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In Ankh-Morpork you were never more than six feet away from a rat, and four of those six belonged to the rat. Samuel Vimes found himself thinking of rat bites as he glared at the Patrician, unconscious under his pea-coloured sheets. Whichever of the Watch had hauled him back to bed after his most recent collapse had saved the morticians the trouble of crossing his arms over his chest. Vimes suppressed the urge to straighten them. The city's leader hadn't been murdered under his watch yet, damn it.
Rat bites would be a neat answer to the poisoning question, and was therefore almost certainly the wrong one. Even Vetinari would not be so absorbed in his letters as to ignore the nibbling. There were other nasty things that might worm their way into a Patrician's quarters to deliver an arsenic-laced bite, however, even discounting Nobby.
Their poisoned Patrician had to be inspected, inch by slimy inch. No less could be called due diligence.
Vimes had been re-checking the underside of the desk for the last ten minutes as he tried to justify saddling another poor soul with the task. Ordinarily, he would have shoved the ordeal onto Littlebottom's plate and been halfway away across the city by now, but the dwarf's increasingly colourful appearance brought to mind a passage Carrot had cited once on the rights of female suspects to request a policewoman for searches of their persons. Vimes was no longer certain how the laws of propriety and the laws of legality might interact in calling upon Littlebottom to inspect the Patrician. That left only Doughnut Jimmy, who had seemed troubled by the very concept of a patient without four hooves and a tail.
Just as Vimes was falling to despair, there came a knock at the door so robust and cheery it could only mean one knocker.
"Captain Carrot!" Vimes cried, yanking the door open, "You and Vetinari get on alright, don't you?"
Carrot lowered the slice of bread he'd been brandishing, but not his smile. "I'd like to think so, sir. Not like the two of you, of course, but he's got the same view of politics as I do have of policing, sir. Or, near enough."
"What do you mean, not like the two of us?" Vimes immediately regretted saying us. It sounded horribly, uninvitedly intimate. "You're the one who strong-armed him into giving the Watch a whole extra tower."
"Yes, but he actually likes you, sir."
"I doubt Vetinari likes his own mother," Vimes scoffed, "or anything, except being proven right."
"My mistake, sir. He must just like being right about you so often."
"He is not right about me often," Vimes said, hearing himself sound like a child. He winced to think of all the times he had marched to Vetinari's tune, unknowingly and knowingly. "At least, not more than he is about anyone else."
"I had hoped I might talk to you about the Battle Bread, sir? Angua and I have had a bit of a breakthrough in the…"
Vimes' hopes for an afternoon that did not involve coming to know the Patrician on a mortifying new level leaked away as he endured Carrot's report. Any attempt to shirk the duty now would land thoroughly in the territory of ladies who didst protest too much, and Carrot could not be allowed evidence to fuel his ridiculous theory. In reality, Vetinari's regard for Vimes hovered somewhere between his duty of care that extended to all Ankh-Morporkians, and a professional acknowledgement that Vimes was not a total cock-up as Commander of the Night Watch. All dolloped over with a some good old-fashioned upper class scorn, to be sure.
Silence alerted Vimes to the fact that his turn in the conversation had finally come back around the long way. "Er, yes?" he hazarded.
Carrot's face lit up and his tightened grip on the bread scattered crumbs over the Patrician's pristine floor. "You mean it, sir?"
"I said so, didn't I?" Vimes hoped he was not condoning the forging of any edible weaponry within the Watchtowers.
"Thank you, sir! You won't regret it."
Vimes agreed, but only because he had already spent his regret, and borrowed a few more years' worth, to pay for what he was about to undergo. Carrot saluted and left, taking the world of sensible boundaries with him.
"Right," Vimes said to himself. He shucked his gloves, only to hurry them back on a moment later. The Patrician wasn't some brittle page of an ancient book; there was no call to go removing physical boundaries as well.
"Right," Vimes said again.
He was a man of action. Deductive reasoning was best left to penny dreadfuls and noble scions with more free time than sense. A good copper followed his gut; he thought of a possibility and he explored it. Direct work. Honest work. And if that work required stripping the tyrant of the Disc's biggest city with all the dignity of a mother changing her newborn, well, it didn't get much more direct than that.
"Right. Nothing to it."
"If those are directions you are memorising, Sir Samuel, I fear someone is leading you in a circle."
Vimes startled like a house cat. The look he cast Vetinari must have been feral, for one pallid hand drifted toward the knife Vimes knew to live beneath his pillow.
"Are we under siege, Vimes?" The Patrician drew himself up onto his elbows and breathed as though it cost him. "You look as though there has been a dire development."
