"What's that noise?" Sam Vimes asked. It seemed to be coming from the direction of the Assassin's Guild.
"Dunno sir," Detritus answered. "Do you want I should find out?"
Detritus, Vimes and Jackson stood at the entrance to the Patrician's palace and watched a few stragglers marching along the road, heading for the source of the noise. It was unusual in Ankh Morpork to see a group of people with a common purpose. It was suspicious enough to gain the attention of the City Watch under even the most peaceful of circumstances. If that noise was anything to go by there was no peaceful purpose involved.
"Just stop one of them and find out what's going on," Vimes told Detritus.
Detritus saluted. His fingers made a neat little tink sound when they collided with his head.
Sam Vimes winced, thinking about the times in the past when Detritus had knocked himself out in his enthusiasm to salute. The air-cooling helmet worked a treat, no two ways about it.
The troll grabbed the first person within reach and extracted him by the collar. He was brought bodily over to speak with Vimes. The man's feet flailed about like a cartoon villain's, to no effect. He wasn't Binky and so he had trouble making motion with his feet clear of the ground. His frantically flailing feet fluttered fitfully to a hesitant halt the moment he was confronted with the lugubrious expression of Sam Vimes's face.
Quailed, thought Vimes, I always wondered what quailed looked like. Now I know.
"You can't do this to me," the man hanging from Detritus' hand complained.
That struck Vimes as vaguely amusing. He almost smiled. "It's the century of the Fruit Bat and this is the discworld, how can something be impossible?"
Their captive seemed to be suffering from an irony deficiency. He just stared at Vimes.
"You can probably put him down Sergeant," Vimes told Detritus and then blew a ring of cigar smoke into the air. The air accepted the additional combustion products with ill grace.
Detritus dropped the man in front of Vimes. He sort of landed upright. He looked around like running might be an option. It wasn't.
"You want to tell me what's going on?" Vimes suggested.
"Why should I?"
"Detritus…"
"It's all happening at the Assassin's guild," the man explained quickly. It all came out as one long word and Vimes found himself translating as though being confronted with a foreign language. "I was just going down to have a look with a few of my mates and we thought…" He trickled to a halt.
"We thought… What?" Vimes prompted.
"We thought we might go down and show those assassins what it's like to live in this town," he finished in a small voice.
"How unusual," Vimes commented.
Many like minded citizens continued to march past. Each of them cast an uneasy eye toward the Vimes, Jackson, Detritus tableau and hurried forward, glad it wasn't them.
The unfortunate wretch that Detritus had rescued from making a fool of himself had a copy of the Ankh Morpork Times in his hand. Vimes took it from his unresisting fingers and read the contents. "Most people find the assassin's guild a place to avoid, lest one attracts their attention," Vimes commented vaguely.
The guy with Detritus' finger prints in his collar blinked at Vimes a couple of times and then rubbed his throat where the collar of his shirt had borne his weight. He could count himself lucky that the shirt had been strong enough to carry his weight. Many of the shirts in his wardrobe would not. In Ankh Morpork, inferior quality goods are available on every street corner. (Except for the ones where the ladies of negotiable affection hung out. This being Ankh Morpork, there were experts in that field on every third street corner.)
"Oh bloody hell," Vimes muttered and screwed the paper up in a trembling fist. "Detritus, go see if you can break that little gathering up, while Dr Jackson and I round up his gonnes. I think it's time we tried to get this whole stargate team out of town before they get lynched."
"Right you are sir," Detritus saluted, with a gentle clink of his stone fingers against the air-cooled helmet that he frequenty wore. He turned and followed the gathering crowd.
*
"I knew something was odd about this place," Samantha Carter told Angua. They were running toward the Assassin's Guild House. "But I would never have guessed that magic works here. Not if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes."
"If you want to live through the next couple of hours so you can get home you better allow for that fact in everything that you do," Angua told her.
The sounds of people gathering with malice and mayhem on their minds drifted to them from around the next corner in the road.
Angua was the first to see the gathering of people, animals, trolls and dwarfs that had gathered outside the assassin's guild. Most of them were there out of simple Ankh Morporkian curiosity. A riot was just another form of street theatre to them. They were there to cheer.
