Thud (16 page)

“Yes?”

“You said you didn’t want to be interrupted…” said the imp defensively.

“Well? What have you got to say?”

“It’s eleven minutes to six, Insert Name Here,” said the imp meekly.

“Good grief! Why didn’t you tell me!” Vimes looked aghast.

“Because you said you didn’t want to be interrupted!” the imp quavered.

“Yes, but not—” Vimes stopped. Eleven minutes. He couldn’t run it, not at this time of day. “Six o’clock is…
important
,” he muttered.

“You didn’t tell me that!” said the imp, holding its head in its hands. “You just said no interruptions! I’m really, really sorry—”

SHINE
forgotten, Vimes looked around desperately at the nearby buildings. There wasn’t much use for clacks towers down here, where the slaughterhouse district met the docks, but he spotted the big semaphore tower atop the dock superintendent’s office.

“Get up there!” he ordered, opening the box. “Tell them you’ve come from me and this is priority one, right? They’re to tell Pseudopolis Yard where I’m starting from! I’ll cross the river on Misbegot Bridge and head along Prouts! The officers at the Yard will know what this is all about! Go!”

The imp went from despair to enthusiasm in an instant. It saluted. “Yes indeed, sir. The Bluenose
^TM
Integrated Messenger Service will not let you down, Insert Name Here. I shall interface right away!” It leapt down and became a disappearing blur of very pale green.

Vimes ran down to the dockside and began to race upriver, past the ships. The docks were always too crowded, and the road was an obstacle course of bales and ropes and piles of crates, with an argument every ten yards. But Vimes was a runner by nature, and knew all the ways to make progress in the city’s crowded streets. He dodged and leapt, jinked and weaved, and, where necessary, barged. A rope tripped him up; he rolled upright. A stevedore bumped into him; Vimes laid him out with an uppercut and speeded up in case the man had chums around.

This was important…

A shiny, four-horse carriage swung out of Monkey Street, with two footmen clinging to the back of it. Vimes speeded up in a desperate burst, grabbed a handhold, pulled himself up between the astonished footmen, dragged himself across the swaying roof, and dropped down on the seat beside the young driver.

“City Watch,” he announced, flashing his badge. “Keep going straight ahead!”

“But I’m supposed to turn left onto—” the young man began.

“And give it a touch of the whip, if you please,” said Vimes, ignoring him. “This is important!”

“Oh, right! Death-defying high-speed chase, is it?” said the coachman, enthusiasm rising. “
Right!
I’m the boy for that! You’ve got your man right here, sir. D’you know, I can make this carriage go along for fifty yards on two wheels? Only old Miss Robinson won’t let me. Right side or left side, just say the word! Hyah! Hyah!”

“Look, just—” Vimes began, as the whip cracked overhead.

“O’course, getting the horses to run along on two legs was the trick. Actually, it’s more of a hop, you might say,” the coachman went on, turning his hat around for minimum wind resistance. “Here, want to see my wheelie?”

“Not especially,” said Vimes, staring ahead.

“The hooves don’t ’arf raise sparks when I do me wheelie, I can tell you! Hyah!”

The scenery was blurring. Ahead was the cut-through leading to Two Pint Dock. It was normally covered by a swing bridge—

—normally.

It was swung now. Vimes could see the masts of a ship being warped out of the dock and into the river.

“Oh, don’t you bother about that, sir,” yelled the coachman beside him. “We’ll go along the quay and jump it!”

“You can’t jump a two-master with a four-horse carriage, man!”

“I bet you can if you aim between the masts, sir! Hyah! Hyah!”

Ahead of the coach, men were running for cover. Behind it, the footmen were seeking other employment. Vimes pushed the boy back into his seat, grabbed a handful of reins, put both feet against the brake lever, and
hauled.

The wheels locked. The horses began to turn. The coach slid, the metal rims of the wheels sending up sparks and the throaty scream of metal. The horses turned some more. The coach began to swing, dragging the horses with it, whirling them out like fairground mounts. Their hooves made trails of fire across the cobblestones.

