Men at Arms

“Looks like three dollars,” said Angua.

“Well done. The exact amount.”

“No, the shopkeeper said—”

“Come on. Back to the Watch House. Come on, Here'n'now. It's your lucky day.”

“Why is it his lucky day?” said Angua. “He was caught, wasn't he?”

“Yes. By us. Thieves' Guild didn't get him first. They aren't so kind as us.”

Here'n'now's head bounced from cobblestone to cobblestone.

“Pinching three dollars and then trotting straight home,” sighed Carrot. “That's Here'n'now. Worst thief in the world.”

“But you said Thieves' Guild—”

“When you've been here a while, you'll understand how it all works,” said Carrot. Here'n'now's head banged on the kerb. “Eventually,” Carrot added. “But it all does work. You'd be amazed. It all works. I wish it didn't. But it does.”

While Here'n'now was being mildly concussed on the way to the safety of the Watch's jail, a clown was being killed.

He was ambling along an alley with the assurance of one who is fully paid up this year with the Thieves' Guild when a hooded figure stepped out in front of him.

“Beano?”

“Oh, hello… it's Edward, right?”

The figure hesitated.

“I was just going back to the Guild,” said Beano.

The hooded figure nodded.

“Are you OK?” said Beano.

“I'm sorry about th-is,” it said. “But it is for the good of the city. It is nothing p-ersonal.”

He stepped behind the clown. Beano felt a crunch, and then his own personal internal universe switched off.

Then he sat up.

“Ow,” he said, “that hur—”

But it didn't.

Edward d'Eath was looking down at him with a horrified expression.

“Oh… I didn't mean to hit you that hard! I only wanted you out of the way!”

“Why'd you have to hit me at all?”

And then the feeling stole over Beano that Edward wasn't exactly looking at him, and certainly wasn't talking to him.

He glanced at the ground, and experienced that peculiar sensation known only to the recently dead—horror at what you see lying in front of you, followed by the nagging question: so who's doing the looking?

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 DISADVANTAGED.

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.