Night Watch (Discworld 29)

'Sir, you said no one was to try to arrest him! That's why I sent the signal to you!'

'That's right. I'm going to arrest him. Right now. While he's counting all his bits to check that he's still got 'em. Tell Detritus what I'm doing, 'cos I don't want to end up as 160lbs of cocktail delicacies. No, don't keep opening your mouth like that. By the time we've sorted out backup and armour and got everyone lined up he'll have dug in somewhere else.' The last words were delivered at a run. Vimes reached a door and darted inside. New Hall was student accommodation, but it was still only half past ten so most of them would be in bed. A few faces looked around doors as Vimes trotted along the corridor and reached the stairwell at the far end. That took him - walking now, and rather less sure of his future - to the top floor. Let's see, he'd been here before . . . yes, there was a door ajar, and a glimpse of mops and buckets suggested that this was a janitor's cupboard. With, at the far end, a ladder leading up to the roof. Vimes carefully cocked the crossbow. So Carcer had a Watch crossbow, too. They were good classic single-shot models, but they took a while to reload. If he fired at Vimes and missed, then that was the only shot he'd get. After that . . . you couldn't plan. Vimes climbed the ladder, and the song came back. 'They rise feet up, feet up, feet up . . .' he hissed under his breath. He stopped just below the edge of the open trapdoor on to the leads. Carcer wouldn't fall for the old 'helmet on stick' trick, not with only one shot available. He'd just have to risk it. Vimes thrust his head up, turned it quickly, ducked out of sight for a moment and then came through the opening in a rush. He rolled clumsily when he hit the leads, and rose into a crouch. There was no one else there. He was still alive. He breathed out. A sloping, gabled roof rose up beside him. Vimes crept along, wedged himself against a chimneystack peppered with splinters of wood, and glanced up at the tower. The sky above it was livid blue-black. Storms picked up a lot of personality as they rolled across the plains, and this one looked like a record breaker. But brilliant sunlight picked out the Tower of Art and, at the top, the tiny dots of Buggy's frantic signal. . . O . . . O . . . O

Officer In Trouble. A brother is hurtin'. Vimes spun around. There was no one creeping up on him. He eased himself around the chimneys and there, tucked between another couple of stacks and out of sight of everyone except Vimes and the celestial Buggy, was Carcer. He was taking aim. Vimes turned his head to spot the target. Fifty yards away, Carrot was picking his way across the top of the University's High Energy Magic building. The bloody fool was never any good at concealment. Oh, he ducked and crept, and against all logic that made him more noticeable. He didn't understand the art of thinking himself invisible. And there he was, furtively shlepping through the debris on the roof and looking as visible as a big duck in a small bathtub. And he'd come up without backup. The fool. . . Carcer was aiming carefully. The roof of the HEM was a maze of abandoned equipment and Carrot was moving along behind the raised platform that held the huge bronze spheres known throughout the city as The Wizards' Balls, which discharged surplus magic if - or more usually when - experiments in the hall below fouled up. Carrot, screened by all that, was not making such a good target. Vimes raised his crossbow. Thunder . . . rolled. It was the roll of a giant iron cube down the stairways of the gods, a crackling, thudding crash that tore the sky in half and shook the building. Carcer glanced up, and saw Vimes. 'Wotcha doin', mifter?' Buggy didn't budge from the telescope. A crowbar wouldn't have separated him at this point. 'Shut up, ye daft corbies!' he muttered. Both men below had fired, and both men had missed because they were trying to fire and dodge at the same time. Something hard prodded Buggy's shoulder. 'Wot's happ'nin', mifter?' said the insistent voice. He turned. There were a dozen bedraggled ravens behind him, looking like old men in ill-fitting black cloaks. They were Tower of Art birds. Hundreds of generations of living in a highly charged magical environment had raised the intelligence level of what had been bright creatures to begin with. But, although the ravens were intelligent, these ones weren't hugely clever. They just had a more persistent kind of stupidity, as