"You're awake, sir," Vimes said stupidly.
"Is that it? How wounding."
"That's not- I'll fetch the doctor."
Vimes fled before the Patrician could warn him of the fines imposed by the Guild of Barber-Surgeons for improper use of the title doctor.
When the Patrician succumbed - most punctually - to the arsenic again the next morning, Vimes arrived like a man possessed. His wretched task had bounced about between his ears all night, preventing progress in any other direction, and when he had finally fallen asleep, it had been into a nightmare wherein the Patrician leant down to unbutton his nightshirt. Vimes had spluttered awake in a state beyond what any sane man could be expected to acknowledge. No, this task could not be allowed to continue its looming.
He locked the door, drew the curtains, and clapped an inch above the Patrician's pointed nose. The angular face remained slack. Somehow, Vetinari looked more sinister in his sleep, absent of even those tiny twitches Vimes had come to navigate by. Still, this morning at least, Vimes was happy for the Patrician to remain deep in the clutches of the poison.
Over the course of his ruminating last night, Vimes had concluded that, like a child with broccoli, the worst should be gotten over with first. So it was, with an efficiency that would have spurred any attending servant to defensive action, that he ripped back the covers, gathered Vetinari's nightshirt at his waist, and checked the man's lower half for bites, front and back. The single emotion that made it through Vimes' ruthless professionalism was a wince at the puckered wound left by the gonne; another injury inflicted right under his nose.
"All clear, sir," he told the Patrician's limp form, straightening the cotton hem of his nightshirt back down. "If we survived that, we can survive anything." He wasn't sure if he meant the gonne or the last forty seconds.
The Patrician's face creased and he mumbled a word that might have been in another language, or simply containing more syllables than Vimes permitted to enter his own vocabulary. He did not wake. Anything else could be borne now that Vimes' veins thrummed with the adrenaline of a fear faced. If Doughnut Jimmy had walked in now, he would have declared neither of them fit to race.
Vimes leaned over the Patrician to undo his nightshirt's top buttons in preparation for the much less daunting upper half of the inspection but was so vividly reminded of his nightmare that he had to prop Vetinari up on a few pillows to change the angle before he could continue. Vetinari's head lolled to the side and a lock of thinning black hair curled forward onto his brow. Vimes had never seen him in such disarray, even being shot at.
Between glancing up at that lock of hair every few moments and his determination not to be caught off guard again, Vimes noted Vetinari's eyelids twitch before he woke this time. Incredible, how much dread the human body could summon in the split second between a man's eyelids twitching and opening.
"Ah, Vimes..." There was a pause longer than any Vimes had ever endured - longer, surely, than any man, anywhere, had endured. "Good morning."
"Good morning, sir."
Only Vetinari's head moved, and only slightly, as he took in the room, the situation, and, it felt like, every thought ricocheting around Vimes' skull.
"I have always found it conducive for one to remove one's gloves before unfastening one's coat buttons. Perhaps the principle may be generalised."
Vimes was seized again by the conviction that something terrible would happen were he to touch Vetinari without a pair of Watchman's gloves. The perfunctory handshakes that accompanied his raises had always been shielded so and they did not provoke in him this feeling that someone had spilt lamp oil beneath his skin and dropped a match.
"No?" the Patrician asked, "Well, no matter; I am not so infirm as to be tyrannised by buttons."
Vetinari's skeletal hands appeared between them to slip free the topmost button of his nightshirt, then the next-
"Stop!" Vimes snapped. It was obscene. "It's my inspection, I'll do it."
Vimes tore off his gloves and shoved them into his pocket. Vetinari's eyes were on him like a wolf's when he turned back, though he was too still beneath Vimes' hands for any decent mammal. There was some esoteric test tucked between these silver buttons, Vimes thought miserably, as he undid the last. The part of his mind straining against iron chains berated him for failing it, whilst his Good Sense scolded that passing would be a gross betrayal of his class, duty, and possibly humanity.
"Tell me, Sir Samuel-" Vimes experienced a slurry of relief and disappointment at the distance the fancy, imposter's title put between them "-why are the good business owners of Ankh-Morpork all at once divesting of their golems? And at such startling discounts."
Vimes' police brain elbowed its way to the forefront, demanding to know how Vetinari heard any rumours whilst lying unconscious for the past ten hours, but the rest of Vimes was not about to look a gift horse in the mouth.
