Men at Arms (Discworld #15)(8)

KNOCK KNOCK.

He looked up. 'Who's there?'

DEATH.

'Death who?'

There was a chill in the air. Beano waited. Edward was frantically patting his face . . . well, what until recently had been his face.

I WONDER . . . CAN WE START AGAIN? I DON'T SEEM TO HAVE THE HANG OF THIS.

'Sorry?' said Beano.

'I'm s-orry!' moaned Edward, 'I meant it for the best!'

Beano watched his murderer drag his . . . the . . . body away.

'Nothing personal, he says,' he said. 'I'm glad it wasn't anything personal. I should hate to think I've just been killed because it was personal.'

IT'S JUST THAT IT HAS BEEN SUGGESTED THAT I SHOULD BE MORE OF A PEOPLE PERSON.

'I mean, why ? I thought we were getting on really well.

It's very hard to make friends in my job. In your job too, I suppose.'

BREAK IT TO THEM GENTLY, AS IT WERE.

'One minute walking along, the next minute dead. Why?'

THINK OF IT MORE AS BEING . . . DIMENSIONALLY DIS-ADVANTAGED.

The shade of Beano the clown turned to Death.

'What are you talking about?'

YOU'RE DEAD.

'Yes. I know.' Beano relaxed, and stopped wondering too much about events in an increasingly irrelevant world. Death found that people often did, after the initial confusion. After all, the worst had already happened. At least . . . with any luck.

IF YOU WOULD CARE TO FOLLOW ME . . .

'Will there be custard pies? Red noses? Juggling? Are there likely to be baggy trousers?'

NO.

Beano had spent almost all his short life as a clown. He smiled grimly, under his make-up.

'I like it.'

Vimes' meeting with the Patrician ended as all such meetings did, with the guest going away in possession of an unfocused yet nagging suspicion that he'd only just escaped with his life.

Vimes trudged on to see his bride-to-be. He knew where she would be found.

The sign scrawled across the big double gates in Morphic Street said: Here be Dragns.

The brass plaque beside the gates said: The Ankh-Morpork Sunshine Sanctuary for Sick Dragons.

There was a small and hollow and pathetic dragon made out of papier-mache and holding a collection box, chained very heavily to the wall, and bearing the sign: Don't Let My Flame Go Out.

This was where Lady Sybil Ramkin spent most of her days.

She was, Vimes had been told, the richest woman in Ankh-Morpork. In fact she was richer than all the other women in Ankh-Morpork rolled, if that were possible, into one.

It was going to be a strange wedding, people said. Vimes treated his social superiors with barely concealed distaste, because the women made his head ache and the men made his fists itch. And Sybil Ramkin was the last survivor of one of the oldest families in Ankh. But they'd been thrown together like twigs in a whirlpool, and had yielded to the inevitable . . .

When he was a little boy, Sam Vimes had thought that the very rich ate off gold plates and lived in marble houses.

He'd learned something new: the very very rich could afford to be poor. Sybil Ramkin lived in the kind of poverty that was only available to the very rich, a poverty approached from the other side. Women who were merely well-off saved up and bought dresses made of silk edged with lace and pearls, but Lady Ramkin was so rich she could afford to stomp around the place in rubber boots and a tweed skirt that had belonged to her mother. She was so rich she could afford to live on biscuits and cheese sandwiches. She was so rich she lived in three rooms in a thirty-four-roomed mansion; the rest of them were full of very expensive and very old furniture, covered in dust sheets.

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socio-economic unfairness.

The point was that Sybil Ramkin hardly ever had to buy anything. The mansion was full of this big, solid furniture, bought by her ancestors. It never wore out. She had whole boxes full of jewellery which just seemed to have accumulated over the centuries. Vimes had seen a wine cellar that a regiment of speleologists could get so happily drunk in that they wouldn't mind that they'd got lost without trace.

Lady Sybil Ramkin lived quite comfortably from day to day by spending, Vimes estimated, about half as much as he did. But she spent a lot more on dragons.

The Sunshine Sanctuary for Sick Dragons was built with very, very thick walls and a very, very lightweight roof, an idiosyncrasy of architecture normally only found elsewhere in firework factories.

And this is because the natural condition of the common swamp dragon is to be chronically ill, and the natural state of an unhealthy dragon is to be laminated across the walls, floor and ceiling of whatever room it is in. A swamp dragon is a badly run, dangerously unstable chemical factory one step from disaster. One quite small step.