5. Curses, Club Sandwiches and Cori Celesti
It was early morning and Sam Vimes was doing two things he didn't especially like. He was sitting at his desk at Pseudopolis Yard, and he was thinking. Hard. It was far too early for either.
The first problem, in his opinion, was allowing vampires to enter the city at will. The Patrician had the philosophy that all potentially productive future citizens should be welcome regardless of race, colour, creed, species, religion and orientation toward blood. It had been a good move with the dwarves, for instance, who hammered away in their workshops, making money for Ankh-Morpork. The trolls had also been useful, doing much of the heavy lifting that had been reserved for only the burliest of citizens.
Vampires, though. As Vimes stared at his notebook on his desk, he couldn't think of one good reason to allow vampires in the city. Sure, there were individuals who contributed to society, but the group as a whole was too secretive for his tastes. No one really knew how many there were in the city. And the Black Ribboners, well, that wasn't very reassuring. The days of Vimes reaching for the bottle were behind him, but he knew as well as a vampire that cravings never left. Maybe seven out of ten ex-alcoholics started drinking again at some point. There was no reason for Vimes to believe the statistic would be any different for vampires trying to abstain from blood.
Get ten of them in a room and seven of them were an extinguished candle away from lunging for your neck.
Vimes rubbed his neck automatically and focused again on his notebook. Last night around midnight, Fred and Nobby found Georgie Potter, age 40, a potter. Tell-tale puncture marks in the area of the jugular vein. No sign of struggle. No sounds, apparently, since the wife…the widow…was in the workshop checking the kiln while the children were sleeping next door. The window in the bedroom was open. The body had been peacefully laid out on the bed before Mrs. Potter found it. Vimes had arrived at the scene a half hour after Nobby left, jarred out of a deep sleep by the pounding of Captain Carrot's fist on the back door of the Ramkin house. There wasn't a drop of blood anywhere in the room. No clues at all.
Mrs. Potter said the family never had contact with vampires.
And so, the investigation reached a dead end before it began. It looked to Vimes like a random murder, though such things were rare in the city and he hated them with a passion. The taking of a life should always have a damn good reason, and even then…
He reached for a new cigar and stuck it between his teeth, though he didn't light it.
The problem now was the population. Morporkians had their fur up and there were already reports of – Vimes looked at a sheet of paper on his desk – four vampires and two people who looked like vampires getting thumped by mobs in various parts of the city. No casualties yet, but the Watch wasn't getting any more popular by breaking up the mobs and defending the vampires. Someone claiming to be from the Committee for the Expulsion of Vampires had sent him a threatening letter copied to the Patrician.
Vimes had watchmen canvassing the streets in the neighborhood where the bodies were found, talking to the neighbors and of course, there were a hundred eye witness accounts of what happened, all of them contradictory. There was nothing solid to go on but the Watch had to do something.
Vimes refused to admit to himself what he really needed. Two things, really.
A vampire who'd help the Watch to access the underground world of his kind.
And worse: Another murder. A sloppier one.
**
Isabella made three visits that day, all of them to people in the teeming city of Ankh-Morpork that few others would go to voluntarily.
First: Hughnon Ridcully, Chief Priest at the Temple of Blind Io.
It wasn't that Hughnon, brother of Mustrum Ridcully, Archchancellor of Unseen University, was an unpleasant person to talk to. It wasn't that he was intimidating, though he was the unofficial spokesman for all of the religions in the city. The problem was that lately, he'd begun wearing a very strange talisman round his neck, one that he insisted had been ordered by Io himself. It encouraged people to make eye contact with Hughnon while speaking to him.
Isabella had a rather delicate stomach and tried not to stare at the talisman while she drank her Triple Whipped Holy Mocha Fizz, a specialty at Io's Best, a café that sat in the shadow of the temple's great statue of Io. The Chief Priest hadn't wanted to speak to her at the temple. Not alone. People might talk.
She had explained her situation in veiled words, using quite a bit of the "I have a friend who…" and Hughnon had nodded, his talisman bobbing like a great brown and white billiard ball at his chest.
"…and so I wondered if any of the gods could have anything to do with it, your reverence," she said.
"Sounds like a good, old-fashioned smiting to me," said Hughnon with a delighted smile on his face.
"A smiting? But…my friend hasn't done anything wrong." Isabella thought a moment. "That she knows of."
Hughnon brushed the froth from his drink from his upper lip. "The Great Io once smote a wayward son by inflicting amnesia on him. He wandered in the desert for forty days and fifty nights."
