Contrary to Vimes' expectation, there was no darkness waiting for him in the dark. In fact, there was nothing, which was, he realised after a second, not exactly true. What surrounded him was that absence of everything. It wasn't, he found, an environment that made him feel good.
There was him, or at least his thoughts. The idea that he might be stuck here for the rest of eternity – a concept that was disturbingly easy to grasp in his current situation – didn't have time to manifest in his brain before the nothing disappeared, but it had been ready to enter his awareness, and he felt its cold hand on the doorknob of his mind even after said mind had become occupied with less abstract and more urgent matters.
Like pain, for example.
It started slowly, more the memory of pain than the actual sensation. After a second, he realised that he had indeed felt this pain before: it was the pain on the spear entering his chest and killing him, almost instantly.
Only this time it wasn't instantly. It happened slowly, as if the blade entered his body centimetre by centimetre. And every centimetre hurt.
Gasping in pain, Vimes looked down and saw nothing. No weapon, no blood. His black shirt didn't stick to his chest.
But he felt it. Felt it killing him, again. Feeling more confusion than anything else, Sam fell to his knees, and for the first time noticed his surroundings.
He was back in the city. And the city looked precisely as it had the last time he'd seen it: Destroyed, burning, and tinted in a deep red that spoke of doom.
"This is the wrong time," he gasped, not really believing that anyone would hear him. He took another step forward and bit his lips when the pain intensified.
Another step, more pain. It was as if he was walking straight into the blade, impaling himself on in. Sam stopped, to catch his breath, but the pain didn't lessen. It didn't intensify either – like him, it had paused.
The flames burned less brightly now. The red veil over the world was thinning.
And Sam knew, out of nowhere, that the pain would leave him if he went back, but that if he did so, he could never turn around again and their mission would fail before it even started. In the direction he had to go, every step could be taken only once.
There was no way of telling how much further he had to go, only that he had to do it. Had to walk into his death again, only this time actively and slowly, as opposed to sudden and almost painless. Sam wasn't quite sure he had signed up for this. Maybe he should be mad at Death and the time-guy for not mentioning this part of their mission – not that it would have changed his decision to come, but it would have been nice to be prepared. Or not. Sam couldn't say if it would have been better to have known, but he'd get angry anyway, he decided. Once he was through with this and no longer distracted by excoriating agony.
Since there was no way to avoid this, Sam though he might as well just throw himself in. After all, the quicker he walked, the quicker it would be over, right? It sounded like a reasonable plan, and so he steeled his resolve and started running.
He managed all of two steps before the piercing pain forced him to his knees with a yelp. Damn it, he could practically feel the freaking blade enter his heart!
Except that his heart didn't stop, and for all his suffering, he didn't really feel like he was dying. Pity, that.
The city looked almost normal again. Hardly any damage, hardly any fire, hardly and redness. Instead it was getting darker. Sam took the most painful breath of his existence so far and stumbled onwards.
The blade went deeper. And killed him. Then it was over.
Breathing hard, Sam opened his eyes and blinked a few times until his vision cleared. He hadn't even realised he'd closed them.
Around him, it was dark. Deep night. It wasn't raining, was the first thing that crossed his mind. The city at night would always be associated with rain for him, as in the memory of his younger years as a too-often drunk member of the nightwatch, it always rained.
It hadn't rained three days ago. It hadn't rained for weeks. This wasn't his memory, or his mind, or his afterlife. This was three days ago, and it was real.
And he was alone.
Free of pain and finally able to think clearly, Sam looked around in renewed interest and rising alarm. Vetinari should be with him, shouldn't he? Sam had assumed that they'd both be spit out in the same place, and no one had claimed differently. Certainly Vetinari had assumed the same thing, or he would have approached Vimes as to the coordination of their further actions.
Or would he? It was Vetinari, after all. Chances where that he'd just let him run through the deserted streets uselessly, simply as a source of amusement. After all, their working relationship had worked like that for the better part of twenty years.
