Men at Arms

and cleared his throat noisily.
    “I think I might have a throat sweet somewhere—” Angua began.
    “I was ordering breakfast,” said Carrot.
    “You know the menu off by heart?”
    “Oh, yes. But it’s written on the wall as well.”
    Angua turned and looked again at what she’d thought were merely random scratches.
    “It’s Oggham,” said Carrot. “An ancient and poetic runic script whose origins are lost in the mists of time but it’s thought to have been invented even before the Gods.”
    “Gosh. What does it say?”
    Carrot really cleared his throat this time.

    “Soss, egg, beans and rat 12p
    Soss, rat and fried slice 10p
    Cream-cheese rat 9p
    Rat and beans 8p
    Rat and ketchup 7p
    Rat 4p”

    “Why does ketchup cost almost as much as the rat?” said Angua.
    “Have you tried rat without ketchup?” said Carrot. “Anyway, I ordered you dwarf bread. Have you ever eaten dwarf bread?”
    “No.”
    “Everyone should try it once,” said Carrot. He appeared to consider this. “Most people do,” he added. *

    Three and a half minutes after waking up, Captain Samuel Vimes, Night Watch, staggered up the last few steps on to the roof of the city’s opera house, gasped for breath and threw up allegro ma non troppo .
    Then he leaned against the wall, waving his crossbow vaguely in front of him.
    There wasn’t anyone else on the roof. There were just the leads, stretching away, drinking up the morning sunlight. It was already almost too hot to move.
    When he felt a bit better he poked around among the chimneys and skylight. But there were a dozen ways down, and a thousand places to hide.
    He could see right into his room from here. Come to that, he could see into the rooms of most of the city.
    Catapult…no…
    Oh, well. At least there’d been witnesses.
    He walked to the edge of the roof, and peered over.
    “Hello, there,” he said. He blinked. It was six stories down, and not a sight to look at on a recently emptied stomach.
    “Er…could you come up here, please?” he said.
    ’“Ight oo are.”
    Vimes stood back. There was a scrape of stone and a gargoyle pulled itself laboriously over the parapet, moving like a cheap stop-motion animation.
    He didn’t know much about gargoyles. Carrot had said something once about how marvelous it was, an urban troll species that had evolved a symbiotic relationship with gutters, and he had admired the way they funnelled run-off water into their ears and out through fine sieves in their mouths. They were probably the strangest species on the Disc. * You didn’t get many birds nesting on buildings colonized by gargoyles, and bats tended to fly around them.
    “What’s your name, friend?”
    “’ornice-oggerooking-Oardway.”
    Vimes’ lips moved as he mentally inserted all those sounds unobtainable to a creature whose mouth was stuck permanently open. Cornice-overlooking-Broadway. A gargoyle’s personal identity was intimately bound up with its normal location, like a limpet.
    “Well now, Cornice,” he said, “do you know who I am?”
    “Oh,” said the gargoyle sullenly.
    Vimes nodded. It sits up here in all weather straining gnats through its ears, he thought. People like that don’t have a crowded address book. Even whelks get out more.
    “I’m Captain Vimes of the Watch.”
    The gargoyle pricked up its huge ears.
    “Ar. Oo erk or Ister Arrot?”
    Vimes worked this one out, too, and blinked.
    “You know Corporal Carrot?”
    “Oh, Ess . Air-ee-un owes Arrot.”
    Vimes snorted. I grew up here, he thought, and when I walk down the street everyone says, “Who’s that glum bugger?” Carrot’s been here a few months and everyone knows him. And he knows everyone. Everyone likes him. I’d be annoyed about that, if only he wasn’t so likeable.
    “You live right up here,” said Vimes, interested despite the more pressing problem on his mind, “how come you know Arrot…Carrot?”
    “Ee cuns uk ere um-imes an awks oo ugg.”
    “Uz ee?”
    “Egg.”
    “Did someone else come up here? Just now?”
    “Egg.”
    “Did you see who it was?”
    “Oh. Ee oot izh oot on i ed. Ang et ogg a ire-erk. I or ing un ah-ay a-ong Or-oh-Erns Eet.”
    Holofernes Street, Vimes translated. Whoever it was would be well away by now.
    “Ee ad a ick,” Cornice volunteered. “A ire-erkhtick.”
    “A what?”
    “Ire-erk. Oo oh? Ang! Ock! Arks! Ocketks! Ang!”
    “Oh, fireworks. ”
    “Egg. Aks ot I ed.”
    “A firework stick? Like…like a rocket