Among those who were just curious, were few more thoughtful souls who had decided that the Assassins having a weapon of a less than personal nature made them less than happy about the situation. Among the citizens of Ankh Morpork there was a gathering middle class who had developed an over-inflated paranoia over the presence of the assassin's guild. It was mainly those souls who made money by taking it off other people and not providing quite the level of service or performance that the customer had in mind when they parted with their hard earned cash who thought that way. For those members of the business fraternity, the presence of a team of trained and cash friendly assassins had always been a source of mild concern. The threat of assassination was not the sort of thing to keep you awake at night, that was the role of the creatures from the dungeon dimensions, but it was the sort of thing that prompted you to buy expensive locks and alarms and such. Those things were expensive and there were better things to spend that hard earned cash upon.
And now, of course, there was now this new weapon to deal with. That was the sort of thing to keep one up at night.
Like any developing crowd, this one was quickly surrounded by a flock of sausage sellers, all under the C.M.O.T Dibbler's banner. Dibbler himself was handling the advertising by shouting at the crowd through a make-shift megaphone.
He was barely audible over the excited babble of the crowd and he began scheming ways to make an impact, something to grab their attention and excite their tastebuds. He would have been better advised finding a different product to sell.
Angua and Carter stopped on the street corner and surveyed the situation.
"God now what do we do?" Carter asked.
"I have an idea," Angua said. Her tone didn't tell Samantha Carter that it was a good idea. Not a good idea at all.
*
Carrot and O'Neill ground to a panting halt on the periphery of the crowd.
"Oh dear," said Carrot. Any gathering of Trolls and dwarfs in numbers meant trouble. Trolls were basically rocks that moved. Dwarfs were mainly miners of rocks. In the past there had been many misunderstandings. There weren't misunderstandings any more, there was just war.
O'Neill said something with a similar meaning to the statement that Carrot made, although it was slightly more colourfully expressed when O'Neill voice it.
Somewhat in the distance behind them came a sound that went pat, pat, pat. It was the footfalls of a small dog, struggling to keep up with them. Not many people would recognise the sounds of Gaspode complaining about this latest bout of physical exercise over the hacking pant of his laboured breathing. Dogs can't talk; everyone knew that, so no one listened to Gaspode.
Carrot marched forward. O'Neill debated the wisdom of that and then followed him anyway.
"Mr Stronginthearm isn't it?" Carrot said loudly and affably to a small person in the horned helmet and leather armour who he had found standing just at the edge of the crowd. O'Neill saw that diminutive person was carrying a battle scared battle-axe. He wore a beard that would have looked at home on a member of ZZ-Top. "What brings you out here?"
The dwarf's first reaction was to turn around and reach for his axe. "Oh it's you Mr Carrot," he said and relaxed the hand that rested on the axe handle. "Those bastards who killed Cuddy have done it again," the dwarf added.
"Done what again?" Carrot asked. O'Neill looked closely at the huge watchman. There was almost menace in the tone, perhaps, if you were uncharitable. Carrot's hands rested on his hips and his face was creased into a frown.
"You know…" Stronginthearm tried to imply.
"No," Carrot said carefully. "I don't. Perhaps you can tell me."
"Same as they did last time," Stronginthearm said less certainly.
"And what was that?"
Stronginthearm suddenly found that he was suffering from a severe case of dichotomy. He dragged the toe of his boot across the ground. For some reason his tongue wouldn't work.
Carrot pushed his way forward, parting the crowd as thought it were the Red Sea parting for Moses. O'Neill followed in his wake, shaking his head the whole way. There were a lot of those battle scarred and battleaxe-wielding people in the crowd. Their lack of stature made them easy to see over, provided you could ignore the fanciful weaponry. O'Neill found he looking for Snow White and shook his head to clear that bizarre notion from his mind.
Scattered among the crowd there were a number of the giant trolls as well. There was an air of menace about the entire gathering and it was currently focussed on the guild house door. It might not necessarily stay there, that was the problem.
A similar bow wave was threading toward the entrance to the Assassin's Guild head quarters. Ploughing through the human (and non-human) sea like an icebreaker bashing it's way through the Arctic ice floes came a small flotilla that was headed up by the bulk of Detritus.
*
Through the forest of legs, deftly dodging those forgotten feet came a tiny pink bunny, grinning stupidly and beating a drum incessantly. It couldn't be heard over the clamour of the crowd, but it was determined all the same.
*
"Ah I thought I might find you two here," Sam Vimes said. To Fred Colon his voice seemed to come out of nowhere.
