The Damn Shrimp Conference

by Vee_hee_hee

Summary:

There's few things commander Vimes enjoys less than attending yet another weirdly specific diplomatic symposium, blindly searching for missing tyrants might be one of them.

Notes:

I think this might technically be a case fic.

The footnotes are at the bottom of the chapter after a bit of space, so hopefully you can scroll down to them without spoiling anything.

Chapter 1

 

 

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.

Chapter 2

Notes:

Good news, I finished this chapter at lighting speed, bad news, this is now a 3 chapter story.

***

 

 

Patrician's irrational hatred of mimes was a well known secret. There were a lot of theories going around about it, so much so that Vimes never thought to actually ask about it at the source. It seemed so out of sync with the man's usually lax approach to tyranny, that he just assumed it must've been yet another elaborate rumour he'd invented himself, to give Ankh Morpork's flowering conspiracy market something to do.

Trapped between two invisible walls and a very visible patrician, it was beginning to seem a bit less irrational.

Most of the mines had shuffled on, leaving only two behind. Vimes decided they must be guards, they looked scruffier than the rest had and their berets were steel-capped.

They were still definitely mimes, complete with white greasepaint, striped shirts, black suspenders and the signature miserable expressions of fools everywhere. The kind you'd see on street corners, pulling invisible ropes and hitting each other with invisible mallets. Well, the kind you saw once upon a time, he could hardly remember any since Vetinari took office.  

Funny, that.

He turned to the patrician, who had not moved from the pillar he'd been sitting on.

"Sir, could it be that you were involved in some kind of a long-time covert mime suppression that is now backfiring?"

"I can see how one could potentially arrive at an assumption like that." Said lord Vetinari, with a professional grade vagueness that would make Dr. Slant pat his forehead dry in excitement.¹  

Vimes grit his teeth.

"You are a veritable well of information today, sir."

He wedged himself between the pillar and the invisible wall, then tried to kick it.

The wall remained a wall in all ways but visual.

He kicked it harder.

Lord Vetinari watched him hop on one foot dispassionately.

"It will do no good, commander, it's not a real wall, it's the Didactylan ideal² of a wall." 

"A what now?"

"Should a wall break, it would cease being a wall, therefore the Didactylan ideal of a wall is completely, philosophically unbreakable."

"Alright, let's say I understand," Said Vimes, who didn't. "but why is it here?"

"The mimes, commander," Said Vetinari, with a touch of impatience. "Surely the Watch knows about the mimes."

"Er, I thought it was just bad street theatre, sir."

Patrician shook his head and muttered something that sounded suspiciously like ‘I sometimes wonder who the real fools are.’

Several things fell into place in Vimes’s mind.

"Wait, you're saying they can just-" He mimicked pressing his palms against a new invisible wall, earning a completely inaudible but definitely derisive snort from one of their guards who clearly considered him a sad amateur. "-and it becomes a real thing? How the hell does that work? Magic?"

"No, not exactly magic. Out there in the vastness of the cosmos, there might well exist worlds where sheer belief makes no ripples in the space-time continuum and worlds only hold metaphorical power, but ours is a little different. Words of course have power, but actions speak louder than words, therefore a mime is at the very top of the power pyramid, preceding even a wizard or a priest."

"Alright, reality bending clowns, might as well."

The two mimes guarding them had meanwhile sat down on an Didactylan ideal of a bench, one starting to eat what could only be a Didactylan ideal of an egg sandwich. Vimes flashed them the Didactylan ideal of fucking right off.

"So what's their plan now? Bore us to death? Wait until we use up all the air in this thing?"

Vetinari shook his head. "Luckily for us, air itself has developed no lofty ideals of things that would keep it unable to pass through our little prison. Unluckily for us, neither has water.

"What."

"While there are some that claim water has memory, I sincerely hope that at least the water in our fair city has learned to forgive and most importantly forget its many harrowing journeys."

"Not that, you're saying they're trying to drown us in muck water?"

"Fortunately, due to Mr King's private operation, they're trying to drown us in water that's merely very unpleasant."

Vimes was well aware the city's ancient bowels acted like their namesake and would periodically flood over. You could sometimes feel the rumble through the cobblestones above. It didn't bode well for anyone trapped between two semi-permeable walls. He tried to remember if the rumbling had a schedule.

He turned back to the patrician who had made himself as comfortable as a bit of fallen masonry would allow him and had closed his eyes. Vimes could tell he wasn't napping just because that wasn't a thing he did.

"You don't look too worried, sir." 

"You'll forgive my lack of enthusiasm," Said Vetinari, eyes still closed. "This is the second overly long death sentence I've been subjected to today, they're starting to wear a bit thin."

Vimes bit back a yawn. "I'd say we're a good way into tomorrow already, sir, It should be around-"

"Bingley-Bingley-Beep!"

Vimes groaned and pulled out his disorganizer.

"Ye gods, let me guess '10AM, agenda plan: drown slowly' ?

"10AM, a meeting with Lord Vetin -." The little demon looked around, noticed lord Vetinari and quickly ducked back into its chassis.

Vetinari opened an eye.

"Sir Samuel, punctual as ever, do come in."

Vimes rolled his eyes, but stood to some semblance of attention.

"Well sir, as long as we're in a meeting, could you at least tell me which one of my men you suspect of being a mime infiltrator?”

There was a surprised pause.

"A mime… infiltrator…?" Said Lord Vetinari, now wide awake, eyebrows furling together in confusion. "Surely even the Watch would notice a completely silent recruit covered in white paint?" 

"Fine, then some sort of a mime-collaborator.”

