Duchess Sybil Ramkin Vimes was probably the richest woman in Ankh Morpork. She was also one of the largest and her own delicate condition, as they say, was not helping her to control her girth.
She woke to find herself in her bed, alone, again. It was at least the tenth time this month that her husband Samuel had been dragged from his bed before the day had progressed to a decent hour and he was already off doing whatever it was that he did with his day. She heard stories, second and third hand, little more than rumours really, about midnight chases across moonlit rooftops. She had once been witness to the way her Samuel conducted himself in his work-a-day role while he was acting as the Official Ankh Morpork representative at the Dwarfish High-King's coronation recently in Uberwald.
She had been forced to conclude that the stories of his nature had not been exaggerated. And yet he was such a gentle man. Not a gentleman certainly, because that was such an ironic term, but a gentle man. The dichotomy was wrenching.
She was lucky she had him. And not just for the luck of finding a man like him, but luck that she still had him.
There was the small matter of the occasional, and so far unsuccessful, assassination attempts.
The Vimes' had only recently repaired yet another hole in the roof of their sitting room. Sam had been quite upset about the loss of one of her tiny swamp dragons, although he had to admit that there were extenuating circumstances in the poor assassins' favour. He had been trying to save his own skin at the time and had been forced to kill the dragon to do so.
Sybil gave up trying to summons her husband back home through will power alone and decided she had better face the day, alone, again.
And so she had pottered around the house for half of the day, attending to her dragons.
Her chambermaid interrupted Sybil's routine. The poor girl was one of the interchangeable Emma's, as Sam referred to them when he thought she could not hear him. They all looked the same to him, earnest horse faced girls. In this instance the maid's name happened to be Emma, to the poor girl's detriment.
"What is it Emma?" Sybil asked.
The girl looked positively wretched. "There's a watchman at the door, Madame," she supplied and then her expression became even more woebegone, if that were possible.
"Oh no," Sybil hissed. Her hand shot to her mouth. She had dreaded this moment, the day when one of them came to give her the bad news. The nausea she felt was entirely unrelated to the delicacy of her condition, and more to do with the sick dread she had nursed for every day of the few years she had shared with Samuel Vimes.
She quickly wiped her hands and made for the door.
Nobby Nobbs and Fred Colon stood in her sitting room, anxiously clutching their helmets in their hands. Nobby had gone to a great deal of trouble to spruce himself, slicking his hair and cleaning his face before he arrived. It made little difference to his appearance, but he felt the effort was required. Sybil had an unaccountable soft spot for Nobby - but then she took in stray dragons - and consequently Nobby went t a great deal of trouble to continue impressing her. Sybil smiled briefly at his presence. There is no accounting for some people's taste.
It would be those two, she thought uncomfortably. She had always hoped it would be the courageous and earnest Captain Carrot who brought the bad news, if it had to come. It had never occurred to her that the duty might fall to his most long serving Watchmen.
She steeled herself for the worst.
Fred Colon watched her entrance anxiously, steeling himself to tell her what he had been charged to convey. For one brief moment they stared across the expanse of her expensively decorated sitting room at each other and tried to out metallic one another. Which got them nowhere.
She decided to brazen it out. She strode across the room forthrightly.
"Out with it Fred," she commanded like a valkery. "It can't be any worse than you're making it look." Knowing full well that it certainly could.
"It's about Mr Vimes," Fred stammered.
"Captain Carrot asked us to come up here," explained Nobby.
"Why didn't he come himself?" Sybil demanded.
"He was busy, so he dispatched us," Fred Colon explained.
"How could he do that, with news as important as this." Sybil had replaced her dread with consternation. How dare he dismiss Samuel Vimes in that manner? "I'm of a mind to go down there and have a word to Captain Carrot about this myself. If he can't bring the news himself then he does not deserve to be an officer."
"I told him we shouldn't go and wake him up Sarge," Nobby said.
"Come on," Sybil called, "you two can escort me to…" She stopped, replayed the conversation in her own mind. Her lips moved.
"Wake who up?" she asked finally. Her voice was dangerously quiet.
"Mr Vimes," Nobby explained. "I was…and Carrot said…and Fred thought it would be a good…"
Sybil had an idea. Suddenly she was aware that the obvious momentum of the conversation - and the follow up actions that she was planning - were not going anything like the way she had anticipated, and that perhaps the fault in this mis-communication was hers.