Daniel Jackson hovered behind Vimes wondering what he might have to say this time
"Ah, Mr Vimes, we were watching developments and preparing to take action," Fred Colon began uneasily and then progressed with gathering confidence as the idea developed. He never managed much momentum with the thought despite the look of obvious scepticism that stole over Vimes' face. Even Fred had to allow that it sounded pretty lame, so the first word was delivered with trepidation, the last with caution, the rest shaded between those two 'extremes'. "We were finalising our plans," he added hopefully.
"Is that your story Nobby?" Vimes asked the slight figure that huddled beside and partially behind Colon's bulk.
"It was just like Fred explained Mr Vimes," Nobby suggested enthusiastically. He nodded his head like one of those toys that sit on the parcel shelf of old rust buckets. There were none of those on the discworld so the similarity escaped Vimes and Colon.
"So you're really not loitering in a doorway, smoking the last of your doggends and letting the whole mess sort itself out so you can arrest the unconscious," Vimes suggested. "I didn't think so. I'm pleased to hear it."
Fred Colon listened to that description with a growing disconnection. He had been a watchman for nearly thirty years and for most of that time the policing practice that Sam Vimes had just described was exactly the sort of action they had always taken. It was standard operating procedure, and for some reason it was now out of fashion. Fred was still not completely comfortable with the change. Now they were expected to keep the peace, not remark upon it after all the action subsided. It just didn't seem right and it certainly didn't come naturally to him.
"It's time to put your plan into action," Vimes suggested jovially. "So what was it?"
"Ah well sir," Colon said. Behind his eyes his brain was working furiously, unfortunately the furious work involved a lot of motion that was focussed into running in tiny circles.
*
The head chef of the Partician's palace catering service was preparing the last of the day's marinades by placing a few delicate additions into the mixture; those little herbal finishes that separated the truly memorable dining experiences from the merely satisfying.
A rapid patter of footsteps outside the door was the prelude to a particularly handsome young woman bursting through the kitchen door. She slid to halt in the middle of the room, performing a half pirouette before she came to rest. Her more than ample bosom heaved at the exertion she had made to get into the room so precipitously, which sight distracted the chef from his cooking for a speechless moment.
Her head whipped every which way, trailing wisps of otherwise severely styled hair. Sacharissa looked around frantically, struggling to find the meat rack. Her eyes lit on it suddenly. She marched across purposefully and started sorting through the meats, looking at each one critically for a moment before turning to the next.
"Here, what are you…?" demanded the head chef, now in charge of his mouth again.
"Get out of my –ing way," Sacharissa snarled and grabbed a haunch of lamb from the hanging rack. It dripped onto the floor. Throwing the lamb over her shoulder she bolted back through the door again.
The chef stared after the gently swinging door and scratched his mostly bald head.
Now that was something that didn't happen everyday.
*
William De Worde sat on the hard timber wheel that had once been attached to a cart. It just lay on the road, apparently abandoned in the street. It not for the scorch mark on the rim, making it unusable as a wheel, it would have disappeared long ago.
William wrote furiously in his notebook. The vantage-point he had chosen for himself was fifty metres from the periphery of the riot. It was close enough to hear what was said (provided it was shouted but then that's how everything was said during a gathering like that) but it was far enough away to avoid the worst of the likely missiles. He watched the action unfolding outside the Assassin's guild with professional intensity.
Another prospective participant raced along the road that ran past William. The man wore a butcher's gore spattered apron and carried a wicked looking meat cleaver in his hand. He looked at William with a blank expression for a second before skidding to a stop. He strolled back to speak with William.
"You're that De Worde guy right?"
It was this same ritual, enacted half a dozen times a day for William. William put on his meet-the-public face. "Yes."
"Nigel Pearce (56)," the man said. "I saw it all. I was in the Mended Drum when those three assassins came in and tried to assassinate the Unseen University Librarian. You should have seen the action then. It was marvellous. Gee I bet you wished you had your fancy iconograph in there when that happened."
"Where were you when this unfolded Mr Pearce?" William asked. His pencil worked furiously, jotting down the details. He was only listening to the man's story with half an ear, concentrating the rest of his attention on the increasingly cohesive demands of the mob besieging the Assassin's guild. His newspaperman's instinct was already discounting the man's story. The pencil was scratching away on auto-pilot.
