Drumknott's body had become untrustworthy. Like the Ankh, anything might be going on under the surface.

After some hours' drugged sleep and some minutes' pleading with Igor, he'd finally been allowed up to see His Lordship. But the fifteen-foot walk from his bed to the cell next door dredged up a stinking, scummy headache, some rotted bits of wood that used to be his knees and ankles, and sharp-toothed pains that bit unexpectedly and hard. All that from a tap on the head and a knife wound that Igor assured him wasn't half as big as it felt. Surely his legs shouldn't be affected? Of course it was all connected inside. Perhaps injuries flowed downstream, just like the dregs from alchemists and dyers that made the Ankh tend to glow (and occasionally burn) even at the delta where it emptied into a presumably reluctant sea.

Leaning on Igor, Drumknott waited while the troll Watchman took four tries to find the right key.

"Dere he is," the Watchman announced.

His Lordship lay utterly still and white, wrapped in a cheap undyed blanket. Shrouded in it.

"Thteady," said Igor, catching Drumknott round the waist as his knees sagged. "I knew you thouldn't -"

"He's dead."

"He's not," Igor insisted, lisp vanishing. "He's breathing."

"He looks -"

"Come and see."

He's alive, Drumknott told his knees, and they took sufficient encouragement from it to cooperate as Igor half-carried him into the cell. He must be alive, or they'd have taken him away. Igor pulled back the edge of the blanket and guided Drumknott's fingers to Lord Vetinari's neck. Warm. Alive, with the quick surge and ebb of pulse.

Some of the cold, slimy mud packing Drumknott's chest oozed out through the soles of his feet.

Some remained. "Why doesn't he wake up?" Drumknott noticed he'd been counting His Lordship's pulse beats, and took his hand away.

Igor shrugged, bringing one shoulder momentarily level with the top of his head. "I don't know. But he'th not dying." With his free hand he pinched His Lordship's earlobe, producing a faint groan.

"Don't hurt him!"

"That'th how I know he'th not tho far gone that he'll never regain conthiouthnethth. Pain'th a thign of life."

It was the sort of thing priests said, usually while warming up the pokers, but Drumknott wasn't inclined to distrust it from Igor. He had a practical-seeming mind and no reason to lie. "Let me sit with him." If he could feel pain, he might hear if Drumknott spoke to him. He might be glad not to be alone.

"Sorry," said the troll, still standing in the doorway. Drumknott had heard more elaborate apologies, but seldom one so patently insincere. "No letting dem cook up dere stories together, Mr. Vimes said."

Of course he did. Of course he didn't trust Lord Vetinari. His Lordship had only raised Vimes out of the bottle and the gutter and asked for his help to guard the city, only had faith in something worthy that nobody else could see in the man back then. Only given him a dukedom and a statue of his vicious ancestor, the one who'd thought if you beheaded enough aristocrats and passed enough laws against gambling and dancing, you'd rid the world of injustice. (The statue was right up against the palace, too, so that when you looked out of the window in the Oblong Office the first thing you saw was that damned great sword.) Of course Vimes would return such astonishing faith with an assumption of guilt. That was human nature. If His Lordship were awake to hear it, he wouldn't even be surprised.

"Mr. Vimes can take his ungrateful suspicions and -"

"Thir, you need to retht." Igor took a step towards the door, and Drumknott's knees, with which he was thoroughly disgusted by now, refused to lock against the movement. There was no way not to follow. "I'm looking in on him every few minuteth, I promithe."

Back in his cell, Drumknott asked Igor to move the pillow to the other side of the bed. Vaguely, through the fuddled rebellion that had spread from his knees up to his brain, he suspected he was being foolish and ought to be ashamed. Lying with his head a few feet closer to Lord Vetinari's cell wouldn't help anything except his own irrelevant misery.

Once he was alone, waiting for the latest dose of poppy syrup to take hold, Drumknott brought his mouth close to the wall and whispered, "I know you didn't hurt me, sir."

The words, too quiet to echo, dissipated into nothing as unheard words always did. They made no difference at all.

