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Ankh-Morpork rarely had summers like this, when the sky was improbably blue and the shadows might have been etched in ink for how sharp they were. It had finally become too hot for Samuel Vimes to pace while he read. He resorted to sitting with a wet cloth on the back of his neck, working his way through a six month backlog of reports. The words on his officers' reports began to blend and morph into little ants marching all over the page. But he was nothing if not determined, after a lifetime of wrangling the written word into submission. Join the Watch, they said, you won't need to read much in the Watch...
After an hour staring at Angua's spidery handwriting, even Vimes had to admit this was going nowhere. He rubbed at his eyes. His mouth stank of stale coffee.
What he really needed now was... a chase. Something to get him out of the Watch House.
He flipped through his notebook. The murder on Endless Street was the latest frustration of the week. Angua had nicked the bastard that everyone was sure had done it, who had all the right relationships with poor Ellie Pathfinder, who had already punched an officer once, but pointed out that he couldn't have been there at the right time, and besides, what was their proof? The infuriating thing was, he was at least partially right. They didn't have proof. Because the Watch had to be accountable. Because otherwise, it was nothing more than rough music, and the Watch would be no better than a mob.
He chewed on his pencil stub. The man had left a dwarf restaurant on Brookless Lane, ensuring the staff remembered him by leaving a tip, and given the connecting street Chrononhotonthologos Street was, that day, unavailable (blame the wizards). He would have taken an hour on foot - or half that by carriage - to get from Endless Street to the restaurant. Either he'd taken a carriage, which were vanishingly rare around the area, or he hadn't done it, or...
An idea rattled around in the tangled ball of string that was Vimes's brain, and he scratched at his stubble for a while, coaxing it out from behind the other competing, irrelevant trains of thought. Gently, gently now...
Vimes thought he knew every inch of his city, until Carrot came along and one-upped his game by getting to know basically everyone by first name. But he knew he was damn good at all the little shortcuts, knowing what was accessible by roof and which underground only, and most importantly at which shops one could get bacon and burnt crunchy bits discreetly without Lady Sybil getting wind of it.
Talking with officers of a more gnomish persuasion suggested that there were, in fact, more underground shortcuts than he had ever accounted for, especially in the neighbourhood. He'd had to clarify that this had to be usable by an average human man, and while it trimmed the list of viable routes, that left one promising one.
That was how Vimes found himself being a right suspicious bastard on The Tump, joining all the other suspicious bastards-in-training from the nearby Assassin's Guild house. He hoped he was a bit more discreet than the student was trying to blend in to the shadows of a tavern, wearing all black, in direct noon sun. Needless to say, this was not fantastically successful.
He'd written 'old tavern - cellar entrance' based on Corporal Swires' advice, and Vimes' collar was soaked through with sweat by the time he found a promisingly abandoned building. He found the cellar, lifted the rotting wooden door, and stepped into the dark.
The temperature dropped several degrees in the gloom. It was only narratively appropriate for the odd plink of water to echo ominously. Dank water soaked through his cheap boot soles. Vimes found himself wishing for a small torch... something you could carry in a pocket for instance... and tried to ignore the twanging of time and multiple universes where this device existed.
Instead the Summoning Dark helpfully pointed out where to duck as the tunnel ceiling dipped down, where to dodge the various detritus washed off from a debris-filled city. Anything newer, that could have dropped off that lying bastard or be linked to Ellie, Vimes picked up and dropped into the wax paper sachets that Cheery was trying out, for her to have a look at later.
And... a knife.
As luck would have it, it had gotten wedged on a rusting grille.
It even still had what looked an awful lot like blood.
Well. Time to get this back to Cheery's lab.
Vimes groped around until he found a ladder that felt secure enough for the weight of an aging, increasingly well-fed copper, and climbed.
His knees protested. His muscles trembled, and the climb felt like it took forever, until he hit his head on a grate. Thankfully he was wearing his helmet, because a headache was starting to build behind his eyes and a concussion would only make things worse.
Vimes emerged into the daylight, blinking owlishly. The heat hit him like a soggy wall, and he took off his helmet in a desperate attempt to cool down. He stumbled to the shade of a nearest tree, panting, while the rest of the world slowly turned upside down, then, at length, right way up.
No body. No culprit. But maybe a murder weapon, wrapped carefully in his bag. Maybe something to pin down Ellie's killer. Or nothing. A productive - ye gods, how long had he been? - two hours seeing a new part of the city.
He let his feet guide him back to Pseudopolis Yard. The usual chatter in his head was today drowned out by the roar of running water, as if he was back in a sinkhole, dying, being carried by the river and the Summoning Dark to a beach to meet Death once again.
His head hurt.
Get it back to Cheery, she'd make something of it, or Igor, who might tell if that was blood on the knife. Or equally to be told that he'd brought back a pile of junk from a sewer and had just been wasting his time. Commander Vimes, he's been around a long time, but sometimes just gets in his head some funny little idea and has to worry it like--
Like a dog with a bone--
The air in the Watch House was surprisingly cool given the constant bustle. To his pride, Vimes attracted minimal notice as he wove through the crowd, heading straight to the erstwhile privy. He didn't particularly feel like talking to anyone just now.