"Vimes, I genuinely have no idea what you're talking about." 

A terrible conclusion was dawning on Vimes.

"You hadn't suspected there was some sort of an internal Watch plot behind all this?"

"No offense to the brave minds of the watch, but they're generally not my first suspect for "plotting" types."

"So what was your stupid 24 hour do-nothing plan for then?” Rasped Vimes.

"Sir." He added after a moment, to no great effect.

Vetinari's eyes narrowed in annoyance.

“As I’m sure Drumknott very accurately cited at you, my ‘stupid 24 hour do-nothing plan’ was made to assure The Quirm-Genua-Ankh Morpork Marine Invertebrate Trade Alliance Symposium goes on without a hitch.”

Vimes laughed a dark, humourless laugh of a man who hopes he’s misheard something, but isn’t betting on it.

"Forgive me, sir, but this sounds like you're telling me you hung upside down in pitch darkness for twelve godsdamn hours and your only thought was 'Oh, am I ever so glad the Genuan medium sized crustacean fisher envoy won't think less of me for having to rely on my own infrastructure to survive occasionally.' "

"Yes, that is exactly what I was thinking. In general terms at least. Mrs Crevette, while a magician with a crabbing net and a terror of prawns everywhere, was in fact not invited to the conference this time."

"YOU WERE PREPARED TO BRAVELY SACRIFICE YOURSELF OVER SOME SHRIMP?"

Lord Vetinari gave him a withering look that just a few years ago would've filled his head with visions of regret and scorpions.

"Not over 'some shrimp', your grace, over a city-wide investigation and the resulting media circus that would most definitely cause a serious delay or even stop in trade of time sensitive, vital resources for a population rapidly approaching its second, or by some counts even its third million. I'm sure you'd be surprised to learn just how important a source of protein overseas trade is, especially with the heavy metal pollution in our local waters, or how many people it employs. And I would hardly call a slight delay in one of your famous search and rescue operations me indulging in any real form of 'self-sacrifice' ."

"So what if I hadn’t just randomly stumbled upon you before you tore your feet off doing air crunches?"

Vetinari waved his hand dismissively as if to banish a pesky thought.

"The City is not the city we grew up in or even the city of just a few years ago. Ankh-Morpork, as it stands now, flush with checks, balances and even the occasional social benefit would in the long run survive my absence, perhaps in some ways even benefit from it. This is not a flaw in its design but rather a fast approaching pinnacle of it. A machine that walks without its maker having to pull its strings at all, a true automaton. This particular conference, however, would stumble, fall and cripple the local marine invertebrate market. I'd call avoiding that that a good amount of reward for an acceptable amount of risk."

Vimes turned a shade that would make Mrs Crevette pull him out of boiling water and serve him with a generous dollop of fresh Genuan butter.

"I sure as hell wouldn't!"

"Forgive me, your grace, but quite frankly I don't see how that's any of your business."

At this hue, Mrs Crevette would have put Vimes in her special "freak lobster" glass bowl, to the delight of local children.

"Any of my business! It's my goddamn job, I'm your goddamn guard!"

"Sir Samuel, while I appreciate the care you routinely show for my life and the very personal slight you take against those who routinely try to end it-"

"Hold on now-"

Lord Vetinari stopped his outraged protest with an impatient wave of his hand. 

"-while I appreciate your stalwart job dedication, It does appear to be dedication to a job you do not actually have."

Vimes did his best impression of a fish trying to breathe in river Ankh.

"Sir?"

"You are not my personal guard just as Archchancellor Ridcully is, gods forbid, not my personal Wizard, Lord Downey is not my personal assassin and Lord Rust is not my personal whatever it is the man does. We are merely all separate aspects of a governmental body, big cogs calibrating the chaotic tick and especially tock of our lovely city. With perhaps the exception of Lord Rust who might in this metaphor be more of a very well bred piece of lint the watchmaker dropped in by mistake and now occasionally rallies the other cogs to go and kill each other in some other, no doubt dangerously foreign chassis."

"With all due respect, sir, that is absolute bullshit."

"Bullshit, commander?"

Vimes gestured at himself furiously.

"Well I'm here, aren't I?"

"I'd say almost, if not all instances of someone trying to kill a patrician count as crimes, commander, a thing I'm told you fight."

"Don't fucking try to logic your way out of this, sir."

"Gods forbid I'd bring logic into a conversation when you're concerned, your grace-"

"OH, WILL YOU TWO STOP YOUR INCESSANT BICKERING!"

 

Several things happened all at once.

 

The mime that spoke covered its mouth in horror, then its body rippled and vanished as if sucked down a cosmic drain, leaving only striped clothes and a sad puddle of greasepaint behind. The invisible wall propping Vimes up disintegrated into nothing and the remaining mime fell soundlessly to the floor only a moment later. 

The last one was easily explained by the glint of metal coming out of the unfortunate mime's neck and patricians still flicked wrist. 

Lord Vetinari stretched leisurely, like he hadn't just inhumed a reality bending clown in cold blood. 

"Smart thinking commander, provoking the mimes into breaking their ritual of silence like that. For a second there I thought you were just being needlessly difficult without greater purpose."

"Shut up. What the hell happened here?"

"Being a mime is not all sunshine, pulling invisible ropes and having absolute control over the very fabric of our reality." Said Vetinari, performing a series of wrist stretches with a slight wince. "There's always a flipside, if a mime speaks, it ceases to be one. Or more accurately, it simply ceases to be in general."

Vimes stood and walked to where the mimes had collapsed. The one who’d disappeared entirely left quite an accurate white imprint behind it. ‘Saves on chalk’ Said the Nobby in his head.

