Another slight tidying and rewrite.
Downey clapped his hands for quiet.
He opened the envelope.
"I'm reliably informed that in accordance with custom, the choice was made by one of the Guild's ancilliary staff. I believe this year, it was Topsy, in the laundry."
He looked at the paper in his hand.
"I am now pleased to be able to inform you that those who have drawn White…. get Over."
There were sighs of relief, together with anticipatory sighs and groans from old hands who had drawn a black.
"By default therefore, members of staff drawing Black will invigilate on Under routes."
Alice groaned. She was going to get her clothes dirty, a long way away from the fresh rooftop air, and then she'd need to be marinaded in a hot bath for a fortnight. Ah well, this was her punishment for dropping Jocasta Wiggs in the cess pit at Sam Vimes'… her heart plummeted.
Jocasta will be doing the run tonight. She comes back as a licenced Assassin, or not at all.
Alice tried to shake away the unthinkable. I've been training her for this night for the last seven years. Either she's good enough or she isn't.
Downey spoke again, quelling the murmured hubbub. .
"You will observe a number engraved on your stone. I will call them out in number order. Please come forward when you hear your number called and you will be given a sealed packet of instructions together with any last-minute additional verbal directions. Please sign for it with Mr Wimvoe." He paused, and called
"White – one!"
Mr Bradlifrudd, of Tree Frog House, went forward. Alice acclimatized herself for a long wait. She and Johanna Smith-Rhodes shared a long commiserating sigh.
So we're in the shit, Alice! Johanna mouthed, combining the mime with finger-code.
Alice laughed and signed back
Poetic justice. That's exactly where they end up when I send them on the Vimes run!
Johanna read her lips, and giggled. With her thick, demurely plaited red-gold hair, and heavily freckled pale skin, she looked hardly any older than many of the girls who would be taking Finals tonight. (damn and blast her, thought Alice), but was in fact twenty-nine. And anyone thinking this girlish red-haired beauty was no threat might discover that to be their penultimate thought, apart from a brief and fading sensation of "Ow, that really hurt!"
Johanna had been brought up in what she nostalgically referred to as "God's Own Country", Ankh-Morpork's former colony of Rimwards Howondaland. Severed from the Mother County by the ebbing of Empire, the settlers who had flocked to Howondaland had needed to learn to fight to hold their own. This had bred a battling warrior people, whose accent with time had diverged away from the Morporkian spoken in the central sea region. Many of the settlers, in fact, had been from Sto Kerrig and still spoke a version of the original Kerrigian tongue, which they called Wondalaans. In this tongue, Johanna and her people were the Boortrekkies, or Boors for short.
They had pushed the limits of the white state up to the Ulungi and Blood rivers, then encountered the Kwa'Zulu confederation of black tribes. The Boors now had a New Best Enemy, and had spent over two hundred years in skirmish and cross-river raiding on a disputed border.
Life on that frontier, the Transvaal and Natal provinces of the Free State of Oranges, had meant everyone needed to know how to fight. By the age of twelve, the young Johanna was proficient in a dozen different weapons, from the deadly sjaembok, the rhinoceros-hide whip, to the assegai and knobkerrie of the enemy Kwa'Zulu.
Before thirteen, she had killed, in legitimate self-defence.
By nineteen, then doing her national service in the regular army, she had inhumed, taking the blood money offered by the Staadt and by the van der Rental family, after one branch of the clan had been wiped out in a Kwa'Zulu raid. The culprits had been an impi of the N'Describibl who had raided across the Ulungi for cattle and booty. They had been fought to the river by the local kommando, who in strict observance of the 1877 peace treaty had been unable to cross, and had to watch helplessly as the raiders retreated to their own side. To add to the humiliation, a late-sanctioned counter-raid was intercepted by Zulus, who had been waiting for such a thing, and killed to a man in a final last stand.
Johanna had reasoned that a smaller group of freelances could go where the regular militia couldn't. In any case, the anguished look on the face of old Hertz van der Rental(1) on seeing his dead son's ruined farmhouse would haunt her for the rest of her life.
Accepting the "Dead or Alive!" reward money on the head of the Kwa'Zulu war chief, she and three trusted associates had ridden into the heart of the enemy country, travelling light and by night.
A tropical thunderstorm gave her the diversion she needed. The gate guard of the kraal was hunched and hiding and anyway didn't expect intruders. This suited Johanna: a leap and a roll placed her over the outer wall, running un-heeded in the space between outer and inner wooden stake walls. Heavier equipment was passed to her by sure hands from the other side. She counted the yards between her entry point and the place she had recce'd earlier.
Just about here, I think…
She set the explosive charge, timing it to go off with the next thunderclap, then retreated to cover. The Agatean Fireclay drove a troll-sized hole through the inner wall and into the hut that adjoined it. Shaking the exlosion and slight concussion out of her head, she leapt in, counting the bodies. All dead. Then did what she needed to, both inside and outside the hut.
The brightest lightning flash of all illuminated an assegai, pushed stave-down into the earth. On the leaf blade was impaled the head of the war impi's leader.
But as the Kwa'Zulu sheltered from the wrath of the thunder gods, this would not be noticed for some time. Nor would the dark-clad slight figure slipping out of the main gate, dripping blood and rainwater, knowing her associates will have dealt with the gate guard. She was carrying an iconograph and a box of salamanders, documentary proof that she had killed the warlord who has been raiding the Staadt.
Her only order as her horse was brought up was a curt Reidt!
Two days later, with every ned for speed and none for stealth, pursued by Zulus who had by now worked it out, they reached the Ulunghi and the battle-famed former missionary station of Lawke's Drain, now a strong military outpost.
In Pratoria, the Staadtskapital, her exploit was the talk of the town and she received money, plaudits, and even offers of marriage, which she turned down, kindly. The government paid her a large cash bounty, but also noted, behind closed doors, that if the Smith-Rhodes family, formerly a power in the land and still quietly influential, had provided a national heroine, they might take it into their heads to try for political prestige again. This could be a problem…
The local bureau of the Guild of Assassins, which had been unsuccessfully been petitioning the Volksraad for monopoly status in matters of inhumation, noted that this piece of freelance work had cost them a 50,000 rand contract. A report was prepared and sent to Filigree Street, where it is noted. The name of Johanna Smith-Rhodes appeared on a list for the first time.
Dr Cruces tapped his teeth with the end of a quill pen, thoughtfully. Something will have to be done. He thought some more, then set quill to paper to write a long letter to the Howondaland bureau, who could negotiate with the Rimwards Howondaland government. If the girl could be lured to Ankh-Morpork and induced to remain, it would suit the interests of a lot of people.
"Indeed, please reassure the Staadtspraesident and the Bureau of State Security that their interests and ours converge in this matter and we will offer every assistance. "
(1) I know. I just couldn't resist it.