befitted birds for whom the exciting panorama of the city below was a kind of daytime TV. 'Push off!' shouted Buggy, and turned back to the telescope. There was Carcer, running, and Vimes running after him, and here came the hail... It turned the world white. It thudded around him and made his helmet ring. Hailstones as big as his head bounced on the stone and hit Buggy from underneath. Cursing, and shielding his face with his arms, and hammered all the time by shattering crystal balls, each one predicting a future of pain, he skidded and slid across the rolling ice. He reached an ivy-hung arch between two lesser turrets, where the heron had already taken refuge, and fell inside. Frozen shrapnel still ricocheted in and stung him, but at least he could see and breathe. A beak prodded him sharply in the back. 'Wot's happ'nin' now, mifter?' Carcer landed heavily on the arch between the student hall and the main buildings, almost lost his footing on the tiles, and hesitated. An arrow from a watchman below grazed his leg. Vimes dropped down behind him, just as the hail hit. Cursing and slipping, one man followed the other across the arch. Carcer reached a mass of ivy that led up on to the roof of the Library and scrambled up it, scattering ice below. Vimes grabbed the ivy just as Carcer disappeared on to the flat roof. He looked round at a crash behind him, and saw Carrot trying to make his way along the wall from the High Energy Magic building. The hail was forming a halo of ice fragments around him. 'Stay there!' Vimes bellowed. Carrot's reply was lost in the noise. Vimes waved his arms and then grabbed at the ivy as a foot slipped. 'Bloody stay there!' he yelled. 'That is an order! You'll go over!' He turned and started up the wet, cold vines. The wind dropped, and the last few hailstones bounced off the roof. Vimes stopped a few feet from the top of the ivy, worked his feet firmly into footholds in the ancient, knotted stems, and reached up for a decent hold. Then he thrust himself up, left hand ready, caught the boot that swung towards him and carried on rising, pushing Carcer off balance. The man sprawled backwards on the slippery hail, tried to get to his feet, and slipped again. Vimes tugged himself on to the roof, stepped forward, and found his legs skidding away beneath him. Both he and Carcer got up, tried to move, and fell over again. From a prone position the man landed a kick on Vimes's shoulder, sending both of them sliding away in opposite directions, and then turned over

and scuttled on all fours around the Library's big glass and metal dome. He grabbed the rusty frame, hauled himself upright, and pulled out a knife. 'Come and get me, then,' he said. There was another roll of thunder. 'I don't have to,' said Vimes. 'I just have to wait.' At least until I get my breath back, he thought. 'Why're you picking on me? What'm I supposed to have done?'

'Couple of murders ring a bell?' said Vimes. If injured innocence was money, Carcer's face was his fortune. 'I don't know anything about-'

'I'm not up here to play games, Carcer. Knock it off.'

'You going to take me alive, your grace?'

'You know, I don't want to. But people think it's neater all round if I do.' There was a clattering of tiles away on the left, and a thud as a huge siege bow was rested on the ridge of a nearby roof. The head of Detritus rose behind it. 'Sorry about dat, Mister Vimes, hard to climb up in dat hail. Jus' stand back.'

'You're going to let it shoot me?' said Carcer. He tossed the knife away. 'An unarmed man?' "Trying to escape,' said Vimes. But this was starting to go bad. He could feel it. 'Me? I'm just standing here, haha.' And there it was. That bloody laugh, on top of that damn grin. It was never far away. 'Haha' didn't come close to doing it the injustice it deserved. It was more a sort of modulation to the voice, an irritatingly patronizing chortle that suggested that all this was somehow funny and you hadn't got the joke. Trouble was, you couldn't shoot someone for having an annoying laugh. And he was just standing there. If he ran, you could shoot him. Admittedly, it would be Detritus doing the shooting, and while with that bow it was technically possible to shoot to wound, the people you were wounding would probably be in the building next door. But Carcer was just waiting there, insulting the world by his existence. In fact he wasn't merely standing there now. In one movement he'd swung himself on to the lower slopes of the Library's dome. The glass panes - at least, the glass panes that had survived the freak hail - creaked in the iron framework. 'Stop right there!' Vimes bellowed. 'And come down!'