"Let's try that with the gaps filled in, please Nobby," she suggested reasonably.
Nobby drew a breath into the nest of ribs that he called his chest. "CaptainCarrotsentmetotellMrVimesthatwe'vefoundanothergonneintown," he said in a rush. "Ma'am." It all came out as one long word and Syble spent a moment adding all the spaces between the words inside her own head. Captain Carrot sent me to tell Mr Vimes that we've found another gonne in town.
"Well he's not here," Sybil said quietly. "Isn't he with you? Working?"
"No."
"Then where is he?" she asked rhetorically. Nobby and Colon looked at one another as though trying to decide if one or the other or neither of them was expected to answer her. Instead, she turned away before either could speak. 'Willikins!" she called.
The butler appeared, immaculate as usual. "Yes ma'am," he bowed.
"Where is Sam?"
"He is at the Patrician's palace, ma'am."
"Oh," said Nobby and Colon in unison. "Damn." It was bad enough the nature of the news they were entrusted to deliver to Sam Vimes, delivering it to Lord Vetenary was going to be an order of magnitude worse. Vetenary had once been shot by one of those gonne things. His dislike for them was more fundamental than they dislike harboured by Sam Vimes.
*
"You've never heard of Samual Vimes?" Angua asked. Her head tilted to one side while she regarded Daniel Jackson carefully. "Where did you say you came from?"
"Earth," Jackson said. He pushed himself up right and was gratified by the lack of dizziness.
"I've never hear of that. Is it up in the Rim mountains?"
"No," Jackson said, with the air of a University Lecturer about to let fly. "It circles another star. We came through a gate between the stars." He could see that he was in danger of losing his audience here. "We come in peace," he finished lamely.
"We could tell that," Angua replied wit heavy irony, "by the number of gonnes you carried."
"Those well…"
"Yes those."
"Um."
"Another star you say? Like our sun? It is a feeble thing that orbits the disc, surely you come from a disc much like ours?"
"If you say so…"
Angua did the tilted head regarding him levelly thing again. "I still have trouble coming to grips with the idea that someone could be in Ankh Morpork without knowing who Samuel Vimes is."
*
Samuel Vimes started out life as a street urchin who graduated to street gang member before he became a street cop. And somehow, now he was the Duke of Ankh, a progression aided by his marriage, without doubt, but seemingly punctuated by a series of citywide crisis that always seemed to fall into his lap for him to unravel. There were times when he thought his entire existence might be just one long alcohol induced hallucination. That would be one tenable conclusion in his occasionally introspective moments, when he mad strenuous attempts to explain how a drunken street cop could become the Duke of Ankh. The transition of his life still left him puzzled. It had seemed like only yesterday that he had woken up, nursing the oh-god of hang overs in the gutter outside the Mended Drum while the city was under siege by a mythical dragon. That had been the turning point of his life. And the ironic thing about the whole train of events that followed the dragon's ascendancy had been the fall from grace along the opposite route of one of his street gang rivals (for want of a term) a man who had previously risen to such mighty heights ahead of Vimes.
And now the city faced another crisis, and again Sam Vimes was at the centre of it. Ah, the reward for a job well done, he remarked to himself, was another, harder job.
He struck a match against Detritus's belly. It flared for a moment before it settled to a flickering lick of flame. He watched it for a moment, puzzled. It seemed to be blown by a breeze that came from the stone wall behind the desk. Vimes lit the end of his cigar with the feeble little flame while he regarded the wall closely.
"Dat was me sir," Detritus chided, watching Vimes extinguish the match by waving it in the air. The giant troll was stooped beneath the low ceiling of the oblong office. The whirr of his air-cooled helmet was loud within the confines of the Patrician's office. Having a Silicon semi-conductor brain, the trolls were best suited to a climate where semi-conductor physics allowed the ready passage of electrons through their doped silicon brains. The colder the better when it came to trollish intellectualisation. They thrived in the mountainous regions, where the snow never melted. Up there, where the air was so cold it had teeth, the trolls were at the top of the Food Chain. In the more temperate climate of Ankh Morpork their brains were more like the mineral used by the dwarfs when they were smelting the metal to make the links of a chain.
The late Cuddy, one of the first dwarfs inducted into the City Watch, had been the first to come upon the idea of the air-cooled helmet. Detritus had leapt at the idea, embracing it with the sort of whole hearted, one tracked obsession only someone with a brain made of doped silicon and germanium could manage.