The talisman ogled Isabella.
"And…what did he do the other ten days?"
"He didn't wander on those. He knew right where he was going. Io isn't completely heartless. He put up a few road signs. Threw in a helpful scorpion, that sort of thing."
"Amnesia," said Isabella. "That means you forget things. Not that you remember things that never happened."
"True." Hughnon drank, his great shaggy brows bowed with concentration. "Some of the gods are tricky. You can't trust Loki behind you with a fork, I can tell you. Maybe one of them raised your friend from the dead and inserted false memories."
"Why would anyone do that?"
Hughnon shrugged. "It's all a game. You know they sit up on Cori Celesti playing games with mortals all the time. The Great Io has been having a good streak lately. He's up fifty dollars as of yesterday." He smiled proudly. The talisman sloshed around in its fluid-filled, glass orb.
Hughnon leaned forward a little. "Your friend hasn't been feeling a little…er…pregnant lately, has she?"
"Your reverence!"
"Well, that's out then. A god could fall in love with her, raise her from the dead, come to her in a shower of rain and so on."
"I don't think so," said Isabella darkly.
"Well, that's all I can think of for now, young lady." He emptied his cup. "I must run. Services in ten minutes. The choir boys steal the candlesticks when they think I'm not looking."
And he left Isabella with her drink and the sensation of being stared at by the massive cow's eye that bounced round his neck in its glass casing.
Second visit: The Ephebian philosopher Vitalites, who happened to be having lunch with the wizard Orangeleaf. This was two birds with one stone for Isabella. The reason they were not pleasant to visit became obvious as soon as the red onions and goat cheese arrived.
"It's possible your friend doesn't exist, " said Vitalites, chewing a black olive meditatively after listening to what Isabella had to say.
"Wouldn't she exist if she's here?" she asked.
"Both of your are way off," said Orangeleaf as he smeared a piece of bread with cream cheese. "She's in a state of existence and non-existence at the same time."
"Nonsense," said Vitalites. "What was your friend's name again?"
"Nancy."
"Yes, there is obviously a world in which the best of all possible Nancies exists. And that world, of course must be the one in which the only Nancy known to exist is, in fact, existing. If Nancy exists in a world that doesn't believe her to exist, then she very probably doesn't exist at all because, as we know, the best of all possible Nancies would have to be one that not only exists, but which others believe to exist."
Vitalites took a satisfied bite of his marinated eggplant.
"Does it count that she believes she exists?"
"Completely irrelevant," said Vitalites, his mouth full.
"Don't listen to the old fool," said the wizard, who looked as close a centenarian as Vitalites. "Obviously, something happened fifteen years ago that was a great turning point in Nancy's life. And this thing, a decision of some kind, spawned a nearly infinite number of other Nancies who all live their own lives and, presumably die, on parallel tracks, one person, but separate, existing in many places in spacetime, but not in others, depending on what occurs in them."
"Nonsense," said Vitalites to his yellow bell pepper.
"How could this happen?" asked Isabella.
"The universe, my dear, is like a club sandwich," said Orangeleaf. He set a plate in front of Isabella that contained a sandwich stacked so high she'd have to slice it in three places horizontally to get a piece that would fit in her mouth. "I should say, universes. There are more of them than we can count. Imagine the lettuce here is the first dimension, the tomato second, ham third – that's usually referred to as our dimension, and the bacon is the fourth, which is usually characterised as time. Many people think these are four separate dimensions, but really, they're all a single sandwich, that's spacetime, that happens to contain four dimensions."
"Is the toothpick there supposed to be anything?" asked Isabella.
"It's to hold spacetime together, my dear. Now, when something happens in one place and seemingly in one moment of time, other universes are born in which other possibilities became the reality. We end up with billions of club sandwiches as a result of one decision made in one moment in space."
"A billion club sandwiches," muttered Vitalites. He rolled his eyes.
"Is it possible for someone to move from one of these…club sandwiches to another?" asked Isabella.
"Oh, I shouldn't think so," said Orangeleaf.
"Ha!" Vitalites raised a triumphant index finger. "You claim infinite universes of possibility but deny the possibility of movement between them. That, my friend, is a paradox."
Orangeleaf wrinkled his brow. "No, it's not. I'm merely acknowledging the need for a vehicle to transport someone from one existence to another. It's only logical. Let's take this zucchini…"
Isabella left them in Vitalites' little garden, convinced that she wasn't going to get anywhere listening to the universe (or universes) explained through the metaphor of whatever the wizard and philosopher happened to be having for lunch.
