3. Great Balls Of Fire
Erich did come back, and he did look at least slightly less like the wrong end of a beaten mule. His broken wrist was reset and parcelled in a sling, the gash under his hair had been stitched tightly shut, and his black eye had ripened to full-on green and purple splendour to the point of near-blindness. Of course, his suitcase and his wallet were long gone into the vaults of the Thieves' Guild, so he had no spare clothes, but he had done his upper-class best to wash his bloodstained shirt, and luckily Igor had had the foresight (informed by his Morporkian uncle Igor) to sew several gold coins into various hems of his clothes, meaning that at least Erich wasn't indebted to the doctor who treated him - being indebted to a Ankh Morpork doctor tended to lead to them undoing the work they'd done, with a little extra as interest. So as he walked into the Watch house early next morning, the overwhelming effect Lance-constable Salacia received was that of a kind of missing link between Igor and mankind.
But he made it all the way through the swearing-in and almost all the way through Sally's harried tour of the watch house without staggering too much, although a combination of exhaustion and the smell of Watchmen in the locker room proved too much for him, and he had to be provided with reviving coffee in the cafeteria.
Over reviving coffee, both of them became increasingly aware that, despite the obvious similarities, they had surprisingly little in common. Sally was the suave and intelligent Uberwaldian that Erich had always failed to be, while Sally left their little chat with the strong impression that, despite his obvious failings, Erich had a level of naïve integrity previously seen in a very specific group of people, which included a very select few small children and Captain Carrot. He was, in fact, as Commander Vimes put it when she reported back to him, "the very helpful kind of bloody stupid. He's not a long-lost king, is he? Or some kind of hero?"
"I doubt it, sir. He tripped over his own feet leaving the interview room. Plus there's the acne. Long-lost kings almost never get spotty."
"Hmph. Well, you can't put him on the beat in his condition. Send him over to the UU, Lance-Constable. Those bloody wizards have been mucking around again. Might as well get the lad to do something useful on his first day on the force."
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Sally found Erich in the locker room again, holding his breath as he struggled into a battered second-hand breastplate. She watched silently for a few minutes, almost wincing in sympathy, and eventually gave up, walked over and buckled it on, careful of his broken ribs.
"Thank you, Lance-Constable," Erich said sheepishly, bending stiffly to pick up his sword. "I am very much better und I am ready to be valking 'on zer beat'"
"Of course you are," Sally said dryly, and handed him his helmet with an air of resignation. "The sergeant was surprised you even came in today. She said you were pretty beaten up." She glanced at the bruised and broken Erich, and corrected herself. "Are pretty beaten up. Look, the Commander wants you to talk to the wizards."
"Vizards? But Corporal Nobbs said zey vere subtle und qvick to anger, und also zat zey vere a bunch of…I did not know a lot of zer vords he used. Vhy am I goink to talk to zer vizards?"
"Because the Commander wants you to." And because you'll die if you go out on the beat in that condition, hung unspoken in the air. Sally shook her head and gestured for Erich to follow her. "Look, Constable, there've hardly been any inexplicable phenomonas since yesterday, just a lot of what the Commander likes to call bloody weirdness. That usually means the wizards have been messing around."
"But phenomena and veirdness are zer same thing, surely?"
Sally sighed and rolled her eyes. "No. How did you manage to grow up in the Old Country and not learn the difference? Never mind. You know how to get to the Unseen University, right?"
"I think so."
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Three hours later, and lucky not to have suffered a repeat of yesterday's little incident (although, of course, it was part of the unspoken rules of the city that only terminally stupid people attacked members of the Watch without good reason, because if you attacked one then the whole Watch would give you good enough reason), Erich managed to find the main gate of the UU. Ten minutes later, he found the knocker. A bledlow opened the small side door and, after being told earnestly and in heavily-accented Morporkian of Constable von Baronheim's duty, led him to the Archchancellor's Study with not a little bad grace.
Chaos followed in their wake.
As Erich passed by, spells stopped and fireballs fizzled out. Which would have been a lot more of a problem if the Ravening Sock Beast and the Voracious Underwear Monster at which said fireballs were aimed had not collapsed into stacks of dirty laundry at much the same time. Now, of course, the only problem was persuading the suddenly very disinterested wizards and students to clear up their damn underwear instead of edging away. Imminent danger was one thing, imminent labour quite another.