"Sorry," Vimes said absently. "It's only that Sybil has stopped me from lighting these things with dragons."
"I unnerstan sir," Detritus said loyally.
Vimes and Detritus watched on while Cheri Littlebottom made busy examining the fixtures and furnishings that made up the Patrician's office. They didn't amount to much. He was a man with simple tastes and his office went essentially undecorated. Whenever Vimes was in the oblong office he was always acutely aware of that lack of ornamentation. It made dealing with Vetenary such a challenge. The man left no handle lying around to be the subject of small talk. In fact when Vimes wrapped his mind around the whole Vetenary conundrum, the man made him more and more confused. He was so iconoclastic that no one was actually sure where he lived.
Littlebottom finished examining the desk draws. She blew the fine white dust from the draw handles that she had taken such great care to apply. No fingerprints were revealed.
The dwarf had selected a fetching floral combo today, contrasting pink and pastel green with her chain mail and war axe accessories. Vimes wondered where you could get floral printed leather. But this was Ankh Morpork he reminded himself, you could get just about anything in Ankh Morpork.
At least now under the tutelage of Sergeant Angua, Cheri Littlebottom had tamed the excesses that marked her early attempts at make-up and they had now reached some sort of happy medium in her search for femininity. It was an alien concept to the dwarf community. Dwarf mating rituals involved a lot of faith and hope, since there was no external signal among the mass of chain mail, leather and armour to allow one bearded gender to accurately assess the other. The recent appearance of dwarf 'girls', of which Cheri was one of the first, was the cause of serious concern among her people.
Now if they could just do something about Nobby's experimentation along the same lines, Vimes thought, then things would be stable in the Watch.
"How can he just disappear?" Vimes asked. He didn't expect an answer from Cheri, no, not yet, she needed time to make her forensic assessments. Nor did he expect an answer from Detritus, that was asking a bit much. Take him up into the mountains and he would probably work it out in two seconds, but down here…No.
"Dunno sir," Detritus answered. He tapped his nose. It made a sound like a pick hammer tapping a piton into a granite cliff face, probably because it was not much different. "This looks like pol..it..ics to me. I know people say I as fick as a plank sanwich, but I can tell which side of da bred is buttered."
"Which side is that Sergeant?"
"The side with the gooey yellow stuff…"
Vines allowed himself one small cynically, pleased smile, happy that some things never change.
"Cheri is there anything at all?" he asked.
"Nothing sir. No sign of anything suspicious. He was the only person in here. No stray hairs, no cigar ash." She looked pointedly at the cigar suspended between Vimes' fingers. He managed to look unembarrassed. It took a great deal of effort and drew upon his experience on the streets, but he pulled it off.
"So where is he?"
"Sorry Sir, I have no idea."
Vimes looked around the room and considered the options. The guilds had been quiet lately. While Vimes was recently away in Uberwald, Carrot had been away chasing after Angua and they had left Fred Colon in charge of the Watch. It had been a tense time throughout the city. The guilds had remained very quiet while he had been away, knowing that there was going to be a period of tension immediately after Vimes' return. When he found the state of the city and the Watch who looked after it, they knew that Vimes was going to undergo considerable stress. When the watch commander is feeling stressed he tends to share it around. And that had been the case for a couple of months now.
Thankfully for the guild heads, Carrot had gotten back first. Or so they thought, at first. It was only then that they found out something unexpectedly unpleasant. The whole city found out, to its chagrin in many cases, that in many things Carrot and Vimes could be interchangeable.
But would they still be quiet? Vimes wondered. Now that the initial over zealous reaction to Colon's steward-ship had subsided and the world watched and waited while a new agreement between Ankh Morpork and the giant untamed wilderness of the Uberwald slowly became obvious. There was a delegation coming over from Uberwald, due to arrive within the next couple of days. Not ambassadors as such because Uberwald was still a long way from being anything more advanced that a collection of feudal baronies, but representatives of the leading citizens of the area. They were going to participate in a ceremony to ratify the agreements reached between Ankh Morpork and the newly crowned Low King during Vimes' recent visit. It would be the golden opportunity for a guild leader to make a play for the oblong office.
So which one would it be? Who among the squabbling factions that managed the city of Ankh Morpork couldn't help placing his spoon in the brew and stirring?
"Normally I would suspect Lord Downey," Vimes ruminated out loud. "But that's too obvious. I always suspect the assassins. For some reason every time a high profile member of society disappears, the trail somehow always leads to them. Funny how that works."
