Night Watch

Black mark right there, lads.
    The iron bulk of the hurry-up wagon stood empty on the cobbles.
    Behind it was what they called, now, the stables. In fact, the stables were only the bottom floor of what would have been part of Ankh-Morpork’s industrial heritage, if anyone had ever thought of it like that. In fact they thought of it as junk that was too heavy to cart away. It was part of the winding gear from one of the original treacle mines, long since abandoned. One of the original lifting buckets was still up there, glued to the floor by its last load of the heavy, sticky, unrefined treacle, which, once set, was tougher than cement and more waterproof than tar. Vimes remembered, as a kid, begging chippings of pig treacle off the miners; one lump of that, oozing the sweetness of prehistoric sugar cane, could keep a boy’s mouth happily shut for a week. *
    Inside the treacle-roofed stable level, chewing a bit of bad hay, was the horse. Vimes knew it was a horse because it checked out as one: four hooves, tail, head with mane, seedy brown coat. Considered from another angle, it was half a ton of bones held together with horsehair.
    He patted it gingerly; as one of nature’s pedestrians, he’d never been at home around horses. He unhooked a greasy clipboard from a nail nearby and flicked through its pages. Then he had another look around the yard. Tilden never did that. He looked at the pigsty in the corner where Knock kept his pig, and then at the chicken run, and the pigeon loft, and the badly made rabbit hutches, and he did a few calculations.
    The old Watch House! It was all there, just like the day he first arrived. It had been two houses once, and one of them had been the treacle mine office. Everywhere in the city had been something else once. And so the place was a maze of blocked-in doorways and ancient windows and poky rooms.
    He wandered around like a man in a museum. See the old helmet on a stick for archery practice! See Sergeant Knock’s broken-springed armchair, where he used to sit out on sunny afternoons!
    And, inside, the smell: floor wax, stale sweat, armor polish, unwashed clothes, ink, a hint of fried fish, and always, here, a taint of treacle.
    The Night Watch. He was back.
    When the first members of the Night Watch came in, they found a man perfectly at ease, leaning back in a chair with his feet on a desk and leafing through paperwork. The man had sergeant’s stripes and an air of an unsprung trap. He was also giving absolutely no attention to the newcomers. He particularly paid no heed to one gangly lance constable who was still new enough to have tried to put a shine on his breastplate…
    They fanned out among the desks, with muttered conversations.
    Vimes knew them in his soul. They were in the Night Watch because they were too scruffy, ugly, incompetent, awkwardly shaped, or bloody-minded for the Day Watch. They were honest, in that special policeman sense of the word. That is, they didn’t steal things too heavy to carry. And they had the morale of damp gingerbread.
    He’d wondered last night about giving them some kind of pep talk by way of introduction, and decided against it. They might be very bad at it but they were coppers, and coppers did not respond well to the Happy Families approach: “Hello, chaps, call me Christopher, my door is always open, I’m sure if we all pull together we shall get along splendidly, like one big happy family.” They’d seen too many families to fall for that rubbish.
    Someone cleared his throat with malice aforethought. Vimes glanced up and into the face of Sergeant “Knocker” Knock and, for a fraction of a second, had to suppress the urge to salute. Then he remembered what Knock was.
    “Well?” he said.
    “That’s my desk you’re sitting at, Sergeant,” said Knock.
    Vimes sighed and pointed to the little crown on his sleeve.
    “See this, Sergeant?” he said. “It’s what they used to call the Hat of Authority.”
    Knock’s little weasely eyes focused on the crown. And then they went back to Vimes’s face and widened in the shock of recognition.
    “Bloody hell,” breathed Knock.
    “That’s ‘bloody hell, sir ,’” said Vimes. “But ‘Sarge’ will do. Most of the time. And this is your mob, is it? Oh dear. Well, let’s make a start.”
    He swung his feet off the desk and stood up.
    “I’ve been looking at the feed bills for Marilyn,” he said. “Interesting reading, ladies. According to my rough calculations, a