Night Watch

secretly afraid you could see their guilty secret written on their forehead. You couldn’t, of course. But neither were you supposed to drag someone off the street and smash their fingers with a hammer until they told you what it was.
    Swing would probably have ended up face-down in some alley somewhere if it wasn’t for the fact that Winder had found in him a useful tool. No one could sniff out conspiracies like Swing. And so he’d ended up running the Unmentionables, most of whom made Sergeant Knock look like Good Copper Of The Month. Vimes had always wondered how the man had kept control, but maybe it was because the thugs recognized, in some animal way, a mind that had arrived at thuggery by the long route and was capable of devising in the name of reason the kind of atrocities that unreason could only dream of.
    It wasn’t easy, living in the past. You couldn’t whack someone for what they were going to do, or for what the world was going to find out later. You couldn’t warn people, either. You didn’t know what could change the future, but if he understood things right, history tended to spring back into shape. All you could change was the bits around the edges, the fine details. There was nothing he could do about the big stuff. The lilac was going to bloom. The revolution was going to happen.
    Well…a kind of revolution. That wasn’t really a word for what it was. There was the People’s Republic of Treacle Mine Road (Truth! Justice! Freedom! Reasonably Priced Love! And a Hard-Boiled Egg!), which would live for all of a few hours, a strange candle that burned too briefly and died like a firework. And there was the scouring of the House of Pain, and the—
    Anyway…you did the job that was in front of you, like unimaginative coppers always did.
    He got up around one in the afternoon. Lawn was closeted in his surgery, doing something that involved some serious whimpering on the part of something else. Vimes knocked on the door.
    After a moment it was opened a fraction. Doctor Lawn was wearing a face mask and holding a pair of very long tweezers in his hand.
    “Yes?”
    “I’m going out,” said Vimes. “Trouble?”
    “Not too bad. Slidey Harris was unlucky at cards last night, that’s all. Played the ace of hearts.”
    “That’s an unlucky card?”
    “It is if Big Tony knows he didn’t deal it to you. But I’ll soon have it removed. If you’re going to injure anyone tonight, can you do it before I go to bed? Thank you.” Lawn shut the door.
    Vimes nodded at the woodwork, and went out to stretch his legs and get some lunch. It was waiting for him, on a tray, around the neck of a man. Quite a young man, now, but there was something about the expression, as of a rat who was expecting cheese right around the next corner, and had been expecting cheese around the last corner, too, and the corner before that, and, although the world had turned out so far to be full of corners yet completely innocent of any cheese at all, was nevertheless quite certain that, just around the corner, cheese awaited.
    Vimes stared. But why should he be surprised? As long ago as he could remember, there was always someone selling highly suspicious chemically reclaimed pork products in this town. The seller was very familiar. Just…younger.
    His expression lit up at the sight of an unfamiliar face. The seller liked to meet people who hadn’t yet bought one of his pies.
    “Ah, Sergeant…hey, what’s the little crown mean?”
    “Sergeant-at-arms,” said Vimes. “That’s like ‘sergeant with all the trimmings.’”
    “Well, Sergeant, could I interest you in a very special sausage inna bun? Guaranteed no rat? One hundred percent organic? All pork shaved before mixing?”
    Why not, thought Vimes. And his stomach, liver, kidneys, and lengths of intestine all supplied reasons, but he fumbled in his pocket for some change anyway.
    “How much, Mr.…er,” Vimes remembered in time, and made a show of looking at the name on the front of the tray, “…Dibbler?”
    “Four pence, Sergeant.”
    “And that’s cutting your own throat, eh?” said Vimes jovially.
    “Pardon?” said Dibbler, looking puzzled.
    “I said, a price like that’s cutting your own throat, eh?”
    “Cutting my own…?”
    “Throat,” said Vimes desperately.
    “Oh.” Dibbler thought about this. “Right. Yeah. It is . You never said a truer word. So you’ll have one, then?”
    “I notice it says on your tray, ‘Dibbler Enterprises,