Night Watch

who’d found a gap a few feet away. “There’s a—”
    Vimes pulled her away.
    “What are you still doing up here?” he roared.
    “It’s safer than the street!” she yelled back, nose to nose with him.
    “Not if one of those grapnels hits you it isn’t!” He grabbed his knife. “Here, take this…you see a rope anywhere, cut it!”
    He scurried along behind the shelter of wobbling parapet, but the defenders were doing very well. It wasn’t exactly rocket magic, in any case. The people at ground level were firing out through any crack they could find and, while aiming was not easy, it didn’t need to be. There is nothing like the zip and zing of arrows around them to make people nervous at their work.
    And the climbers were too bunched up. They had to be. If they tried attacking on a broad front there’d be three defenders to greet each man. So they were in one another’s way, and every falling man would take a couple more down with him, and the barricade was full of little gaps and holes where a defender with a spear could seriously prod those trying to climb up the outside.
    This is stupid , Vimes thought. It’d take a thousand men to break through, and that’d only be when the last fifty ran up the slope made of the bodies of all the rest of them. Someone out there is doing the old hit-them-at-their-strongest-point-to-show-’em-we-mean-business thinking. Ye gods, is this how we won our wars?
    So how would I have dealt with this? Well, I’d have said, “Detritus, remove the barricade” and made sure that the defenders heard me, that’s what I’d have done. End of problem.
    There was a scream from further along the parapet. A grapnel had caught one of the watchmen and pulled him hard against the wood. Vimes reached him in time to see a hook dragged into the man’s body, through breastplate and mail, as an attacker hauled himself up—
    Vimes caught the man’s sword arm in one hand and punched him with the other, letting him tumble into the melee below.
    The stricken watchman was Nancyball. His face was blue-white, his mouth opened and shut soundlessly, and blood pooled around his feet. It dripped through the planks.
    “Let’s get the bloody thing out—” Wiglet said, grabbing the hook. Vimes pushed him away, as a couple of arrows hummed overhead.
    “That could do more damage. Call up some lads, take him down really carefully, and get him to Lawn.” Vimes snatched up Nancyball’s truncheon and brought it down on the helmet of another struggling climber.
    “He’s still breathing, Sarge!” said Wiglet.
    “Right, right,” said Vimes. It was amazing how willing people were to see life in the corpse of a friend. “So make yourself useful and get him down to the doctor.” And, speaking as one who has seen some stricken men in his time, he mentally added: and if Lawn can sort him out, he can start his own religion.
    A lucky attacker, who’d achieved the top of the barricade and then found himself horribly alone, slashed desperately at Vimes with his sword. Vimes turned back to business.

    Ankh-Morpork was good at this, and had become good at it without anyone ever discussing it. Things flowed quietly rather than happened; that is, you’d sometimes have to look quite hard to find the point of change between “hasn’t been done yet” to “already taken care of, old boy.” And that was how it was done. Things were taken care of.
    It was twenty minutes before Mr. Snapcase arrived and twenty-five minutes before he was duly sworn in as Patrician, had magically become Lord Snapcase, and was sitting in the Oblong Office; this included the one-minute’s silence for the late Lord Winder, whose body had been taken care of.
    A number of servants were shown the door without any great unpleasantness, and Spymould was even allowed to remove his toad farm in peace. But those who filled the grates and dusted the furniture and swept the floors stayed on, as they had stayed on before, because they seldom paid any attention to, or possibly didn’t even know, who their lord was, and, in any case, were too useful and knew where the brooms were kept. Men come and go, but dust accumulates.
    And it was the morning of a new day, which looked, seen from below, quite like the old ones.
    After a while, someone raised the question of the fighting, which clearly needed to be taken care of.

    There were scuffles all along the barricade now, but they were going only one way. Siege ladders had been brought