***

A day and a half in the Watch House so far, and it felt like a holiday. Drumknott had only ever been on one holiday, a cheap tour of Ephebe that he'd paid a month's wages for as a junior clerk, and apart from the cost there was a striking resemblance. The bed was hard, the food had gristly lumps, he felt sick much of the time, and people shouted a lot, usually in the middle of the night. On the other hand, in Ephebe there'd been Sights of Historical Interest, which was Ephebian for lumps of masonry from former temples and palaces that some legendary king had legendarily built, or in same cases legendarily knocked down and set fire to. Here there were just walls, a monotony broken only when Mr. de Worde had come to ask him insinuating questions.

Igor appeared occasionally to say His Lordship still hadn't woken, but seemed closer to it. Drumknott wondered if Lord Vetinari was crawling to consciousness like the ant in the story, crossing half the distance, then half the remaining distance, on and on, always halfway there but never arriving. It was His Lordship who'd told him that story, and smiled wryly and made a joke about paperwork.

Drumknott dozed the hours away in poppy-induced lethargy, did the uncomfortable stretching exercises Igor had taught him, and worried. It was a special kind of worry, the diffuse foggy kind that came from not thinking the unthinkable, and like fog it got everywhere. He worried in his sleep and woke with a sore jaw from grinding his teeth.

In the grey evening of the second day, the creak of rusting hinges woke Drumknott from yet another foggy grey dream. He opened his eyes to see the face of Corporal Nobbs, which was grey only in patches, and was about to close them self-protectively when Nobbs said, "Lord Vetinari's awake, Mr. Drumknott, and he wants to see you."

The fog dissolved and hope glared through, as painful at first as the bad news some part of Drumknott's mind had quietly started to expect. He sat up abruptly, wrenching his wound and making his head throb in cadence with his speeding heart. At least the walk to the cell was easier this time, the prospect of Nobbs's supporting arm giving Drumknott's knees an incentive to get him there without help.

Lord Vetinari, sitting very upright on the edge of the bed, was being harangued by Commander Vimes. "- an epidemic of bad memories at the palace? You don't remember anything, Drumknott doesn't -"

"Drumknott, how glad I am to see you well. Apparently I'm suspected of trying to murder you."

In two days--less than two--he'd forgotten the sound of His Lordship's voice. He blinked hard and clasped his shaking hands together. "Not by me, my lord."

Lord Vetinari looked at him as though he were a half-deciphered message, obscure and possibly rather important. "Good." A nascent smile formed on his lips before he turned to Vimes and let it grow up and become ironic. "If only the Watch shared your faith."

"I don't need faith, sir," Vimes said irritably. "I've got evidence. And all the evidence says you didn't do it. Trouble is, we don't know who did, and without that there'll have to be a trial."

"A trial before the new Patrician, yes," His Lordship's voice was calm, his fingers contemplatively steepled. He wore the manner like a poor man's best coat, trying to disguise too much. His robe was wrinkled, his hair askew, his eyes sunk in bruised-looking skin, his face white and waxen as a death mask. "And then, I imagine, a quiet and extremely brief retirement."

Vimes nodded, then sighed. Without the momentary pleasure of scolding His Lordship to buoy him up, he looked rather tired. "I'll let you know if we find . . . anything, sir. You two can talk a while if you'd like. Corporal Nobbs will take you back to your cell afterwards, Mr. Drumknott."

Drumknott, mind snagged on the barbed realisation that Vimes wasn't going to release His Lordship, didn't even manage a thank you.

"Cell?" asked His Lordship when Vimes had gone. As if that were the important thing.

"For my own protection, sir."

"And a solid protection it is, no doubt. Come and sit down, Drumknott, you look ghastly."

Drumknott had been trying to convince himself and the laws of nature that he could lean all his weight on a vertical wall. He made his way cautiously to the bed and tried to think nothing of sitting beside His Lordship like an equal or a friend. There was nowhere else to sit. It was no different from riding in the coach with him. And His Lordship had told him to do it. "Are you really all right, my lord? I thought -"

"I'm sure Commander Vimes would say I was born to hang, and therefore need fear no other death." As he spoke, he draped a blanket over Drumknott's shoulders, managing not to jar the bad one. He was always a careful man, attentive however trivial the problem. "Corporal, a pot of tea, please. Don't forget the sugar. And biscuits."

