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Any chance of a bone? No, no, sorry, bad taste there, forget I mentioned it. You’ve got beef sandwiches in your wossname, lunchbox thingy, though. Why not give one to the nice little doggy over there?
He could think in italics. Such people need watching. Preferably from a safe distance.
Any highwayman demanding “Your money or your life” had better bring a folding chair and packed lunch and a book to read while the debate goes on.
The small but very select audience watched it with the carefully blank expressions of people who are half convinced that their host is several cards short of a full deck but are putting up with it because they’ve just eaten a meal and it would be rude to leave too soon.
Young Edward thinks the touch of a king can cure scrofula, as if royalty was the equivalent of a sulphur ointment. Young Edward thinks that there is no lake of blood too big to wade through to put a rightful king on a throne, no deed too base in defense of a crown.
“He always says,” said Lord Rust, “that if you’re going to have crime, it might as well be organized crime.”
What’s so hard about pulling a sword out of a stone? The real work’s already been done. You ought to make yourself useful and find the man who put the sword in the stone in the first place, eh?”
(In one strange but theoretically possible universe the Watch House was redecorated in pastel colors by a freak whirlwind, which also repaired the door latch and did a few other odd jobs around the place.)
Since it’s got a river you can chew, where does the drinking water come from?
Actually, visitors don’t often say this. They usually say things like “Which way to the, you know, the…er…you know, the young ladies, right?” But if they started thinking with their brains for a little while, that’s what they’d be thinking.
“How about Corporal Nobbs?” said the Patrician. “Nobby?” They shared a mental picture of Corporal Nobbs. “No.” “No.”
“Why is it his lucky day?” said Angua. “He was caught, wasn’t he?” “Yes. By us. Thieves’ Guild didn’t get him first. They aren’t so kind as us.”
While Here’n’now was being mildly concussed on the way to the safety of the Watch’s jail, a clown was being killed.
KNOCK KNOCK. He looked up. “Who’s there?” DEATH. “Death who?” There was a chill in the air. Beano waited. Edward was frantically patting his face…well, what until recently had been his face. I WONDER…CAN WE START AGAIN? I DON’T SEEM TO HAVE THE HANG OF THIS.
“Sorry?” said Beano.
IT’S JUST THAT IT HAS BEEN SUGGESTED THAT I SHOULD BE MORE OF A PEOPLE PERSON.
BREAK IT TO THEM GENTLY, AS IT WERE.
THINK OF IT MORE AS BEING…DIMENSIONALLY DISADVANTAGED.
Vimes’ meeting with the Patrician ended as all such meetings did, with the guest going away in possession of an unfocused yet nagging suspicion that he’d only just escaped with his life.
He’d learned something new: the very very rich could afford to be poor. Sybil Ramkin lived in the kind of poverty that was only available to the very rich, a poverty approached from the other side.
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes “Boots” theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
A swamp dragon is a badly run, dangerously unstable chemical factory one step from disaster. One quite small step.
The Ramkins were more highly bred than a hilltop bakery, whereas Corporal Nobbs had been disqualified from the human race for shoving.
Dwarfs make a living by smashing up rocks with valuable minerals in them and the silicon-based lifeform known as trolls are, basically, rocks with valuable minerals in them.
Colon thought Carrot was simple. Carrot often struck people as simple. And he was. Where people went wrong was thinking that simple meant the same thing as stupid.
And then the world exploded.
He was said to have the body of a twenty-five year old, although no one knew where he kept it.
“Woof, woof,” said the dog, in a bored way. “Woof, woof, woof, and growl, growl.”
If you spent any time in Lady Ramkin’s company, you soon found out what dragons smelled like. If something put its head in your lap while you were dining, you said nothing, you just kept passing it tidbits and hoped like hell it didn’t hiccup.
Edward picked it up, cradled it for a while, and found that it seemed to fit his arm and shoulder very snugly. You’re mine. And that, more or less, was the end of Edward d’Eath. Something continued for a while, but what it was, and how it thought, wasn’t entirely human.
Vimes paused. There’s something in the air in this city, he thought. If the Creator had said, “Let there be light” in Ankh-Morpork, he’d have got no further because of all the people saying “What color?”
Besides, almost all dogs don’t talk. Ones that do are merely a statistical error, and can therefore be ignored.
Vimes stood on Carrot’s shoulders and walked his hand up the wall, but the little blue strip was still out of reach. The gargoyle rolled a stony eye toward him. “Do you mind?” said Vimes. “It’s hanging on your ear…“ With a grinding of stone on stone, the gargoyle reached up a hand and unhooked the intrusive material. “Thank you.” “’on’t ent-on it.” Vimes climbed down again.
The maze was so small that people got lost looking for it.
Carrot leaned over the wall of a pen. “Coochee-coochee-coo?” he said. A friendly flame took his eyebrows off.
Vimes adjusted his cravat as best he could. He’d faced trolls and dwarfs and dragons, but now he was having to meet an entirely new species. The rich.
Vimes was dimly aware that he’d spent several hours eating too much food in
the company of people he didn’t like.
If you had enough money, you could hardly commit crimes at all. You just perpetrated amusing little peccadilloes.
“Carrot?” “Yes, captain?” “Do you think there’s such a thing as a criminal mind?” Carrot almost audibly tried to work this out. “What…you mean like…Mr. Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler, sir?” “He’s not a criminal.” “You have eaten one of his pies, sir?” “I mean…yes…but…he’s just geographically divergent in the financial hemisphere.”
There were people who’d steal money from people. Fair enough. That was just theft. But there were people who, with one easy word, would steal the humanity from people. That was something else.
Doctrine of signatures, thought Vimes. That’s what the herbalists call it. It’s like the gods put a “Use Me” label on plants. If a plant looks like a part of the body, it’s good for ailments peculiar to that part. There’s teethwort for teeth, spleenwort for…spleens, eyebright for eyes…there’s even a toadstool called Phallus impudicus, and I don’t know what that’s for but Nobby is a big man for mushroom omelettes. Now…either that fungus down there is exactly the medicine for hands, or…
The river Ankh is probably the only river in the universe on which the investigators can chalk the outline of the corpse.
The Alchemists’ Guild is opposite the Gamblers’ Guild. Usually. Sometimes it’s above it, or below it, or falling in bits around it.
The gamblers are occasionally asked why they continue to maintain an establishment opposite a Guild which accidentally blows up its Guild Hall every few months, and they say: “Did you read the sign on the door when you came in?”
Scuse me,” said Cuddy, prodding him in the knee. “Who’s there?” “Down here!” Silverfish looked down. “Oh. Are you a dwarf?” Cuddy gave him a blank stare. “Are you a giant?” he said. “Me? Of course not!” “Ah. Then I must be a dwarf, yes.
It was a scene to make a happy man slit his wrists on a fine spring morning.
“That’s what I tell myself. I say, ‘Fred, whatever happens, you’re brighter than Detritus.’ But then I say, ‘Fred—so’s yeast.’”
In the last hour she’d learned more about Ankh-Morpork than any reasonable person wanted to know. She vaguely suspected that Carrot was trying to court her. But, instead of the usual flowers or chocolate, he seemed to be trying to gift-wrap a city.
