Chapter 3, wherein Angua deals with the aftermath of last night's events. This is also the place where I broke my own rule and diverged entirely from her POV in two scenes. Both just sort of happened. What's odd is how easy the Vetinari scene was to write; I'm not sure what that says about the way my mind works....

Note that for ease of scrolling, any footnotes are in brackets shortly after the sentence in question. Not quite as authentic, but also not quite so annoying. [note: re-uploaded to tweak a couple bits of dialogue.]


The next morning, a prisoner slept in the cells under the Watch house, having been administered a rather potent medication and a long, sensible talk about wolves and young policewomen, and the unreliable nature of memory after a concussion and loss of blood.

Angua's report, shorter and mercilessly honest, sat in Vimes's inbox. He'd read it twice, then put it back, as if the third time he picked it up, it would say something different.

She was fraying at the edges. But then, so was he.

He'd visited the Patrician yesterday, for a largely uninformative update on the progress of the mission. Vetinari had little to say that Vimes couldn't have guessed: they're approaching their destination, there've been a few bumps along the way, but the ship is holding together very well and everything is proceeding as hoped, so more news will be forthcoming as it develops, thank you.

Well, he hadn't guessed the bit about the Librarian stowing away in the ship, but he supposed he ought to have.

Vimes rubbed his face with both hands, trying to focus. He still hadn't slept much. The story about the Librarian kept nagging at him, mostly because of the unplanned stopover it had required. He didn't want to think about telling Angua about this.

After all, unexpected danger was one thing. That happened to all of them, all the time. Stopping on the moon was something else entirely. He wasn't sure she could take that bit of news without snapping.

Vimes got up from his desk and stalked over to the window, staring out across the city. If this mission doesn't work, he thought, the wizards say this will all just... disintegrate. Disappear. The words themselves sent prickles up and down his spine, although the concept was still too big, too unbelievable, to wrap his head around. And he couldn't help but think that Carrot's phenomenal track record ought to give the Four Horsemen plenty of reason to rein in their steeds and tromp off back home before causing any trouble. Still, the possibility was there... and ultimately, in the face of all that, loss of personal control for a moment or two wouldn't really matter. But he knew it mattered to Angua. He'd seen it in her face when she came in, after her visit to Igor; there was a sort of suppressed despair, something close to self-loathing, as she grimly reported what she'd found and what she'd done about it.

He understood her actions better than she'd have thought, but just then he'd suspected empathy wouldn't have reached her. It might, he thought darkly, have made it even worse.

Even in the face of apocalypse, he thought, it's still the private crises that define us....

Vimes walked back to his desk -- empty but for Angua's report -- and slowly stubbed out his cigar. The Watch was out in its usual force, oblivious to what was brewing at the Hub, and that was just as well. The paperwork was filed, the administrivia dealt with, his blasted meetings even over for the day. The city was running just as it should, for the time being.

Or, not to put too fine a point on it, for whatever amount of time they had.

Vimes looked around his office. For that moment, his job here was done. It was time to go home to Sibyl for a while.

He walked out, closed the door and went downstairs.



Far away from the Watch house, games of Fate and Destiny were deciding the future of the world.

One sword slashed neatly through a falling die; another, short and plain and very sharp, made its point without being used at all. Heroes faced off under the gaze of the gods; some were destined to die, but they'd be damned if they didn't do it on their own terms. And in the words of the saga to come, whether or not fire was actually returned to the gods, whether or not the old heroes were victorious, they would, at least in legend, continue forever.

It ended in a spectacular explosion -- but not, ultimately, the crack of final doom.

For the other heroes, who had after all saved the world, it was a long, bumpy ride back to the city. And what could loosely be termed a splash-down * in the Ankh.

And then, the tricky matter of the homecoming.



[* In the Ankh, you don't exactly splash. Splut, perhaps. Or on bad days, thud.]



"Sergeant!"

Angua, who'd pulled desk duty after her injury and was staring blearily at a stack of crime-scene iconographs, straightened up and winced, putting one hand to her side. She wasn't even sure why she'd bothered to straighten up. The unmistakably high-pitched voice belonged to Corporal Buggy Swires, a gnome, who'd only have been at eye-level if she'd been lying flat on her stomach.