"Er -" Nobbs looked at Lord Vetinari and somehow shuffled his feet without moving an inch. "Prisoners get tea at mealtimes."

Lord Vetinari said nothing.

"Right, tea. I'll go and get that, sir. Your Lordship." He scurried away, leaving the cell door open.

"Are we going to escape?" Drumknott wondered what use he could be. Perhaps he could distract the Watch by fainting.

"No, we're going to have tea."

"Sweet tea." His Lordship had asked for sugar. He never took sugar. "My mum's - my mother's cure for everything." Gods, he was so addled he was forgetting how to speak like a gentleman. What must His Lordship think?

"Mothers are often very sensible people, I believe," said His Lordship, as though he hadn't noticed a thing. That was a true gentleman.

"I'm sorry, sir."

"Whatever for?"

Bits of words assembled in Drumknott's mind like a half-solved crossword, but there were no clues and he couldn't guess what they ought to be. "This."

"Mr. Drumknott, are you apologising for being stabbed?" Lord Vetinari looked closely at him and frowned. "That's a sort of arrogance, you know. I insist on keeping the responsibility myself."

"Sorry."

"Do be quiet."

Gratefully, Drumknott was quiet. Doing something for His Lordship--and such a simple thing, tempered to his very limited capabilities at the moment--set the world partway to rights. He propped his muddled head on his hands, closed his eyes, and didn't open them again until the sound of footsteps and the smell of Nobbs approached.

Nobbs left the tray on a stone table like the one in Drumknott's cell. It was out of his reach, but when he started to lean forward His Lordship cleared his throat in a distinctly quelling manner. So he sat and let himself be served tea by his master. There was a topsy-turvy pleasure in seeing Lord Vetinari's elegant hands holding the same kind of cheap teapot that Drumknott's family had used.

Four spoonfuls of sugar went into a mug with Welcomm! to Ankh-Morpork written on the side, which Lord Vetinari handed to him. "Thank you, sir." Drumknott had stopped taking sugar in his tea when he'd read that cultured people didn't, but he'd never lost the taste for sweets. Anyway, it was like medicine, as everyone's mother (and His Lordship) knew.

"You seem better already." A smile briefly brightened his drawn face. "But do drink it. I know I'll feel better when you stop shivering."

He hadn't noticed he was shivering, but the warmth of the tea--nastily bitter even through the sugar, the Watch must have lead-lined stomachs--was nearly the best thing he'd felt in two days. Lord Vetinari nodded, brushed at the smudges on a biscuit, and gave him that as well. "It should be edible enough. I don't believe any of Corporal Nobbs's . . . personal misfortunes are contagious." He poured tea for himself--the other mug said Seamstresses Do It To Order--sipped at it, and winced.

"Sir," Drumknott asked after he'd drunk a mug and a half of the revolting tea and eaten two biscuits, "Do you know what actually happened?" Drumknott had long since understood that some of His Lordship's perfect foresight was really improvisation. But at the worst moments, His Lordship always did know. He'd been locked up before, over that business with Leshp, but only to wait for the solution he knew was coming.

"Let us say that I have a theory. It's a rather outlandish theory that I cannot yet prove." He sighed and ran a hand through his hair, a gesture Drumknott had never seen before. "Wuffles is missing, did they tell you that?"

"No, sir. I'm sure he'll -" No, Drumknott wasn't at all sure he'd be all right, a pampered old dog unprotected on Ankh-Morpork streets. And His Lordship wouldn't take comfort from a polite lie. "I'm sorry."

"The Watch are looking for him, of course. They've even put his picture in the Times."

The tea, or maybe the proximity of His Lordship's analytical mind, had got Drumknott's almost functioning. It took him a few seconds, but he sorted this information out. "He's the proof. He's a witness. That werewolf, Sergeant von Uberwald - they're going to question Wuffles. But will that be enough?"

"We shall find out. I hope." Lord Vetinari sighed again and glanced at the cell door, which Corporal Nobbs had closed after bringing the tea. "Being in a prison that I don't have the key to is most educational. I've learnt that I don't like it at all."