16 The Tower

A tall and seemingly impregnable tower is struck by lightning and bursts into flame. Or otherwise explodes and collapses. A man and a woman are seen falling out from a higher window. Ominous black stormclouds are overhead, punctuated by flashes of lightning, and it is clear there is no place to hide.

Sudden disaster, sudden complete change. A place or a person or an institution thought to be ever-present and unchanging suddenly collapses in ruins. What do you do if your health fails or your house burns down, or you're travelling on a bus where you see somebody with a large rucksack fiddling with two wires sticking out of the top…if you lose your job… if your savings go down the toilet when your investments go belly-up.. if you suddenly end up with nothing… disaster and recovery after disaster. Not a nice card. At least it does come with an assurance that things are not likely to get much worse…

Ankh-Morpork is a city with a surprising number of towers.

There are the obvious ones, such as the looming and mysterious Tower of Art which dominates the skyline and can be seen from a surprising distance away. Eight hundred and eighty-eight feet tall and unguessably ancient, the best age the Guild of Archaeologists can put on it is ten thousand years old. Or, from other contrary evidence also discovered on the dig, it was built last Friday, will be built in the next century, and isn't in fact scheduled to be built for another ten thousand years, and is therefore an optical illusion. This is patently ridiculous and had Miss Alice Band throwing her hands up in frustration. Although she has tried to excavate on magical sites before(1) and from an archaeologist's perspective, hates them, because of how ornery they can be.

Many of the redundant towers in the outer and inner City Walls have been taken over for other uses. The former tower of The Keeper of The King's Wardrobe (just next to all the wall-top garderobes which remain in constant use today) (2)is today the Haberdashers' Tower, Guildhouse for the Tailors' and Haberdashers' Guilds.

The Leaning Tower, at the junction of Rime Street and Frost alley, is the former headquarters of the Thieves' Guild. Although the Thieves have long since moved on to the former Law Courts, they maintain this tower as a store-room and strong-point where valuable stolen items are kept under guard.

The Temple of Small Gods has its impressive Gong Tower, and the longer-established Guilds have their various bell and clock towers.

But, dwarfing all of them except for the Tower of Art, is the only lasting legacy of disgraced financier and entrepreneur Reacher Gilt.(3)

Already several hundred feet up on the summit of The Tump, a largely man-made hill in the upper turnwise quadrant of the City, the Tump Tower risers for five hundred feet and is the City's tallest made building (nobody knows who built the Tower of Art, nor why). Built to radical and unproven techniques by the Guild of Architects and using novel and lightweight building material, the tower is home to the Grand Trunk Corporation and liberally festooned with clacks towers and semaphores all the way up its height. It wobbles a lot in a high wind, and the race is on to get it adequately equipped with lightning conductors against the inevitable day it will be hit by lightning.

Nominally adding to the city's office and building space, in practice nobody very much wants to go much beyond about two hundred feet up, and much of the upper floor space remains unoccupied save for crazy clacksmen and a sub-set of Extreme Gamblers who thought living opposite the prone-to-self-immolate Alchemist's Guild was a bit too tame. (This offers them a chance for a set of really exciting bets).

People have also sworn that on nights when the magical flux has been higher than usual, the Tower of Art has twisted round, and somehow glared at the young upstart across the city. Professor Ponder Stibbons has gone "um…" and tried to explain that just as wizards, in the bad old days, retreated to towers and did not brook competition, thus opening Mage Wars of great violence and destruction, it could well be the case that their towers are jealous of each other, too.

Either way – poor construction, the poisoned legacy of Gilt, the clacks towers straining the building's fabric, or the jealousy expressed by the Tower of Art at a parvenu upstart - nobody really thinks the Tump Tower is going to stay up for very much longer.

Commander Vimes of the Watch wants it knocking down, pronto: in his own well-chosen words, if it goes up, there's going to be a Towering Inferno. And what happens, given the ever-growing population in the airspace over the city, if some bloody Klatchian flies a magic carpet right into it? A fully charged magical field hitting an unstable high building… especially one where the stairs are too flimsy to allow Golems to climb and put fires out or rescue people. To Vimes, it is a disaster waiting to happen.

Lord Vetinari is considering the issue. Although scurrilous rumour has it that he has spoken to Miss Smith-Rhodes at the Assassins' Guild, and asked how many completely deniable exothermic alchemy charges it might need to bring down a building by night, during a bad thunderstorm in which …well, we never did get round to finishing installing those lightning conductors, tsk tsk, regrettable, at least it opens the site for a better designed and more stable building. Talking (seemingly) to himself, Vetinari mused: "It was a mercy that nobody was in at the time, and yes, it did collapse in a remarkably even way, straight down, rather than drifting to the side and destroying half of Brookless Lane and Spa Road in one of the most expensive parts of Ankh…" Miss Smith-Rhodes, for her part, is quite interested in the professional challenges presented by the inhumation of an entire building, and has been seen in the Black Library's (De)Construction and Civil (Dis)Engineering section, taking notes and making calculations..

The Tump Tower, already thought of by the people as a part of the city skyline as if it had been there forever, might well become a memory quite soon. Meanwhile, Professor Stibbons has sent the University's Professor of Esoteric Civil Engineering and Eldritch Surveying to the Tower of Art to soothe it, empathise with it, and find out what it wants. Most builders only ever have to do a more prosaic condition survey...

(1) See my story, The Lancre Caper.

(2) Really true. The old Kings really did hang their clothes in the toilet to keep moths at bay. The Keeper of the Wardrobe at Conway Castle in North Wales occupied the tower next to the line of impressive garderobes for this reason.

(3) Not entirely at the start, when he looked legitimate and people were being taken in by him, he made a big public thing about endowing the Assassins' Guild School with sufficient cash to establish a new House of Study. This was eventually called Tump House, the very welcome and generous donation of money arriving at the time the Guild was gearing up to admit girl students. Housemistress Alice Band has been pressing consistently for a change of name to remove the Gilt association. Tump House may be renamed Praying Mantis House, to keep up the tradition of naming the female Houses after animal species with attitudinal females, ie Black Widow, Raven, and Scorpion.