"Yes, Corporal?"

His riding heron, still sitting on the windowsill, flapped its wings once as Buggy made a beeline across the floor and away from possible foot traffic. The Watch house had been equipped with all sorts of little staircases and pedestals, under what Carrot had cheerfully termed Ease of Access modifications -- sort of like the not-a-dog door he'd thoughtfully rigged for her long ago -- but she knew Buggy was less concerned with Ease of Access than he was with Ease of Remaining Vertical.

The thought temporarily derailed her again.

Don't think of Carrot, don't think of Carrot....

"Sergeant, news from Air Patrol," Buggy said, snapping off a textbook salute. "What looks like a huge metal bird just came crashin' down on the river."

Angua involuntarily jerked forward, not caring this time as Igor's stitches pulled tight. "What?"

"I tailed it in as soon as I saw it," Swires said. "The folks around had only nicked a few bits by the time I got there, 'n mostly they're just gawping. I can't tell what the thing was or what it was doing there...."

"Did you see any of the passengers? Were they hurt?"

He nodded quickly at the first, shook his head at the second. "Saw three men and what I swore was a monkey -- couldn't see their faces, but one looked an awful lot like--"

Angua leapt out of her seat, remembered just in time to shout, "Thank you, Corporal!" over her shoulder, and ran headlong for the door without even bothering to ask for directions to the scene.

She knew who was there. She could just follow her nose.



Of course, Angua thought moments later in some disgust, if I'd been thinking, I would have followed the scent away from the river....

She'd found her trail immediately, that clear, sharp scent she knew so well -- tinged with something dusty and odd, yet weirdly familiar -- but she'd made it all the way down along the edge of the Shades to the Ankh Bridge before she realized her mistake: the scent trail headed in the opposite direction.

Clearly, she'd found the crash site. Whoever had been in the pilot's seat had aimed for the straightest uninterrupted stretch of river they could get, and had come down right by Pearl Dock, where the half-submerged shape of the flying machine was still visible in the gloop. She stared in some awe at Leonard's work, or what was left of it, not noticing how the crowds around her -- possibly from nearby Cockbill Street -- shied away from her gleaming badge and pretended fiercely that they'd only been, er, looking at the various other metallic bits lying about in the vicinity. *

[ * Which, in many cases, was probably true. Stealing would have been tantamount to admitting that they needed things they couldn't pay for, and that -- although also true -- was not a Cockbill Street sort of thing to do. On the other hand, pride could be safely quashed for a salvage operation every now and then. ]

But she'd arrived too late. If the passengers had walked out of this, they'd have made their way quite far away by now....

Angua swore under her breath and turned to sprint back up the street. Her side ached fiercely, and the relative slowness of her human feet made her wish she could just lope away on all fours....

But even if the moon had been out to aid her, she wasn't sure that was a good idea.

So she kept running, darting between surprised onlookers, following the trail back to the location that should have been obvious, and would, to her infinite annoyance, have been a much shorter run.

When the Patrician's palace guards tried to halt her at the gate for their usual questions, she just shoved them aside with slightly more than human strength, growled "Watch business," and silently dared them to make an issue of it as she darted inside.

They'd seen the look in her eyes. They didn't.



Up in the Oblong Office, the debriefing was already well underway.

Crowded into the room was the Kite's crew (and their simian stowaway), as well as the wizards from Mission Control, and Commander Vimes, who had been summoned from home as soon as the news had reached the palace. The rest of the original committee members had not yet been invited. Lord Vetinari planned to give them the short version. That looked as though it might be a difficult thing to assemble.

"And just so I understand -- the Horde voluntarily sacrificed themselves to stop the chain of events they themselves started?"

"Yes, sir."

"Wouldn't it have been simpler not to start the fuse?"

"I believe they had a change of heart at the last minute, sir."

Vetinari leaned back in his chair, looking over his assembled... heroes, for lack of a better term. Captain Carrot, in the center of the room, was the only one who looked the part. He stood tall and perfectly composed, with his helmet still held under one arm. But Leonard, distracted as ever, was busy with a notepad and kept murmuring things like "I must capture the right arc of water over the Rim..." under his breath. Rincewind had shuffled back toward a corner and was trying to avoid the attentions of Ponder Stibbons, who had his own notepad and was already trying to scribble down something about trajectory, speed and what the velocity must have been at the moment of Ankh-bound collision. The Librarian, for his part, had been given a banana, and all was right with his world.

