Night Watch - Terry Pratchett [108]
Vimes pulled himself upright, following on the curve of the stroke.
Send it back into the dark until you need it…
He turned the ruler as the backstroke began and it whispered through the air edge-first, leaving the hazy smoke rolling and coiling behind it. The tip caught Swing across the neck.
Behind Vimes, the white smoke tumbled out of the corridor. The ceiling of the bloody chamber was falling in.
But he stayed, watching Swing with the same blank, intent expression. The man had raised his hands to his throat, blood spurting from between his fingers. He rocked, gasping for a breath that couldn’t come, and fell backward.
Vimes tossed the ruler on top of him, and limped away.
Outside, there was the thunder of moving barricades.
Swing opened his eyes. The world around him was gray, except for the black-clad figure in front of him.
He sought, as he always did, to learn more about the new person by carefully examining their features.
“Um, your eyes are…er…your nose is…your chin…” He gave up.
YES, said Death, I’M A BIT OF A TRICKY ONE. THIS WAY, MR. SWING.
Lord Winder was, thought Vetinari, impressively paranoid. He’d even put a guard on the top of the whiskey distillery that overlooked the palace grounds. Two guards, in fact.
One of them was clearly visible as you rose over the parapet, but the other was lurking in the shadows by the chimneys.
The late Hon. John Bleedwell had spotted only the first one.
Vetinari watched impassively as the young man was dragged away. If you were an Assassin, being killed in the pursuit of your craft was all part of the job, albeit the last part. You couldn’t complain. And it meant there was only one guard now, the other one taking Bleedwell, who had lived up to his name, downstairs.
Bleedwell had worn black. Assassins always did. Black was cool, and, besides, it was the rules. But only in a dark cellar at midnight was black a sensible color. Elsewhere, Vetinari preferred dark green, or shades of dark gray. With the right coloring, and the right stance, you vanished. People’s eyes would help you vanish. They erased you from their vision, they fitted you into the background.
Of course, he’d be expelled from the Guild if caught wearing such clothing. He’d reasoned that this was much better than being expelled from the land of the upright and breathing. He’d rather not be cool than be cold.
The guard, three feet away, lit a cigarette with no consideration for other people.
What a genius Lord Winstanleigh Greville-Pipe had been. What an observer. Havelock would have loved to have met him, or even to have visited his grave, but apparently that was somewhere inside a tiger which, to Greville-Pipe’s gratified astonishment, he hadn’t spotted until it was too late.
He had done him a private honor, though. He had hunted down and melted the engraver’s plates of Some Observations on the Art of Invisibility.
He tracked down the other four extant copies, too, but had felt unable to burn them. Instead, he’s had the slim volumes bound together inside the cover of Anecdotes of the Great Accountants, Vol. 3. He felt that Lord Winstanleigh Greville-Pipe would rather appreciate that.
Vetinari lay comfortably on the lead of the roof, patient as a cat, and watched the palace grounds below.
Vimes lay face-down on a table in the Watch House, wincing occasionally.
“Please hold still,” said Doctor Lawn. “I’ve nearly finished. I suppose you’d laugh if I told you to take it easy?”
“Ha. Ha. Uh!”
“It’s only a flesh wound, but you ought to get some rest.”
“Ha. Ha.”
“You’ve got a busy night ahead of you. So have I, I suspect.”
“We should be okay if we’ve got the barricades all the way to Easy Street,” said Vimes, and was aware of a telling silence.
He turned over and sat up on the table that Lawn was using as a bench.
“We have got them to Easy Street, haven’t we?” he demanded.
“The last I heard, yes,” said the doctor.
“The last you heard?”
“Well, technically no,” said Lawn.