Chapter Three

In which things are afoot, or possibly atentacle, and Louisa Assists The Watch With Its Inquiries.

Almost half a city away from the mild excitement at the Yard, a coach bedecked in suspiciously purple finery rattled over the cobblestones of King's Down. The heavy velvet curtains were closed firmly against any outside eyes.

Within, Madam reclined back on the padded seat, stroking a long, stringy ginger tom idly with one pale finger.

She was distinctly unsatisfied with the events of the evening. It was just as well the actual diplomacy was unofficially officially scheduled for another day, because she sure as hell had other things on her mind for the night.

Havelock, dear boy that he was, would undoubtedly have set a few of his 'agents' on his old auntie. She hadn't bothered to check the coach for innocent recording devices of specialized nature, because it would have been a waste of time. Everything he wanted to know in his city ended up reaching his ears, one way or another. In any case, there was no need to say anything out loud. Madam had half a century's experience of keeping her thoughts to herself, and she didn't intend to stop now.

Most of the mysteries of the evening, she decided, centered around Vimes - if that was even his real name(a). She knew, at a level bone deep, that he was the man she'd first seen thirty years ago. The voice, the face, and the way he responded, all were perfectly matched, down to every particular mannerism she had found peculiar to Keel. He might even, it occurred to her, have been wearing the dress armor mentioned by Rosie Palm, or at least a costume made from the same model. Her cursory description certainly fit it well enough.

Of course, there were still a few minor flaws in the theory that Vimes was Keel. Like, say, the fact that Keel had been murdered and buried and mourned and almost forgotten by the time that Vimes would have been turning twenty, according to her calculations. On the other hand, this was Ankh-Morpork, where tentacled things from other dimensions broke in every other week. Mr. Hong was case in point. If there was magic afoot, it could explain - well, most things possible and impossible, really.

It could not, however, explain Havelock's curious reaction. He had all but told her that Vimes was indeed Keel, or at the very least in some way hiding a secret concerning his identity, and that he himself was in on the game.

And Havelock never did anything without a reason.

She sighed and put her head in her hands, leaving Fluffy to fend for himself a little in the vital area of tummy rubs. The trouble with trying to understand her nephew, Madam thought bitterly, was that he had learned the lessons she had given him all those years ago too bloody well. She had only intended for him to be competent. It seemed to her rather unfair that he had taken her teachings to heart and then betrayed her by using them properly.

At this point, her revery was interrupted by a genteel sort of cry.

"Bobbi!"

Recognizing Louisa's voice, she drew back one of the curtains and instructed the coachman to halt. Light footsteps approached quickly, and then the girl's pretty oval face appeared in the window. There was a delicate suggestion of earlier distress in the hint of redness around the eyes.

"Louisa, dear, I thought you took Jamie's coach back to the embassy," Madam said, who was genuinely surprised, although she completely failed to show it.

"We were," asserted Louisa. "But he was riding on the roof, you know how boys will be, and then..." She took a deep, shuddery breath.

"And then?"

"And then there was this horrible scream, like a banshee, gave me a fright like you wouldn't believe. I'm positive it was Jamie. So I opened the door to see what was going on, and then the horses went absolutely mad, and I fell out of the coach, and it was gone like a shot.

"Well, as you can imagine, I was rather frightened and upset by all this, but I composed myself and soon found that I had, ah, landed in Dimwell. I knew the way, so I set off, and have seen neither hide nor tail of the runaway coach."

Madam listened intently to the curious sequence, and then invited Louisa to ride with her, which the young woman accepted gladly, no doubt eager to escape the smog of a typical Morporkian night.

When they arrived at the Pseudopolis embassy, Louisa dashed out before Madam had time to exhale and hurried into the low stone building. Madam, however, climbed out at a leisurely pace and strolled inside without, and this is important, in any sense following the young ambassador.

Inside, a bewildered James was being harangued by his older cousin. "Louisa? Lou? Are you alright? What's going on?"

Madam smiled wryly and did her best to detach the clearly hysterical young woman from the much beleaguered boy. It was not until Louisa had been pulled off him and, because she was still in a state of great agitation, steered gently but firmly off to bed, that she began asking some questions, which she considered as showing remarkable restraint under the circumstances.

