Men at Arms (Discworld #15)(64)

Someone was singing, underground. Or trying to sing.

The chthonic voices went something like this:

'Dlog, glod, Dlog, glod—'

'Listen, you . . . troll! It's the simplest song there is. Look, like this “Gold, Gold, Gold, Gold”?'

'Gold, Gold, Gold, Gold—'

'No! That's the second verse!'

There was also the rhythmical sound of dirt being shovelled and rubble being moved.

The Librarian considered matters for a while. So . . . a dwarf and a troll. He preferred both species to humans. For one thing, neither of them were great readers. The Librarian was, of course, very much in favour of reading in general, but readers in particular got on his nerves. There was something, well, sacrilegious about the way they kept taking books off the shelves and wearing out the words by reading them. He liked people who loved and respected books, and the best way to do that, in the Librarian's opinion, was to leave them on the shelves where Nature intended them to be.

The muffled voices seemed to be getting closer.

'Gold, gold, gold—'

'Now you're singing the chorus!'

On the other hand, there were proper ways of entering a library.

He waddled over to the shelves and selected Hump-tulip's seminal work How to Kille Insects. All 2,000 pages of it.

Vimes felt quite light-hearted as he walked up Scoone Avenue. He was aware that there was an inner Vimes screaming his head off. He ignored him.

You couldn't be a real copper in Ankh-Morpork and stay sane. You had to care. And caring in Ankh-Morpork was like opening a tin of meat in the middle of a piranha school.

Everyone dealt with it in their own way. Colon never thought about it, and Nobby didn't worry about it, and the new ones hadn't been in long enough to be worn down by it, and Carrot . . . was just himself.

Hundreds of people died in the city every day, often of suicide. So what did a few more matter?

The Vimes inside hammered on the walls.

There were quite a few coaches outside the Ramkin mansion, and the place seemed to be infested with assorted female relatives and Interchangeable Emmas. They were baking things and polishing things. Vimes strolled through, more or less unregarded.

He found Sybil out in the dragon house, in her rubber boots and protective dragon armour. She was mucking out, apparently blissfully unaware of the controlled uproar in the mansion.

She looked up as the door shut behind Vimes.

'Oh, there you are. You're home early,' she said. 'I couldn't stand the fuss, so I came out here. But I'll have to go and change soon—'

She stopped when she saw his expression. 'There's something wrong, isn't there?'

'I'm not going back,' said Vimes.

'Really? Last week you said you'd do a full watch. You said you were looking forward to it.'

Not much gets past old Sybil, Vimes thought.

She patted his hand.

'I'm glad you're out of it,' she said.

Corporal Nobbs darted into the Watch House and slammed the door behind him.

'Well?' said Carrot.

'It's not good,' said Nobby. 'They say the trolls are planning to march to the Palace to get Coalface out. There's gangs of dwarfs and trolls wandering around looking for trouble. And beggars. Lettice was very popular. And there's a lot of Guild people out there, too. The city,' he said, importantly, 'is def'nitely a keg of No.1 Powder.'

'How do you like the idea of camping out on the open plain?' said Colon.

'What's that got to do with it?'

'If anyone puts a match to anything tonight, it's goodbye Ankh,' said the sergeant morosely. 'Usually we can shut the city gates, right? But there's hardly more'n a few feet of water in the river.'

'You flood the city just to put out fires?' said Angua.

'Yep.'

'Another thing,' said Nobby. 'People threw stuff at me!'

Carrot had been staring at the wall. Now he produced a small, battered black book from his pocket, and started to thumb through the pages.

'Tell me,' he said, in a slightly distant voice, 'has there been an irretrievable breakdown of law and order?'

'Yeah. For about five hundred years,' said Colon. 'Irretrievable breakdown of law'n'order is what Ankh-Morpork is all about.'

'No, I mean more than usual. It's important.' Carrot turned a page. His lips moved silently as he read.

'Throwing stuff at me sounds like a breakdown in law and order,' said Nobby.

He was aware of their expressions.

'I don't think we could make that stick,' said Colon.

'It stuck all right,' said Nobby, 'and some of it went down my shirt.'

'Why throw things at you?' said Angua.

'It's 'cos I was a Watchman,' said Nobby. 'The dwarfs don't like the Watch 'cos of Mr Hammerhock, and the trolls don't like the Watch 'cos of Coalface being arrested, and people don't like the Watch 'cos of all these angry dwarfs and trolls around.'

Someone thumped at the door.

'That's probably an angry mob right now,' said Nobby.

Carrot opened the door.

'It's not an angry mob,' he announced.

'Ook.'

'It's an orang-utan carrying a stunned dwarf followed by a troll. But he is quite angry, if that's any help.'