Night Watch

He turned. There were a dozen bedraggled ravens behind him, looking like old men in ill-fitting black cloaks. They were Tower of Art birds. Hundreds of generations of living in a highly charged magical environment had raised the intelligence level of what had been bright creatures to begin with. But, although the ravens were intelligent, these ones weren't hugely clever. They just had a more persistent kind of stupidity, as befitted birds for whom the exciting panorama of the city below was a kind of daytime TV.

“Push off!” shouted Buggy, and turned back to the telescope. There was Carcer, running, and Vimes running after him, and here came the hail…

It turned the world white. It thudded around him and made his helmet ring. Hailstones as big as his head bounced on the stone and hit Buggy from underneath. Cursing, and shielding his face with his arms, and hammered all the time by shattering crystal balls, each one predicting a future of pain, he skidded and slid across the rolling ice. He reached an ivy-hung arch between two lesser turrets, where the heron had already taken refuge, and fell inside. Frozen shrapnel still ricocheted in and stung him, but at least he could see and breathe.

A beak prodded him sharply in the back.

“Wot's happ'nin' now, mifter?”

Carcer landed heavily on the arch between the student hall and the main buildings, almost lost his footing on the tiles, and hesitated. An arrow from a watchman below grazed his leg.

Vimes dropped down behind him, just as the hail hit.

Cursing and slipping, one man followed the other across the arch. Carcer reached a mass of ivy that led up on to the roof of the Library and scrambled up it, scattering ice below.

Vimes grabbed the ivy just as Carcer disappeared on to the flat roof. He looked round at a crash behind him, and saw Carrot trying to make his way along the wall from the High Energy Magic building. The hail was forming a halo of ice fragments around him.

“Stay there!” Vimes bellowed.

Carrot's reply was lost in the noise.

Vimes waved his arms and then grabbed at the ivy as a foot slipped. “Bloody stay there!” he yelled. “That is an order! You'll go over!”

He turned and started up the wet, cold vines.

The wind dropped, and the last few hailstones bounced off the roof.

Vimes stopped a few feet from the top of the ivy, worked his feet firmly into footholds in the ancient, knotted stems, and reached up for a decent hold.

Then he thrust himself up, left hand ready, caught the boot that swung towards him and carried on rising, pushing Carcer off balance. The man sprawled backwards on the slippery hail, tried to get to his feet, and slipped again. Vimes tugged himself on to the roof, stepped forward, and found his legs skidding away beneath him. Both he and Carcer got up, tried to move, and fell over again.

From a prone position the man landed a kick on Vimes's shoulder, sending both of them sliding away in opposite directions, and then turned over and scuttled on all fours around the Library's big glass and metal dome. He grabbed the rusty frame, hauled himself upright, and pulled out a knife.

“Come and get me, then,” he said. There was another roll of thunder.

“I don't have to,” said Vimes. “I just have to wait.” At least until I get my breath back, he thought.

“Why're you picking on me? What'm I supposed to have done?”

“Couple of murders ring a bell?” said Vimes.

If injured innocence was money, Carcer's face was his fortune. “I don't know anything about—”

“I'm not up here to play games, Carcer. Knock it off.”

“You going to take me alive, your grace?”

“You know, I don't want to. But people think it's neater all round if I do.”

There was a clattering of tiles away on the left, and a thud as a huge siege bow was rested on the ridge of a nearby roof. The head of Detritus rose behind it.

“Sorry about dat, Mister Vimes, hard to climb up in dat hail. Jus' stand back.”

“You're going to let it shoot me?” said Carcer. He tossed the knife away. “An unarmed man?”

“Trying to escape,” said Vimes. But this was starting to go bad. He could feel it.

“Me? I'm just standing here, haha.”

And there it was. That bloody laugh, on top of that damn grin. It was never far away. “Haha” didn't come close to doing it the injustice it deserved. It was more a sort of modulation to the voice, an irritatingly patronizing chortle that suggested that all this was somehow funny and you hadn't got the joke.

Trouble was, you couldn't shoot someone for having an annoying laugh. And he was just standing there. If he ran, you could shoot him. Admittedly, it would be Detritus doing the shooting, and while with that bow it was technically possible to shoot to wound, the people you were wounding would probably be in the building next door.

But Carcer was just waiting there, insulting the world by his existence.