He squatted down beside it and rubbed the liquid remains between his fingers. It was just regular greasepaint.

Something wasn't adding up.

"Why are you alive?”

Lord Vetinari didn’t stop in his attempts to re-set his joints. "Unfortunately, the two people who could answer that, are no longer with us.”

Vimes ignored this. 

"They could’ve made anything from nothing, a sword, a crossbow, a whole war machine. Why go to the trouble of kidnapping you, just to leave you not only alive, but completely alone? And why leave again now? Guarded by just two pretty shabby guards, when you've already escaped once? How are they not taking over the damn world?"

There was a longer pause, worryingly at odds with Patrician’s usually whip-quick responses. He truly was tired, Vimes realized. Hanging upside down with a head full of shrimp politics will do that to you.

“There are situations, commander, that benefit from ignorance,” He said finally. 

He looked at Vimes as if trying to dissect him, clearly considering something.

"But I suppose-" His gaze flickered somewhere behind Vimes for a split second. Vimes turned to follow it. There was nothing there, just a sewer wall lined with heavy metal doors presumably leading to even more sewers.

“Tell me, Sir Samuel, are you familiar with the theory of narrative causality?”

He was, in the same vague way he was aware of gravity. It was storybook rules, everyone knew a million to one chance always came true and that a sole unarmed hero always won against a squad of armed guards, it was just common knowledge.

“It’s a minor law of physics.” Continued Vetinari “One that some experts now think might be powered by completely regular particles vibrating with the morphic resonance of Disc’s residual magic fields. While quite harmless by itself, the trouble arises when this magic is less than residual. A wizard casting a spell is naturally subjecting himself to a heightened narrative field. This radiation is an unwelcome side effect that is only now being researched by what I’m assured is a much more sensible generation of wizards.”

Vimes, who had occasionally seen the remains of this much more sensible generation of wizards, grimaced. The chalk outlines on those were approaching modern art.

“As I’ve alluded to before, mimes are much, much stronger than that. The narrative fields they generate are thus no mere suggestions, nudging reality here and there, they’re firm scaffolding for real stories that must progress like stories should.”

He rotated an ankle experimentally and seemed pleased with the result.

“Thankfully for all of us, while wizards are narratively quite impactful, mimes are perhaps the least respected type of a fool. Their own immensely powerful narrative field treats them as mere backdrop, nigh-irrelevant to the story, but still bound to the laws of reality it imposes on all who come near.”

The look Vetinari gave him, told Vimes he won’t like what he was about to say next.

“Of course as the Evil Tyrant and his Nameless Lackey-"

"Hey-"

"As two traditionally antagonistic archetypes we likewise enjoy no benefits from a classic story-tale system like this, in fact I daresay we are in a bit of danger. But laws are laws and leaving us with two, easily distracted guards is exactly what these laws demanded of them."

His gaze softened a bit.

“It'd be better if you weren't aware of this at all. You are a remarkably contrarian man, Vimes, and I’m afraid pushing against narratives tends to only encourage them." ³ 

Vimes was not entirely sure if that was a compliment or not.

"Why didn't they kill you straight off the bat then?" He asked instead.

Vetinari gave that a grim smile.

"That's the point. They couldn't, it wouldn't make any narrative sense. While I am very clearly an antagonistic force, I am also one of the main ones, so to speak. The mimes are simply not narratively impactful enough to kill me themselves. I suspect they hoped that if they left me hanging there and walked a sufficiently long way away to thin their morphic resonance, I might quite anticlimactically die on my very own."

He pushed himself off the pillar and managed to stand up on his own, with some amount of smugness. 

"Evidently they were wrong."

Vimes looked at the gaunt dark figure currently trying his best to not rest any weight on either foot, while also avoiding delegating it to the thigh he'd been shot in nearly a decade ago. In an hour or two he'll be presiding over the mollusc trade again or reading the demands of the cheese curdles union or whatever his job entailed in between their 10am meetings.

"If it's any consolation, sir, I've always viewed you as more of just a bastard." 

Vetinari shot him a sharp look, but accepted the offered arm as support.

"Narrative causality, commander, is not so much concerned with what things are, but what things should be." He continued, as they slowly made their way to one of the heavy iron doors Vimes was almost certain led to an exit.

"For example," Said lord Vetinari. "In plain old reality you might be the highly decorated duke of Ankh whose name is synonymous with law across half the continent, but as far as the raw, primal radiation of a story is concerned, you are but a random guard who bursts into a room and gets decimated in some humorous way."

Vimes paused to lean the Patrician against the wall by the door, needing both hands to persuade the ancient hinges into motion.

"Speaking of-"

 

He was suddenly shoved inside the newly opened passage, just managing to lean on the door, before it could slam shut behind him.

 

"What the hell are you doing?" He yelled at the madman on the other side.

"I'm ordering you to return to the palace, immediately and on your own." Came Vetinari's reply, muffled by the heavy metal door and his pained efforts to close it completely. “There should be a passage just ahead of you that eventually opens into Easy Street. I'll take the roundabout way to put some distance between us."

Vimes tried to push harder, but due to the age of the door frame, the gravity was now working against him. How the hell was the skinny bastard still this strong?

"The hell you are, sir, you can barely walk, I didn't spend the whole damn night treading mud just to leave you alone with some monochrome clown cult."

"The clowns, commander, represent no real danger to me. Your life, however, is right now worth at best a mid paragraph throwaway line, significantly less than its market value."

"Excuse me?"