Detritus and Littlebottom watched Vimes carefully. He was a trifle scary in his deep thinking mode.
"Lord Vetinari's bounty has been set temptingly high sir," Cheri suggested timorously. "Almost as high as yours. The assassins have been very quiet lately."
Vimes tasted the idea, a concept he had picked up in Uberwald.
"They have too much invested in the status quo," Vimes commented dryly.
"Still, they have been quiet lately."
Vimes smiled evilly. "I guess that's suspicious enough by itself. Let's talk to them shall we." He pointed to Detritus, "fetch Lord Downey for me. Oh and Cheri, you might want to explore the secret passage that's hidden behind that wall."
He pointed.
Cheri stared. "How…? Never mind."
"On second thoughts," Vimes corrected himself thoughtfully. "Go get Angua. I think we might need her help getting through that maze."
"Why sir?"
He raised an ironic eyebrow. "A secret passage leading from the Patricians office… Oh come on Littlebotton."
"Ah yes."
Detritus lurched from the room. He had to step aside to allow Fred Colon and Nobby to walk through the door.
*
Fred Colon and Nobby had finally found Samuel Vimes and were far from happy about where they had found him. They had gone up to his house without success and had taken a few moments to shake off a persistent Sybil Ramkin Vimes who had been unaccountably insistent in her desire to see her husband and to make sure he was all right.
"It's because she's expecting," Fred had confided in Nobby.
"Ah, I see," Nobby replied gravely.
They had walked on for a while in that characteristic shuffle of the beat copper that seems to involve the minimum of actual motion while achieving a surprisingly stead pace.
"Expecting what Fred?" Nobby had asked.
Fred Colon had shaken his head and walked on.
Nobby trailed along behind shaking his head for a different reason. They hadn't spoken from then until they found themselves in the Patrician's office.
And now they stood before Sam Vimes and if Fred was any judge of body language, some one was deeply embedded in the manure. It wasn't a good time to tell Sam Vimes about the gonne he decided. Fred pushed Nobby forward. "Nobby has something to tell you sir," Fred suggested.
*
Teal'c explained about the Goa'uld to the Igor. He explained about how they dominated human space by dominating the human body.
"What a wonderful opportunity to investigate the workingth of life firtht hand," said Igor. "If you don't mind my thaying tho thir."
Teal'c looked around for a towel so he could wipe his face. He couldn't find one. The palm of his hand was just not good enough.
*
Lord Downey of the Assassin's guild watched the quorum of his management council from beneath heavy lidded eyes. On the desk before him was the morning's issue of the Anhk Morpork Times. The headlines read "Brawl in the Drum ended with a bang."
"Sacharissa hasn't lost her touch with headlines I see," was the comment from the council. Downey looked over his council and tried to find the face that fitted the voice. Ah there he was at the end, Peter Mansell-Smith. Like all the other assassins he was dressed in black. The whole room looked like a gap in space were light failed to escape, there was so much black cloth being employed.
"Have you read it yet?" Downey asked them collectively.
"Yes," chorused the team. It took several seconds for them all to join the chorus but they finally managed.
"A gonne," Downey concluded. "It must be. More than one, if this is to be believed." Downey tapped the paper with his index finger. His eye traced the sub-title of the news sheet. It said 'the truth shall set your fee.' Always the way, he thought. Slant would probably see that one and chuckle. "We still don't know what happened to the last one."
"There's always that rumour," said the same voice. Peter Mansell-Smith continued after a glance from Downey. "You know, the one that said Captain Carrot had it buried with Cuddy the dwarf."
Downey rubbed his hands across this forehead. At some stage Downey was going to have to address the whole Mansell-Smith situation. The man's rise through the ranks was starting to look like it had the sort of momentum that might one day carry him to the same chair that Downey had occupied since the unfortunate events surrounding the passing of Dr Cruses. "That would be a comforting thought," Downey commented. He looked up at the gathered assassins. "We know that Cuddy is still buried?" For some reason he was put in mind of an undertakers convention.
"It's been checked already," Mansell-Smith said. "His grave remains undisturbed."
Yes, altogether too much momentum.
"Well that is one blessing at least," Downey commented.
"We don't have any other ideas." Well at least Mansell-Smith hadn't totally undermined Downey's authority. One day he was going to have to find out how Vimes kept Carrot from taking over the City Watch. Vimes had been dealing with a highly competent subordinate for a long time now. There had to be a trick to it.