Third visit: Agatha the witch at her Botanical Shop on Glimmer Street.
Isabella stepped into the cluttered little shop full of jars stuffed with dried plants and animal parts and immediately sneezed.
"Get those devils out of ye, girl, eh? Hehe." It was a bit of presumption for Agatha to call Isabella girl. Agatha looked about twenty.
"You're the owner?" said Isabella doubtfully. For a witch, Agatha had a healthy mouthful of teeth. And a pink jumper that was definitely not standard witch issue.
"That I am," said Agatha. "You're looking for a love philtre, eh? The old charms ain't workin' how they used to, hm? Hehe." She made little jabbing motions at Isabella with her elbow.
"My charms are just fine, thank you," said Isabella. "Try again."
Agatha came out from behind the counter and stroked her chin as she eyed Isabella from head to foot.
"That your original hair colour?"
"Yes."
"Not looking for any henna?"
"No."
"Not hit your time of life yet, eh?"
"How old do you think I am?" Isabella glared.
"May I see your hand, milady?"
Agatha examined Isabella's left palm, muttering unidentifiable words under her breath.
"Hm," she said. "You haven't been cursed lately, have you?"
Isabella looked startled. "Does it look like I've been cursed?"
Agatha took her right palm and compared it to the left.
"Hm," she said again.
"What?"
"Looks like maybe a truth potion'll help."
Despite the unsettling mention of a curse, Isabella was impressed. A truth potion was what she'd come into the shop to buy. Agatha trotted behind the counter, bent to rummage in a cabinet and pulled out a small blue corked pot. After finding a glass vial, she poured some of the contents of the pot inside, corked and waxed it and held it out to Isabella.
"You're in luck; it's two for one today. Two applications, ten dollars."
Isabella had felt bad about borrowing from Sybil. She would've helped with the dragons to even things out if there wasn't a danger of the dragons turning her into charcoal. She laid the coins on the counter.
"How long will the effects last?" she asked.
"It's fast stuff. About ten minutes after drinking it, the truth will start flowing. For good or for ill. It lasts a good hour depending on your weight, if you had a heavy meal beforehand, that kind of thing." Agatha grinned. "There may be a bit of a headache afterward, so I don't recommend driving a carriage or operating heavy machinery, eh? Hehe."
**
Cannibals and vampires have one thing in common. They believe that the consumption of a human, in one case flesh and the other blood, transfers the life force from victim to the consumer. In both cases it's a belief and not inherently true in the physiology of either cannibals or vampires, and it's nothing that could be tested in a laboratory. But most people are aware of the power of belief, its ability to make true what the believer wishes.
The vampires who still consumed human blood were some of the strongest believers on the Disc. They were certain that the vampires who joined the Black Ribbon Movement and shunned human blood had lost their faith. Broken the blood covenant. On another world in another dimension, millions of victims discovered the consequences when a belief splintered, its believers ranged against each other, accusations of loss of faith supported at the edge of a sword.
In Uberwald it was happening too. On one side the Reds, the traditionalists, the blood drinkers. On the other, the Blacks, the reformers, the teetotalers training themselves to sip warm tomato soup or stay content with steak tartar.
Klieg knew what side she was on.
Of course, a change of sides only took a little convincing, a little faith and a lot of self control.
Or, looked at from another perspective, a single drop of human blood.
The buttresses outside of an outcropping on the turnwise side of the Palace served as a comfortable base from which Klieg wandered over stone gargoyles and peeked in windows. She did love to peek. The Winter Palace had three whole pages in the "Vampire's Guide to Ankh-Morpork." Through windows or glass domes she'd already peeked into the Throne Room, the Rats Chamber and the ballroom where apparently the Patrician hadn't had any balls in years.
She was currently peeking into a large office with a snow white carpet on the floor, a large desk, and a tall, slim man in black sitting behind it, his profile to her. He was talking to a deferential young man, probably a clerk. Klieg eased her way along the narrowest of stone sills, confident that she couldn't be seen in the evening light. She didn't wish to and so she wasn't. She watched as the man at the desk shook his head and said something else to the clerk.
Klieg leaned toward the glass.
"Vetinaaaaariiiii," she sang softly.
He got up from his desk and Klieg eased out of sight, then climbed up the stone wall, moving to other windows, peeking for the fun of it.
