The Wit And Wisdom Of Discworld

one. He was idealistic, and thought of his men as ‘jolly good chaps’ despite the occasional evidence to the contrary, and on the whole did the best he could with the moderate intelligence at his disposal. When he was a boy he’d read books about great military campaigns, and visited the museums and looked with patriotic pride at the paintings of famous cavalry charges, last stands and glorious victories. It had come as rather a shock, when he later began to participate in some of these, to find that the painters had unaccountably left out the intestines. Perhaps they just weren’t very good at them.
    *
    ‘What’s it look like to you, Tom?’ said the major.
    ‘We’ve lost nearly eighty men,’ said the captain.
    ‘What? That’s terrible!’
    ‘Oh, about sixty of them are deserters, as far as I can see. As for the rest, well, as far as I can see only six or seven of them went down to definite enemy action. Three men got stabbed in alleyways, for example.’
    ‘Sounds like enemy action to me.’
    Yes, Clive. But you were born in Quirm. Getting murdered in alleyways is just part of life in the big city’
    *
    ‘Tom?’
    Yes, Clive?’
    ‘Have you ever sung the national anthem?’
    ‘Oh, lots of times, sir.’
    ‘I don’t mean officially.’
    ‘You mean just to show I’m patriotic? Good gods, no. That would be a rather odd thing to do,’ said the captain.
    ‘And how about the flag?’
    ‘Well, obviously I salute it every day, sir.’
    ‘But you don’t wave it, at all?’ the major enquired.
    ‘I think I waved a paper one a few times when I was a little boy. Patrician’s birthday or something. We stood in the streets as he rode by and we shouted “Hurrah!” ‘
    ‘Never since then?’
    ‘Well, no, Clive,’ said the captain, looking embarrassed. ‘I’d be very worried if I saw a man singing the national anthem and waving the flag, sir. It’s really a thing foreigners do.’
    ‘Really? Why?’
    ‘We don’t need to show we’re patriotic, sir. I mean, this is Ankh-Morpork. We don’t have to make a big fuss about being the best, sir. We just know.’
    *
    ‘It’s called Victory Stew, sergeant,’ said Dibbler. ‘Tuppence a bowl or I’ll cut my throat, eh?’
    ‘Close enough,’ said Vimes, and looked at the strange (and, what was worse, occasionally hauntingly familiar) lumps seething in the scum. ‘What’s in it?’
    ‘It’s stew,’ explained Dibbler. ‘Strong enough to put hairs on your chest.’
    ‘Yes, I can see that some of those bits of meat have got bristles on them already’ said Vimes.
    *
    There were rules. When you had a Guild of Assassins, there had to be rules which everyone knew and were never, ever broken.
    An Assassin, a real Assassin, had to look like one – black clothes, hood, boots and all. If they could wear any clothes, any disguise, then what could anyone do but spend all day sitting in a small room with a loaded crossbow pointed at the door?
    And they couldn’t kill a man incapable of defending himself (although a man worth more than AM$10,000 a year was considered automatically capable of defending himself or at least of employing people to do it for him).
    And they had to give the target a chance.
    † Named after Wallace Sonky, a man without whose experiments with thin rubber pressure on the housing in Ankh-Morpork would have been a good deal more pressing.

 
    I MAGINE a million clever rats. Rats that don’t run. Rats that fight…
    Maurice, a scruffy tomcat with an eye for the main chance, has the perfect fiddle going. He has a stupid-looking kid for a piper, and he has his very own plague of rats – rats who are strangely educated, so Maurice can no longer think of them as ‘lunch’. And everyone knows the stories about rats and pipers – and is giving him lots of money…
    Until they try the trick in the far-flung town of Bad Blintz, and the nice little con suddenly goes down the drain.
    Someone there is playing a different tune. A dark, shadowy tune. Something very, very bad is waiting in the cellars. The rats must learn a new word.
    Evil.

    Everyone needs their little dreams. If you knew what it was that people really, really wanted, you very nearly controlled them.

    Cats are good at steering people. A miaow here, a purr there, a little gentle pressure with a claw … Cats didn’t have to think. They just had to know what they wanted. Humans had to do the thinking. That’s what they were for.
    *
    Everyone knew about plagues of rats.