"Make some inquiries in the street of cunning artificers," Downey instructed. It was nice to make a decisive contribution to the process. "If anyone could reproduce that thing we would find them among the dwarfs that hang around down there."
Their conversation was interrupted by a knock at the door. A student poked his head through the door and then ducked as though dodging a knife. In most of the doorways of the Assassin's guild that was a valuable reflex.
"Lord Downey," the junior assassin said. "There's a watchman at the door. It's that troll Detritus. Apparently the Duke of Ankh has requested your presence, sir."
It is always hard to say no to Detritus, unless of course it is the kind of no that is part of a scream of, "No, no, please don't. No!"
"What does Vimes want this time?" Downey asked no one in particular. The question was intended rhetorically. Downey waved a dismissal and sent his council on it's way before one of them was tempted to answer. He gathered his cape and marched for the door.
*
Jack O'Neill was bored.
He had counted the bars on his cell door. There was nine.
He had counted the stones in the floor. There were two hundred and sixty seven - if you allowed for the half and quarter stones at the edges.
He climbed up on his bunk and stared through the little window and seen clouds drift by. He counted those but the answer only came to two before his neck started to hurt.
He climbed down.
What was left?
He could count his fingers… But he already knew how many of them he had.
*
Samuel Vimes marched along the corridor, puffing on his cigar. It was his one remaining vice now that he had stopped drinking. He intended to savour it.
Angua was leading both him and Cheri Littlebottom through the labyrinth. She had assumed her canine guise, and made her way along the corridor by stepping lightly from stone to stone in what appeared to the outside world to be a haphazard manner. Her nose tracked the Patrician's steps.
Vimes watched her progress carefully, matching each of her footsteps after she skipped from stone to stone, as though his life depended on it.
It did.
The hallway through which they walked was littered with dozens of dangling knives, embedded swords, swinging candelabras, splashed nets and swaying morning stars, all of them attached to springs, mechanisms and ropes. Each of the implements had been released by the application of an errant foot to the wrong stone at some time in the past few hours.
Vimes noted the lack of blood or gore on any of them. It was that lack that caused him the most concern.
Vimes and Angua were threading their way from stone to stone, careful how they made their way through the booby-trapped corridor because the previous group who passed through this corridor might have missed one of the traps.
Looking around him Vimes thought it couldn't have been much more that one; given the number of cunningly contrived weapons hanging in the hallway. He handled one vicious looking blade with care and then dropped it back on the floor.
Who was there, in Ankh Morpork, that the Patrician thought so badly of, that he would need this level of security to keep him in?
Or keep others out? Vimes tasted that idea for a moment. After all it was Haverlock Vetenary they were dealing with here.
A few steps ahead, Angua rounded a bend in the corridor and the sound of her padded footfalls stopped suddenly. Vimes stepped up to join her. The corridor opened into a room. It was littered with paper and half-finished machinery. A window overlooked a Bloody Stupid garden. Beneath the clutter of paper the room was furnished with quality fixtures.
Neither Vimes nor Angua saw the clutter of course. It all paled into insignificance compared to the giant stone contraption filling the corner of the room.
All eyes were locked on the gaping maw contained within the stargate.
"Oh bugger," said Samuel Vimes. He pulled his cigar from his slack lower lip before it fell to the floor. With the amount of paper scattered about, that was a wise reaction. Vimes shook his head, placed the butt of the cigar into his mouth, flinched at the pain with an absent grimace, pulled it from his mouth, reversed it and then puffed on the cigar a few frantic times. Then he blinked.
A sound like someone extruding a piece of meat through a metal sheeting press filled the silence behind Vimes.
"The bloody wizards," Vimes half said, or perhaps asked, even he wasn't sure which. "They've broken through to the dungeon dimensions again,".
A discreet cough sounded behind him, breaking the spell.
"Um sir," Angua asked. "If we're going to stay here for a while, then…Could I borrow your shirt."
Vimes turned slowly, already certain of what he would see, and in the aftermath of seeing the stargate for the first time, he realised that he didn't care.
Well, he thought, at least surrendering his shirt would free up her hands and arms to do something more useful than cover up the bits of her anatomy that were different to the ones that Vimes had in those same places.
"Don't let any one else in here until the wizards get here," Vimes said to Cheri. "I think we're going to be busy today."