And imminent labour, although he hadn't realised it yet, was about to place its beady eye on Archchancellor Ridcully (or at least on his impressive pointy hat) and bark at him to, as it were, tidy his room if he wanted any pocket money.
And when a wizard is told to metaphorically tidy his room, you can bet imminent danger is not too far behind.
But as of yet, the problem was only just beginning. And the clock started ticking the moment Erich stepped through the door of the Archchancellor's Study, at which point the crossbow bolts Ridcully was shooting at the target on the back of the door completely failed to amusingly strike either Erich or the bledlow.
It was getting worse. Now even the universal laws of humour were failing.
"Yes, what is it?"
The force of Mustrum Ridcully's unexpectedly booming voice sent the nervous Erich literally stumbling back a step. His hands were sweating, and his voice came out a little thin and reedy when he spoke. "Ah, um, I am Constable von Baronheim of zer City Vatch. Um. Commander Vimes sent me to, ah…" He checked the painstaking notes on the inside of his pale wrist. "…um, investigate reports of certain, um, slight disturbances in zer normal runnink of zer city and zer sudden uprise in bloody veirdness. Sir."
Ridcully regarded him from the small window of face between hat and beard. What he saw didn't so much scream first year student as grab him by the over-embellished collar and shake him, yelling teenagerteenagerteenager between sporadic cries for its mother. The spots, the nerves, the greasy hair, the watery eyes, the earnest attitude, the general skinny awkward Erichness of Erich was like the memory of a thousand open days and fresher weeks combined into one person. One person with a City Watch badge.
Ridcully lowered his crossbow.
"Couldn't come himself, then? Don't blame him, busy man, busy man!" he said in a tone of transparent faux-cheeriness that suggested he did blame him and that Commander Vimes would, if he was not polite enough to come in in person in the future, find himself a busy frog, busy frog. "Why's he calling on us about bloody vei…I mean weirdness, then?" Erich's laboured Morporkian was slightly infectious. "Perfectly natural phenomena, nothing to worry about."
"Vell, um, sir, zese are not inexplicable phenomena. Zey are a little bit different." He held out a smudged iconograph hesitantly. Ridcully took it, not hesitantly, and turned it around several times.
"One of those new-fangled thingummys, isn't it? All springs and cogs, Never saw the appeal of it, really, but-"
Erich summoned up the tatters of his confidence and cleared his throat nervously. "Um, except zat it used to be vun of zose old-fangled thinkummys, sir. It had an imp in it, and zen…"
Ridcully ruminated for a moment, an unusual occurrence when quantum magic or a choice between dinner menus was not involved. It all reminded him uncomfortably of the trolleys. Next thing, it would be Things. Ghastly thought, really.
"So if you could, erm, be 'knockink it off', zat vould be-"
The door burst open again, and a boy a few years older than Erich burst in, panting with exertion, eyes wide. "Archchancellor! It's Tomas! He's gone critical again! Outside the…DUCK!"
"Outside the duck? That's-" Ridcully was borne down by the combined weight of the two boys as a colossal fireball vaporised a section of the outside wall and blazed into the room
And then collapsed into a point of heat that went beyond mere white heat, which stopped for a split-second, then winked out.
Ridcully got up and dusted himself off. "Honestly, I don't know why you had to go and do that. I just had my robe cleaned, and after all Tomas is up to you chaps over at the HEM to sort out. There was no call to get so excite…a…ble…"
He followed their horrified gaze. There was a very copious hole in the wall behind the Archchancellor's desk. Well, less a hole, more a copious lack of wall. With singed bits around the edges. Ridcully took the bottle of Bentinck's Very Old Peculiar from his hat and took a sip slightly dazedly. "Well. I think I'd best talk to Tomas, calm him down a bit, that kind of thing."
The Archchancellor swept out of the room, bottle in hand, and the student trailed after him. The awkwardness felt by every visitor when an unavoidable situation occurs gave Erich two options; stay in the study and leaf through the Archchancellor's belongings, or follow them. He didn't know what would happen if you leafed through a wizard's belongings, but he'd rather not find out. He glanced out of the window, where the immaculate lawn they had skirted on the way in was a rather less immaculate mess of blackened earth and oddly-coloured grass, then fled after Ridcully and the young man before they could get too far ahead.
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A/N: Nyeh, even more plot-thickery. Next chapter, we will meet the mysterious Tomas and his fiery balls! NYEH!