Chapter 6

Sir Samuel Vimes, Duke of Ankh, ruler of the small but powerful kingdom of Nightwatch and late husband of Lady Sybil Deidre Olgivanna Ramkin, had thought that the weirdest thing that could possibly happen to him had already happened. It was a justified assumption, he felt, as his life was already over and shouldn't be able to offer any further surprises.

Since he had died, he'd already been proven wrong in that regard a number of times. Coming here had been weird. Meeting Death had been weird, and this house was pretty high on the list of weird things that ever happened to anyone. But even seeing his own dead body, and living with the grim reaper (in a very wide scaled definition of 'grim' and 'living'), and finding out that every single person's life found room between the covers of a book somewhat paled in the face of being in bed with Havelock, Lord Vetinari.

The very idea would have been enough to make him doubt his sanity any other day. No, scratch that – it would have been enough to make him doubt the sanity of the person who'd suggested it, because that certainly wouldn't have been him. Sybil perhaps, who had funny ideas like that from time to time. And Sam wouldn't have flipped out, like he currently considered doing, no, he would have snorted. Because it was so far out of the realm of the possible that it wouldn't even have been worth a proper laugh.

Now it had been, without warning, catapulted straight into the real world, Vimes felt lost, disoriented, and generally like reality was cheating on him. Fine, a house that was bigger on the inside, used blackness as illumination and made it work, and was surrounded by painted mountains and paths that led nowhere only accounted for a certain value of 'reality'. Still, it was cheating. Whatever it was.

Since his mind couldn't figure out an appropriate reaction, Sam's body took over from him, and five seconds after the door had closed after Death, he fell backwards with a squeak – albeit a quiet one, least Vetinari might wake up, and that would make it worse.

But the patrician didn't stir – not even when Vimes bumped his head against the wall and let out a sharp – but quiet – curse. He didn't look like he would ever stir again, actually. Vimes thought that he looked dead and was reminded that their shared situation, very urgently, required a new vocabulary.

No black-paged dictionary miraculously materialized out of thin air. Instead, Sam at the same moment noticed that the bed wasn't all that wide, remembered what he had read in Vetinari's life-book and wondered why the man had ended lying half on top of him if the house could, apparently, have as many bedrooms as it wanted to.

"What the hell even happened?" he asked the room in general and the furniture in particular. No answer was forthcoming – the only reaction was Vetinari moving slightly, causing Sam to yelp again and nearly fall through the wall.

He didn't get far – partly because the wall proved more solid than his stomach believed in one second of uncertainty, and partly because Vetinari had taken hold of his shirt and seemed not inclined to let go.

He also didn't seem inclined to wake up anytime soon, though Vimes was still certain that the patrician's reflexes were still working well enough to kill him on instinct, should he try to move away. Or touch him, which was making moving or even staying still in this cramped space increasingly difficult. Or breathing. Trapped somewhere between being confused, sympathetic and seriously crept out, Vimes cursed the fact that despite being dead breathing was still a necessity.

Or perhaps he just breathed because he believed he had to. There was an idea. With sleep interrupted and out of reach, he was desperate enough to try.

On the upside, he nearly managed to suffocate himself into unconsciousness.

-

The next morning never came. Vimes, having been torn from sleep after far too short a time, kept staring into the darkness around him, waiting for it to get brighter as the night finally ended and offered an excuse to get out of bed. It was testament to the fact that he really, really needed sleep – his thoughts had fallen back into the world he was used to, ignoring that in this place there was no night and thus no morning to come – and that the room had no windows.

That eventually he did fall asleep, he only noticed for the fact that once his drifting thoughts returned to reality, reality wasn't one hundred percent as he remembered it.

For example, he was warmer than he had been before. And the blanket seemed heavier than before. And, on a side note, Havelock Vetinari was using him as a pillow.

For a few minutes, Sam was laying very, very still, wondering what he could do to wake up properly and restore reality to its traditional setting. It had to be something that didn't involve moving, as moving might wake Vetinari and maybe then, with two of them to acknowledge the situation, reality might be strained beyond what it could bear and shatter around them, or worse get stuck the way it was now.

