** Thanks for the reviews everyone. Let the plotting begin!**
V.
The day shift had it hard.
An Assassin almost always wore black, or at least dark colours, and he was because of his profession more comfortable in darkness. The night was an Assassin's playground, cool, mysterious, draping him like a cloak.
June on the island of Khavos averaged temperatures high enough to make the Assassin Kinsey, head of the day shift, shock his comrades by discarding his black suit coat, conducting his surveillance of Vetinari in shirt sleeves and a pair of sandals he'd fashioned out of leather straps from a couple of extra knife scabbards he'd brought along. Kinsey was from an impoverished noble family and had thus acquired a habit of practicality that sometimes shocked gentlemen of means. He cropped short his dark hair contrary to the fashion for shoulder-length locks tied back with ribbon. In Ankh-Morpork he had packed a snack bag for long periods of surveillance rather than abandoning his post at the dinner hour (for Assassins, 4 a.m.) and seeking a restaurant that catered to the guild and always had a quality white chilling on the sideboard. He never visited the seamstresses, insisting there were better things to spend his hard-earned money on. Despite these eccentricities he was well-respected and Downey had appointed him to head up the team of Assassins whose responsibility it was to shadow Hanna and Vetinari during daylight hours. This less desirable shift was made up of middle class merchant's sons or former scholarship boys from the Guild School. The gentlemen of means worked the night shift.
Downey forbade the Assassins to speak to the exiles except when absolutely necessary, but Kinsey had an easy-going nature and greeted Vetinari and Hanna politely in the morning when they left the house. The Assassins rarely entered the villa during the day except to do random searches. Downey ordered these for their annoyance value.
"Good morning, sir," said Kinsey, strolling up to Vetinari, who was wearing a broad-brimmed hat and bending over a flowering bush on an upper terrace of the garden. "Ganglian Butter Rose you've found there, sir."
"Indeed, Mr. Kinsey." Vetinari took a pair of sheers from a cloth bag over his shoulder and snipped a rose at the stem.
"Just for your information, sir, we've all taken antidotes against Ganglian poison," said Kinsey.
"A worthy move." Vetinari held the rose up to the sunlight. "Such an intense yellow. Magnificent in the sunshine, eh?"
"It'll start to fade quickly, sir, if you don't get it in water."
"Thank you for the tip, Mr. Kinsey." Vetinari set the rose in his bag and smiled pleasantly. "I am delighted to see you have taken so well to working in daytime. I know when I was at the Guild, night work was so much more pleasant."
"Guild service day or night," said Kinsey.
"Naturally. Naturally. But still a bit…uncomfortable." Vetinari motioned toward Kinsey's sandals. "A practical adjustment there. Not Guild regulation footwear but practical."
Kinsey looked embarrassed. "I would never wear this kind of thing in Ankh-Morpork, sir. The conditions here are different."
"Ah, yes. We have Ganglian Butter Roses in all their natural beauty growing wild on the slopes of the mountains. We have twelve hours of near cloudless sky. We have..." he shaded his eyes and looked up, "…a hot sun that one might call merciless if we were to attribute human motives to a star. I am thinking twice about my choice of clothing as well." To illustrate, he undid the first few buttons on the collar of his robe.
"It is a bit warm, sir," said Kinsey. He felt that Vetinari's relaxing of the dress code allowed him to loosen his tie.
"At least," said Vetinari, "you have the consolation of extra pay over your night-working colleagues for enduring the unpleasantness of the day shift. I'm sure it makes the unfortunate conditions here a tad more bearable. Ah! I do believe I've spotted a Starlitz. This garden is truly marvellous, Mr. Kinsey."
He shouldered his bag and continued his stroll through the garden, stopping now and again to admire a bloom.
**
The sea was at its mildest in the evening, when the waves took more gentle tumbles over the black islands of rock that acted as breakers further out from the coast.
It was the best time to swim. Hanna floated on her back and stared up at the starry sky. It was a bigger sky than she had ever seen. Most of her life was spent in Ankh-Morpork where the sky was lit up by a million candles, lanterns and localized fires and the next horizon was probably a Klatchian take away. There were no horizons in the city. The few sea voyages she had taken were spent on deck staring at the place where sky and water met. The edge of the world.
She turned over and started swimming toward the shallows, letting the incoming tide pick her up and carry her in. When she could finally stand up, the bathing suit she'd found in her bedroom wardrobe hung off her body like flabs of extra skin. Some Ankh lady had left it, a lady with substantially more to her than Hanna. It extended from her shoulders to her knees and was striped. Hanna hated stripes. She was buttering up the housekeeper with gold in hopes she'd sew something more Hanna's style.
The wind picked up, the temperature a good fifteen degrees cooler than in daytime. Hanna shivered.
"Miss Stein!"
Townsend, head of the night shift Assassins, was up the beach, a towel over his arm. She waved at him, crossed the coarse sand carefully and took the towel with a smile.
"How cold it's become, Mr. Townsend!" She wrapped the towel around her and rubbed it vigorously back and forth. Her hand still ached when she moved her fingers but she was healing quickly.
Townsend was a gentleman and thus made a point of not appearing to be looking anywhere near Hanna's bare legs. His pale hair seemed to glow in the starlight. Hanna wondered how practical that was for an Assassin.
"I am so, so sorry," she said.
"Pardon?"
"You're not here to watch me swim or to fetch towels. My goodness, you're an Assassin. Nil mortifi, sine lucre."
"I am not doing volunteer work." Townsend offered her a cigarette, which she took. As a seamstress she had found social smoking to be a useful talent.
They smoked together for a while.
"I don't know if I could do it under the same circumstances," said Hanna.
"I'm sorry?"