"I was hiding under one of the tables. The one where Hansen the Brave broke his arm when he crashed into it. Anyway. I saw it all. It was a huge fight and…"
"Mr Pearce," William said with exaggerated patients. "I've already covered the brawl. I need something on this afternoon's activities."
Nigel Pearce looked dubious for a moment. "Did you get the story about Cartwright's cart?" He hesitated.
"Yes," Wiliiam answered. He was sitting on the wheel left behind in the cart's altercation with Mustrum Ridcully.
Over the top of Nigel Pearce's head, William watched the bow wave of people flowing out of Detritus' path while he pushed his way through the crowd.
Ah, things were starting to look up; William considered - the watch had arrived in force. Of course that might only mean Detritus, who was a force on his own, but it still meant the Watch was on the job.
William found himself wondering where Sacharissa was now. He hoped she and Otto had followed the Watch and were getting plenty of iconographs. This situation looked like it was going to be as big an issue as the last Patrician crisis.
*
Mustrum Ridcully skidded to a halt at the entrance to the Unseen University. He stopped running within of sight of the gate and organised his ensemble a bit more decorously before moving on. It didn't do for the Arch-chancellor to be seen doing anything as undignified as running. It often carried the unfortunate connotation of running 'away'. That just wouldn't do.
Given some of the things that the wizards had done and seen in the past, that was a petty piece of image management, but that was the way Ridcully was wired up.
Instead of bursting into the grounds at a dead run, he strutted into the grounds in full Arch Chancellor mode. (after one glance back over his shoulder to be sure that the denizen of the dungeon dimensions that had been following him was not in sight. His pursuer had been coherently human shaped for a remarkably long time and Ridcully entertained a nagging and growing doubt about the whole thing, but only for a brief moment. Doubts didn't survive long in the dangerous environment of Ridcully's mind.)
He burst through the entrance to the great hall, still on the stalk, and found most of the discworlds supply of Wizards involved in their primary function; eating a huge dinner. The smell of a coronary in production filled the room and threatened to induce Ridcully's tastebuds into organising a mutiny. He pulled himself together with a visible effort and decided to make his presence known.
"Bursar!" Ridcully bellowed. Half a dozen fat bearded faces looked up from the vast culinary attempt at cellulite production that lay scattered about the table. Each face made a troubled attempt to determine who had had the nerve to disturb their most solemn of rituals. They all saw the Arch Chancellor and the threatening expression they had all assumed at the outset seemed to melt as one. "Runes, I need you as well," Ridcully continued, unaware of the commotion his entrance had caused. "Hustle man we have work to do."
The Lecturer in Recent Runes looked up from his plate of stuffed pheasant and sighed. When the Arch Chancellor got into this kind of mood, Recent Runes lost his appetite entirely. Inevitably this sort of boisterous demand for activity involved tentacles and running, neither of which ranked high in any of his preferred activities lists.
Runes pushed away the now unpalatable remains of dead pheasant and began preparing himself for an unpleasantly active afternoon.
The Bursar was found occupying his usual position - under the table, cowering. He had given up locking himself in boxes and cupboards. Even those with their locks on the inside were not proof against Wizards who could teleport right through the walls. He had been this way almost from the time that Ridcully had taken the chair. A man best suited to the rigours of totting up columns of numbers and ensuring that every document had the appropriate signatures, he was singularly unprepared for the rigours of battle with the dungeon dimension denizens that seemed to flock to Ridcully's battle cry. With the regular ingestion of dried frog pills the bursar could at least function, albeit badly, but that was a short term solution to his problem at best
Ridcully was convinced that the man just needed the correct motivation to get past his hesitation, and that meant a lot of yelling in his face and bullying generally. So far it hadn't worked, but Ridcully was not a man to give up a perfectly good theory simply because someone else had found such inconvenient things as contradictory facts.
The Bursar crawled from beneath the table and followed along like a man being led to his execution, or like a dog slinking in for the inevitable beating.
"What is it this time?" The lecturer in Recent Runes demanded. "Not the dungeon dimensions again." It was meant as a joke. The wizards had not been actively experimenting with that sort of magic for weeks and the alchemists had been remarkably quiet lately. (Well OK, there had been a lot of loud bangs, but that was just chemicals.)
"Good guess man," Ridcully replied. He was almost out the door again. "Someone get the Librarian. I think we need more information."
The Lecturer in recent Runes looked at his pheasant one last time and then turned away. The things he had to put up with…
*
Samantha Carter watched, appalled, while Angua began discarding her clothing. "What are you going to do?" Samantha demanded.
