Alice and Johanna edged across the gap, the almost-water of the Cloaca Maxima swirling and eddying forty feet beneath their feet, making the best of the older ropework, testing every piton first and moving in slow careful steps. Above them, the stone work of the Cloaca soared and curved to its apex, perhaps a handred feet above them. Alice felt enervated and purposeful: the extra concentration this drainholing called from her, together with the additional consideration that almost certainly some of the ropes had been tampered with, made her feel confident and at home.
"Elmost there, Ellice!" Johanna called. Alice grinned to herself, remembering the way Joan Sanderson-Reeves had fawned over Emannuelle's "quite charming!" Quirmian accent, but had blanched on being confronted with Johanna's harsh and grating White Howondalandian. Evidently some foreign accents were more acceptable then others to the elocution teacher.
Joan had then continued to get off on the wrong foot with Johanna by delicately offering to do something about the way she spoke Morporkian – "these things can be remedied, dear". To which Johanna had replied "This wes good enough for my ouma. This wes good enough for my mother. It's good enough for my volk! So it hes to be good enough for me! And my grend-opie wes the ferrrst generation of my femmily to speak eny Morporkien ET ELL! Before her, the van der Kaffirboetjes spoke only the old language, der Wondalaans!"
Realising she had wounded the younger woman's national pride, Joan had apologized and withdrawn.
But this hadn't stopped the three younger women gathering protectively round the older, discreetly helping her through those parts of the syllabus they instinctively grasped and which Joan had problems with. There had been a shared awareness that the four of them, if they were to survive at all, had to share their skills and survive together. Thus, Alice, the natural edificeer, took Johanna and Joan on extra rooftop runs to help them pass the course as "adequate". Emmanuelle, the gifted swordswoman, put them through extra classes in blade theory and swordsmanship with a variety of edged weapons, adding a few interesting new techniques for Alice, who had her own proficiency.
Johanna, the frontierswoman, took the three others into the wilderness and taught them how to survive in even the most inhospitable of places. (The women noted that while they'd secured a leave of absence from the Guild, they were still being discreetly trailled by a party of student Assassins and their teacher. Johanna and Alice made a point of raiding their camp by night and stealing a variety of interestingly personal items, getting in and out un-noticed, even leaving notes pinned to the breasts of the sleepers saying "You have been inhumed".)
Joan's unparalleled personal experience came to the fore in classes such as Poisons and Poisoning, Intelligence-Gathering, and Making an Entrance By Stealth. In fact, Mericet himself could barely fault her application and dedication, and graded her with an exemplary 98%.
And down here in the sewers, the passing task had been to climb to the very apex of the sewer and then down again on the other side. It was a 7.0 rated climb: halfway through, hanging by your fingertips and toes at the very highest point, with gravity screaming at every muscle and ligament, it was necessary to perform a full hundred and eighty degree turn, so as to descend feet-first on the other side. Anyone trying a descent head-first would soon realise it was the last thing they'd ever do. Alice had bullied Joan through the turn – the trick was to waste no time and do it as quickly as possible – marveling that even here, Assassins past had stopped to write or carve their names – and talked her through the descent.
It didn't help that a despairing scream was heard to Doppler down towards that unspeakable water, followed by a dull splash. And nothing.
"Keep moving, keep moving!" Alice urged.
"The faster you go, the more you get the benefit of the curve in the wall evening out. You'll feel less strain on shoulders and hips. Everything returns to a kind of normal about… now, with your head up above your shoulders again, where it's meant to be. Now we just climb gently and carefully down. Which you've done a dozen times before."
Even so, Joan was shaking like a leaf at the bottom, and had to be assisted to sit down. It was some minutes before she was able to stand again.
Things weren't helped by Compte de Yoyo announcing that "Mr Everett appears to have failed himself. Both on the climb and on the Emergency Drop. Which means there are now, what, twenty-six of you left, from an initial intake of thirty?"
"At least let us look for him!" Alice heard somebody shout, indignantly.
