Men at Arms (Discworld, #15; City Watch, #2)

by Terry Pratchett

Edward’s thoughts often ran like this. He could think in italics. Such people need watching. Preferably from a safe distance.

“Sa-fer? Vetinari set up the Thieves’ Guild!” shouted Edward. “Yes, yes, of course, very reprehensible, certainly. On the other hand, a modest annual payment and one walks in safety…”

“He always says,” said Lord Rust, “that if you’re going to have crime, it might as well be organized crime.”

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.

“He’s a bit set in his ways.” “Congealed, I should think.”

KNOCK KNOCK. He looked up. “Who’s there?” DEATH. “Death who?”

IT’S JUST THAT IT HAS BEEN SUGGESTED THAT I SHOULD BE MORE OF A PEOPLE PERSON.

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. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. 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.

It must be the attraction of opposites. The Ramkins were more highly bred than a hilltop bakery, whereas Corporal Nobbs had been disqualified from the human race for shoving.

To understand why dwarfs and trolls don’t like each other you have to go back a long way. They get along like chalk and cheese. Very like chalk and cheese, really. One is organic, the other isn’t, and also smells a bit cheesy. 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.

He was said to have the body of a twenty-five year old, although no one knew where he kept it.

har.” It held up a threadbare paw. “My name’s Gaspode. Something like this happens to me just about every week. Apart from that, I’m just a dog.”

“No one sent for you!” he said. “What gives you the right to be here, mister policeman? Walking around as if you own the place?” Vimes paused, his heart singing. He savored the moment. He’d like to take this moment and press it carefully in a big book, so that when he was old he could take it out occasionally and remember it. He reached into his breastplate and pulled out the lawyer’s letter. “Well, if you would like the most fundamental reason,” he said, “it is because I rather think I do.”

He looked embarrassed for a moment. “Pride is all very well, but a sausage is a sausage,” he said.

“This will be different, do you understand?” “No, sir.” “Good.

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?”

In Ankh-Morpork, there was Bloody Stupid Johnson. Bloody Stupid “It Might Look A Bit Messy Now But Just You Come Back In Five Hundred Years’ Time” Johnson. Bloody Stupid “Look, The Plans Were The Right Way Round When I Drew Them” Johnson. Bloody Stupid Johnson, who had 2,000 tons of earth built into an artificial hillock in front of Quirm Manor because “It’d drive me mad to have to look at a bunch of trees and mountains all day long, how about you?”

The maze was so small that people got lost looking for it.

“Oh dear,” said Bjorn. “And I can’t swim, either.” THAT WILL NOT, OF COURSE, BE A PROBLEM, said Death.

“That damn thing killed me!” YES. “That’s the first time anything like that has ever happened to me.” TO ANYONE. BUT NOT, I SUSPECT, THE LAST TIME.

“I believe in reincarnation,” he said. I KNOW. “I tried to live a good life. Does that help?” THAT IS NOT UP TO ME. Death coughed. OF COURSE,…SINCE YOU BELIEVE IN REINCARNATION…YOU’LL BE BJORN AGAIN.

Hwun…two…” The truncheon bounced off Arthur’s helmet. “Very good, only one thing wrong. Anyone tell me what it was?” They shook their heads. “From behind,” said Sergeant Colon. “You hit ’em from behind. No sense in risking trouble, is there?

“This is very unfortunate.” “Certainly it was for Mr. Hammerhock,” said Vimes.

The Patrician heard him thump the wall outside. Vimes wasn’t aware, but there were a number of barely perceptible dents in the wall outside the Oblong Office, their depths corresponding to his emotional state at the time. By the sound of it, this one would need the services of a plasterer.

Normally. Vimes seemed in a suitable emotional state. With any luck, the orders would have the desired effect…

Because the fact was that, despite all evidence to the contrary, murder was not a commonplace occurrence in Ankh-Morpork. There were, it was true, assassinations. And as aforesaid there were many ways one could inadvertently commit suicide. And there were occasional domestic fracas on a Saturday night as people sought a cheaper alternative to divorce.