At this point, Vimes let go of everything, gripped the underside of the seat with one hand, held on to the rail with the other, shut his eyes, and waited for all the noise to die away.

Blessedly, it did. Only one little sound remained: a petulant banging on the coach roof, caused, probably, by a walking stick. A querulous, elderly female voice could be heard saying: “Johnny? Have you been driving
fast
again, young man?”

“A bootlegger’s turn!” Johnny breathed, looking at a team of four steaming horses now facing back the way they’d come. “I am
impressed
!”

He turned to Vimes, who wasn’t there.

The men moving the ship had dropped their ropes and run at the sight of coach and four spinning down the road toward them. The dock entrance was narrow. A man could easily scramble up a rope onto the deck, run across the ship, and let himself down on the cobbles on the other side And this, a man had just done.

Speeding along, Vimes could see that Misbegot Bridge was going to be a struggle. An overloaded hay wagon had wedged itself between the rickety houses that lined the bridge, ripped out part of someone’s upper story, and had shed some of its load in the process. There was a fight going on between the carter and the unimpressed owner of the new bungalow. Valuable seconds were spent struggling over and through the hay until he was hurrying through the backed-up traffic to the other end of the bridge. Ahead of him was the wide thoroughfare known as Prouts, full of vehicles and uphill all the way.

He wasn’t going to make it. It must be gone five to six already. The thought of it, the thought of that little face—

“Mister Vimes!”

He turned. A mail coach had just pulled out onto the road behind him and was coming up at a trot. Carrot was sitting beside the driver and waving frantically at him.

“Get on the step, sir!” he yelled. “You don’t have much time!”

Vimes started to run and, as the coach drew level, jumped onto the door’s step and hung on.

“Isn’t this the mail coach to Quirm?” he shouted, as the driver urged the horses into a canter.

“That’s right, sir,” said Carrot. “I explained it was a matter of extreme importance.”

Vimes redoubled his grip. The mail coaches had good horses. The wheels, not very far away from him, were already a blur.

“How did you get here so quick?” he yelled.

“Shortcut through the Apothecary Gardens, sir!”

“What? That little walk by the river? That’s never wide enough for a coach like this!”

“It was a bit of a squeeze, sir, yes. It got easier when the coach lamps scraped off.”

Vimes took in the state of the coach’s side. The paintwork was scored all along it.

“All right,” he shouted, “tell the driver I’ll meet the bills, of course! But it’ll be wasted, Carrot. Park Lane’ll be jam-packed at this time of day!”

“Don’t worry, sir! I should hang on very tight if I were you, sir!” shouted Carrot, above the rising wind.

Vimes heard the whip crack. This was a
real
mail coach. Mailbags don’t care if they’re comfortable. He could feel the acceleration.

Park Lane would be coming up very soon. Vimes couldn’t see much, because the wind of their flight was making his eyes water, but up ahead was one of the city’s most fashionable traffic jams. It was bad enough at any time of day, but early evening was particularly horrible, owing to the Ankh-Morpork belief that right of way was the prerogative of the heaviest vehicle or the gobbiest driver. There were minor collisions all the time, which were inevitably followed by both vehicles blocking the junction while the drivers got down to discussing road-safety issues with reference to the first weapon they could get their hands on. And it was into this maelstrom of jostling horses, scurrying pedestrians, and cursing drivers that the mail coach was heading, apparently, at a full gallop.

He shut his eyes and then, hearing a change in the sound of the wheels, risked opening them again.

The coach flew across the junction. Vimes had a momentary glimpse of a huge line, fuming and shouting behind a couple of immovable troll officers, before they were spinning on down toward Scoone Avenue.

“You closed the road? You closed the road!” he yelled as they plunged on.

“And Kings Way, sir. Just in case,” Carrot shouted down.

“You closed
two
major roads? Two whole damn roads? In the rush hour?”