"She'll be all right, love," she said soothingly, patting Jamie, who looked doubtful. "Now, why don't you tell your Auntie Bobbi what happened?"

"I don't know! Everything was normal and then when we arrived Lou wasn't in the coach. We were just about to go back and look for her when you came in."

"I see," said Madam, thoughtfully. "Odd."

He gave a start. "Why? What did you think happened?"

"Oh, I don't know." She stared at him for a moment, until he shifted uncomfortably. His magenta suit was mudstained, and there were leaves in his hair.

"So nothing out of the ordinary happened?"

"No, ma'am."

If he was lying, he was doing so well, which always earned points with Madam, who was the sort of person who would applaud their own murder if it was done with style.

"Am I in trouble?"

"No. Run along to bed. I have to take care of a few things, that's all..."

He disappeared.

"More curious and more curious," she said, to no one in particular, and was aware of two sensations: the faint uneasiness that always accompanies a mistranslated incident of morphic resonance, and the more traditional feeling of overwhelming embarrassment at hearing those words coming out of her mouth.

(a) The fact that Havelock had told her it was meant absolutely nothing. In a situation like this, Havelock's word was about as trustworthy as a chocolate hammer.

---

Elsewhere, in the Patrician's Palace...

"...Octeday..." murmured a quiet, precise voice. There was a thump. "...snow's all been melted from today's heat wave..."

It was dark in the dim hall, but that didn't bother the dark figure hopping from one stone to the other.

After all, he had so many better things to be bothered about.

"...two, four, six, eight," he finished, and rapped twice on the door.

Leonard of Quirm opened the door and greeted him with a happy smile.

"Oh, hello, my lord. Do come in."

The light of the hundreds of lamps scattered around the attic illuminated Lord Vetinari's austere visage.

The inventor beckoned for him to come in, and he did so, with some trepidation. His eyes kept being drawn to the large glass sphere full of some viscous emerald fluid Leonard was tossing lightly from hand to hand.

"What is the problem, my lord?"

Vetinari did not answer immediately, opting instead to take the opportunity to sit down in an armchair wedged between two easels and cleverly disguised from one side by a mountain of notebooks. Once he was comfortably perched, he said quietly, still staring at the sphere,

"Is that it? The potion I asked you to make? You are sure?"

"Why, yes," said Leonard, looking somewhat derailed. "Er, my lord, what did you need this for again?"

"What? Ah... personal experimentation, Leonard. It does not concern you. Do you have the ingredients list?" He delicately lifted the orb from the table in one thin hand, bringing it up to eye level. The slightly unnatural movement of the liquid seemed to fascinate him.

"Here it is. Will you stay for tea, my lord?"

"I must fly, unfortunately. Perhaps another day."

Then he was gone.

Leonard watched the closed door for a while. He was not the sort of person who was easily unnerved, but there was something faintly wrong about the whole business.

Then he shrugged, and went back to designing his Device For Burning Bread, Or Possibly Bagels.

---

Vimes was having a nightmare.

It involved flowered curtains and Nobby Nobbs, and when he finally managed to wake up it was with a scream.

"Wstfrgl?" murmured Sybil, next to him.

He opened his eyes wide and stared fixedly at the canopy for a moment in the hope that its vivid blue shade would purge his mind of the dream-images. He was breathing hard.

"What's wrong?" asked Sybil, awake now.

"Nightmare," muttered Vimes. "Don't ask."

"Right then," said Sybil amiably, and went back to sleep. Vimes looked at her for a while in silence, before getting up, pulling on a dressing gown, and padding out of the room, careful all throughout not to make any noise. Yesterday had been a long day for both of them. No need to make his wife lose sleep over his own Nobbs-induced insomnia.

It was early in the morning, just after dawn, and grey light filtered in through the windows,weak stuff that had already been swallowed and recycled twice by the thick gumbo(a) of a fog outside. Bloody odd weather, thought Vimes to himself. A day hotter than all those of summer combined coming in the middle of the famously icy Ankh-Morpork winter, right after a perfectly normal stretch of below zero weather, and followed, now, by a rolling white fog that to the connoisseur was obviously a thick spring mist, not a light winter smog.