Angua's helmet clattered to the ground. She crouched gingerly and began unbuckling her boots. "Get myself inside the assassin's guild and see what they're planning," Angua replied. A second boot followed the first. They made an honour guard for the helmet.
"Dressed like that'll get you into all sorts of places, and all sorts of trouble," Carter noted cynically.
"A lot more than you could possibly know," Angua grimaced at a few unsavoury memories.
"What about the mob?" Carter asked.
"They aren't the dangerous ones," Angua replied cryptically. Her breastplate came unbuckled easily and joined the pile on top of her shoes and helmet that were already keeping each other company. The breastplate wasn't impressively beaten for show. Carter could see that now. It was that shape because it had to be.
"Mind that lot for me," Angua said. "It usually goes missing if I'm not careful about it." She looked at the pile ruefully before she added, "and those things are hard to come by." She tossed her chain mail skirt aside casually. Carter showed some discretion by looking away, but not before reaching an obvious conclusion about the brief display of flesh that she had already seen. Angua might not be human, but she certainly looked enough like one that she could find a place for herself posing for the sort of photographs that might appear in the centre of glossy magazines.
Behind Carter's turned back, came a sound like a muffled sneeze - if you had the world's largest sinuses.
A huge golden haired wolf sauntered casually up the alley and dropped to sit beside Carter's feet. Carter's expression could have been used to sell thousands of copies of horror comics to impressionable minors.
"OK," Carter muttered to herself. "I knew it was coming. I did. I knew she was a werewolf. I knew all along." She reached out a tentative hand and patted Angua's head, and scratched her ear. "Nice doggy."
Angua reluctantly endured scratched ears for a moment before sloping off down the alley that lead to the Assassin's guild kitchen.
*
Gaspode the wonder dog was the way he liked to fashion himself. His case was compelling since he was probably the only talking dog on the discworld. He sat outside the tradesman's entrance to the Assassin's guild head quarters and waited for the Kitchen door to open. The night's leftovers were due to be cast away, and they were easily the best pickings available in this town, outside of the University kitchen of course. (But hanging around outside the University kitchen was not an option any more. Not since the last time. Things happened there. Improbable things). The waste products from the University had an unfortunate tendency to cause bizarre consequences. You could be just another self effacing little mongrel dog one minute and the next moment you were a self aware sentient being with existential and philosophical leanings and a mouth full of words that only humans, dwarfs and some trolls could get a handle on. Even being a werewolf would be better than a talking dog.
The sleek golden form of Angua in her wolf guise strolled up and sat beside him.
"Hey," Gaspode said.
"Don't start…" Angua warned.
"How's about you and me…"
"Must we have this conversation every time we meet?" she asked. Her nose was threatening to mutiny.
"Well look at you," Gaspode said in exasperation. "A dog doesn't stand a chance. You should smell yourself."
"I smell like a werewolf."
"Yeah but a mighty tasty one."
Angua shook her head and then pushed in front of Gaspode so she was closer to the door than he was.
"Hey, that's my…" He trailed off in the face of the look she cast over her shoulder. "Then don't eat it all," he finished lamely.
"I don't intend eating any of it," she shuddered, as only a dog can.
The door opened. Light spilt into the alley.
*
Sacharissa managed to skid to a halt before she scattered the pile of ash that used to be Otto any worse than she had already done earlier. She held the haunch of lamb over the pile and waited for the next drop of blood to fall.
Nothing happened.
"Oh –ing hell," she cursed. A trail of small red spots highlighted her path all the way from the kitchen to the hallway, naturally. Now it decided not to drip.
She shook the haunch a few times, without effect.
She watched the base of the meat some more, and went to throw the thing at the wall. It bounced off the brickwork once and then hit the floor with a dull meaty thud. Something from inside the wall went 'whoosh'.
Sacharissa felt something pass her ear before the world went black.
There were a lot of stars first, but only for a moment. Then there was just black.
*
Death surveyed the crowd from a position atop the assassin's guild building. "THIS LOOKS PROMISING," he told Binky. Binky snickered.
*
Teal'c croaked. He was not a happy frog. From his perch atop Detritus' hand, he looked down at what lay beneath him and decided in his little amphibian brain that down was a bad idea. Down meant dealing with all those feet at street level.
Detritus plowed on and Teal'c's options narrowed.