Vetinari sighed just a little. The hero was passing off credit to a band of barbarians, and the others had transmuted a world-saving effort into an alchemical experiment. At least, with everyone seemingly unwilling to confess to any acts of bravery, he wouldn't have any trouble officially establishing that this entire escapade did not, in fact, occur.

"So, Captain," he said at last, "might I assume that... someone inspired them to change their minds and descend the mountain with the explosives before detonation?"

"Oh, that was the minstrel, sir," Carrot said honestly, stepping right around Vetinari's suggestion. "He reminded them that no one would live to remember their deeds if the world, um, ended."

"Man has always sought to live forever," Leonard said absently to his sketchpad. "But Mr. Cohen clearly saw that his lifetime alone was not sufficient, compared to the power of a saga...."

Vetinari stared, eyes slightly narrowed. Rarely, if ever, had he heard anyone call Cohen the Barbarian a mister with such an utter lack of sarcasm.

"If I might interrupt," said Ridcully, not bothering to wait for permission, "we seem to be missing a segment of this story. What of the gods? Are we to believe that this entire -- ahem, saga played out under their noses without intervention?"

"Oh, they intervened," Rincewind muttered. "They probably would've been happy to see us all on The Wheelchair Ride of Doom."

Vetinari, very briefly, caught Carrot's eyes, then looked away. Somehow he doubted very much indeed that the gods were done with his Watch captain.

Carrot either missed or intentionally ignored the glance. "In fact," he said unhappily, as he looked behind him to the contentedly doodling da Quirm, "they set out a few tasks...."

Before he could get any further, the door flew open. Everyone jumped and spun around to look, except for Vetinari. He merely sat forward a bit, steepled his fingers, and said calmly to the force of nature who'd just stormed in, "Welcome, Sergeant Angua. I suppose I don't need to ask how you found us?"

He was well aware of her tracking skills, but it was meant to be a double entendre. He turned the other half of it on Vimes in a piercing glare. The Commander merely stared back, eyebrows raised, and gave him a "what could I do?" shrug.

Angua, windblown and breathless, looked around her, suddenly overwhelmed by the crowd. She clearly hadn't expected this many people. "I -- ah...."

"Angua!" Carrot exclaimed, reaching toward her, then he noticed the crowd around them too, and blushed as he dropped his hand. "I meant to tell you before...."

"I see you need to catch up on events," Vetinari said smoothly. "Perhaps I should continue this conversation with the wizards for now, and complete the analysis of the flight itself. I have no doubt I'll be further informed on the Horde's confrontation with the gods the next time a bard wanders astray over the Brass Bridge and into the attention of my guards. And perhaps I'll also hear about the... incidental parts played by a wizard, an inventor and a Watchman."

"Ook."

"And a Librarian," Vetinari said, not missing a beat.

Angua stared at Carrot, who was still looking at her as if he wanted to say something of immense importance, but couldn't in this company. Vetinari glanced again at Vimes, attempting to communicate with a look, You may want to escort your Watchmen home to continue their conversation elsewhere....

Sir Samuel Vimes could, on occasion, be very perceptive. "Captain, Sergeant... I believe that means we're back on the clock."

"Indeed," Vetinari murmured. "Now that the city you watch is in no immediate peril, other than that which you face every day...."

Angua gave him an eerily intense look, her eyes bright as the moon and just as unfathomable, before saying, "Sir..." and turning away. Her hand, after its brief salute, had dropped lightly onto Carrot's arm.

Vetinari watched the three members of the City Watch quietly leave the Office, and take a peculiar amount of pressure out with them; it was as if the entire room had let out a sigh. Even the Librarian looked relieved. It took a long moment for the Patrician to push aside the sense that he'd just been under the scrutiny of something almost as primal as the forces they'd been discussing moments before.

And then he sighed, leaned his elbows on the desk, and said, "Before we continue, would anyone else like a banana?"

## continued in chapter 4.... ##