Sam shoved the thought aside. There was a time and a place for doing things just to annoy him, and this was neither. Vetrinari wouldn't play games with him if the city, never mind the entire disk, was at stake.
He'd been spit out, for lack of a better word, in once of the less decayed part of the city. Sam identified it by smell – if it didn't stink, there were a lot if placed this could not be.
He'd been here before. Apart from that, this place had no connection to him whatsoever. He hadn't even died here, which was a great relief – him ending up in the exact place of his demise would have indicated that the same happened to Vetinari, and in that case Sam truly had no chance of ever finding him, even by accident.
It was dark around him and darker in the shadows. Sam wondered, briefly, if someone coming this way would see him, and what would happen if he touched them, but the thought remained just that, as he was all alone. Only one window was dimly lit by the light of a single candle. It was very late then. Sam's sense of time confirmed this: closer to dawn than to dusk.
He used to love this time of night, when the city belonged to him alone. Now it seemed eerie, as if there was a thunderstorm lurking somewhere in the cloudless sky. In less than three days, all this would be in flames, the people of the city would be dead or on the run, and yet no one had the slightest idea of what was to come.
Somewhere in this city, right now, was another, younger Sam Vimes who also had no idea. That Sam Vimes was frantically trying to find out what had happened to Lord Vetinari, and it created a strange sort of harmony that the current Sam Vimes was doing pretty much the same.
And so far he was equally unsuccessful. There was nothing but the almost unnaturally empty street to be seen, the stars in the sky not yet obscured by the inevitable morning fog. While Sam looked around, even the single candle in the window was blown out. It was good that he wasn't superstitious, else it would have felt like a bad omen.
And rightly so. In three days these people would be dead. Except they wouldn't, if Vimes and Vetinari had any say in it.
For their mission to succeed, though, Vimes needed to find Vetinari. He became acutely aware just how much he needed the other man, because Sam Vimes honestly had no idea what to do next. Without him he could only run through the streets, hoping he would eventually stumble over some kind of clue.
It had worked surprisingly often in his life.
It occurred to Sam that the upcoming end of the world due to supernatural intervention was not an every day situation, not even for Death. Ergo, he had not done anything like this before. Ergo, he had no idea what would happen to Vimes and Vitinari but had merely guessed. Ergo, anything could have happened and the possibility that Vetinari had somehow been lost on his way here suddenly seemed very real.
It also occurred to Sam that if he had gone through the experience of getting killed, if not necessarily of dying, in that red haze, then Vetinari, most likely, would too. He swallowed. It would explain why the other man had never made it.
After all, Vimes had been blessed with an almost instantaneous death. He'd been gone before he had time to get over his surprise and begin to register the pain. But even that had been terrible to live through again in slow motion. Vetinari on the other hand had been tortured to death, and Vimes didn't even want to imagine how much strength it would cost him to get through it again.
On the other hand, this was Havelock Vetinari. If there was anyone who had that strength, it was him.
And in the end, if his path wasn't longer than Sam's, the experience would be mercifully short compared to the first time.
Somehow, this observation did nothing to ease the cold knot in Sam's stomach he refused to acknowledge as pity or even worry. He bit his lips and resumed his search.
The darkness surrounding him, even at this hour, could never be so thick that the shadows couldn't be darker. Even with eyes accustomed to the night, Sam couldn't penetrate them. They were, therefore, the obvious place to look in. He did so, and due to Vetinari's dark clothes and hair, nearly fell over the man before he realised he'd found him.
The patrician was lying on the ground, curled into a tight ball, and didn't move. At first Sam thought he was unconscious, but when he touched his shoulder, Vetinari flinched away from his hand with a sound that might have sounded like a whimper had it escaped the throat of anyone else.
