On the floor of the Oblong Office, a man was unexpectedly not dying.
Rufus Drumknott, the man in question, wasn't aware of doing anything remarkable. He was aware of a pain in his head and another one high on his chest near the left shoulder, of a viscous red puddle he seemed to be lying in, and of a tiny blue flower woven into the carpet pattern. It was much bluer than anything he'd seen actually growing, apart from bread mould. He'd always lived in Ankh-Morpork, whose primary botanical renown was for its fungus.
Perhaps the flower was so blue because it was surrounded by red.
The last available sliver of Drumknott's awareness was taken up by the voice. It came from someone standing over him, and it also seemed to come from past the rim of the world, out in the empty space between the stars. The voice resounded with certainty--not an arrogant certainty, not anything to do with feelings, but the certainty of fact.
And yet what it was saying was: OH DEAR. I WAS SURE THAT THE HOURGLASSES . . . BUT NOW . . . AND THE DOG'S NOT EVEN HERE. I WISH TIME WOULD DECIDE WHAT UNIVERSE ITS TROUSERS ARE IN.
"Trousers?" Drumknott asked. Trousers weren't often discussed in the Oblong Office. His Lordship was a bit old-fashioned on the subject, although not as much as the wizards, who kept demanding a ban on trouser sales within 300 yards of the university.
NEVER MIND. BIT OF A SCHEDULING MIX-UP.
Nonsense. He didn't make mistakes like that. Well, once, but only because he'd confused the two Ridcullys. " . . . nother . . . appoint . . . ?"
NOT JUST YET. NOT FOR SOME TIME, I SEE.
" . . . book?"
YOU WON'T NEED TO WRITE IT DOWN.
Of course he did. Pencil, yes. He'd had one in his hand. He moved his fingers through wetness. Where . . . ? Get up. Get up and find the pencil. Get up now. What would His Lordship say?
Why wasn't His Lordship saying anything?
Shadows gathered around the red edges of Drumknott's vision, blowing in like clouds until there was only black.
***
Later he awoke to find himself being stitched back together by a man whose face inspired confidence. It did so by proving that a quite large amount of stitchery was survivable.
"You're very lucky," the man--the Igor--said brightly, and then explained what would've happened if he'd been stabbed a little to the right (death from a punctured lung or blood vessel) or left (irreparable damage to his shoulder joint). Unpleasant anatomical knowledge churned against Drumknott's various burning, throbbing, piercing pains like waves against a squall-tossed boat, and he retched. Igor gave him something minty to drink for the nausea.
"But what happened?" Drumknott asked, once he could. He was keeping his eyes closed. When he'd tried looking around the room so as not to look at the needle, he'd seen unnameable things bobbing in tanks.
Igor murmured soothingly and went on stitching.
The last thing Drumknott could remember was Lord Vetinari. His Lordship had opened the office door. But he never did that, just said come in. Had the door been locked? It oughtn't to have been, with His Lordship inside and at work.
He'd gone in, and there'd been a white flash like lightning in his head. He'd been hit.
Had . . . ? No. No, surely not. He wouldn't. Why would he? It must have been someone else.
Someone like an assassin, or even an Assassin. "Is His Lordship all right? Has anything happened to him?"
"Commander Vimeth will be thpeaking with you thoon. I'm sure he'll exthplain everything."
"Has someone hurt Lord Vetinari? You've got to -"
"Lie thtill." Igor pushed him back the half-inch he'd managed to rise off the hard, chilly slab. "You've torn out a thtitch, and -"
"Please."
"Mr. Drumknott," said Commander Vimes from the doorway. "I'm glad you're awake. I've got some -"
"What's happened to His Lordship?"
"I need you to tell me what happened." Vimes stood over him, looking stonier than ever.
"I don't know!" He tried again to sit up, but Igor held him down. "Where is he?"
"He's just down the corridor, relax." Vimes put a heavy hand on his uninjured shoulder, and Igor started in again with the needle on the other one.
"Let me see him."
"You can't just now. He's unconscious."
Drumknott closed his eyes once more and hung onto the slab. It was the only steady thing in the world. Someone put another blanket over him, and Vimes said, "Easy, now. He's probably going to live."
Probably pounded in Drumknott's ears. Prob-ab-ly, three sharp raps, like a hammer on a coffin nail.
"Commander," Igor said, "I think . . . "
"Yeah. Settle him down and I'll try again later."
Footsteps, and a few more sharp stings from the needle, and then Igor held a little vial to his lips. "Drink thith."
He was almost too tired to swallow. "Don't let him die," he said, as his tight-furled pains opened like roses, turning bright and warm. He leaned back into them and slept.
When he woke next, he was lying on a little narrow bed in a little narrow room. At first he thought it was his own room, that he'd overslept and His Lordship would be angry, but by the time he'd located his feet and dragged one out from under the blanket, he remembered. By the time he'd worked the foot under the blanket again, Commander Vimes was there.