"If you wish. From just over a hundred feet up he would have impacted with all the force of a man hitting a brick wall. You may retrieve the body and take it back with you to the Guild as an additional field exercise."
Roland Everett had been one of the sub-group of mature entrants known as The Accountants. They were all bank clerks, accountants, or book-keepers who had inhumed for money. Alice had wondered why the Guild had collected so many, until it was revealed that the veteran Guild Bursar, Mr Wimvoe, was considering retirement within the next few years. As Assassin Accountants were few and far between, this had been a chance to recruit a likely successor in good time. Well, one less to compete for the job, thought Alice.
They attended the fourth funeral of one of the Mature Students Class with low morale and heavy hearts. Nearly a sixth of the intake dead, and the year only a quarter gone.
Bartholomew Matkin had died first, a man who on a live Traps and Pitfalls exercise had carelessly stood right in front of a door while opening it. It had been agreed afterwards that his gloves had probably dispersed the poison smeared on the latch, but the trapdoor beneath his feet activated by opening the latch mechanism had been crucial in plummeting him right into the bowels of the City. Retrieval of the body had taken a long time.
Jeremiah Culvert had fallen to his death during a routine Edificeering lesson, victim of a defective safety-rope he had not checked for fraying.
Philip Worsely had breathed in at the wrong moment during the synthesis of Black Agaric during a Poisons lesson. .
But the survivors had been shocked into realizing the price of failure. They were hardening up. Four women and twenty-two men remained from thirty.
Classroom sessions could mean the Mature Students were split up into smaller groups and shared a class with school-age pupils as and where necessary. Here, they were seen as quaint curiosities, except for the brighter students who realized that one day in the immediate future, some of these old fossils would end up teaching them.
For Joan, who still had the burden of being a part-time teacher in the Guild, a strange thing was happening. She'd known for a long time she commanded a kind of respect among the boys. Now the secret was out, that she had on her own account succeeded in eighteen inhumations, it had become a kind of awe. And there was also the other factor…
She'd first seen it when after ten minutes of brisk no-nonsense bullying of Eccleston Minor to get him to produce the correct speech sounds, the boy had burst into tears and stood there blubbing.
Mustering what patience she could, she had asked him if her teaching style was too harsh? Too abrupt, maybe? She had no apologies, because, my lad, if you don't jolly well shape up and get tough, you'll meet an awful lot worse in this school!
"No, miss, it's not that…" the boy had gulped through his tears. "It's just that… you're making me homesick! My nanny was just like you!"
Some things require little explanation. A twelve-year old boy, product of a stern unsympathetic nanny and governess, had just met a woman who conjured up his happy early childhood, which was utterly traumatic in the impersonal and harsh world of the boarding school. And Joan realized, partly to her horror and partly to her gratification, that many of her pupils identified her with the Nanny who'd brought them up in early life.
And now those boys were flocking to her and helping her pass the course, passing on their knowledge, preparing her for difficult parts of the syllabus, because, well, you'll do it for Nanny, won't you? And older boys, who she'd taught to speak like young Morporkian gentlemen if it killed her, were now reaping the benefits of sounding and acting like young men of means, and felt a corresponding debt of gratitude to the teacher who'd helped them fit in. And all of them respected her eighteen confirmed inhumations and were firmly of the opinion that such talent should not be allowed to Fail the test and be lost to the Guild. Those she had taught and who had passed Finals made a point of taking their old teacher to dinner, and telling her all they could about the Test and how to pass it – invaluable knowledge, that she shared later with Emmanuelle and Johanna and Alice, in the suite of rooms they shared in an upper floor at the Guild.
But now, Lord Downey, the new Guild Master, was addressing them at Everett's funeral.
He praised the surviving members of the Senior Class for their ongoing dedication to learning the craft of Assassin, and stressed that after the recent most regrettable incidents in which leadership of the Guild had passed into his hands, (1) there had been no change in policy or strategy. The Guild was committed fiercely to the education of its mature students, and was determined to see as many of them passed what was still a rigorous and demanding selection procedure.