Even the brief contact had been enough to tell Vimes that the other man was shaking. His right hand was clawing at the cobblestone, as if he tried to dig his nails into the ground. At a loss, Vimes took his shoulders in an attempt to shake him out of whatever miserable state he was in.
"I need your help," he hissed, more to himself than anyone else, as he dragged Vetinari's skinny form out of the shadow and into the less consuming darkness of the street, as if that would be of any help. "The entire bloody city needs your help. Because frankly, I have no idea where to go next, or what to fight." In response, Vetinari went limp and passed out.
"That's not helping," Sam mumbled while he tried not to panic. In the pale light that seemed to come from out of nowhere and was only available to those whose eyes had been given the chance to grow accustomed to the dark, he saw the blood running out of Vetinari's mouth, and a fit of panic, for a second, became a very tempting option. Sam had suffered no physical damage from the imaginary killing he'd just been subjected to, but maybe Vetinari's experience had been so terrible that his body had been convinced it was, in fact, damaged and dying, once again.
Sam thought, faintly, that there was a certain irony to the fact that it was his hands that were shaking, while Vetinari's were still and clam and cold when he grasped them. The gesture invoked no response whatsoever from the motionless man. Pressing his lips together, a part of his mind already working through possible actions to be taken in the worst-case scenario, he reached out and felt for the patrician's pulse. Before he could find it, however, the patrician reached out and felt for Vimes' hand. In fact, he found it rather quickly. Finding his wrist suddenly crushed in a vice like grip, Sam gave a startled little sound of relief (and terror).
A second passed. And another one. Vetrinari was looking in his direction, but Sam didn't know if he could see him in this darkness. After all, he hadn't lived all his life in the dark streets, but rather in a semi-dark office, lit by a grand total of one candle.
He could probably see him.
The question that remained was: did he recognize him? For if he didn't, Sam better prepared for another lesson in sudden and unpleasant death.
Eventually, the tension left Vetinari's body and the hold on Sam's wrist relaxed, though the fingers holding him didn't let go completely. Sam felt the other's sigh more than he heard it.
"That has been a most unpleasant experience," the patrician said, his voice even, calm and all business. "I do not care at all to repeat it."
"And I don't care to repeat the experience of you trying to throttle me," Sam agreed, shaking his arm for emphasis. Instead if letting go off him, however, Vetinari used him as leverage to pull himself upright, as if that had been his intention all along.
"You are the man with the plan," Vimes pointed out once they were both standing in the dark street. There was a first hint of dawn in the sky, more an idea yet than a visible brightening. For a strange, irrational second, Sam wondered if the sun only rose every day because they expected it to. "Where do we go now?"
In the cover of darkness, Vetinari rubbed his thin wrists. "Right now, the Agathean ships are closing in on Ankh-Morpork," he explained. "It's an entire fleet, carrying one and a half million soldiers. It can't possibly go unnoticed, and if it doesn't go unnoticed, the city won't be unprepared." Vimes wasn't sure in what way that was an answer to his question.
"What can we possibly do against one and a half million soldiers? We don't have one and a half million inhabitants." But the patrician smiled thinly, in a way that made Vimes's hair stand on edge, and didn't answer.
"Besides, as a matter of fact, we didn't notice them, impossible or not," Sam further pointed out, before adding, as an afterthought, "Sir."
"The 'impossible' part of that statement is of much greater significance than you imagine," Vetinari kindly told him. "It's impossible, so we have to make sure it doesn't happen. It is up to us merely to set the world right."
"And it's up to you to give away information I can actually work with." Sam was beginning to get irritated. "Sir."
Even in the weak light he could make out the raised eyebrow. "Is it?"
Sam grinded his teeth. "Do you happen, by any chance, to know where we have to go now, and what to do there? Sir?"
"As a matter of fact, Sir Samuel, I do." With that, Vetinari vanished into the shadow. Cursing under his breath, Sam followed him into the dark and nearly ran into a wall.
-tbc
July 29, 2009