"Sir Samuel, as I've very pointedly stressed before, the mimes enhance narrativity of reality around them to a point if cliché and the ever-present Nameless Guard is in said narrative for one reason and one reason only. To die in a wholly insignificant way. Any fool can and will end you right now, it's a miracle you survived this far. This is not something I'm prepared to let happen."

"Yeah I saw how little danger they represent to you sir, I think I'll stay if it's all the same to you."

There was a muffled laugh from the other side. It didn’t sound very joyful.

"Whoever heard of a Clown slaying the big bad Tyrant, they'd need at very least a bona-fide Hero to pull that off, if not the Rightful Heir to the Throne-."

The pressure lessened from both sides at once, as a name presented itself.

 

"Carrot."

 

As if on cue, the ceiling behind Vimes fell in with a kingly thud.

There was a very royal grunt followed by an altogether ordinary cough.

"Hullu, is that you Commander Vimes, sir? I was searching the alleyways like you told me, when the floor gave in!"

Vimes had a definite feeling like someone was playing a string instrument rendition of silly buggers on his very nerves. He turned to the expert on the matter.

"How on disc did he get here?"

"Narrative causality, it loves a plot convenient coincidence." Whispered back Vetinari, not taking his eyes away from the new pile of rubble now blocking their way.

The debris parted to reveal Captain Carrot's big honest face. 

"Ah, your lordship, I'm glad to see you safe!"

“Captain.” Said Lord Vetinari, pleasantly, reaching for what Vimes assumed was one of his many remaining hidden daggers.

Vimes's mind was racing. Could Vetinari handle Carrot? The man was a trained assassin. They probably taught them to fight with both hands and one leg behind their back, never mind a sprained ankle or two, though they likely hadn't trained them against 6 foot 5 brick walls with fists like well intentioned hammers. Could *he* handle Carrot, for that matter? Could he handle *Vetinari* if he'd decided this was a problem best solved permanently? Were they even able to go against the story, once it took hold? Could-

Vimes stopped that train of thought in its entirely and did what he always did when he didn't like a game he was being shoved into.

He decided not to play.

He lit his cigar instead. It was as clammy as everything else and needed a few tries to really start smouldering, but he noted the two men were now focused on his little performance. Good.

He took a deep drag of equal parts smoke and mud and did his best not to cough.

"Captain Carrot of the Ankh Morpork City Watch, " He said, hoarsely, stressing the title as if daring any morphic whatchamacallsits present to call him anything else. "-whatever you do, do not kill Lord Vetinari, that's an order."

Carrot gave this a spirited, if confused salute. "Yes, sir, wasn't planning on it, sir."

"Good." 

Vimes ignored Vetinari's almost audibly raised eyebrow, but did note with some pride that the man had sheathed the dagger.

He slapped his hand on Carrot's shoulder. "How are you feeling Captain , any sudden bouts of birthright fuelled ambition?"

"Er, no sir, I was just thinking I could go for a cup of coffee when the floorboards gave in, it's been a long night."

It has, hasn't it. Vimes could feel his nerves protesting having to process the world around them. Why could goddamn Vetinari never get kidnapped at a sensible hour in the afternoon.

"Good, that's great, let's keep it that way."

"Impressive, commander, who knew the key to fooling the very fabric of our reality was man's firm belief in rank and file."  Said Lord Vetinari, voice dripping with what Vimes chose to pretend was not sarcasm. 

Easy Street passageway was blocked, but there was bound to be another way though, sewers ran everywhere.

"Alright!” He said, clapping his hands to hopefully distract any new narratives that might’ve started to evolve when he wasn't looking. “As long as no one else wants to, heh, drop in, I suggest we start-"

 

There was another rumble of falling rocks, followed closely by a surprised bark.

 

 

 

 

To be continued…

 

 

 

---

 

¹ Technically, dr. Slant, Ankh Morpork's finest and oldest lawyer, didn't sweat on account of being a zombie, but he had on occasion been observed to ooze a bit when faced with a particularly well executed perjury.

² While functionally not much different from it's roundworld equivalent, the Platonic ideal, the Didactylan ideal proposes that since every physical object is in a perpetual state of "they don't make these like they used to", there must therefore be some perfectly ideal form that existed in potentia before the real deal was invented just to promptly break down a minute later due to a faulty fuel gauge.

³ A famous example of this was an early Ankh-Morpork regent, who upon being prophesied he was destined to choke on a baker’s dozen, banned all sales of more than 10* objects and was later found strangled to death by an angry pastry chef with an extra thumb.

* Due to Ankh-Morpork’s savvy business instinct that less was definitely more if you were the one selling it, a baker’s dozen on disc meant 11, not 13. 

 

 

Notes:

I really appreciate all your kudos and comments! They help me write and all proceeds go to fund Mrs Crevette's symposium ticket for next year.

Chapter 3

***

 

 

Two cave-ins and a landslide later, Vimes was thoroughly tired of explaining the situation to each new member of the watch that fell through the ceiling.

To make things worse, the mimes were back, shuffling just on the end of their now only way out. A brief expedition towards them proved there was indeed a new invisible wall as well as an invisible wind-tunnel strong enough to push away a troll. At least they didn't seem to be in any immediate danger just standing there. Now that they've already survived Detritus almost levelling the entire sewer.

"Magic clowns make things work on silly fairytale logic." He told the confused and still very dusty Sergeant Cherry Littlebottom, who'd been the last to join them, plummeting down after Angua and Detritus. "That's the gist of it. What I don't get is why my entire squad fell on me, one by one."

