Men at Arms

dust.”
    “That’s vampires, sir,” said Carrot.
    “Hah! You’re right. Assassins and licensed thieves and bloody vampires! You know, this was a great old city once, lad.”
    Unconsciously, they fell into step…proceeding.
    “When we had kings, sir?”
    “Kings? Kings? Hell, no!”
    A couple of Assassins looked around in surprise.
    “I’ll tell you,” said Vimes. “A monarch’s an absolute ruler, right? The head honcho—”
    “Unless he’s a queen,” said Carrot.
    Vimes glared at him, and then nodded.
    “OK, or the head honchette—”
    “No, that’d only apply if she was a young woman. Queens tend to be older. She’d have to be a…a honcharina? No, that’s for very young princesses. No. Um. A honchesa, I think.”
    Vimes paused. There’s something in the air in this city, he thought. If the Creator had said, “Let there be light” in Ankh-Morpork, he’d have got no further because of all the people saying “What color?”
    “The supreme ruler, OK,” he said, starting to stroll forward again.
    “OK.”
    “But that’s not right, see? One man with the power of life and death.”
    “But if he’s a good man—” Carrot began.
    “What? What? OK. OK. Let’s believe he’s a good man. But his second-in-command—is he a good man too? You’d better hope so. Because he’s the supreme ruler, too, in the name of the king. And the rest of the court…they’ve got to be good men. Because if just one of them’s a bad man the result is bribery and patronage.”
    “The Patrician’s a supreme ruler,” Carrot pointed out. He nodded at a passing troll. “G’day, Mr. Carbuncle.”
    “But he doesn’t wear a crown or sit on a throne and he doesn’t tell you it’s right that he should rule,” said Vimes. “I hate the bastard. But he’s honest. Honest like a corkscrew.”
    “Even so, a good man as king—”
    “Yes? And then what? Royalty pollutes people’s minds, boy. Honest men start bowing and bobbing just because someone’s granddad was a bigger murdering bastard than theirs was. Listen! We probably had good kings, once! But kings breed other kings! And blood tells, and you end up with a bunch of arrogant, murdering bastards! Chopping off queens’ heads and fighting their cousins every five minutes! And we had centuries of that! And then one day a man said ‘No more kings!’ and we rose up and we fought the bloody nobles and we dragged the king off his throne and we dragged him into Sator Square and we chopped his bloody head off! Job well done!”
    “Wow,” said Carrot. “Who was he?”
    “Who?”
    “The man who said ‘No More Kings’.”
    People were staring. Vimes’ face went from the red of anger to the red of embarrassment. There was little difference in the shading, however.
    “Oh…he was Commander of the City Guard in those days,” he mumbled. “They called him Old Stoneface.”
    “Never heard of him,” said Carrot.
    “He, er, doesn’t appear much in the history books,” said Vimes. “Sometimes there has to be a civil war, and sometimes, afterwards, it’s best to pretend something didn’t happen. Sometimes people have to do a job, and then they have to be forgotten. He wielded the axe, you know. No one else’d do it. It was a king’s neck, after all. Kings are,” he spat the word, “ special . Even after they’d seen the…private rooms, and cleaned up the…bits. Even then. No one’d clean up the world. But he took the axe and cursed them all and did it.”
    “What king was it?” said Carrot.
    “Lorenzo the Kind,” said Vimes, distantly.
    “I’ve seen his picture in the palace museum,” said Carrot. “A fat old man. Surrounded by lots of children.”
    “Oh yes,” said Vimes, carefully. “He was very fond of children.”
    Carrot waved at a couple of dwarfs.
    “I didn’t know this,” he said. “I thought there was just some wicked rebellion or something.”
    Vimes shrugged. “It’s in the history books, if you know where to look.”
    “And that was the end of the kings of Ankh-Morpork.”
    “Oh, there was a surviving son, I think. And a few mad relatives. They were banished. That’s supposed to be a terrible fate, for royalty. I can’t see it myself.”
    “I think I can. And you like the city, sir.”
    “Well, yes. But if it was a choice between banishment and having my head chopped off, just help me down with this suitcase. No, we’re well rid of kings. But, I mean…the city used to work.”
    “Still does,” said