"How are you feeling?" Vimes asked.
"Vile." His skull felt like someone had chiselled it open and sandpapered the inside. The culprit had used the same chisel on his shoulder, along with pincers and branding irons, and in fact still seemed to be at it. "How is His Lordship?"
"Still unconscious, but Igor believes he'll recover." Vimes perched on a bit of stone that jutted out from the wall to form a rough table. "It'll take more than a fall off a horse to kill him. A stake through the heart might do the trick, but I wouldn't bet a dollar on it."
What a charming sense of humour. "A horse? But he was in . . . "
"Yes? I need to know what you remember."
"I want to see him."
"Answer my questions first." Slouching, armour off, Vimes was still a human portcullis. There was no getting round him; the only route to His Lordship was compliance. No wonder people didn't like the Watch.
"He was in the office," Drumknott said. (Why had His Lordship got up and opened the door? He'd looked odd, too. Almost nervous.) "I went in at about seven o'clock. I had His Lordship's tea and the morning newspaper. Someone hit me, I suppose. Later I think I came to for a little while, because I remember seeing blood. And something . . . blue? Sorry, it's like trying to remember a dream. I didn't know I'd been stabbed until Igor told me." He almost laughed, saying it, because the words I and stabbed didn't belong together in any reasonable sentence. As an apprentice Drumknott had studied rhetoric manuals, the sort that teach you three hundred ways to say thank you for the book, all carefully modulated by rank and circumstance. Elegance for every occasion, they promised, but stabbing-related occasions had been curiously neglected. "I was stabbed," he repeated, and it sounded even stranger.
"Who by?"
By whom, Drumknott thought, clinging to the floating spar of grammar in a sea of doubt. Vimes was an educated man by Watch standards--his reports had most of the commas in the right places--and surely they'd beaten whom into him at dame school. He just enjoyed playing the common man, showing his independence. It was like punching the wall outside the Oblong Office, or joking about His Lordship dying. "I don't know," Drumknott said.
"Was anyone in the office apart from Vetinari?"
"I'm not sure." It was true. It was rhetorically true, just as saying "I am most grateful for your generous and edifying gift of a book" was true thanks even when it really meant "I dislike you intensely but I'm hoping to borrow some money." Drumknott wasn't sure, although he'd seen no one in the visitors' chairs, no one at the conference table. No one but Lord Vetinari, opening the door. Had His Lordship been holding his walking stick? Could he have . . . no. No. The impossibility of the image made Drumknott dizzy. There must have been someone else in the office, at the far end or behind the door; Drumknott had not, after all, looked. "There might have been. As I told you, it's all rather blurry."
Vimes asked the same question a few times in different words--a use of rhetoric Drumknott had never envisioned--and finally explained that His Lordship had been found unconscious in the stables with an agitated horse and a saddlebag crammed with dollars.
"That's absurd," Drumknott said.
Vimes looked at him silently, but questions bristled and clawed under the surface like cats in a sack. "I've arrested Vetinari for attempted murder and theft. The evidence against him is . . . well, there's a lot of it."
"Arrested? Where is he? You said he's unconscious, you can't -"
"He's in the next cell. Igor's looking after him."
"And what does your Igor know about proper medicine? Has he studied the astrological influences and the balance of the humours? Or does he just play with his needle?"
"He knows not to give purgatives to a man with a head injury, which is more than I can say for doctors!"
"If His Lordship . . . " Drumknott couldn't get the next word out. Not many things are really unspeakable, but this was. If something unspeakable happened to His Lordship . . . oh gods. The best man to rule Ankh-Morpork in a thousand years, he couldn't . . . not alone in a cell like a criminal. It wasn't right. And Commander Vimes was a good man. His Lordship said so. Couldn't he see that it wasn't right? "Please, Your Grace."
"I think I'd better have Igor bring you some more poppy syrup."
"I demand to see him! I'm not under arrest, am I?" For the first time, he noticed exactly what Vimes had said: the next cell. He looked carefully but still painfully around the room. It was a very bare room, and dark, with just the one small window set high in the stone wall. Drumknott couldn't see it properly lying down, but he felt sure there were bars on it. The door looked like solid oak and was reinforced with strips of iron. All in all, it could have been the "c is for cell" illustration in some unusually grim alphabet book.
"No, you're not," Vimes said slowly, "but I'm keeping you at the Watch House for your own safety. And you're not getting out of that bed yet because you look like you might die if you tried, and then I'd have to answer to Vetinari for it." A smile appeared on his face, lingered uncomfortably for a moment, and went away. "You needn't worry about us neglecting him. Igor's good at his job. And don't go spreading this around, but I want Vetinari to live."