"I'm not sure either, commander."  Said Vetinari, who looked unsettlingly unsettled. "The morphic resonance is indeed very present, thick even, but the narrative it's supposedly causing quite frankly makes no sense."

"What, no stories where the Evil Tyrant and his Goons just kinda mill around a sewer flanked by an army of homicidal street performers?" Said Vimes, with perhaps some sarcasm.

Vetinari gave him an unimpressed look.

"Not that I'm aware of, commander, generally there's a lot of righteous slaying with the occasional self-inflicted accident caused by an ironic twist of fate." 

"Not sure about dem funny clowns." Rumbled Detritus. "But I could prob'ly punch us out der other way."

The troll knocked on the wall behind them experimentally, chipping off whole wedges of granite in the process.

There was a warning creak of architecture who'd just survived four attacks on its structural integrity and really wasn't guaranteeing anything going forward.

"I'd take that as a no." Said Vimes quickly, before he could be entombed by well intentions.

"Maybe we should just sit back and wait for a hero to come by and get us out, there's bound to be one around, this being a story and all." Carrot was looking around as if one was about to pop out of a convenient trap door, his shoulder muscles bulging heroically.

Vimes and Vetinari shared a Look.

"Don't you think about that, Captain . Focus on being a guard. Focus really hard on it." Gritted Vimes through his teeth.

He turned to Angua, desperate to change the subject.

"What about you, Sergeant, remember any whimsical tales about rains of guards from the old country? Maybe this is a well-traveled narrative that likes to experiment with culture?"

"Let's hope not." Said Angua, who had.¹ 

"Well whatever this story thinks it's doing, it better have a damn good-"

 

"Em, I might have a theory."

 

A polite cough brought group's attention to Cherry, who was dusting herself off with a thoughtful expression.

"It's a bit far-fetched but-"

"Out with it sergeant." Said Vimes, who would at this point listen to anything, no matter how distantly-delivered.

"It's just- I'm guessing none of you read much modern fiction?" 

She received a collective shaking of heads from people whose daily workload made them experience things they wished were fiction and thus weren't looking for any more of it in their spare time.

"Well it's just that all these classical brave hero slays evil villain type stories, those haven't been popular in years." Said Cherry, with that special careful tone of someone sharing details a beloved hobby with their co-workers. "It's all about the anti-hero now, the unlikely protagonists, turning the narrative on its head, deep explorations of class struggle and the everyman."

Vimes pointed at the city's tyrant with a family coat of arms and several degrees in inhumation. "What, like him?"  

"I think what Sergeant Littebottom is suggesting," Said Lord Vetinari sharply. " is that whatever narrative is happening to us right now might in fact be a modern one that moves with the times and thus might, under right conditions, be willing to treat us as protagonists."

"That's nonsense, look at us!" Said Vimes, taking great care to not look too hard at Carrot. "There's no story like that, it would be-"

"It would certainly be quite a funny story, sir, people like funny stories." Suggested Cherry, approachfully.

"It does make a certain amount of sense, sir. The way we just kept falling through the floor was definitely very comical ." Said Angua, severely.

Vimes massaged his temples without much results. 

"You're telling me right now anything goes as long as it's what, funny enough?"

"That's bad, that's very bad." Muttered Angua under her breath.

Vimes clapped his hands together.

"Alright squad, I need some suggestions, real knee slappers."

"I have half of Glimmer's Delicatessen Triple Zeolite Basalt Brownie [only 2 $AM] left from der lunch." Rumbled Detritus, helpfully. "Is not one of dem funny cream pies but it got fine shale topping what is very porous and I think if I threw it hard enough it could-"

Vimes stopped the troll's arm before it could reach the murder weapon.

"Sergeant, thank you for your suggestion, but I think even the zaniest narrative would struggle to make this anything other than just you vaporizing a clown with a big rock."

“I could make a small explosion.” Suggested Cherry, the former alchemist.

"Is that likely to elicit much merriment, sergeant?"

"People on the street often cheered when the guild exploded, sir."

"Likely due to them not being caught in the blast that one time." Said Vetinari, under his breath.

Vimes sighed. 

"Thank you sergeant, I'll consider it if the exploding clowns with big rocks plan fails. Anyone else?” 

 

There was silence.

 

"Come on, people, where's that famous Ankh Morpork sense of humor, eh?"

 

He saw Carrot raise his hand anxiously.

"Yes, you may be excused from having one, captain."

Carrot lowered his hand again, with visible relief.

"I could-" Angua visibly cringed but braved on regardless. "-turn into a wolf and bite their behinds so they scream and their pants tear to reveal comically large underpants with big red hearts, would that help?"

The whole group shuddered.

"Could it be that watchmen are just not what you'd call-" Lord Vetinari paused, clearly forcing himself to utter something he considered especially distasteful. "-' particularly comedically inclined' by nature?" 

"I don't see you making any suggestions, sir." Hissed Vimes, who hadn't made any either. The one person who consistently laughed at his jokes was a 2 year old who also squealed with delight whenever he saw a dog wee itself.

"While I could, of course, think of some no doubt very joyful tricks, japes and, gods forbid, even yuks," Said Lord Vetinari, looking at the ceiling as if daring it to fall again. "-this type of comedy requires someone to be the butt of it, which, despite of how foolish it might look to a bystander, requires a rare natural talent to make said bystander laugh instead of running off to report it as physical assault or even more likely, knowing our dear city, joining in."

 

There was a crash nearby, as if another pair of people fell through the street. Or at least one person and someone with a very convincing document proving he was one as well.

Lord Vetinari paled a shade that would make a mime jealous.

 

"Oh no."