"On four occasions now, you have worked to ensure that a fellow Assassin is not dishonoured or abandoned, even in death. This is most laudable and in the finest traditions of the Guild. You brought back the body, often in difficult and dangerous circumstances. I believe Miss Band and Miss Sanderson-Reeves are to be epecially praised in this respect.
"We do not abandon our dead. There are many reasons for this, but first and foremost is the respect we owe to a friend and colleague. We do not leave our dead to be dishonoured. There are practical reasons too: you leave nothing from which a client of an unsuccessful inhumation may gain information and intelligence, least of all the identity of one who tried to inhume him and failed. After all, we all have friends and family members outside the Guild walls who may then be compromised by those of little or no honour. The dead Assassin will also carry valuable, sometimes secret, tools and equipment, which we take good care to see that nobody outside these walls views, except very briefly in strictly limited circumstances."
Alice nodded: she remembered the auction of Everett's equipment and possessions, which had seemed distasteful to her the first time she witnessed it, but she now recognized fulfilled several useful functions, not the least of which was psychological closure. (2)
"Let me make it very clear" Downey went on, addressing the packed Chapel, "That we have no interest in killing you. We accepted you as potential full Guild members, each of whom has something vital and important to offer the Guild family, and the death of any one of you diminishes us all. We have every interest in seeing you qualify as full, chartered, Assassins.
Let me remind you. Let me make it abundantly clear. The only person who can fail you as an Assassin is you yourself. Conquer that enemy within, and you will qualify. And I look forward, very greatly, to that day. I recruited most of you, after all! Thank you, ladies and gentlemen."
A definite wind of change had blown through the Guild since Dr Cruces had passed into an unspecified sort of insanity and then into death. Alice suspected it was part of a wider wind of change blowing through the City.
Leaving the Chapel, she looked at the new front gates, and the paler cleaner stonework where a troll-shaped hole had been patched up. She remembered the afternoon when the world had turned upside down for the Guild. She and the other ladies had just returned from a training exercise when the explosions and the shouting had happened. Asking a shaken Assassin what was happening, the news that Cruces had been chased up the stairs by Watchmen – in his own Guild? – and some sort of a fight was happening in the Master's Office. It was incredible. Still more so when Vimes, and the mountainous Carrot, had walked slowly and grimly down the stairs lined with Assassins, who included four unheeded female students . She had noted that Carrot was carrying the strange gonne-weapon in one hand, and had the body of a large golden-haired dog slung over his shoulder. They had confronted Downey, who had inexplicably given way… and then the troll had burst in.
Something momentuous had happened.
The Assassin's Guild had been exposed in a plot to assassinate the Patrician. It had failed. Cruces was dead. The Watch had been allowed to walk into Guild premises and conduct arrests – in the Guild. And to get out again. Downey had undergone long and uncomfortable interviews at the palace, to try to rescue what pride and prestige he could.
But in the shifting sands of city politics, the Assassins' guild had lost a lot of face and a lot of power. Vimes' Watch had gained correspondingly.
Alice wondered out loud about walking out of the Guild and signing on as a Watchwoman. After all, they were in the ascendancy now, and none of Alice's inhumations had occurred within Vimes' jurisdiction. The others laughed, and accused her of having dangerous thoughts.
Emmanuelle thoughtfully said she suspected their rooms backed directly onto the Fools' Guild. "Could we escape that way, do you think, or will the Clowns just send us back?"
"Right now, m'dear, they'd kill us. Sergeant Clapstick (3) is not a nice man and his little jokes tend to be terminal!" Joan cautioned.
But they all got to see the oval sword-blade shaped hole in the pillar in the Master's Study, the one that had not been there before, and wondered about Vimes and Carrot…
(1) See "Men At Arms"
(2) British airmen in both world wars auctioned off the kit of friends who'd failed to come back from a mission: the practice is believed to persist in Special Forces, ie the SAS and SBS.
(3) Sergeant Jack Clapstick is head of the Jolly Good Pals, the lethal-force Laugh-Yourself-to-Death Enforcers of the Fools' Guild. Not a nice man. He redefines "Black Humour" in a very terminal way.