Eventually, Sam noticed that even while he stayed still as a stone, Vetinari wasn't. It took him a while to realise, for there wasn't much movement to speak of after all. The man was trembling, softly, and every once in a while he would jerk slightly and tighten his hand in Sam's shirt. Daring to open his eyes, Sam gazed down at him in the disturbingly transparent darkness.

Vetinari's face was twisted in something resembling pain, pale and covered in sweat. He appeared to be having a nightmare, and Sam really couldn't say this surprised him. It disturbed him, though – someone like Vetinari didn't have nightmares, because someone like Vetinari had no emotions and wasn't entirely human. Despite everything, Vimes still clung to that belief. The world was much simpler that way.

Burying his face in Sam's shirt, Vetinari whimpered ever so softly, and that belief went out of the window.

Okay, so he was having a nightmare. That was hardly surprising, and really no reason for Vimes to jerk in shock and then freeze in an uncomfortable position that defied gravity, as if Vetinari was going to wake up and kill him the moment he moved. It wasn't even like the late patrician was displaying a particularly violent behaviour right now – in fact, he was hardly moving, or making any noise at all. Very much unlike Sam's son, Sam, who also had nightmares from time to time, and always made sure that the entire world knew.

So, Vetinari was the proof that one could well suffer with dignity. Not that it was very hard to show more dignity than a sleeping one year old living among dragons and Willikins the butler.

It was still a disturbing situation, particularly because it made Vimes feel more sympathy than he had to spare, and the need to do something about it, that might have been born from a lifetime as a policeman (but was more likely a product of living with Sybil).

So the logical step would be to wake Vetinari up – but Sam couldn't ignore the memory that the last time he'd tried that, he'd nearly ended up dead once more. (He began to wonder if there were layers to that state.)

Admittedly, his little son had shown some murderous tendencies too from time to time, but there was a certain difference in height and strength that made his attempts cute and pitiful, as opposed to, for example, creepy and fatal.

Still, even more creepy than that was the idea of calming Vetinari down like he'd calm his child (by taking him in his arms and making soothing noises) and having parts of his body nailed to parts of the furniture in gratitude.

Something had to be done though, because like this Vimes couldn't get back to sleep, he couldn't get up and he couldn't scratch the itch he knew would start somewhere on his body as soon as the realization that both his arms were trapped by either Vetinari's body or between his own and the wall had reached the soles of his feet. He was, in one word, stuck.

So in the end he used the part of his right arm that was not trapped to – very carefully – rub the patrician's back and hope that it worked.

Surprisingly enough, it did.

-

Time had no meaning in this place, so hurry was useless – at least in theory. Death had no feelings, so impatience was not a problem of his – in theory. The end of the world had already begun, so there would have been no worst case scenario to prevent even if the first had not applied. In theory.

Death was feeling uneasy and impatient, because they were running out of time to prevent the worst from happening. It wasn't actually true, but he felt like it was, and blamed it on the connection his realm had to the collapsing world of the living. There was a sense of doom hanging even over this place.

Also, Death was in a bad mood. Being not used to feelings, he found that he quite liked it, which confused him. (He had too little experience with emotions to know that this was not necessarily a contradiction.)

Recently, he had visited a number of gods on the occasion of their ceasing to exist. Gods, like kings, deserved his personal attention, even though he found them annoyingly arrogant. Somehow it seemed inappropriate for them to look down on him, the common little anthropomorphic personification, when he was still very secure in his existence while theirs had just ended. It had to have something to do with most of them having been created from human beliefs and inherited a lot of human traits.

Death sighed, like wind humming through an open grave. He liked troll gods. Troll gods were uncomplicated, and usually too solid to speak.

Dealing with gods was never very pleasant. Usually, however, Death didn't have to do it a lot, because gods, dependant as they were on the fleeting fancies of their followers, were very resilient and only died rarely – and if they did, they first degenerated into a form more likely to be dealt with by the Death of Rats. (Not that Death would let his little helper do these jobs. That would have been impolite.) These days, however, many of the gods and demons of the Disc were erased because all of their believers had died. It were the ones with a small following that went first, but the sheer number of gods showed just how many gods had so far survived with no more than one family of worshippers, usually resident in Ankh-Morpork.

And their sudden demise made sure that the gods died quickly, without a slow fading, in all their godly glory and indignation.