 

 

***

 

 

"No sergeant, you do not have to continue to be funny, in fact I'd appreciate your total abstinence on the matter." Said Lord Vetinari, severely.

"Sah!" Replied Sergeant Fred Colon, forehead wet with well intentioned terror-sweat, as he stood to attention in front of Patrician’s desk.

"Luckily for us all,” Continued Vetinari. “the morphic field of narrative causality thins out significantly outside of special instances like the one we just faced and with its source so very well disposed of, it is unlikely it will congeal again anytime soon."

"Sah?"

Vetinari closed his eyes for a moment, recalibrating to Sergeant Colon.

"The mimes are gone."

"Sah!"

He turned to the rest of the Watch gathered in his office. It was noon and no one had slept yet.

"I believe I don't have to stress how nothing that has happened is to leave this room."

There was a collective shaking of heads by people who'd already been doing their best to forget.

"Capital. Now don't let me keep you from the rest of your day."

As they filtered out, Vimes was stopped by patrician’s half-raised hand.

"Vimes, a word if I may."

Vimes sighed, but stood back to attention in front of Patrician’s desk. It was basically traditional of Vetinari to graciously bestow him with some new class-treason-inducing reward, but surely he must be running out of weaponized heraldry at this point.

Vetinari gestured to Drumknott, who handed him a medium sized, severely balding velvet box.

"After our little escapade I had Drumknott do some digging in the heraldic archives and he found something quite interesting." 

"This better not be another title."

Vetinari ignored him in favour of dusting off the box slightly and sliding it to the edge of his desk.

Vimes opened it with some apprehension, then started at it for a couple of seconds.

"It's a badge."

"Unparalleled observation skills as always, commander!"

Vimes turned it around. A range of decorations gleamed back at him. It was definitely a badge, made by someone not overly concerned with the price of brass or minimalism. In the very center, above the gilded crest of the city it said 'Protector of the King's Piece' in large, ornate letters.

His mouth moved on its own accord.

"Which piece?" 

Vetinari sighed, like he'd expected the question, but was still slightly disappointed it had been asked.

"I suspect the piece in question was the one whole piece the king was meant to stay in. I appreciate the idea might take a little bit of adjustment, considering your ancestry."

"But-"

"Yes, yes, it's also a rather humorously misspelled phrase on some older truncheon models, but it was a very real title back in the day, quite coveted in fact."

There was no response from Vimes, so he continued on.

"I'm afraid the position was considered to be 'an honor', so outside of a traditional goose and a pound of suet every hogswatch, it carries no actual salary."

Vimes continued to say nothing.

"You've been of course performing your duties quite admirably for, let's see, the better part of a decade now, starting with that whole dragon affair. I feel lady Sybil might object to you being in possession of this much suet, but I can arrange the rest of the back-pay to be delivered directly to your home, rounded up to oh, a dozen live birds perhaps?"

The promise of twelve knee-height demons finally jogged Vimes out of his stupor.

"I don't need any damn geese!"

Lord Vetinari made a little note on the form in front of him. "As you wish."

"What is this, sir?"

"I'm making you my personal guard, officially."

"And if I refuse?"

Lord Vetinari raised both his eyebrows. "Then I'd simply question your propensity to passionately argue about things you don't care about and ask for the badge back."

Vimes ignored the outstretched hand

"That's it? No attempt to bribe me with additional dartboards or parades?"

"Please do fill in the required paperwork if any of the watchhouses are missing inventory.” Said Vetinari. “As for a parade-"

"I don't want any damn parade."

"Capital." He made another small check on the form. "Am I to understand you're refusing the position then?"

Patrician's hand was still outstretched and still badgeless. 

Vimes ignored it furiously.

"You've talked to Sybil, haven't you."

"I promise you that the suet issue aside, I have not discussed this with your wife at all."

"Ha! But what about-" Vimes gestured furiously, to no great effect. "Blast it, I know you've done something!"

Lord Vetinari raised his eyebrows in mock confusion.

"Sir Samuel, are you somehow upset that I'm not forcing you into taking a completely superfluous title for a job you're already performing?"

"Yes! I mean, no!"

"A title, if I might add, you were initially convinced you already held and when confronted with the opposite argued for with enough ferocity to cause a reality bending clown to delete itself from existence?"

"Stop that!"

"Stop what, your grace?" Said Vetinari, incredibly seriously.

"Pretending like you're not laughing!"

Lord Vetinari removed the hand he’d been holding in front of his mouth. 

"Apologies sir Samuel, is this better."

"No!"

The hand returned, its work clearly unfinished.

Vimes groaned internally. Of course the Bastard was enjoying himself. He wondered which deity was in charge of Patrician-induced headaches and why it’d chose him as its champion.

"Look sir, what is this actually about?" He said in what he hoped was a calm and collected manner.

"It's nothing, just another title as you say." Said Lord Vetinari, mildly. "Please do not feel obliged to jump in front of any arrows because of it, I expect you to simply continue as you are. It's merely a more accurate job description."

He found himself on the receiving end of a Righteous Vimes Scowl.

"I don't do it because you pay me."

"Then why do you do it?" Asked Vetinari, eyebrows raised in faux bewilderment.

"Someone has to! You're a bastard, but you don't deserve to be assassinated for it."

Vetinari looked at the ceiling in an entirely non-confrontational manner.

"One could argue I have an extensive network of palace guards and dark clerks in place for that exact reason."

"Yeah, load of good they do!" 

