Men at Arms

Night Watch?”

    It’s generally very quiet in the Unseen University library. There’s perhaps the shuffling of feet as wizards wander between the shelves, the occasional hacking cough to disturb the academic silence, and every once in a while a dying scream as an unwary student fails to treat an old magical book with the caution it deserves.
    Consider orangutans.
    In all the worlds graced by their presence, it is suspected that they can talk but choose not to do so in case humans put them to work, possibly in the television industry. In fact they can talk. It’s just that they talk in Orangutan. Humans are only capable of listening in Bewilderment.
    The Librarian of Unseen University had unilaterally decided to aid comprehension by producing an Orangutan/Human Dictionary. He’d been working on it for three months.
    It wasn’t easy. He’d got as far as “Oook.” *
    He was down in the Stacks, where it was cool.
    And suddenly someone was singing.
    He took the pen out of his foot and listened.
    A human would have decided they couldn’t believe their ears. Orangs are more sensible. If you won’t believe your own ears, whose ears will you believe?
    Someone was singing, underground. Or trying to sing.
    The chthonic voices went something like this:
    “Dlog, glod, Dlog, glod—”
    “Listen, you…troll! It’s the simplest song there is. Look, like this ‘Gold, Gold, Gold, Gold’?”
    “Gold, Gold, Gold, Gold—”
    “No! That’s the second verse!”
    There was also the rhythmical sound of dirt being shovelled and rubble being moved.
    The Librarian considered matters for a while. So…a dwarf and a troll. He preferred both species to humans. For one thing, neither of them were great readers. The Librarian was, of course, very much in favor of reading in general, but readers in particular got on his nerves. There was something, well, sacrilegious about the way they kept taking books off the shelves and wearing out the words by reading them. He liked people who loved and respected books, and the best way to do that, in the Librarian’s opinion, was to leave them on the shelves where Nature intended them to be.
    The muffled voices seemed to be getting closer.
    “Gold, gold, gold—”
    “Now you’re singing the chorus!”
    On the other hand, there were proper ways of entering a library.
    He waddled over to the shelves and selected Humptulip’s seminal work How to Kille Insects . All 2,000 pages of it.

    Vimes felt quite light-hearted as he walked up Scoone Avenue. He was aware that there was an inner Vimes screaming his head off. He ignored him.
    You couldn’t be a real copper in Ankh-Morpork and stay sane. You had to care . And caring in Ankh-Morpork was like opening a tin of meat in the middle of a piranha school.
    Everyone dealt with it in their own way. Colon never thought about it, and Nobby didn’t worry about it, and the new ones hadn’t been in long enough to be worn down by it, and Carrot…was just himself.
    Hundreds of people died in the city every day, often of suicide. So what did a few more matter?
    The Vimes inside hammered on the walls.
    There were quite a few coaches outside the Ramkin mansion, and the place seemed to be infested with assorted female relatives and Interchangeable Emmas. They were baking things and polishing things. Vimes strolled through, more or less unregarded.
    He found Sybil out in the dragon house, in her rubber boots and protective dragon armor. She was mucking out, apparently blissfully unaware of the controlled uproar in the mansion.
    She looked up as the door shut behind Vimes.
    “Oh, there you are. You’re home early,” she said. “I couldn’t stand the fuss, so I came out here. But I’ll have to go and change soon—”
    She stopped when she saw his expression. “There’s something wrong, isn’t there?”
    “I’m not going back,” said Vimes.
    “Really? Last week you said you’d do a full watch. You said you were looking forward to it.”
    Not much gets past old Sybil, Vimes thought.
    She patted his hand.
    “I’m glad you’re out of it,” she said.

    Corporal Nobbs darted into the Watch House and slammed the door behind him.
    “Well?” said Carrot.
    “It’s not good,” said Nobby. “They say the trolls are planning to march to the Palace to get Coalface out. There’s gangs of dwarfs and trolls wandering around looking for trouble. And beggars. Lettice was very popular. And there’s a lot of Guild people out there, too. The city,”