduce its operating efficiency. Right now he obviously needed a cooler head.

'Ah. Dis is some kind of politics, right?' he said.

'Um, maybe. Sorry.'

Otto had staggered to his feet and was fiddling with the icono-graph again.

Detritus reached a decision. He nodded to a constable.

'Fiddyment, you take dese... two to Mister Vimes. Dey are not to fall down any steps on der way or any stuff like dat.'

Mister Vimes, thought William, as they hurried after the constable. All the watchmen called him that. The man had been a knight and was now a duke and a commander, but they called him Mister. And it was Mister, too, the full two syllables, not the everyday unheeded 'Mr'; it was the 'mister' you used when you wanted to say things like Tut down that crossbow and turn around real slow, mister.' He wondered why.

William had not been brought up to respect the Watch. They weren't our kind of people. It was conceded that they were useful, like sheepdogs, because clearly someone had to keep people in order, heavens knew, but only a fool would let a sheepdog sleep in the parlour. The Watch, in other words, was a regrettably necessary sub-set of the criminal classes, a section of the population informally defined by Lord de Worde as anyone with less than a thousand dollars a year.

William's family and everyone they knew also had a mental map of the city that was divided into parts where you found upstanding citizens and other parts where you found criminals. It had come as a shock to them... no, he corrected himself, it had come as an affront to learn that Vimes operated on a different map. Apparently he'd instructed his men to use the front door when calling at any

building, even in broad daylight, when sheer common sense said that they should use the back, just like any other servant.* The man simply had no idea.

That Vetinari had made him a duke was just another example of the Patrician's lack of grip.

William therefore felt predisposed to like Vimes, if only because of the type of enemies he made, but as far as he could see everything about the man could be prefaced by the word 'badly', as in -spoken, -educated and -in need of a drink.

Fiddyment stopped in the big hall of the palace.

'Don't you go anywhere and don't you do anything,' he said. 'I'll go and--'

But Vimes was already coming down the wide stairs, trailed by a giant of a man William recognized as Captain Carrot.

You could add '-dressed' to Vimes's list. It wasn't that he wore bad clothes. He just seemed to generate an internal scruffiness field. The man could rumple a helmet.

Fiddyment met them halfway. There was a muttered conversation, out of which the unmistakable words 'He's what?' arose, in Vimes's voice. He glared darkly at William. The expression was clear. It said: it's been a bad day and now there's you.

Vimes walked the rest of the way down the stairs and looked William up and down.

'What is it you're wanting?' he demanded.

'I want to know what's happened here, please,' said William.

'Why?'

'Because people will want to know.'