The weather had gone mad, he concluded, and promptly forgot about it.

Feeling restless, he wandered into Young Sam's room and drew up a chair to the crib where his son rested.

It was there his wife found him, several hours later, snoring quietly. She shook him by the shoulder.

"Huh?"

"Message from the Yard, Sam."

He looked suddenly alert. "What is it?"

"Carrot says there's been some funny business with those charming ladies we met last night, you remember, Sam," she said, with what Vimes considered to be a rather pointed look, "the one you recognized from your old sergeant's funeral and her friend, that nice Madam Louisa?"

He was out the door almost before she finished her sentence. Sybil sighed, and murmured to herself, "Well, he'll find out about the rest of it once he gets there..."

(a) The more traditional phrase is "thick as pea-soup," but the poetic license laws made by Olaf Quimby II resulted in a revision of the saying when in reference to Ankh-Morpork's fog, which is notably rather thicker and fishier than any form of pea soup, even one that was eighty six days old.(b)

(b) A reference to another example of Ankh-Morpork Special Editing of a traditional nursery rhyme, when a comprehensive survey revealed that no one in the entire city had ever even tried a single taste of nine day old pea soup. In fact, no one ate pea soup after it had aged even one day, because Ankh-Morpork citizens do have some common senses as a collective entity, despite evidence to the contrary. At first this discovery caused much wailing and tearing of hair among those individuals who cared about nursery rhymes in the first place, since Quimby's legislation meant that it was absolutely impossible to read that charming little song to one's children without have deficiencies in the general region of the head, such as the fact that if one nodded it fell off. Then, however, it was discovered that one very old woman made a habit of eating pea soup precisely, to the minute, eighty six days after she had first cooked it, and the rhyme, after being suitably re-edited, regained its status as respectable children's entertainment, and all five people who had heard of the issue rejoiced.

---

Carrot took out a notebook, carefully licked the nub of his pencil, and said cheerfully,

"Well, ma'am, whenever you're ready."

"Call me Louisa," she murmured, batting her eyelashes at him. Carrot paused and gave her a concerned look.

"Do you have something in your eye? Irritation can be very dangerous -"

"No, no," she assured him, wondering inwardly why she always got stuck with the dumb ones. "I'm fine."

"I see. Carry on, then."

The narrative went on for some while. At one point she was forced to do a little pantomime to get the point across in a suitably dramatic fashion.

When she had finished, and the sound of Captain's laborious writing had died away, Carrot chewed on his thumb for a while, re-reading what he had entered in the rough pages.

"Very good. Thank you. We will be investigating this as soon as possible."

He exited.

Louisa watched him go, and when the door had closed behind him she let out a most unladylike snort. Man wouldn't recognize innuendo if it was dropped on his head from great height, she decided. Pity, she could have done with a distraction, something to redirect Madam's inquisitiveness with.

Another Watchman came in, a young woman this time. She had short, dark hair and a disturbingly pale face, the color of which made Louisa think of dead men's flesh, and, when she smiled, without showing her teeth, something - some things - white and sharp glimmered. Louisa made an educated guess.

"Constable Sally von Humpeding, I presume?"

The vampire's face went carefully blank. "Correct. Do I know you?"

"Only by reputation, if at all," said Louisa, with an easy smile. "You're quite well-known among political circles. Your appointment caused a very large stir."

"Really," said Sally, in tones that could have preserved meat for a year. Preferably meat that had once been the living tissue of Madam Louisa of Pseudopolis, if at all possible.

"Oh, yes. I understand Commander Vimes was most unhappy about it."

"He was not exactly overcome with joy. What's it to you?"

"Oh, I just think it's so fascinating to see women, live and undead, making their way in the world!" She gave a fairly convincing giggle. "My friends and I thought it was just wonderful, you and Sergeant Angua doing so well."

"I'm honored." There was a certain finality to the way the vampire said it. "In any case, the reason I am here is to go with you to the embassy."

"I don't understand. Why are you coming with me?" said Louisa, who understood perfectly.

"In order," said Sally, "to ask a few questions. One way or another."

She grinned, then. Toothily.