'Now where could I go?' said Carcer, grinning at him. 'I'm just waiting for you to arrest me, right? Hey, I can see your house from up here!' What's under the dome? thought Vimes. How high are the bookcases? There's other floors in the Library, aren't there? Like galleries? But you can definitely look up at the dome from the ground floor, right? If you were careful, could you swing on to a gallery from the edge of the dome? It'd be risky, but if a man knew he was going to swing anyway . . . Picking his way with care, he reached the edge of the dome. Carcer climbed up a little further. 'I warn you, Carcer-'

'Only high spirits, Mister Grace, haha! Can't blame a man for trying to enjoy his last few minutes of freedom, can you?'

'I can see your house from up here . . . Vimes hauled himself on to the dome. Carcer cheered. 'Well done, your Vimes!' he said, easing himself towards the top. 'Don't mess me about, Carcer. It'll go badly for you!'

'Badder than it's going to go anyway?' Carcer glanced down through a smashed pane. 'Long way down, Mister Vimes. I reckon a man'd die instantly falling all that way, wouldn't he?' Vimes glanced down, and Carcer leapt. It didn't go the way he'd planned. Vimes had been tensed for something like this. After a complicated moment, Carcer was lying on the iron latticework, one arm under him, the other outflung and being banged heavily on the metal by Vimes. The knife it had held skidded away down the dome. 'Gods, you must think I'm stupid,' Vimes growled. 'You wouldn't throw away a knife. Carcer, if you didn't have another one!' Vimes's face was close to the man's now, close enough to look into the eyes above that chirpy grin and watch the demons waving. 'You're hurting me, and that's not allowed!'

'Oh, I wouldn't want anything to happen to you, Carcer,' said Vimes. 'I want to see you in front of his lordship. I just want to hear you admit something for once. I just want to see that bloody cheeky grin wiped off your face. Sergeant Detritus!'

'Sah!' shouted the troll, from his distant ridge. 'Make a signal. I want people up here now. Me and Carcer are just going to stay nice and quiet here, so's he doesn't try any tricks.'

'Right, sir.' With another distant clatter of doomed tiles, the troll disappeared from view.

'You shouldn't have sent Captain Carrot away,' muttered Carcer. 'He doesn't like watchmen bullying innocent civilians-'

'It is true that he has yet to master some of the finer details of de facto street policing,' said Vimes, maintaining his grip. 'Anyway, I'm not hurting you, I'm protecting you. Wouldn't like you to fall all that way.' Thunder rumbled again. The sky wasn't just storm-black now. There were pinks and purples in the clouds, as though they were bruised. Vimes could see the clouds moving like snakes in a sack, to an endless sullen rumbling. He wondered if the wizards had been messing about with the weather. Something was happening to the air. It tasted of burned metal and flints. A weathercock on top of the dome began to spin round and round. 'I didn't think you was stupid, Mister Vimes 'What?' said Vimes, looking down suddenly. Carcer was smiling cheerfully. 'I said I didn't think you was stupid, Mister Vimes. I know a clever copper like you'd think I'd got two knives.'

'Yeah, right,' said Vimes. He could feel his hair trying to stand on end. Little blue caterpillars of light were crackling over the ironwork of the dome, and even over his armour. 'Mister Vimes?'

