Men at Arms

believer in Destiny. Such people often are.
    The Guild library was one of the largest in the city. In certain specialized areas it was the largest. These areas mainly had to do with the regrettable brevity of human life and the means of bringing it about.
    Edward spent a lot of time there, often at the top of a ladder, often surrounded by dust.
    He read every known work on armaments. He didn’t know what he was looking for and he found it in a note in the margin of an otherwise very dull and inaccurate treatise on the ballistics of crossbows. He copied it out, carefully.
    Edward spent a lot of time among history books as well. The Assassins’ Guild was an association of gentlemen of breeding, and people like that regard the whole of recorded history as a kind of stock book. There were a great many books in the Guild library, and a whole portrait gallery of kings and queens, * and Edward d’Eath came to know their aristocratic faces better than he did his own. He spent his lunch hours there.
    It was said later that he came under bad influences at this stage. But the secret of the history of Edward d’Eath was that he came under no outside influences at all, unless you count all those dead kings. He just came under the influence of himself.
    That’s where people get it wrong. Individuals aren’t naturally paid-up members of the human race, except biologically. They need to be bounced around by the Brownian motion of society, which is a mechanism by which human beings constantly remind one another that they are…well…human beings. He was also spiraling inward, as tends to happen in cases like this.
    He’d had no plan. He’d just retreated, as people do when they feel under attack, to a more defensible position, i.e. the past, and then something happened which had the same effect on Edward as finding a plesiosaur in his goldfish pond would on a student of ancient reptiles.
    He’d stepped out blinking in the sunlight one hot afternoon, after a day spent in the company of departed glory, and had seen the face of the past strolling by, nodding amiably to people.
    He hadn’t been able to control himself. He’d said, “Hey, you! Who are y-ou?”
    The past had said, “Corporal Carrot, sir. Night Watch. Mr. d’Eath, isn’t it? Can I help you?”
    “What? No! No. Be about your b-usiness!”
    The past nodded and smiled at him, and strolled on, into the future.

    Carrot stopped staring at the wall.
“I have expended three dollars on an iconograph box which, is a thing with a brownei inside that paints pictures of thing’s, this is all the Rage these days. Please find enclosed pictures of my room and my freinds in the Watch, Nobby is the one making the Humerous Gesture but he is a Rough Diamond and a good soul deep down.”
    He stopped again. Carrot wrote home at least once a week. Dwarfs generally did. Carrot was two meters tall but he’d been brought up as a dwarf, and then further up as a human. Literary endeavor did not come easily to him, but he persevered.
    “The weather,” he wrote, very slowly and carefully, “continues Very Hot…”

    Edward could not believe it. He checked the records. He double-checked. He asked questions and, because they were innocent enough questions, people gave him answers. And finally he took a holiday in the Ramtops, where careful questioning led him to the dwarf mines around Copperhead, and thence to an otherwise unremarkable glade in a beech wood where, sure enough, a few minutes of patient digging unearthed traces of charcoal.
    He spent the whole day there. When he’d finished, carefully replacing the leafmould as the sun went down, he was quite certain.
    Ankh-Morpork had a king again.
    And this was right . And it was fate that had let Edward recognize this just when he’d got his Plan. And it was right that it was Fate, and the city would be Saved from its ignoble present by its glorious past. He had the Means , and he had the end . And so on…Edward’s thoughts often ran like this.
    He could think in italics . Such people need watching.
    Preferably from a safe distance.
“I was Interested in your letter where you said people have been coming and asking about me, this is Amazing, I have been here hardly Five Minutes and already I am Famus.
“I was very pleased to hear about the opening of #7 shaft. I don’t mind Telling You that although, I am very happy here I miss the Good Times back Home. Sometimes on my day Off I go and, sit in the Cellar and hit my head