Jingo

truncheon and he’s tossing it up in the air and catching it again, you know the way he does with his sword when he’s thinking…He looks quite happy…”
    “I think he’s going to really treasure this moment of happiness,” said Carrot.
    Then the murmur started. The procession had halted behind Vimes. Some of the more impressionable people who weren’t sure what they should be doing, and those who had partaken too heavily of the University’s rather good sherry, started to fumble around on their person for something to throw up in the air and catch. After all, this was a Traditional Ceremony. If you took the view that you were not going to do things because they were apparently ridiculous, you might as well go home right now.
    “He’s tired, that’s what it is,” said Carrot. “He’s been running around overseeing things for days. Night and day watches. You know what a hands-on person he is.”
    “Let’s hope the Patrician will agree to let him stay that way.”
    “Oh, his lordship wouldn’t…He wouldn’t, would he?”
    Laughter was starting. Vimes had started to toss the truncheon from one hand to the other.
    “He can make his sword spin three times and still catch it—”
    Vimes’s head turned. He looked up. His truncheon clattered on to the cobbles and rolled into a puddle, unheeded.
    Then he started to run.
    Carrot stared at him and then tried to see what the man had been looking at.
    “On top of the Barbican…” he said. “In that window…isn’t that someone up there? Excuse me, excuse me, sorry, excuse me—” He began to push his way through the crowd.
    Vimes was already a small figure in the distance, his red cloak flying out after him.
    “Well? There’s lots of people watching the parade from high places,” said Angua. “What’s so special about—”
    “No one should be up there!” said Carrot, starting to run now he was free of the crowd. “It’s all sealed up!”
    Angua looked around. Every face was turned toward the street theater, and there was a cart nearby. She sighed and strolled behind it wearing an expression of suspicious nonchalance. There was a gasp, a faint but distinctly organic sound, a muffled yelp and then the clank of armor hitting the ground.

    Vimes didn’t know why he ran. It was a sixth sense. It was when the back of the brain picked up out of the ether that something bad was going to happen, and didn’t have time to rationalize, and just took over the spinal cord.
    No one could get to the top of the Barbican. The Barbican had been the fortified gateway in the days when Ankh-Morpork didn’t regard an attacking army as a marvelous commercial opportunity. Some parts were still in use, but the bulk of it was six or seven stories of ruin, without stairs that any sensible man would trust. For years it had been used as an unofficial source of masonry for the rest of the city. Bits of it fell off on windy nights. Even gargoyles avoided it.
    He was aware that far behind him the noise of the crowd became a lot of shouting. One or two people screamed. He didn’t turn round. Whatever was going on, Carrot could take care of it.
    Something overtook him. It looked like a wolf would look if one of its ancestors had been a long-haired Klatchistan hunting dog, one of those graceful things that were all nose and hair.
    It bounded ahead and through the crumbling gateway.
    The creature was nowhere to be seen when Vimes arrived. But the absence was not a matter that grabbed at his attention, because of the more pressing presence of the corpse, lying in a mess of fallen masonry.
    One of the things Vimes had always said—that is to say, one of the things he said he always said, and no one disagrees with the commanding officer—was that sometimes small details, tiny little details, things that no one would notice in ordinary circumstances, grab your senses by the throat and scream, “See me!”
    There was a lingering, spicy scent in the air. And in the gap between a couple of cobblestones was a clove.

    It was five o’clock. Vimes and Carrot sat in the Patrician’s outer office, in silence except for the irregular ticking of the clock.
    After a while Vimes said: “Let me have a look at that again.”
    Carrot obediently pulled out the small square of paper. Vimes looked at it. There was no mistaking what it showed. He tucked it into his own pocket.
    “Er…why do you want to keep it, sir?”
    “Keep what?” said Vimes.
    “The iconograph I borrowed from the