"I'm a seamstress. Nil volupti, sine lucre. No play until you pay. No pay unless there's play of some kind. You know what I mean, Mr. Townsend. You can't pay a seamstress and expect her to serve drinks at a pub. That isn't what she's trained to do." She took a drag of the cigarette. "That's why I'm sorry. For all of you, really. Guild Assassins unable to practice your profession here."
Townsend smiled. "We will if the opportunity arises."
"I know that." Hanna smiled with him. "Believe me, I hope it doesn't. My best years are behind me but I'm not retiring yet."
"I assumed you were getting paid to be here."
"I'm charging Lord Vetinari double my contract rates. On paper anyway. He doesn't have any money at the moment." She sighed. "I'm promised plenty of lucre, but there's no volupti going on these days. I hope that'll change once his lordship adjusts to exile."
"We still have to be sure you stay apart nights."
"Then at some point the day shift will get a show."
Townsend smirked.
"At least that'll be something, won't it?" said Hanna. "It's not like there's anything else to see on this bloody island. Thank goodness I'm getting something extra for the conditions here. No shops, no theaters, no restaurants. It's disgraceful. You won't have to inhume me, Mr. Townsend; I'll be dead of boredom by next week."
After a wish good night, Hanna continued to smoke as she walked back up to the villa. Townsend followed at a distance, aware that somewhere invisible in the foliage were other Assassins, the part of the night shift not assigned to watch the house to be sure Vetinari didn't leave it. Those assigned to Hanna had of course been watching.
And listening.
**
The Thieves in the know called it Breaking and Entering.
There had always been some version of this in Ankh-Morpork, even after Lord Vetinari legalized the Thieves Guild and the men previously used to dank dens got themselves respectable houses and a few servants and advanced the novel idea of offering citizens the chance to purchase the right not to be burgled. As long as freelancers were kept in line, the system worked. People paid up and many a thief found himself with a satisfyingly expanding waistline.
It wouldn't do to disturb a good thing, so Mr. Gloss came up with an alternative.
In Breaking and Entering, the Thief chose a dark, still night to put a crowbar to a cellar door or back gate of a random house in Ankh. Perhaps a window was quietly broken, a lock silently sawed. That was the Breaking part.
The Thief entered the house, looked around and – this was the important bit – didn't steal anything. This was the Entering.
After a short breather, the Thief slipped away, empty handed.
The interesting thing was, when the servants of a lord or lady discovered a sawed lock or broken window, they suspected each other of staging it as a cover up for their own dishonest acts. The master and mistress suspected them too. There was a general search of the servants quarters and a mad search to discover what exactly had been stolen. It had to be something. Nobody broke into a house in order not to steal.
It happened at the house of Lord Rust. The Selachiis summarily fired their entire household staff. Lord Venturi bought a pit bull. Even the Downey family villa was not immune.
When Ankh-Morpork's upper class discovered that the Breaking and Entering appeared to be a trend, they took the business to Downey. Downey turned it over to the Palace Guard, which turned it over to what was left of the Watch. Captain Carrot, who Vimes had urged to stay on, did a thorough investigation with a couple of his best men and concluded that the houses had not been burgled by a person or persons unknown. There wasn't much more he could do. He was told not to. By Vimes.
Inquiries the Palace made to the Thieves Guild received the following answer: Breaking and Entering without Thieving is out of the purview of the Guild.
**
Rufus Drumknott sat in a rented attic room on Cheapside, a stack of papers in front of him. He had been Vetinari's head clerk, a job that required a good deal of quickness, patience and savvy. The healthy competition among clerks at the Palace also meant that Drumknott without his master was a man without allies.
Some time ago, Vetinari had advised him: "Consult the Seamstresses if you ever need a helping hand."
It wasn't hard for Drumknott to ascertain if Vetinari was being ironic. He almost always was. But after the coup, Drumknott had quickly contacted Mrs. Palm and declared himself at her service.
There was a little wooden desk in the room, two chairs and two small beds. A stove would allow for coal heat in the winter, but Drumknott assumed he wouldn't be there long enough to use it.
Leonard of Quirm had been told this but he still spent a good part of his day kneeling in front of the stove with the box of wire, springs, tools and bits of metal he'd managed to secure before his flight from his attic workshop at the Palace. He insisted he could transform the inefficient pot-belly stove into a device that, as far as Drumknott could follow, would produce energy by splitting thaums. The clerk didn't think it a good idea but the project kept Leonard occupied.
At the table, Drumknott slowly unrolled a new message from Vimes, read it quickly, and smiled. A stocking foot rubbed the stomach of Wuffles, Vetinari's terrier, who was used to sleeping under Vetinari's desk at the Oblong Office. One desk was as good as another. He snored contentedly in the bed Drumknott had fashioned out of a paper box and a blanket.
Drumknott had taken a stack of files from the Palace that his lordship had instructed him to guard should anything "inconvenient" happen. One was labelled 7956a. Most of the files had numbers on the label. Only he and Vetinari knew the code.
He glanced through the papers in 7956a. Downey's name showed up on almost every page. One paper Drumknott lingered on, then took out, laying it separate on the desktop. He readied a fresh sheet of fine paper, inked a pen, examined the paper from the file very closely, and began to write. Every few seconds he paused to look at the paper. He wrote very, very carefully.
The note from Vimes curled itself back up into a tube by the ink pot. It said several things, scuttlebutt from the streets gathered by watchmen out of work because of their species or loyalty to Vimes. Only one part interested Drumknott.
Detritus says troll community uneasy.
Ex-Watch Sergeant Detritus was a troll. Drumknott didn't know him personally but he was still a bit sorry that he'd have to upset the sergeant and his people even more.