And now, she is dressing for the occasion, having been informed that her invigilation beat is a strategic section of the Cloaca Maxima, the main sewer long lost to the rest of the city, but whose existence has been known only to Assassins for getting on for a thousand years.
All other professional and leisure users of the Cloaca have been requested to stay away for the night, she remembers reading. This involved the Guild of Thieves, the Guild of Plumbers and Dunnikin Divers, and Mr Harry King's trade operatives. We wish to remain on good terms with Mr King, as it is likely he will be given the management of the Cloaca if it re-opens for business. It is too indispensable as a quick means of getting around the city unseen. Leisure users, such as the City's new Extreme Sports Society, have also been asked to refrain from edificeering and drainholing tonight. Please discourage any Society members you may encounter, but try not to use lethal force, however tempting. Be diplomatic.
Over warm silk thermal underwear, Alice elected for body-hugging skin tight leather. At room temperature she'd sweat like a hog, but down there in the sewer it was going to be cooler. And it was also waterproof, and washable – all she'd need to do afterwards is have a fire-hose pointed at her. Let's see. Zlobenian-style foot-cloths rather than socks – so much more practical in tight boots. The skintight flexible leather boots with external pockets and sheaths, with the special edificeering soles. As she'd told her pupils, drainholing was exactly like edificeering, only in the opposite direction. (Gods, I wish you'd given me a white ball!) Alice preferred the heights, the sky, the open air, the Over routes: but tonight had given her Under, the manholes, the drains, the sewers, the whole lost Ankh-Morpork underneath the current Ankh-Morpork. Once you were over the smell, it had a certain charm to it, and she was an archaeologist, after all…
Alice added a few more pieces of equipment, ensured the official paperwork was in a watertight and weatherproof pack secured to her hip, then checked the look of her hat and cloak in the full-length mirror. Her purple teaching sash showed up a paler streak against the black. She nodded, then left her room.
Junior school pupils looked at her with awe and respect. Alice curtly bade them back to their rooms and dorms, NOW, and get on with your Prep. Some of the male pupils looked at her with eyes that suggested their bedsheets would be contaminated by morning. She wryly remembered the Guild laundress, Washable Topsy, joking that it seemed right that so many poltergeist incidents happened around young boys – judging by all the ectoplasm we get to see on their bedsheets! This had convulsed the washerwomen having their cigarette break in the alley, and one lady Assassin had laughed too. It came with the turf that she was a masturbation fantasy for pubescent boys: she'd discussed this aspect of pastoral practice with Emmanuelle and Johanna, and the response had been to say nothing and pretend ignorance. ("Mes Dieux! It's a compliment, after all! Why begrudge them?" and Joan Sanderson had wryly added: "When you STOP being a fantasy for the boys, you know you've grown old. You'll all miss it when it stops!")1
Alice swept her cloak around her to permit a better view of her in the skin-tight leathers. She was not an unfair woman, and anyway, if some of the girls were also tempted to night fantasies of a physical sort about their teacher in body-hugging leathers, then, from her point of view, so much the better.
She briefly spoke to the lower-sixth prefects and Captain of Year, who would be supervising Tump House that night in the absence of the teaching staff. They would keep order, ensure the various Years went to bed at the appropriate times, patrol discreetly until midnight, and finally do a head-count in the dorms: any missing pupils, not that she expected them on this night, were to be reported to the Porters' Lodge, as per procedure, and she'd expect some sort of written report on her desk in the morning. Good luck, they have been told you have the authority of teaching staff for the night, any serious disobedience you cannot deal with, take names and report it to me. Thank you.
And then, by discreet stairways and passages, to the Assembly Point for Under-runners.
Grune Di Nivor, a fat, jolly man loved by the pupils and respected by his colleagues, greeted her affably.
"Glad to have you, Alice! First timer on Finals? You'll feel so much better when it's over!"
Alice nodded. It had been a decision made back then, when the first intake of first-year girls had been received, to allow the female teachers to rise up the school with them and mature alongside successive years of female pupils, until those first eleven-year-olds had become the Upper Sixth who were now about to Graduate. For the previous few years, Alice had opted to take a few days' leave about this time rather than hang uselessly about the Guild. That first year had been depressing – excluded from participating in Finals and having the time and leisure to hear all the rumours as they came in, along with the reality the next day, and the empty seats in the Hall for dinner that night.
"I see you're suitably dressed for the occasion!" Nivor added. "You and Johanna both."
Johanna Smith-Rhodes had also adopted the practical skin-tight leather look, her red-gold hair bound up under her hat.