“Yes, sir,” said Carrot. “It was the only way.”

Vimes hung on, speechless. Would
he
have dared to do that? But that was Carrot all over. There was a problem, and now it’s gone. Admittedly, the whole city is probably solid with wagons by now, but that’s a
new
problem.

He’d be home in time.
Would a minute have mattered? No, probably not, although his young son appeared to have a very accurate internal clock. Possibly even two minutes would be okay. Three minutes, even. You could go to five, perhaps. But that was just it. If you could go to five minutes, then you’d go to ten, then half an hour, a couple of hours…and not see your son all evening. So that was that. Six o’clock, prompt. Every day. Read to Young Sam. No excuses. He’d promised himself that.
No excuses.
No excuses at all. Once you had a good excuse, you opened the door to bad excuses.

He had
nightmares
about being too late.

He had a lot of nightmares about Young Sam. They involved empty cots and darkness.

It had all been too…good. In a few short years, he, Sam Vimes, had gone up in the world like a balloon. He was a Duke, he commanded the Watch, he was powerful, he was married to a woman whose compassion, love, and understanding he knew a man such as he did not deserve, and he was as rich as Creosote. Fortune had rained its gravy, and he’d been the man with the big bowl. And it had all happened so
fast.

And then Young Sam had come along. At first it had been fine. The baby was, well, a baby, all lolling head and burping and unfocused eyes, entirely the preserve of his mother. And then, one evening, his son had turned and looked directly at Vimes, with eyes that for his father outshone the lamps of the world, and fear had poured into Sam Vimes’s life in a terrible wave. All this good fortune, all this fierce joy…it was wrong. Surely the universe could not allow this amount of happiness in one man, not without presenting a bill. Somewhere a big wave was cresting, and when it broke over his head it would wash everything away. Some days, he was sure he could hear its distant roar…

Shouting incoherent thanks, he leapt down as the coach slowed, flailed to stay upright, and skidded into his driveway. The front door was already opening when he raced toward it, scattering gravel, and there was Willikins holding up The Book. Vimes grabbed it and pounded up the stairs as, down in the city, the clocks began to mark various approximations of the hour of six o’clock.

Sybil had been adamant about not having a nursemaid. Vimes, for once, had been even more adamant that they got one, and a head cavern girl for the pedigree dragon pens outside. A body could only do so much, after all. He’d won. Purity, who seemed a decent type, had just finished settling Young Sam into his cot when Vimes staggered in. She gave him about one third of a curtsy before she caught his pained expression and remembered last week’s impromptu lecture on The Rights of Man, and then she hurried out. It was important that no one else was here. This moment in time was just for the Sams.

Young Sam pulled himself up against the cot’s rails, and said “Da!” The world went soft.

Vimes stroked his son’s hair. It was funny, really. He spent the day yelling and shouting and talking and bellowing…but here, in this quiet time smelling (thanks to Purity) of soap, he never knew what to say. He was tongue-tied in the presence of fourteen-month-old baby. All the things he thought of saying, like “Who’s Daddy’s little boy, then?” sounded horribly false, as though he’d got them from a book. There was nothing to say nor, in this soft pastel room, anything that needed to be said.

There was a grunt from under the cot. Dribble the dragon was dozing there. Ancient, fireless, with ragged wings and no teeth, he clambered up the stairs every day and took up station under the cot. No one knew why. He made little whistling noises in his sleep.

The happy silence enveloped Vimes, but it couldn’t last. There was The Reading Of The Picture Book to be undertaken. That was the
meaning
of six o’clock.

It was the same book, every day. The pages of said book were rounded and soft where Young Sam had chewed them, but to one person in this nursery this was the book of books, the greatest story ever told. Vimes didn’t need to read it anymore. He knew it by heart.

It was called “Where’s My Cow?”

The un-identified complainant has lost their cow. That was the story, really.

Page one started promisingly:

Then the author began to get to grips with their material: