Chapter Text
Sir Samuel Vimes, Commander of the City Watch and the Duke of Ankh was furious.
This was not an altogether unprecedented state of affairs.
The event that caused it was similarly not exactly unheard of either, something that definitely added an extra log to the inferno of the Fury currently raging in the Vimes furnace.
The rest of the logs were the fact he was three days into a five day, highly diplomatic shellfish trade event he'd been forced to participate in, the fact that no matter how many times he'd spilt Genuan Lobster Bisque down his ducal thighs Sybil always seemed to have a spare set ready, the fact that it was currently the wrong side of three in the morning and most egregiously-
"What do you mean he's been missing for six hours and you haven't informed the Watch until now, the man schedules his blinks."
Rufus Drumknott, personal secretary to lord Vetinari and the current recipient of the Fury withstood it valiantly.
"Patrician's orders."
"Just what the hell does that mean? That's never been a rule before."
"I was supposed to wait for twelve hours," said Drumknott, voice grave as if admitting to some grand sin.
The little man looked so haggard at the idea of unpunctuality that Vimes's anger subsided a bit. Besides, it wasn't his fault, it was that damned bastard -
"Hold on, every single nob's at the damn shrimp conference this week, I've personally seen him at the head table tonight, menacing people over crab canapes."
"The Quirm-Genua-Ankh Morpork Marine Invertebrate Trade Alliance Symposium, your grace. That was Charlie."
Vimes mind flickered briefly to patrician's body double who, while uncannily similar physically, had mentally more in common with certain softer species of turnip that could achieve spontaneous alcohol fermentation.
"Charlie? But that man's a total-"
"He got the glaring down now, guests tend to stay away when he's glaring."
Vimes groaned inwardly as the situation staunchly refused all his efforts to become any less troublesome on its own.
"Alright, I'll mobilize the Watch, we'll have the city combed before he has to do any actual speaking."
"I'm sorry sir, by patrician's orders, if in the event of disappearance he hasn't reappeared within the initial 12 hours , there's to be no direct Watch mobilization for at least additional 12 hours after any incident pertaining to results of any hostile external plots involving one Havelock Vetinari [see itemized schedule of active internal ¹ plots and non hostile external plots in section 89/3/f for reference] while the The Quirm-Genua-Ankh Morpork Marine Invertebrate Trade Alliance Symposium is in progress ."
Drumknott's secretarial senses sensed the question before it was even fully formed.
"There were no scheduled plots for this exact time period."
Vimes groaned outwardly.
"What am I supposed to do, personally go door to door asking if anyone's been kidnapping any patricians lately?"
"Those are the orders I've been given," repeated Drumknott firmly, clutching his notepad like a shield.
"This is a goddamn joke, I'll have him arrested for obstruction of justice."
"I sincerely hope you get the chance to, your grace."
***
In the end he did not mobilize the watch. If there was something to be said for Lord Vetinari, it was that he rarely did anything without a good reason and he surely had to have a goddamn amazing reason for this. Was Vetinari suspecting the watch had been compromised somehow? Was whoever was behind the plot a new recruit? It might've even been an old one, for all Vimes knew. So many new faces, so many new watch houses. It would've been nice to know these things in advance, but of course the Bastard must've viewed actually providing him with any useful information as unsporting somehow.
He did mobilize what he considered to be his core team, on grounds that at some point you had to trust someone . There was only so much of your own back you could watch before your neck gave out.
Carrot has taken the alleyways, Angua the city outskirts, Cherry was unobtrusively sampling half the palace and Detritus was checking in with the gargoyles. He'd also sent Colon and Nobby out on patrol without any specific instructions, trusting their primordial watchman instincts will surely lead them to some assortment of clues.
He delegated searching the city’s sprawling underground maze to himself, mostly due to the ancient evil entity in his mind that gave him night vision. He didn't like it, but if he had to use an ancient evil entity to find another evil entity of around his age, so be it.
He'd still lit his regulation lantern. It truthfully didn't help at all, in fact the stark white glow of the candle drowned out some of the detail allowed by the menacing green filter of Summoning Dark. But it was the principle of things that counted here. No way in hell was he crawling through pitch darkness without a light source like some sort of a cave creature.
***
Some six hours later, Commander Vimes was crawling through pitch darkness, staunchly denying any cave creature allegations to a fleeting audience of mostly disinterested rats that scuttled past without casting all that much judgment in the first place. Watch lanterns were made to withstand heavy rainfall from any direction aside from straight up ² , but the pervasive humidity of Ankh Morpork underworks made the wick start smoldering almost immediately and he'd nearly ran out of matches and completely ran out of patience some five hours ago.
At least the ducal thighs would currently need a whole team of art restorers and a couple of very ambitious archeologists to make them presentable again.
He grit his teeth when the next suspicious cavern once again failed to contain any tyrants.
The trouble with Vetinari was that while he spent most of his time being annoyingly infallible, obnoxiously all-knowing and irritatingly five steps ahead of everyone, he then had the gall to bleed just as well as anyone off the street and tended to barely skirt death on a monthly basis. The bastard.
What the hell did he expect Vimes to do? Stumble around the city on an off chance he stumbled into the exact right plot ³ ? He rounded the next ancient corner, giving the crumbling masonry a half hearted punch.
Even if he was here, in the unending maze of tunnels, caverns, mines and abandoned waterways, it would be a real one-in-a-million chance if he actually found the goddam-
"Ah, Vimes."
Vimes recoiled so hard his lantern slipped from his hands and spun on the floor.
There, in the ancient, sickly green vision of the Summoning Dark was ᴉɹɐuᴉʇǝΛ pɹo˥. He angled his head until it became Lord Vetinari.
There was a tiny, eternally suspicious part of Vimes, who, upon seeing Patrician hanging upside down from the ceiling in a dark cavern under his palace, immediately thought 'I knew it!' and began looking for a suitably sharp piece of wood.
The rest of Vimes told it to shut up.
If nothing else, vampires rarely chained and handcuffed themselves to the ceiling ⁴.
"Sir?" he asked, instead, figuring it was as good a question as any.
The man's eyes zoned on his voice.
"I thought I heard sounds of your oh so distinctive plaster-focused violence coming down the caverns, commander. I don't suppose you have a light on you?"
Vimes fumbled with the remaining few matches and somehow managed to re-light the lantern without it going out again. The added color vision proved it was indeed Lord Vetinari, seemingly alive and in one piece, if a bit damp and hanging some six feet from the floor. He did look even thinner than normal and it took Vimes a moment or two to figure out it was just because he'd been missing his outer robes of office. Most probably to remove at least a good chunk of the man’s extensive hidden dagger collection in one go, less likely to spare him the indignity of looking like a wind-turned umbrella.
In his unfortunately sizeable experience, most kidnapping victims led with 'Oh thank gods you've found me' or 'Quick, before they come back!' or in some rare cases 'What's all this then, can't a man have some privacy?'.
Patrician gazed at him with a slightly bored and uninvolved gaze of someone waiting for a cab with just enough on their mind to not consider it a terrible nuisance.
Vimes cleared his throat.
"Fancy meeting you down here, sir, any idea how you got into this situation?"
"Yes."
"And would you consider sharing it with the watch?"
“No, I shouldn’t think so," replied Vetinari, conversationally.
“Sir,” said Vimes, with a tone that bordered on insubordination. “It would be so very helpful to know just who or what’s going to stab me in the back while I’m getting you out of here."
"Consider your back safe, your grace, my captors left hours ago and I know for a fact they're not coming back."
There was an abrupt gear shift in Vimes’s brain as the situation instantly went from amusing if a bit obnoxious to potentially lethal.
"Hours ago- Fuck, how long have they kept you here?" he rasped, looking for anything climbable to get the man down immediately.
Hanging upside down used to be a popular form of public and eventually capital punishment during the bad old years of lord Winder's reign. It looked silly at first and it was often used only for an hour or so, to humiliate a prisoner, but at some point the body simply refused to stay alive and drowned in its own blood. There was something about a swollen upside down corpse that had kept all but the most jaded gangs of children from throwing sticks at it.
Vetinari gave that a brief thought.
"Has it rained?"
Vimes'a brain stumbled over what seemed like a complete non sequitur.
"Er-Not since yesterday."
"Twelve hours and forty-three minutes then, give or take a minute."
"Fuck, how on disc did you-"
"I've been using a droplet based timekeeping system, an old Ephebian trick. Heavy rainfall might've disturbed the consistency of drip rate after my initial calibration. Despite the relative stability of groundwater levels, there might of course still be some minor dilatation due to drying, ergo what I hope is an acceptable margin of error."
"I don't care about the godsdamn timetable, how are you alive?"
"Oh, that," said the patrician, using a tone that made it clear he considered this a mere detail he was now annoyed was under review.
Vimes watched as Vetinari, suddenly taunt like a prima ballerina, simply raised his torso until it was almost parallel with his legs, held the pose for a few seconds, then gracefully unfolded back down, body barely swinging out of its vertical axis.
"Quite simple."
Vimes's abdomen ached with both sympathy and definite knowledge it could absolutely not pull this off on anything steeper than flat ground.
"I've timed myself to invert once every ten minutes to avoid blood pooling and minimize stroke risk."
"I see you have it all figured out, sir," Vimes said, numbly.
The man tutted. "Yes, I'm afraid as far as slow and painful death within hours goes, this one has been a bit of a wash."
“Sir.” said Vimes, who felt the situation was getting away from him. Perhaps he was the weird one here for not expecting their daily meeting to be in a dank underground catacomb and upside down.
His gaze instinctively rose to focus on the usual spot a foot and six inches above patrician's gaze, then recoiled in betrayal when it realized the man's current spatial configuration meant the usually safe spot now contained even more Vetinari.
"The only thing I can commend them on is not simply binding my wrists with rope or, god forbid, watch regulation handcuffs."
Vimes’s professional pride momentarily overcame the situation.
“And just what’s wrong with watch regulation handcuffs?”
Lord Vetinari's eyebrows rose (or more accurately; fell) in shock. "My apologies commander, are they perhaps a fun, if a bit casual motor exercise to enrich the last few seconds of some unlicensed thief's life before you hand them over to the guild?"
He interrupted Vimes before he could reply properly.
"I'm glad to see your enthusiasm for product design, but I think further review of your no doubt excellent equipment catalog can wait until our next, more official meeting."
'Get me the fuck down already.' went unsaid, but not un-implied.
Vimes returned a look that said 'You could've just led with that.'
Vetinari countered with one that said simply 'Nevertheless.' which Vimes always found he couldn't quite argue with.
"Er-"
"Getting my hands free should suffice, I have a lockpick in my left boot, if you've forgotten yours at the station."
Vimes briefly thought of denying it, but it's been a long night containing more patricians that he'd ever deemed necessary. He instead wordlessly pulled out Mr Boggis's Mix and Match Titanium Tip 20 Piece Set For the Plucky Professional (Licensed Use Only) 8 $AM and moved behind the man's back where his hands were bound.
He had to admit the cuffs were a grade above the regulation stuff, no finicky chains, no conveniently exposed clasps, just one solid piece of steel with an inbuilt lock, very much useless to struggle against. They didn't stand a chance against Mr Boggis's special and a bastard with 5 minutes to spare, but then again you could unlock the watch set with a slightly undercooked noodle and even that only if you considered just pulling them apart as unsporting.
A hiss escaped him when the iron slabs fell apart.
Even in the monochrome green of his night vision the handcuff prints on patrician's thin wrists looked red and angry. Someone did struggle. He could hazard a guess the ankles fared way worse.
"Sir, perhaps I can find some kind of a ladder around and help you get down instead?"
"Quite unnecessary, we should aim for speed."
Lotd Vetinari righted himself back up with cat-like grace, retrieved his own pin, unlocked the shackles at his ankles with several fluid, serpent-like moves, stuck the landing perfectly like a trained gymnast and then immediately crumpled to the ground, a movement that could only be described distinctly like a sack.
"That was very fast, sir," commented Vimes, feeling only slightly guilty for not catching him.
"A simple issue of insufficient blood flow, it should resolve itself momentarily." There was a twinge of annoyance in patrician's voice, but he did allow Vimes to haul him back up.
Vimes didn't miss the barely perceptible hiss of pain and a slight stumble when the man's feet made contact with the floor, which did make him feel significantly guiltier. Like hell it was just blood flow! He readjusted Vetinari to take on more of his weight, grumbling under his breath.
"Why do I always do what , commander?"
Goddamn the man and his assassin hearing.
Normally he’d simply act stupid his way out of it, but his patience was currently more worn out than the ducal thighs.
"Well sir, I was just thinking about how it's generally seen as beneficial to not withhold crucial case information and underplay your injuries just to recreationally fuck with people's minds at 9 in the morning?"
"Sir Samuel, do you honestly think I'd risk the safety of our city as well as my own life just to, as you so succinctly put it, 'fuck with you'? Perhaps for my own, personal amusement?"
There was a certain familiar tilt to his voice, one which over the years of their working relationship Vimes stopped interpreting as a threat and started realizing was a challenge. In most other situations, especially those that involved considerably less hours spent wading through the city’s bowels, he’d snap back with a barb that similarly at this point contained mostly just the aesthetic shell of animosity. As it was, he gave it the bitter, dry snort it deserved.
They’ve made their way along the ancient corridors in silence.
Silence stretched.
Silence stretched further.
Silence performed a 20 piece gymnastics routine with several splits.
"Apologies, Commander, I’ll admit I did try to simply dislocate my way out of the shackles at first. An unfortunate tactic, the consequences of which have been slowly made worse by the length of my containment.”
Vimes made a noise which contained a pinch of sympathy and a generous heap of surprise. The last time Patrician had apologized for anything it’d been used as a key evidence to prove he’d been replaced with a body double.
He shifted his hold on the man once again, which was getting increasingly harder considering the Vetinari was a head⁵ taller than him.
It would've been easier to just carry him, which was out of the question. Well he had done it before, when Vetinari had been shot, but that was just so he could get him away from the second bullet. And during the arsenic case, he’d found the man lying unconscious on the floor for gods knows how long, so simply moving him to a bed was a no-brainer. That was all besides the point. He just couldn't go around carrying fully conscious, non-bleeding tyrants, there was bound to be a rule about it somewhere.
He risked a side glance at the tyrant in question. Vetinari was watching him with silent amusement that Vimes thought was quite unfair coming from someone who he was at least reasonably sure did not have night vision.
"it took you 27 minutes to admit you fucked up your ankles, sir? He said, instead.
"27 minutes, Vimes?"
"Ephebian water trick."
It was rare to see lord Vetinari crack a smile without any effort to hide it. Perhaps he thought the dark was doing his job for him.
"Since you're in such a sharing mood, sir, you wouldn't perhaps consider telling me just who-”
It was at this moment that Vimes ran face first into a wall.
"What the.."
He looked around for the offending structure.
There was nothing but thin air in front of him.
He tapped the air. It made a definite wall sound.
Behind him, Lord Vetinari let out a resigned sigh and carefully lowered himself to sit on a piece of a fallen pillar.
"I think you'll find, your grace, that there's one just behind us as well."
"What the hell? Did the damn wizards open another dungeon dimension?"
"No, no dungeon dimensions this time commander, something much, much worse than that."
There was torchlight flickering from the vast corridor ahead. Figures walked out of it, ghostly pale and struggling to advance against heavy wind. One was walking down a non-existent flight of stairs.
Lord Vetinari's face was an uncharacteristically open mask of disgust.
"Mimes."
To be Continued...
¹ Lord Havelock Vetinari was a big proponent of occasionally plotting against himself, he felt it kept the standards up and gave others something to strive for.
² While Ankh Morpork often experienced rain that was less falling and more stagnating, the elusive upwards rain had only appeared once in recorded history and was a consequence of good old fashioned country wisdom and a misprinted almanac.
³ The likelihood of randomly stumbling into just any given plot in Ankh Morpork is of course significantly higher and has been subject of a thorough and unfortunately very literal research paper which ended with 846 civilians, 155 secret society members and one very irate ape all injured by bricks thrown with scientific randomness as well as one thoroughly mauled researcher.
⁴ While irrelevant to the story, this was not entirely true. Unbeknownst to Vimes, handcuffing yourself to the ceiling had become a very popular and completely ineffectual crash-cleanse fad for recent Black Ribboners who wanted to show off their true dedication to the cause. The logic behind it was bulletproof, utterly false and has made certain community members who sold special fast-draining-teeth-caps and un-death proof handcuffs extremely rich. Lady Margolotta was aware of the grift, but let it slide, as she thought it taught humility and was objectively very funny.
⁵ Not necessarily a human’s head.