The privy had been retrofitted and redone dozens of times by now, but it remained the most suitable place for Cheery's experiments and analyses. It just felt wrong that there were no mysterious substances bubbling in glass beakers, but there was health and safety for you. Vimes' fatigue and... whatever else was going on... made him clumsy, though, and he almost upset an umbrella stand's worth of... mysterious metal poles.
Cheery poked her head through at the clatter, a mug in hand.
"Oh, sir! It's you."
"Yes, Sergeant, it is me. Now, I found these in an underground tunnel under The Tump leading to Endless Street -"
"Oh, Dog's Guts? I haven't been there for a while, I'm surprised you know about it!"
"Dog's- you have a *name* for that shortcut and no one told me about it?"
"Sorry, sir. Honestly, I didn't even make that connection until now. Oh! Is this about Ellie Pathfinder?"
"Yes. I even have a knife."
If the pounding in his head was less godsdamned loud, he would have added a snarky remark. As it stood, it must have been audible, and she was very polite not to comment on it. He emptied his bag on the stained worktop, gripping the side with one hand in an attempt to remain upright.
"Don't worry, sir, I'll tell you everything I can by tomorrow morning. And, sir, permission to speak honestly?"
"Always."
"You look like shit. When was the last time you ate something?"
She cleared books off a stool and had him sit down with his head between his knees. The sudden change in position made his vision fizzle, and his attempt at speech came out slurred and far too quiet. He wanted to tell her to crack on, that he'd get back to his office.
When had he last eaten? Had he had breakfast? Last night?
Sybil would probably be so mad that he'd done it again. Sam couldn't let her know. Just rest for a while and get home at the end of the day and have some sleep -
An ice-cold glass was being pushed into his hand, and a familiar voice was telling him something, if he could only *listen*. The roar of moving water in his ears again. The glass missed his mouth the first go, but the cold drink within was absurdly refreshing. Sam gulped the rest down within seconds, then had to cling to his knees and breathe noisily through his nose to avoid throwing it all up.
Another voice, equally familiar but so dearly loved, was speaking
and he wanted to listen but he just couldn't make out the words one from the other he couldn't hear the voice over the roar in his head
and the horrible pressure building in his chest
He felt it before he opened his eyes: a cold weight on his face, suffocating, stifling -
Sam clawed at his face and leapt away, crashing into the poky undergrowth of an Uberwaldean forest -
He opened his eyes.
A cold flannel cloth dropped off his face with perfect comic timing. It was only his office, and all he had fallen on was on a forlorn pile of paperwork and a stray pencil. A scrap of paper had the audacity to stick to his sweat-soaked shirt. Through the shuttered windows, Sam realised it was night.
And suddenly Sybil was there - what was she doing in his office? - stashing away the adorable reading glasses she'd resisted getting for so long. She closed her ledger and hurried over to where Sam was.
"Sam?"
"Sybil!" Sam wobbled upright. "Oh - I told Littlebottom I would go back and see how she was doing with the knife -"
"Sam, sit down."
Therein was a voice that brooked no argument. That voice had historically halted ships and stopped tyrants: what could a simple man like Samuel Vimes do against that? His knees folded even before his brain could catch up.
His wife joined him on the couch, taking his scarred trembling hands into her own. Despite the calluses, her hands were soft and gentle.
"Sybil, what are you doing here?"
"Sergeant Littlebottom told me you'd taken ill. You've overheated, Sam, and you haven't been eating again, have you?"
Sam felt something in him retreat in shame. It was subconscious, sometimes: this use of hunger, to keep himself sharp, maintain the habits of his youth and pretend he was young again. Often, nowadays, he simply forgot. He would get caught up in a case, chase down patterns and details. Or he would just rush from meeting to meeting, schedules that didn't account for anything like lunch. When, on a case, he got an intoxicating taste of How Things Fit Together, and there was, in fact, a pattern that fit, pursuing that was far more exciting than eating. Sometimes eating felt like an annoyance rather than nutrition, even less pleasure.
He couldn't meet Sybil's eyes, then, and instead mumbled to his hands. Sybil, fluent in Embarrassed Sam, understood perfectly.
"Sam, I'm not angry. I'm just worried about you. I brought something." She gestured at a basket beside his desk, which he only just noticed. Some detective he was.
"Syb, I really don't think I'm up to -"
The pain in his head had marginally eased, but that only made miscellaneous other aches and pains clamour for attention. The nausea was really starting to hit now.
"Just a cold drink, then. Come on, now. Small sips."
She pushed a mug of something cold into his hands, and he followed her instructions, sipping slowly.
"I'm sorry," he said, when he'd finished drinking.
"What for?"
"For - for forgetting I'm getting old and decrepit, for making you worry, for -"
"Sam, with love, shut up. You're not decrepit. You just forget your physical limitations sometimes."
"But-"
"Stop apologising, Sam. I love you."
Sam sputtered a series of disconnected consonants, but at least the flush on his cheeks had nothing to do with the heat, which by now was fading in the evening air. He turned his head to rest his forehead against her broad strong shoulder, and mumbled a collection of sounds that, to the experienced ear, would be interpreted as "I love you, too."