Night Watch - Terry Pratchett [35]
“You’ve got your ear to the ground, eh?”
“Yessir!”
“There’s someone in every nick who knows all that’s going on and can lay his hands on just about anything, Snouty, and I think you are that man.”
“Hnah, yessir!”
“Then listen here,” said Vimes. “Size eight boots, size seven-and-a-quarter helmet, a good leather cape. The boots should be a good make but secondhand. Got that?”
“Secondhand?”
“Yes. Soles pretty nearly worn through.”
“Soles pretty nearly worn through, hnah, check,” said Snouty.
“Breastplate not to have any rust on it but a few dents will be okay. A good sword, Snouty, and believe me I know a good sword when I hold one. As for all the rest of the stuff, well, I know a man like you can get hold of the very best and have it delivered to Dr. Lawn’s place on Twinkle Street by ten tomorrow. And there’ll be something in it for you, Snouty.”
“What’ll that be, sir?” said Snouty, who was finding the grip uncomfortable.
“My undying friendship, Snouty,” said Vimes. “Which is going to be an extremely rare coin in these parts, let me tell you.”
“Right you are, Sarge,” said Snouty. “And a bell, sir?”
“A bell?”
“For ringing and shouting, hnah, ‘All’s well!’ with, Sarge.”
Vimes considered this. A bell. Well, every copper still got a bell, it was down there in the regulations, but Vimes had banned its use on anything but ceremonial occasions…
“No bell for me, Snouty,” said Vimes. “Do you think things are well?”
Snouty swallowed.
“Could go either way, Sarge,” he managed.
“Good man. See you tomorrow.”
There was a glow of dawn in the sky when Vimes strode out, but the city was still a pattern of shadows.
In his pocket was the reassuring heaviness of the badge. And in his mind the huge, huge freedom of the oath. Ruler after ruler had failed to notice what a devious oath it was…
He walked as steadily as he could down to Twinkle Street. A couple of watchmen tried to waylay him, but he showed them the badge and, more important, he had the voice now, it had come back to him. It was night and he was walking the streets and he owned the damn streets and somehow that came out in the way he spoke. They’ve hurried off. He wasn’t sure they’d believed him, but at least they’d pretended to; the voice had told them he could be the kind of trouble they weren’t paid enough to deal with.
At one point he had to step aside as a very thin horse dragged a huge and familiar four-wheeled wagon over the cobbles. Frightened faces looked out at him from between the wide metal strips that covered most of it, and then it disappeared into the gloom. Curfew was claiming its nightly harvest.
These were not good times. Everyone knew Lord Winder was insane. And then some kid who was equally mad had tried to knock him off and would have done, too, if the man hadn’t moved at the wrong moment. His lordship had taken the arrow in the arm, and they said—they being the nameless people of the kind that everyone meets in the pub—that the wound had poisoned him and made him worse. He suspected everyone and everything, he saw dark assassins on every corner. The rumor was that he woke up sweating every night because they even got into his dreams.
And he saw plots and spies everywhere throughout his waking hours, and had men root them out, and the thing about rooting out plots and spies everywhere is that, even if there are no real plots to begin with, there are plots and spies galore very soon.
At least the Night Watch didn’t have to do much of the actual rooting. They just arrested the pieces. It was the special office in Cable Street that was the long hand of his lordship’s paranoia. The Particulars, they were officially, but as far as Vimes could remember they’d reveled in their nickname of the Unmentionables. They were the ones that listened in every shadow and watched at every window. That was how it seemed, anyway. They certainly were the ones who knocked on doors in the middle of the night.
Vimes stopped in the dark. The cheap clothes were soaked through, the boots were flooded, and rain was trickling off his chin, and