Men at Arms

“OK. A twofour is what we call an eight .”
    “Ate.”
    “You know,” said Cuddy, subjecting the troll to a long critical stare, “you might not be as stupid as you look. This is not hard. Let’s think about this. I mean… I’ll think about this, and you can join in when you know the words.”

    Vimes slammed the Watch House door behind him. Sergeant Colon looked up from his desk. He had a pleased expression.
    “What’s been happening, Fred?”
    Colon took a deep breath.
    “Interesting stuff, captain. Me and Nobby did some detectoring up at the Fools’ Guild. I’ve writ it all down what we found out. It’s all here. A proper report.”
    “Fine.”
    “All written down, look. Properly. Punctuation and everything.”
    “Well done.”
    “It’s got commas and everything, look.”
    “I’m sure I shall enjoy it, Fred.”
    “And the—and Cuddy and Detritus have found out stuff, too. Cuddy’s done a report, too. But it’s not got so much punctuation as mine.”
    “How long have I been asleep?”
    “Six hours.”
    Vimes tried to make mental space for all of this, and failed.
    “I’ve got to get something inside me,” he said. “Some coffee or something. And then the world will somehow be better.”

    Anyone strolling along Phedre Road might have seen a troll and a dwarf apparently shouting at one another in excitement.
    “A two-thirtytwo, and eight, and a one!”
    “See? How many bricks in that pile?”
    Pause.
    “A sixteen, an eight, a four, a one!”
    “Remember what I said about dividing by eight-and-two?”
    Longer pause.
    “Two-enty-nine…?”
    “Right!”
    “Right!”
    “You can get there!”
    “I can get there!”
    “You’re a natural at counting to two!”
    “I’m a nat’ral at counting to two!”
    “If you can count to two, you can count to anything!”
    “If I can count to two, I can count to anything!”
    “And then the world is your mollusc!”
    “My mollusc! What’s a mollusc?”

    Angua had to scurry to keep up with Carrot.
    “Aren’t we going to look at the opera house?” she said.
    “Later. Anyone up there’ll be long gone by the time we get there. We must tell the captain.”
    “You think she was killed by the same thing as Hammerhock?”
    “Yes.”

    “There are…niner birds.”
    “That’s right.”
    “There are…one bridge.”
    “Right.”
    “There are…four-ten boats.”
    “All right.”
    “There are…one tousand. Three hundret. Six-ty. Four bricks.”
    “OK.”
    “There are—”
    “I should give it a rest now. You don’t want to wear everything out by counting—”
    “There are—one running man…”
    “What? Where?”

    Sham Harga’s coffee was like molten lead, but it had this in its favor: when you’d drunk it, there was this overwhelming feeling of relief that you’d got to the bottom of the cup.
    “That,” said Vimes, “was a bloody awful cup of coffee, Sham.”
    “Right,” said Harga.
    “I mean I’ve drunk a lot of bad coffee in my time but that, that was like having a saw dragged across my tongue. How long’d it been boiling?”
    “What’s today’s date?” said Harga, cleaning a glass. He was generally cleaning glasses. No one ever found out what happened to the clean ones.
    “August the fifteenth.”
    “What year?”
    Sham Harga smiled, or at least moved various muscles around his mouth. Sham Harga had run a successful eatery for many years by always smiling, never extending credit, and realizing that most of his customers wanted meals properly balanced between the four food groups: sugar, starch, grease and burnt crunchy bits.
    “I’d like a couple of eggs,” said Vimes, “with the yolks real hard but the whites so runny that they drip like treacle. And I want bacon, that special bacon all covered with bony nodules and dangling bits of fat. And a slice of fried bread. The kind that makes your arteries go clang just by looking at it.”
    “Tough order,” said Harga.
    “You managed it yesterday. And give me some more coffee. Black as midnight on a moonless night.”
    Harga looked surprised. That wasn’t like Vimes.
    “How black’s that, then?” he said.
    “Oh, pretty damn black, I should think.”
    “Not necessarily.”
    “What?”
    “You get more stars on a moonless night. Stands to reason. They show up more. It can be quite bright on a moonless night.”
    Vimes sighed.
    “An overcast moonless night?” he said.
    Harga looked carefully at his coffee pot.
    “Cumulus or