Night Watch

I wouldn’t want anything to happen to you, Carcer,” said Vimes. “I want to see you in front of his lordship. I just want to hear you admit something for once. I just want to see that bloody cheeky grin wiped off your face. Sergeant Detritus!”
    “Sah!” shouted the troll from his distant ridge.
    “Make a signal. I want people up here now. Me and Carcer are just going to stay nice and quiet here, so’s he doesn’t try any tricks.”
    “Right, sir.” With another distant clatter of doomed tiles, the troll disappeared from view.
    “You shouldn’t have sent Captain Carrot away,” muttered Carcer. “He doesn’t like watchmen bullying innocent civilians…”
    “It is true that he has yet to master some of the finer details of de facto street policing,” said Vimes, maintaining his grip. “Anyway, I’m not hurting you, I’m protecting you. Wouldn’t like you to fall all that way.”
    Thunder rumbled again. The sky wasn’t just storm-black now. There were pinks and purples in the clouds, as though the sky was bruised. Vimes could see the clouds moving like snakes in a sack, to an endless sullen rumbling. He wondered if the wizards had been messing about with the weather.
    Something was happening to the air. It tasted of burned metal and flints. A weathercock on top of the dome began to spin round and round.
    “I didn’t think you was stupid, Mister Vimes…”
    “What?” said Vimes, looking down suddenly. Carcer was smiling cheerfully.
    “I said I didn’t think you was stupid, Mister Vimes. I know a clever copper like you’d think I’d got two knives.”
    “Yeah, right,” said Vimes. He could feel his hair trying to stand on end. Little blue caterpillars of light were crackling over the ironwork of the dome, and even over his armor.
    “Mister Vimes?”
    “ What?” Vimes snapped. Smoke was rising from the weathercock’s bearings.
    “I got three knives, Mister Vimes,” said Carcer, bringing his arm up.
    The lightning struck.

    Windows blew out and iron gutters melted. Roofs lifted into the air and settled again. Buildings shook.
    But this storm had been blowing in from far across the plains, pushing the natural background magic ahead of it. It dumped it now, all in one go.
    They said afterward that the bolt of lightning hit a clockmaker’s shop in the Street of Cunning Artificers, stopping all the clocks at that instant. But that was nothing. In Baker Street, a couple who had never met before became electrically attracted to one another and were forced to get married after two days for the sake of public decency. In the Assassins’ Guild, the chief armorer became hugely, and, since he was in the armory at the time, tragically, attractive to metal. Eggs fried in their baskets, apples roasted on the greengrocers’ shelves. Candles lit themselves. Cartwheels exploded. And the ornate tin bath of the Archchancellor of Unseen University was lifted neatly off the floor, sizzled across his study, and then flew off the balcony and onto the lawn in the octangle several stories below, without spilling more than a cupful of suds.
    Archchancellor Mustrum Ridcully paused with his long-handled scrubbing brush hovering halfway down his back, and stared.
    Tiles smashed to the ground. Water boiled in the ornamental fountain nearby.
    Ridcully ducked, as a stuffed badger, the origin of which was never ascertained, flew across the lawn and smashed through a window.
    He winced, as he was hit by a brief and inexplicable shower of small cogwheels, which pattered down all around him.
    He stared, as half a dozen watchmen dashed into the octangle and headed up the steps to the Library.
    Then, gripping the sides of the bath, the Archchancellor stood up. Foaming water cascaded off him, as it would off some ancient leviathan erupting from the abyssal sea.
    “Mister Stibbons!” he bellowed, his voice bouncing off the imposing walls. “Where the is my hat ?”
    He sat down again and waited.
    There was a few minutes of silence, and then Ponder Stibbons, Head of Inadvisably Applied Magic and Pra-elector of Unseen University, came running out of the main door carrying Ridcully’s pointy hat.
    The Archchancellor snatched at it and rammed it on his head.
    “Very well,” he said, standing up again. “Now, will care to tell m at the is going on? And why Old Toming repeatedly?”
    “been a of magic, sir! I someone up the mechanism!” Ponder shouted above the sound-destroying silences. *
    There was a dying