Grouped in the lowest cellar room – at least, the lowest official cellar room – the group of teachers awaited the signal to move off. Nivor, affably, said:
"A word or two of advice, ladies. This is my thirtieth year. You lose a lot of illusions by then. Some jolly surprising people will qualify, ones you privately think never had it in them, or were cert Fails. And some surprising people will Fail, including ones you're fond of or might think of as favourites. You will grieve in the morning. I have. Everyone in this room has. But the drill is to express it privately. Tomorrow morning there'll be parents, families, friends, waiting at the gate. You will be expected to speak to them, whatever the outcome. That requires self-control and self-discipline. I know you've got it and you won't fail the Guild. Have you collected your rats, by the way?"
"Rats?" Alice was taken aback.
"Messenger rats. For emergencies. They'll return to the Palace with messages. The Dark Clerks there – old Guild boys, naturally – will act on the message. Kind permission of Vetinari. He keeps an eye on Finals night, by the way – old boy, friend of the Guild. Not sure what was said, but he had heated words with Downey last week about exam procedure. Some things might not be all they seem this year". Nivor paused.
"Anyway, just do the job which is ahead of you to the best of your not inconsiderable abilities. Remember – we are being monitored too. And don't think for one second you're alone down there!"
Nivor loaded both women with small closed cages in which things could be felt to scamper and chitter. Alice felt her skin go clammy and repulsed a shudder as the older man secured the carrying straps, with a tuneless whistle.
"Black – three!" a voice called. An Assassin stepped forward and was shown to a trapdoor.
"Black – four!" Another Assassin was directed to a door in the far wall, and silently disappeared.
"Ah – we're off, then!" Nivor said. "I'd have preferred the rooftops, but luck of the draw, and all that!"
He left on the call !"Black – seventeen", moving with surprising grace for a man of his bulk and years. And then it was Johanna's call. The two women clasped hands briefly, and then they were off.
Two numbers down from Johanna, Alice was vectored through the same trapdoor, and followed the chalked marks at intervals, always a number and an arrow: she followed the 27's deeper down into the bowels of the city, until a pretty final "27" was seen above an arrow pointing straight down. In fact, a clutch of numbers came together here, all in the twenties. She wasn't surprised to find Johanna waiting for her.
"We might es well trevel together. Our checkpoints are edjacent."
The sound of rushing almost-water had grown louder and nearer. Johanna and Alice co-operated in lifting the large, heavy, cast-iron cover. It moved with surprising ease on recently-oiled hinges, both women noted quietly.
Alice scanned with a discreet lamp. It didn't penetrate the gloom very far. But it did illuminate an iron-runged ladder going down into the darkness. She took a deep breath, and lowered herself into the Stygian.
What if a Traps Team have been here and weakened this ladder as somebody's Emergency Drop? A sane part of her gibbered.
She took control, and carried on descending. A rattling above her told her Johanna was following, swinging the cover back into place as she climbed. Alice, ever-wary for a missing rung or the first signs of the cast-iron failing, not to mention other perils such as Slippall or a poison dart placed just where her questing fingers would find it, moved quickly and surely.
"They wouldn't trep this one, Ellice. It's meant for us, not for the Cendidettes!" Johanna called, reassuringly.
Alice counted rungs. After a hundred and seventy-one, her feet touched firm ground. Eyes now accustomed to the dark and aided by the mandatory patches of luminous fungus always found in dark tunnels, she saw they were on a wide stone walkway, that was still forty feet or so above the almost-water of the Ankh that was flushing through the Cloaca. The archaeologist in her took over.
Of course. This would have been a service path, an engineer's walkway.
She knelt, and her fingertips brushed the ground and the edge.
Post-hole. There would have been a security barrier here once, but it rotted away.
"Let's go!" Johanna called. Alice followed, and they ran to take their stations. Suddenly Johanna paused, raising a warning hand. Alice, coming up next to her, could see why. For about twenty yards in front of them, the walkway had crumbled into the Great Sewer, leaving a void. The wooden bridging sections that would have spanned the gap had been dismantled and stacked neatly on the other side.
"Somebody's Emergency Drop." Alice remarked, drily. They looked down. The turgid waters were lapping against the side of the breach. "I bet the spilled masonry is only a few feet underneath that." So even if the stench doesn't get you, the shock of falling forty feet doesn't do for you, you might still break both legs on the rubble just under the surface and end up drowning.
"But people have been this way before" Johanna pointed out.
Edificeering ropes and pitons had been hammered into the wall so that, with care, the gap might be climbed.
Suspiciously new-looking pitons and edificeering ropes, in among older ones which looked ragged and rusty.
Alice looked at Johanna. The Howondalandian girl suddenly gasped and exclaimed:-
"Remember when we were training? Something like this nearly inhumed you!"
"This might even be the same place!" Alice said, shuddering.
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1 In The Art of Discworld and The Assassins' Yearbook, Kidby draws "stealth archaeologist" Alice Band to look not a million miles away from Roundworld computer game icon Lara Croft – who is very definitely a fantasy for growing boys, judging by some of the, er, unseemlier websites featuring artistic impressions of her.