Snuff

as it didn’t happen where Vimes was drinking.
    Vimes was becoming aware that the pub was filling up, mostly with other sons of the soil, but also with people who, whether they were gentlemen or not, would expect to be called so. They wore colourful caps and white trousers and spoke continuously.
    There was also further activity outside; horses and carriages were filling the lane. Hammering was going on somewhere and Jiminy’s wife was now manning or, more correctly, womaning the bar while her husband ran back and forth with his tray. Jethro remained in his corner like a man biding his time, occasionally glaring daggers, and probably fists as well with an option on boots, if Vimes so much as looked at him.
    Vimes decided to take a look out of the grubby pub window. Regrettably, the pub was that most terrifying of things, picturesque, which meant that the window consisted of small round panes fixed in place with lead. They were for letting the light in, not for looking out of, since they bent light so erratically that it nearly broke. One pane showed what was probably a sheep but looked like a white whale, until it moved, when it became a mushroom. A man walked past with no head until he reached another pane and then had one enormous eyeball. Young Sam would have loved it, but his father decided to give eventual blindness a miss and stepped out into the sunshine.
    Ah, he thought, some kind of game.
    Oh well.
    Vimes wasn’t keen on games because they led to crowds, and crowds led to work for coppers. But here in fact he wasn’t a copper, was he? It was a strange feeling, so he left the pub and became an innocent bystander. He couldn’t remember when he had been one before. It felt … vulnerable. He strolled over to the nearest man, who was hammering some stakes into the ground, and asked, ‘What’s going on here, then?’ Realizing that he had spoken in copper rather than in ordinary citizen, he added quickly, ‘If you don’t mind me asking?’
    The man straightened up. He was one of the ones with the colourful caps. ‘Haven’t you ever seen a game of crockett, sir? It’s the game of games!’
    Mr Civilian Vimes did his best to look like a man eager for more delicious information. Judging by his informant’s enthusiastic grin, he was about to learn the rules of crockett, whether he wanted to or not. Well, he thought, I did ask …
    ‘At first sight, sir, crockett might seem like just another ball game wherein two sides strive against one another by endeavouring to propel the ball by hand or bat or other device into the opponents’ goal of some sort. Crockett, however, was invented during a game of croquet at St Onan’s Theological College in Ham-on-Rye, when the novice priest Jackson Fieldfair, now the Bishop of Quirm, took his mallet in both hands, and instead of giving the ball a gentle tap …’
    After that Vimes gave up, not only because the rules of the game were incomprehensible in their own right, but also because the extremely enthusiastic young man allowed his enthusiasm to overtake any consideration of the need to explain things in some sensible order, which meant that the flood of information was continually punctuated by apologetic comments on the lines of ‘I’m sorry, I should have explained earlier that a second cone is not allowed more than once per exchange, and in normal play there is only one tump, unless, of course, you’re talking about royal crockett …’
    Vimes died … The sun dropped out of the sky, giant lizards took over the world, the stars exploded and went out and all hope vanished with a gurgle into the sink-trap of oblivion, and gas filled the firmament and combusted and behold there was a new heaven, one careful owner, and a new disc, and lo, and possibly verily, life crawled out of the sea, or possibly didn’t because it had been made by the gods – that was really up to the bystander – and lizards turned into less scaly lizards, or possibly did not, and lizards turned into birds, and worms turned into butterflies, and a species of apple turned into bananas, and possibly a kind of monkey fell out of a tree and realized that life was better when you didn’t have to spend your time hanging on to something, and, in only a few million years, evolved trousers and ornamental stripy hats and lastly the game of crockett and there, magically reincarnated, was Vimes, a little dizzy, standing on the village green looking into the smiling countenance of an