In other words, Death was pissed. Not the "I'll bring down the house with an axe" kind of pissed (that would be I'LL BRING DOWN THE WORLD WITH MY SCYTHE kind of pissed in his case, really), but mildly annoyed and not in the mood for delays.

THEY ARE LATE, his voice rolled through the house, making the walls shake in sympathy with his state of mind.

"Did you even invite them?" the young man sitting at the long table asked. He shifted uncomfortably. Time had no meaning here, and thus he felt thoroughly out of place, and the invisible scowl Death send in his direction obviously didn't help.

Then Death stopped to think. He was an anthropomorphical personification and therefore it was not expected of him to say things clearly. The word 'ominous' would have been written in his DNA if he had any, and beside that, he was Death. The End. Usually his very presence left no room for misinterpretations.

…NO, he said.

"I believe you have been waiting for us," a voice sounded from the doorway. Death looked up to see the two humans enter, neither of them looking as if he was death or dying as far as he could tell. "I apologize for the delay."

Something about the voice confused Death. It sounded perfectly polite, and he wasn't trained enough in dealing with the nuances to understand why it still felt like it wasn't.

"Who's that?" the other human, the one called Samuel Vimes asked and pointed at the table. The young man sitting there stood to greet them.

"My name is Lobsang Ludd," he introduced himself. "I'm-"

"-an unusually talented member of the thief's guild who disappeared a couple of years ago," Vimes finished for him.

"You also happen to be the son on time herself and her heir, which makes you an anthropomorphic personification, even though you grew up as a human – which I believe to be related to your reason for being here," Vetinari added, which earned him a surprised look from everyone in the room able to experience proper surprise.

"You're what now?" asked Vimes.

-

Sam understood little of the following explanation. It was something mysterious that made a lot of sense if one was into that sort of thing. He understood that much and it was enough for him. Still, he eyed the boy Death had apparently invited here with a healthy dose of suspicion. No one who came when Death called could be trusted.

That Vetinari knew who he was didn't surprise Sam at all. It was Vetinari. He knew things. That was his job. And in the last few days he had done a lot of reading.

And if he had skipped a bit of reading and done a bit more sleeping, he might have spared Sam a very embarrassing night. At least he had the decency to be gone when Vimes came fully awake in the metaphorical morning and spare him an equally embarrassing day.

Lobsang, despite being a mystic something or other, wore that expression often seen on the faces of people who talked to the patrician for the first time. Vimes felt inappropriately smug about that.

The young man caught himself quickly, however. He looked at Vimes.

"The surviving Ankh-Morprokians would be relieved to know you're still, in a sense, here. Especially the members of the watch were suffering from a notable decline in motivation after learning of your demise."

"They found my body, then." In the chaos and the flames, Sam hadn't been sure about that.

"The enemy did, actually. Sorry about that. They buried you separately."

Sam frowned. "You mean, separate from all the others?" he asked without much hope.

"I mean in parts."

There was a moment of silence.

"Well," Sam eventually said. "It's a family tradition." It probably shouldn't have shocked him. After all, he'd always thought it wouldn't matter to him what happened to his body after he died. Of course, then he'd never thought he'd ever learn about it.

"As for you, Sir," Lobsang turned to Vetinari. "I'm afraid they never quite found out what happened to you."

"I died," Vetinari friendly informed him.

"Yes, thank you, I figured as much."

"As I take it, you are to help us with the solving of the problem of impending worldwide destruction." Vetinari sat on one of the chairs and watched Lobsang intently over folded hands. "How exactly is that going to happen?"

"And when?" added Vimes, who preferred to stand even as Lobsang returned to his seat. "We've been waiting for ages." His patience was running out. During Death's prolonged absence, Vimes had tried to console himself with the knowledge – if not understanding – that time did not really pass in this place. But regardless of the place it passed for him, and he wanted to do something. Sitting around waiting had never sat well with him, especially if there was something threatening his family and he had the opportunity to crush it under his heel.

ALL PREPARATIONS HAVE BEEN MADE, Death kindly informed them with a voice that for once not only gaped but echoed. YOU CAN START AS SOON AS YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE TO DO.

Vimes quite liked the sound of that.

-tbc

June 06, 2009