“Don’t get me wrong. I mean…dwarfs? Some of my best friends are dwarfs. My parents are dwarfs. Trolls? No problem at all with trolls. Salt of the earth. Literally. Wonderful chaps under all that crust. But…undead…I just wish they’d go back to where they came from, that’s all.” “Most of them came from round here.” “I just don’t like ’em. Sorry.”

Carrot is prejudiced? I mean, everyone has their dislikes, but I wouldn't have thought Carrot would have had any prejudices.

He glanced around, and followed her in. Silence followed, for about five seconds. Then Bundo emerged, very fast, and didn’t stop running until he reached the docks, where a boat was leaving on the tide. He ran up the gangplank just before it was pulled up, and became a seaman, and died three years later when an armadillo fell on his head in a far-off country, and in all that time never said what he’d seen. But he did scream a bit whenever he saw a dog.

“Samuel Vimes! You’re drunk!” “Not yet! But I hope to be!” said Vimes, in cheerful tones.

People stood aside for Corporal Carrot. It was the first time she’d seen him through these eyes. Good grief. How did people not notice it? He walked through the city like a tiger through tall grass, or a hubland bear across the snow, wearing the landscape like a skin— Gaspode glanced sideways. Angua was sitting on her haunches, staring. “Yer tongue’s hanging out,” he said. “What?…So? So what? That’s natural. I’m panting.”

“He was making himself look foolish. I was merely helping.”

“I thought dwarfs didn’t believe in devils and demons and stuff like that.” “That’s true, but…we’re not sure if they know.”

He passed the paper back to Carrot. “What can you make of it?” Carrot frowned. “I could make a hat,” he said, “or a boat. Or a sort of chrysanthemum—”

Love the Airplane references

“He’s dead!” “Catching, isn’t it?”

The Alchemists’ Guild is opposite the Gamblers’ Guild. Usually. Sometimes it’s above it, or below it, or falling in bits around it.

“I could make a hat out of it,” said Sendivoge, “or a string of dollies, if I could get some scissors—”

Love the Airplane references

Vimes smiled. Someone was trying to kill him, and that made him feel more alive than he had done for days.

Clowns and fools weren’t encouraged to live the soft life. Humor was a serious business.

“Listen!” hissed Quirke, leaning toward Carrot. “He’s a troll. He’s as guilty as hell of something. They all are!” Carrot smiled brightly. Colon had come to know that smile. Carrot’s face seemed to go waxy and glisten when he smiled like that.

“That damn troll just happened to save my life today,” shouted Cuddy. “What for?” “What for? What for? ’Cos it was my life, that’s what for! I happen to be very attached to it!”

“You can really talk?” said Carrot. Gaspode rolled his eyes. “’Course not,” he said.

There was a moment of sound so loud that the aural nerves shut down. When they opened again, somewhere around the pain threshold, they could just make out the opening and extremely bent bars of Fondel’s “Wedding March”, being played with gusto by someone who’d discovered that the instrument didn’t just have three keyboards but a whole range of special acoustic effects, ranging from Flatulence to Humorous Chicken Squawk. The occasional “oook!” of appreciation could be heard amidst the sonic explosion.

Somewhere under the table, Vimes screamed at Ridcully: “Amazing! Who built it?” “I don’t know! But it’s got the name B.S. Johnson on the keyboard cover!”

Gaspode got to his feet. “Now, are you going to come on out or have I got to come in there and be brutally savaged?”

“I appear…to be losing a lot of blood,” said Lord Vetinari. “Who would have thought you had it in you,” said Vimes, with the frankness of those probably about to die.

But a pack doesn’t act like that, Angua had said. A pack is an association of free individuals. A pack doesn’t leap because it’s told—a pack leaps because every individual, all at once, decides to leap.

Gaspode took a deep breath and adjusted his jaw. Dogs leapt. “SIT!” said Gaspode, in passable Human.