"It's confounding, sir." Vimes launched into his theories with more candour than he usually awarded Vetinari. "Golems have these holy days, you see, and…"
Talking through the case, Vimes could pretend he was giving a report in the Oblong Office. Or rather - for the Patrician was sliding his arms out of his nightshirt now - he could pretend to pretend. At the very least, he could assure himself that the wiry black hair that crawled across Vetinari's chest was not a surprise, because the Commander of the Night Watch had no business holding any sort of expectation on the matter. Likewise, while the Patrician's build wasn't going to elicit free samples from the Seamstress' Guild (only Carrot could claim that compliment), he wasn't the emaciated husk Vimes had not-expected either. He was leaner than any man with a private kitchen should be, yes, but solid, despite his illness. Reliable.
"I find your silence most unnatural, Commander. If your inspection has uncovered an ingress point for the poison upon my person, do tell."
Vimes' eyes snapped up to Vetinari's face just in time to see one of those infinitesimally small twitches of the mouth. Surely, Vimes had not been gawking in silence? Surely, his mouth had been keeping up appearances whilst his mind betrayed him?
"Nothing yet, sir." Resentment soured Vimes. How dare Vetinari make him feel like the one bared to inspection? "If his lordship would lift his arms?"
Vetinari's eyes narrowed. He obliged in a curt motion. No man could hold onto his dignity long with his arms aloft like some dark, plucked chicken, so Vimes took his time before nodding.
"Very good, sir. All clear."
Vetinari lowered his hands to rest, steepled, in his lap. His nightshirt lay peeled about him like a rumpled skirt.
"I have, of course, conducted my own inspection."
"I don't doubt it, sir."
That predatory brightness flashed back into Vetinari's eyes. Panic shot through Vimes. He had just as good as admitted that this farce had been made redundant the moment Vetinari regained his powers of speech. A simple have you noticed any odd markings on your person, sir? and Vimes could have been about his day. Here was the test - the trap - Vetinari had laid and Vimes, genius that he was, had ripped off his gloves to stick his hands in it.
"A second opinion is always valuable, however," Vetinari said, "Wouldn't you agree?"
"Very valuable, sir." Vimes grasped that like the lifeline it was. And then, because he was the sort of man to dive back off a rescue boat if he had unfinished business with the sea, he added: "But a man can't check his own back. Sir."
That raised Vetinari's eyebrows almost a millimetre. Vimes could already hear the snide don't let me detain you. Instead, the Patrician sat up off his pillows and paused to consider. Except - consider wasn't quite right; that was only the word that Vimes' brain insisted upon, in the same way people insisted that Gaspode only said woof. Strip away everything Vimes knew of Vetinari and paused to consider looked a hell of a lot more like hesitated.
Vetinari eased himself around to face the rest of the room, giving Vimes his back. Scars ran across it like sticks caught in a current, ranging from the size of a staple to a slash that would have peeked out even if Vimes had laid his whole hand across it. Vimes let loose a low curse.
"Anything of note, Sir Samuel?" Vetinari wielded the title like a shield now.
"Apart from the fact someone's mistaken your back for a butcher's block?"
"Yes, well, the back of one's enemy is famously a favourite place to leave one's knives. I regret to say I did not arrive at my current powers of discernment all at once."
Scar tissue complicated this final chapter of the inspection. That was the only reason Vimes touched him; to be sure no insect-sized puncture wounds hid in the shadow of an old assassination attempt. The skin beyond the scar tissue was soft in the way only the rich could stay. Never spent a day sweating under the hot sun, this one. Never known the irritation of an undersized hand-me-down. Vetinari's skin was a sign of the injustice they lived under - injustice Vetinari worked alongside as skilfully as the palace gardener did the exploding sundial. But his skin was also warm - from the fever, and the bed.
"Measuring out a space of your own?" Vetinari asked.
His back was the kind of still now that spoke less of the wolf and more of the rabbit. There was a nasty edge to his voice usually reserved for greedy Guildspeople who threatened the balance of the city, and for mimes. He was embarrassed, Vimes realised suddenly; his professional pride as injured by these scars as Vimes' was by the one on his leg.
"No plans for that, sir."
"Come now, I have received more than one report of you fantasizing about just such a conquest. Once, in fact, from my own ears as you demonstrated your usual architectural opinion of the wall outside my office."
Vimes wrinkled his nose at the back of Vetinari's head. He couldn't deny the charge but, gods above, had he had to phrase it like that?
"You've never had a bad word to say about your bosses?" Vimes grumbled, "Is that why you ended up in the only job in the city without one?"
"They take that sort of talk rather more seriously at the Assassin's Guild."