"Well if it makes you feel any better, I do not actually pay your bills, I simply sign them.” Said Lord Vetinari, the empath. “As, again, you are a public servant and not my private employee. Of course if the geese were to be added to the equation-"

"I said I don't want any geese, this is not about the damn geese!"

 

 

***

 

 

Drumknott watched Vimes storm out, a thin sheen of confusion misting over his usually perfect lacquer of secretarial professionalism.

"I’m sorry sir, but should I mark that he’s accepted the new title or not?"

"Commander Vimes is a man of many mysteries, Drumknott." Said Vetinari with a far-away look.

"Only, it seems he took the badge with him, sir?" Added Drumknott.

"So he did." 

There was a distant sound of a fist meeting several layers of frequently battered plaster.

Lord Vetinari gave it a dry chuckle and bent back over his paperwork.

A quiet moment later, there was another punch, this time facing the other way, closely followed by the rest of Vimes as he re-entered the office, face like distressed granite.

"Ah, Lord Protector."

"Shut up. Right now I have-" He stopped to count his titles, like a non-enthusaistic child overturning a particularly grimy looking rock to survey the bugs under it. "- five different jobs, and yes most of them are absolute tosh you've given me solely to piss me off, but there's one or two I actually care about."

"Is there a point to this, commander?"

"My point is, I don't need you making my life more difficult on top of that."

Lord Vetinari's expression strongly implied that that ship had sailed a long time ago.

Vimes ignored him in favor of assuming the air of someone who was absolutely not about to budge on whatever he was about to say next and would also appreciate not being ordered to do so. 

“I’m not about to accept yet another superfluous title just because you think it’s funny, sir. No, if I’m taking this thing-” He lifted the badge, he already took some ten minutes ago. "Then I want the power to veto any order that I, in my professional opinion as the man in charge of you not dying, think is total bull."

That did wipe the sneaky non-grin off Patrician's face.

"Vimes, do you have any idea just how much careful information gathering and diplomatic planning making a call like that involves?"

"Then inform me, sir."

"I was under the impression you did not want me making your life more difficult.” Said Vetinari, eyes narrowing. “You barely read the paperwork I do send you."

Vimes gave that a dry laugh.

"Let's start with you answering any potential assassination-in-progress-related questions when asked, sir, then I'll do my best to make the right call."

"And if I'm not present at the moment?" 

Vimes grinned a grin of a professional chess-piece eater.

"I'd call that an acceptable amount of risk, sir." 

There was silence, punctuated only by the barely audible arrhythmic tick and tock of the waiting room clock and the tap tap tap of patrician's fingers as he apparently considered the idea.

The silence stretched, did a little bit of warm up exercise, and was just about to go into a sprint ending with a triple somersault when-

"Very well."

"I don't give a damn what you'd call it, so you can just-     …wait - really… ?"

Vimes felt suddenly thrown off balance, like a mountain climber who just found out his next handhold was a completely horizontal plateau complete with several reclining chairs.

Vetinari shrugged.

"You present a solid argument, Lord Protector, I'm not an unreasonable man" 

He cordially pretended not to hear Vimes's snort at such an obvious lie.

“Of course,  I trust you to act reasonably in return and use this new right of yours  extremely sparingly .”

He re-dipped his, by now, dry quill and picked up what looked like a timetable.

"Now if that was all, I do have a conference to get back to. I believe the official crab brunch starts in half an hour and I hear you get your own little set of weapons to go at it. What joy."

“No.”

The ink dripped back into the inkwell without accomplishing much.

"Excuse me?"  

Vimes managed a very good effort of staring right back at the now near-lethal glare of the Patrician.

"Get some damn sleep, sir. That's an order. And stay off your feet for a few days."

Vetinari's expression told him he was being dangerously unreasonable.

"I'm sure I stressed how important the results of this conference were for the well-being of our city." He said, testily.

"And I'm sure you have someone to fill in for you, sir." Said Vimes, maintaining eye contact despite both his eyeballs desperately trying to slide back to their safe spot on the wallpaper.

Vetinari leaned back in his high chair.

"Well you are correct there, Lord Protector." He said after a few beats. 

"Aha!" 

Had Vimes been any less smug at that moment, he might have noticed the tiniest of smirks.

"It's you."

"What?"

The smile widened.

"Traditionally, Protector of the King's Piece is also the one to act as the king's replacement at any official ceremonies, should the king become indisposed in any way."

"But-"

The smile continued.

"Oh, not to worry, Sir Samuel, you barely have to do a thing."

He sorted through the paperwork on his table until he found the thick stack of papers Vimes noticed were printed with cheerful borders made out of entwined lobster tails.

"But-"

"I'm sure you'll be excused from the brunch and meet and greet, so you do have some four hours to rest before the daily agenda re-starts with the Crayfish Inclusion round table at 16:30. There will likely be an altercation between the freshwater and marine interest groups, so make sure all hammers, shell crackers and shears have been returned to the kitchens following the crab brunch. Then there's the special panel at six on Large Decapod Weighting Integrity and Standardization. I'd watch out for Mr Crust, there's been reports of dwarves buying his lobsters just for the lead pellets. At seven, there's a private meeting about renaming the Ugly Little Pig prawn to something more marketable and Big Slimey Knob clam to something less marketable."

"But-"

Vetinari turned a few pages, not paying any attention to Vimes's mostly silent battle with his internal crustacean-based horrors.

"Most of the evening lectures you can and should use Charlie for, he has become increasingly proficient at sitting still and scowling at people. Oh and the Quirmian Oyster Coalition has been badgering me about adding the letter R to more months. Apparently their in-house wizard had assured them the edibility rule also works in reverse. You should assure them that, if push comes to shove, you won't hesitate to canonize Apil and Febuay. Then there's, of course, the nightly soiree-"

"But I don't know the first thing about shrimp!" Yelled Vimes, finally breaking out of his shellfish stupor.

