Night Watch

slippery hail, tried to get on his feet, and slipped again. Vimes tugged himself onto the roof, stepped forward, and found his legs skidding away beneath him. Both he and Carcer got up, tried to move, and fell over again.
    From a prone position the man landed a kick on Vimes’s shoulder, sending both of them sliding away in opposite directions, and then turned over and scuttled on all fours around the Library’s big glass and metal dome. He grabbed the rusty frame, hauled himself upright, and pulled out a knife.
    “Come and get me, then,” he said. There was another roll of thunder.
    “I don’t have to,” said Vimes. “I just have to wait.” At least until I get my breath back, he thought.
    “Why’re you picking on me? What’m I supposed to have done?”
    “Couple of murders ring a bell?” said Vimes.
    If injured innocence was money, Carcer’s face was his fortune.
    “I don’t know anything about—”
    “I’m not up here to play games, Carcer. Knock it off.”
    “You going to take me alive, Your Grace?”
    “You know, I don’t want to. But people think it’s neater all round if I do.”
    There was a clattering of tiles away on the left, and a thud as a huge siege bow was rested on the ridge of a nearby roof. The head of Detritus arose behind it.
    “Sorry about dat, Mister Vimes, hard to climb up in dat hail. Jus’ stand back.”
    “You’re going to let it shoot me?” said Carcer. He tossed the knife away. “An unarmed man?”
    “Trying to escape,” said Vimes. But this was starting to go bad. He could feel it.
    “Me? I’m just standing here, haha.”
    And there it was. That bloody laugh, on top of that damn grin. It was never far away. “Haha” didn’t come close to doing it the injustice it deserved. It was more a sort of modulation to the voice, an irritatingly patronizing chortle that suggested that all this was somehow funny and you hadn’t got the joke.
    Trouble was, you couldn’t shoot someone for having an annoying laugh. And he was just standing there. If he ran, you could shoot him. Admittedly, it would be Detritus doing the shooting, and while with that bow it was technically possible to shoot to wound, the people you were wounding would probably be in the building next door.
    But Carcer was just waiting there, insulting the world by his existence.
    In fact he wasn’t merely standing there now. In one movement, he’d swung himself onto the lower slopes of the Library’s dome. The glass panes—at least, the glass panes that had survived the freak hail—creaked in the iron framework.
    “Stop right there!” Vimes bellowed. “And come down!”
    “Now where could I go?” said Carcer, grinning at him. “I’m just waiting for you to arrest me, right? Hey, I can see your house from up here!”
    What’s under the dome? thought Vimes. How high are the bookcases? There’s other floors in the Library, aren’t there? Like galleries? But you can definitely look up at the dome from the ground floor, right? If you were careful, could you swing onto a gallery from the edge of the dome? It’d be risky, but if a man knew he was going to swing anyway …
    Picking his way with care, he reached the edge of the dome. Carcer climbed up a little further.
    “I warn you, Carcer—”
    “Only high spirits, Mister Grace, haha! Can’t blame a man for trying to enjoy his last few minutes of freedom, can you?”
    I can see your house from up here …
    Vimes hauled himself onto the dome. Carcer cheered.
    “Well done, Your Vimes!” he said, easing himself toward the top.
    “Don’t mess me about, Carcer. It’ll go badly for you!”
    “Badder than it’s going to go anyway?” Carcer glanced down through a smashed pane.
    “Long way down, Mister Vimes. I reckon a man’d die instantly falling all that way, wouldn’t he?”
    Vimes glanced down, and Carcer leaped.
    It didn’t go the way he’d planned. Vimes had been tensed for something like this. After a complicated moment, Carcer was lying on the iron latticework, one arm under him, the other outflung and being banged heavily on the metal by Vimes. The knife it had held skidded away down the dome.
    “Gods, you must think I’m stupid,” Vimes growled. “You wouldn’t throw away a knife, Carcer, if you didn’t have another one!”
    Vimes’s face was close to the man’s now, close enough to look into the eyes above that chirpy grin and watch the demons waving.
    “You’re hurting me, and that’s not allowed!”
    “Oh,