Night Watch полностью

Vimes considered this. A bell. Well, every copper still got a bell, it was down there in the regulations, but Vimes had banned its use on anything but ceremonial occasions.

“No bell for me, Snouty,” said Vimes. “Do you think things are well?”

Snouty swallowed. “Could go either way, sarge,” he managed.

“Good man. See you this afternoon.”

There was a glow of dawn in the sky when Vimes strode out, but the city was still a pattern of shadows.

In his pocket was the reassuring heaviness of the badge. And in his mind the huge, huge freedom of the oath. Ruler after ruler had failed to notice what a devious oath it was…

He walked as steadily as he could down to Twinkle Street. A couple of watchmen tried to waylay him, but he showed them the badge and more importantly he had the voice now, it had come back to him. It was night and he was walking the streets and he owned the damn streets and somehow that came out in the way he spoke. They'd hurried off. He wasn't sure they'd believed him, but at least they'd pretended to; the voice had told them he could be the kind of trouble they weren't paid enough to deal with.

At one point he had to step aside as a very thin horse dragged a huge and familiar four-wheeled wagon over the cobbles. Frightened faces looked out at him from between the wide metal strips that covered most of it, and then it disappeared into the gloom. Curfew was claiming its nightly harvest.

These were not good times. Everyone knew Lord Winder was insane. And then some kid who was equally mad had tried to knock him off and would have done, too, if the man hadn't moved at the wrong moment. His lordship had taken the arrow in the arm, and they said—they being the nameless people of the kind that everyone met in the pub—that the wound had poisoned him and made him worse. He suspected everyone and everything, he saw dark assassins in every corner. The rumour was that he woke up sweating every night because they even got into his dreams.

And he saw plots and spies everywhere throughout his waking hours, and had men root them out, and the thing about rooting out plots and spies everywhere is that, even if there are no real plots to begin with, there are plots and spies galore very soon.

At least the Night Watch didn't have to do much of the actual rooting. They just arrested the pieces. It was the special office in Cable Street that was the long hand of his lordship's paranoia.

The Particulars, they were officially, but as far as Vimes could remember they'd revelled in their nickname of the “Unmentionables”. They were the ones that listened in every shadow and watched at every window. That was how it seemed, anyway. They certainly were the ones who knocked on doors in the middle of the night.

Vimes stopped, in the dark. The cheap clothes were soaked through, the boots were flooded, rain was trickling off his chin and he was a long, long way from home. Yet, in a treacherous kind of way, this was home. He'd spent most of his days working nights. Walking through the wet streets of a sleeping city was his life.

The nature of the night changed, but the nature of the beast remained the same.

He reached into the ragged pocket and touched the badge again.

In the darkness where lamps were few and far between, Vimes knocked on a door. A light was burning in one of the lower windows, so Lawn was presumably still awake.

After a while a very small panel slid back and he heard a voice say, “Oh…it's you.” There was a pause, followed by the sound of bolts being released.

The doctor opened the door. In one hand he held a very long syringe. Vimes found his gaze inexorably drawn to it. A bead of something purple dripped off the end and splashed on to the floor.

“What would you have done, injected me to death?” he said.

“This?” Lawn looked at the instrument as if unaware that he'd been holding it. “Oh…just sorting out a little problem for someone. Patients turn up at all hours.”

“I'll bet they do. Er…Rosie said you had a spare room,” said Vimes. “I can pay,” he added quickly. “I've got a job. Five dollars a month? I won't be needing it for long.”

“Upstairs on the left,” said Lawn, nodding. “We can talk about it in the morning.”

“I'm not a criminal madman,” said Vimes. He wondered why he said it, and then wondered who he was trying to reassure.

“Never mind, you'll soon fit in,” said Lawn. There was a whimper from the door leading to the surgery.

“The bed's not aired but I doubt that you'll care,” he said. “And now, if you'll excuse me…”

It wasn't aired, and Vimes didn't care. He didn't even remember getting into it.

He woke up once, in panic, and heard the sound of the big black wagon rattling down the street. And then it just, quite seamlessly, became part of the nightmare.

At ten o'clock in the morning Vimes found a cold cup of tea by his bed and a pile of clothes and armour on the floor outside the door. He drank the tea while he inspected the pile.