The Patrician's back moved only with his breath. Vimes' thumb stretched of its own accord over the nub of his spine. He blinked. Bites. He was here to check for bites.
"All these people who've had their go at you - do they report to you as well now, sir?"
"Not many had the mind to listen to an offer of employment, I'm afraid. Fewer still were suitable. Though career satisfaction did quiet one or two."
Vimes stopped. "Is that what I am? Quieted?"
Vetinari made as if to turn around but Vimes grunted for him to stay still. He could already see that face with one elegant eyebrow raised to indicate that Vimes was missing the obvious. But it wasn't obvious to Vimes what use a man with his own dungeons had for an anti-authoritarian policeman. If Vimes was being kept as a pet, he wanted to hear it said out loud. He couldn't quite throw his badge at Vetinari's face - there was still work to be done in Ankh-Morpork - but he mightn't worry so much about the poisoning.
Vetinari spoke slowly to the wall: "If you ever feel yourself quieting, Commander, I shall find you a comfortable desk on the other side of the city. Ankh-Morpork needs loud boots keeping order in her streets, and, occasionally, in a mansion or two. And… one day, perhaps, despite my best efforts, she may need them in her palace."
"So I'm, what" - Vimes huffed out a noise of amazed dismay - "your fail-safe against turning into the next Lorenzo the Kind? Your bloody executioner-in-waiting?"
"You are my Watchman, Vimes. Although, now having seen the alacrity with which your mind springs to the headman's block, I would ask that, should the day come, you confer with Captain Carrot first, and remember that exile is an option."
Vimes chewed over the idea, tapping his thumb against Vetinari's spine, until he realised what he was doing.
"No," he said at last.
Vetinari sighed. "Really, now. I have every confidence that you would rise to the occasion. Even leaving aside the strength of your personal principles, your ancestor-"
"Paid a high price for his heroics. Sorry to burst your bubble, sir, but if there was a noble spirit in the Vimes family, it died with old Stoneface. No, you've managed up to now without giving anyone a reason to lop your head off - anyone decent, that is - so I suppose you'll just have to keep on holding yourself in check, sir."
Vetinari was silent for just long enough that Vimes' resolve started to waver. Then, his back shook under Vimes' palm with a chuckle that was little more than breath.
"My, my, Vimes, I underestimated just how ruthless a negotiator you are."
Vimes ignored him and stood back, balling his fists to keep hold of the feel of Vetinari's laugh. He fought the urge to dash around the bed so he could see whether it was accompanied by the familiar facial twitches. Vimes would never see them again without feeling the ghost of warm skin.
"All clear, sir."
Vetinari inched back around to face Vimes. Though he moved with stiff limbs, the fever had flushed colour back into his face better than any mortician. Perhaps a smidgen of the warmth had even reached his eyes.
Vimes had been so very wrong about the first half of his inspection being harder.
"Thank you, Commander." Vetinari inclined his head. "Your work is, as always, very… thorough."
For a moment, they only sat there in the late-morning light, eyeing each other like businessmen. Then, Vetinari set about threading one arm through his nightshirt's sleeve again. Vimes stood to go so that he wouldn't do anything stupid like watch.
"On the subject of possible delivery methods for the arsenic, I feel obliged to note that there is one constant in my life you have yet to deprive me of."
Vimes whipped around, mid-step. "Oh? What's that?"
Vetinari's ice-blue eyes pinned him in place. He lifted an eyebrow, exactly as Vimes had pictured.
"Ah," Vimes said, suddenly, horrifically, strangling a grin, "I ought to stay away a good few days then, sir, to rule it out."
"Indeed."
"Or I could borrow someone else's uniform when I come in tomorrow."
"Mm, as you've borrowed someone else's boots?" Vetinari sniffed, but he was smiling without smiling. It was in the eyes, maybe. Maybe other things were, too, burrowed in deep. Vimes had gotten the scent now, and he had never been good at giving up on a trail.
A twinge of pain replaced that invisible smile as Vetinari reached back for his second sleeve. Vimes was there in a flash. He guided his arm, then did up his buttons without a thought, until his knuckles brushed Vetinari's throat. A swallow travelled down it, though Vetinari's expression remained as animated as that of someone who had died in their sleep. Vimes could, the chained voice inside him urged, do something about that.
"I have taken up quite enough of your time today, I think, Sir Samuel," Vetinari oozed, "Don't let me detain you."
The words had the effect they always did on Vimes, which was to say that a fist-sized stretch of wallpaper in the corridor would need replacing. But Vimes found himself whistling as he left the Palace. Bruised knuckles or no, he was glad he had not delegated this task to Captain Carrot.