Vetinari waved a hand dismissively.

"We're all here to learn and I'm sure Drumknott can fill you in on any details I might've glossed over."

He re-stacked the papers neatly and held them out to Vimes who stared at them like they were about to explode.

"You could, of course, simply reconsider your decision-" He added, innocently.

"Not bloody likely, you bastard." Hissed Vimes, the emerging shrimp specialist, snatching the agenda out of his hand.

"I see." Said Vetinari, expression carefully blank. "Then this just leaves the question of your new uniform…"

Horrible images flooded Vimes's mind. He wasn't quite sure what people wore, once they started considering thighs, giant furled collars and plumed hats too pedestrian, but he had a bad feeling he was about to find out. Leave it to Vetinari to enact not single, but double revenge over being asked to take a little nap. He steeled himself for the worst, while already calculating how much strategic damage a lit cigar could cause to brocade.

"Unfortunately," Continued Vetinari, "all that Drumknott could find in the archives was a single piece of ruffle and some very well fed moths." 

He sighed, willfully misinterpreting Vimes’s new expression.

"Yes, I'm afraid you'll just have to work with what you already have."

"But not-" Vimes swallowed, seeing some sort of light at the end of the tunnel, but still preparing to dodge in case it turned out to be a mine explosion. "-not the Ducal uniform?"

Vetinari looked him up and down.

"Vimes, in its current state, your Ducal uniform is a hacksaw, a pottery kiln and a particularly scrupulous priest away from starting its own life as a rather short golem."

He tapped his quill pensively on his chin.

"No, no, you attending as a mere Duke might send the wrong message either way. I believe something with actual armor would be much more appropriate."

"My regular Watch uniform, perhaps?" Said Vimes, mad hope in his eyes.

Vetinari's expression told him not to push his luck.

"The Commander of the City Watch ceremonial armor, Vimes, with the very shiny breastplate."

"But with the standard Captain cape, sir." Interjected Vimes, who had, since the latest diplomatic mission to Überwald, developed a certain anxiety about turning his head and seeing fur so close to his neck. "And no plumes."

They stared at each other for a moment.

Then, Vetinari did the unthinkable and looked away.

"Such a harsh negotiator, your grace! I have no doubt that after the end of this symposium, the good people of Ankh-Morpork will have more shrimp than they've ever dreamed of." ²  

He considered Vimes for a moment more, even closing an eye and angling his head as if to try and imagine what a completely feather-less man might look like. ³

"Very well. But no helmet at all in that case, I'm sure Sybil can do something about the hair."

"Deal! No take backs." Hurried Vimes, who was prepared to face both the horrible things crawling on the ocean floor and the produce they lobbied for, as long as he didn't have to face them dressed as a bird with a summer home and delusions of granderour.

"Capital! Those prawns won't know what hit them!"

 

 

***

 

 

Drumknott had waited for a bit, just to make sure the newly appointed Protector of The King's Piece wasn't coming back to yell some more.

"My Lord?" He said, finally, with a touch of very light reproach.

"Yes Drumknott?"

"Well, sir, it's just that - I did tell you the official Protector breeches were found in a separate box and in much better condition than the rest of the uniform."

"Really?" Said Lord Vetinari, without looking up from his paperwork. "I seem to recall they looked like somebody had burned them."

"No, sir," Drumknott cast a worrying glance at the patrician. "In fact they were surprisingly well preserved. You remember I told you about the rare pearl-head pin smocking on the decorative thigh puffs?"

"Ah, must've been a premonition then." Said Lord Vetinari, with the sureness of someone very used to foreseeing things accurately, especially once he'd said them out loud.

"I see, sir.” Said Drumknott after a beat. "I'm guessing you'll be checking on the damage later today?"

Vetinari bit back a yawn with ferocity that made it recede back into the lungs and apologize for making baseless assumptions.

"Make that tomorrow, I'm afraid we all have orders to follow."

 

 

 

 

 

The end.

 

 

 

---

¹ While most fairy tales start out as warnings and slowly turn into kitschy stories full of whimsy as civilizations move away from living off nature to only seeing it in cheery little books with big illustrations, Überwaldian variety decided, that if you're going to traumatize children, it might as well be for life.

² While true for the average civilian who hardly ever dreamed of any shrimp at all, Munstrum Ridcully, the Archchancellor of the Unseen University, was regularly haunted by nightmares of various shellfish, flying from city to city in huge, sun-dimming flocks. The problem was entirely due to his staunch refusal to understand how the clacks system worked and had made him spend almost the entire duration of Marine Invertebrate Symposium barricaded in his office.*

       *An early attempt to face his fears by attending at least the first day's grand dinner had been cut short by a novelty balloon that had escaped from the conventions's official merchandise booth and had caused him to scream and fall off his chair, to the great surprise of his colleagues.**

      **He wasn't usually prawn to hysterics.

³ A dilemma he unknowingly shared with the ancient Ephebian philosopher Plexus, who had, after a heated argument with his colleague and rival Didactylos, began regularly stripping naked, covering himself in feathers and waiting in ambush in case his opponent ever dared to define a chicken.

 

 

 

 

Notes:

Thank you for reading!

This is the longest Discworld thing I've ever written and it was a blast, hope you enjoyed it too!

Notes:

Love writing Discworld stuff, it's very fun.

If you enjoyed this, consider leaving a kudos and/or a comment, I consume them all!