'What?' Vimes snapped. Smoke was rising from the weathercock's bearings. 'I got three knives, Mister Vimes,' said Carcer, bringing his arm up. The lightning struck. Windows blew out and iron gutters melted. Roofs lifted into the air and settled again. Buildings shook. But this storm had been blowing in from far across the plains, pushing the natural background magic ahead of it. It dumped it now, all in one go. They said afterwards that the bolt of lightning hit a clock-maker's shop in the Street of Cunning Artificers, stopping all the clocks at that instant. But that was nothing. In Baker Street a couple who had never met before became electrically attracted to one another and were forced to get married after two days for the sake of public decency. In the Assassins' Guild, the chief armourer became hugely, and since he was in the armoury at the time, tragically attractive to metal. Eggs fried in their baskets, apples roasted on the greengrocers' shelves. Candles lit themselves. Cartwheels exploded. And the ornate tin bath of the Archchancellor of Unseen University was lifted neatly off the floor, sizzled across his study and then flew off the balcony and on to the lawn in the octangle several storeys below, without spilling more than a cupful of suds.

Archchancellor Mustrum Ridcully paused with his long-handled scrubbing brush hovering halfway down his back, and stared around. Tiles smashed to the ground. Water boiled in the ornamental fountain near by. Ridcully ducked as a stuffed badger, the origin of which was never ascertained, flew across the lawn and smashed through a window. He winced as he was hit by a brief and inexplicable shower of small cogwheels, which pattered down all around him. He stared as half a dozen watchmen dashed into the octangle and headed up the steps to the Library. Then, gripping the sides of the bath, the Archchancellor stood up. Foaming water cascaded off him, as it would off some ancient leviathan erupting from the abyssal sea. 'Mister Stibbons!' he bellowed, his voice bouncing off the imposing walls, 'Where the is my hat?' He sat down again and waited. There were a few minutes of silence and then Ponder Stibbons, Head of Inadvisably Applied Magic and Praelector of Unseen University, came running out of the main door carrying Ridcully's pointy hat. The Archchancellor snatched at it and rammed it on his head. 'Very well,' he said, standing up again. 'Now, will care to tell m at the is going on? And why Old Tom ing repeatedly?'

' been a of magic, sir! I someone up the mechanism!' Ponder shouted, above the sound- destroying silences.* * Old Tom, the University's venerable clock, tolled not sounds but silences. They were not simply ordinary silences, but intervals of noise- absorbing non-sound that filled the world with loud soundlessness. There was a dying metallic noise from the big clock tower. Ponder and Ridcully waited a few moments, but the city stayed full of normal noise, like the collapse of masonry and distant screams. 'Right,' said Ridcully, as if grudgingly awarding the world a mark for trying. 'What was that all about, Stibbons? And why are there policemen in the Library?'

'Big magical storm, sir. Several thousand gigathaums. I believe the Watch is chasing a criminal.'

'Well, they can't just run in here without askin',' said Ridcully, stepping out of the bath and striding forward. 'What do we pay our taxes for, after all?'

'Er, we don't actually pay taxes, sir,' said Ponder, running after him. 'The system is that we promise to pay taxes if the city ever asks us to, provided the city promises never to ask us, sir. We make a voluntary-'

'Well, at least we have an arrangement, Stibbons.'

'Yes, sir. May I point out that you-'

'And that means they have to ask permission. The essential decencies must be maintained,' said Ridcully firmly. 'And I am the Master of this college!'

'On the subject of, er, decencies, sir, you are not in fact wearing-' Ridcully strode through the open doors of the Library. 'What is going on here?' he demanded. The watchmen turned, and stared. A large blob of foam, which up until that point had been performing sterling service in the cause of the essential decencies, slipped slowly to the floor. 'Well?' he snapped. 'Haven't you lot seen a wizard before?' A watchman snapped to attention and saluted. 'Captain Carrot, sir. We've, er, never seen so much of a wizard, sir.' Ridcully gave him the slow blank stare used by those with acute uptake- grasping deficiency. 'What's he talkin' about, Stibbons?' he said out of the corner of his mouth. 'You're, er, insufficiently dressed, sir.'