Chapter Thirteen: Why Was He Wearing A Dress, Then?

In which Miss Marietta von Lipwig produces a variety of useful pointy things and Havelock Vetinari exploits L-space in ways that for any normal human being would risk death by wild thesaurus

Some time later, some ways away, Sam was having an unexpected moment of premonition. He could see the future. It involved him, hacking up his own lungs.

"Nngk," he wheezed.

They had stumbled out of the plaza more or less successfully, but by this point the area surrounding the river was chaos, and it was impossible to say where the watchmen were, although if you threw a brick you probably had a good chance of hitting at least one. On the Ankh side, noble men and women were at work piling sandbags on bridges, because Lord Vetinari had Views when it came to willfully destroying private property, never mind the circumstances, and on the Morpork side the poor were either ripely abusing the unfortunate sandbags or hitting each other, as was traditional. And, of course, there was the problem of the smoke currently thick in Sam's nostrils.

"Put a wet cloth over your face!" Marietta bellowed. She managed to sound distracted regardless, which was impressive.

"How!"

"Dip a handkerchief in the Ankh, or something, I don't know!"

It looked like she'd done this herself, from what he could make out, and she was not screaming in agony, so Sam decided it was probably worth the risk. But - "I don't have anything to break the crust with!"

"Here!"

She passed him a filthy machete. He didn't ask, and hastened to cut a hole in the Ankh, dipped his handkerchief in it, and plastered it over his face. The sudden relief from heat and smog was almost worth the sudden destruction of his olfactory, he thought, dizzily.

"Good!" she said, extending a hand imperiously. He returned the machete. "Now let's get out of here!"

"Again, how!" he screamed, his voice only slightly muffled by the soggy face-protective-covering-thing.

"We can run on the river!"

Sam groaned. But it did have a certain logic to it. A horrible, horrible logic. And he was wearing good boots. "Fine!"

It's not a pleasant business, running on the Ankh. You have to keep near the sides, where the crust of drying mud and, er, assorted other liquids is thicker, and you have to make sure you don't sink or stick, both hazardous to your feet, and you have to be quick or the pollution will eat away whatever protective covering you might happen to have on you. Sam, unlike most children Ankh born and bred, was well aware of this – handy things for a watchman's son to know, and so forth – but he'd never actually put it into practice until now.

It did seem to be working, though. It was just a trick of finding the balance...

"Where are we going?" he said, when he was fairly sure of his step.

"The gates."

"Oh." Comprehension dawned like a big flaming ball of gas. "You want to flood the city? Are you sure?"

"Do you have a better idea?"

"Well... no, but I mean, I thought you were trained to handle these things! You're crowd control, aren't you? There's really no other way?"

"I'm crowd control, yes! Crowd is not the same thing as raging thatch combustion!" Marietta snapped.

"Maybe pavement would be a better place to argue about this?"

She blinked and then nodded curtly before wading out, her soles sizzling only slightly. Sam jogged after her. Happily, the crowd had thinned out here, because most of the city's population had been clustered around the plaza when Jacko struck.

"The fire isn't even that widespread yet," Sam said, peeling off his handkerchief, which had hardened into a grotesque mask, baked by the heat. He shook it. It took two tries to make the slime crack off. What was left would have been enough to make anyone blow their nose on their sleeve.

"Yet," she said flatly.

"The golems might be able to contain it still."

"Not bloody likely. The Fool will be setting other fires as we speak, anyway. It's out of their hands, although if we can find some on the way to help close the gates that would be nice."

"How do you know?" Sam said, frustrated.

"It's what I would do if I were him," she said, grinning mirthlessly. "No, the only people who could contain this are our favorite superheroes. And we don't want that."

"We don't?"

"If they save the city, they'll have won. Don't you understand how it works? All they have to do is sway popular opinion enough, and --" She made the classic gesture of 'the midden will hit the windmill', i.e., she drew the edge of her hand across her throat and then flailed expressively a bit. Sam eyed her, wavering.

"Between fire and water, there'll be no houses left after we're done!"

"Between Manly Man and Voose, there'll be no brains left after they're done!"

He stared at her briefly, and then said, "Fine."

"Right! Now hurry up – the fire's catching up with us."

He whirled around in time to see a sight that only Morporkians see, really – tendrils of flame licking the cobblestones and rolling across the street and the riverwater towards them, eating up the inch-deep superficial scum that covered both.

"Oh, bugger."

Marietta was already starting to blur as she fled the oncoming wall of what might politely be called quite agitated molecules getting some fresh air. He followed her example. She was quite a good runner, but he caught up with her in not much time at all. Running ran in the family, ahahaha, and he had very insistent genes when it came to such things. He would have been grateful, but he had learned early on that thinking too much while at full speed ahead + the inevitable rock = falling face-first into the sludgy streets in a not very hum'rous fashion, given the circumstances.

It wasn't far from where they'd gotten ashore again to the city wall, or what remained of it. Climbing said wall was another matter.

"Well, there's a... ladder up to the gatehouse?" Sam tried.

They both turned to look at it. It was not what you might call a happy ladder.

"I can climb this," Marietta said, slowly. "You went to the Assassins' Guild, didn't you? Can you -"

"I was never very good at edificeering," Sam said dubiously, "but I suppose I'll just keep close to the ladder and hope it's rustier than I am. Er."

Marietta pursed her lips considerately and then shrugged. "It's your neck. You could also go for the hills at this point – they'll be starting evacuation camps by now."

Sam gave her a disbelieving look. "I don't think so. You have spare hooks and things, I take it?" he said shortly, nodding to her suspiciously baggy clothing.

"Of course," she said, and produced the necessary tools from somewhere on her person, after an excess of rustling, while he watched the approaching blaze and whistled. "Here."

"Thank you."

Some busy minutes later, a sharp(1) eye could have caught two dark figures scaling the not-very-sheer, crumbling face of the west wall of the city.

As it happened, a sharp eye did.

"K-Manly Man?" said Voose, craning to see over his shoulder at where the shadows were ascending.

"What?" his companion said lazily.

"Someone's trying to get to the gatehouse," Voose said.

"Ah. Go and take care of them, will you?"

"Er... right."

When he had gone, Manly Man did a slow barrel roll and glanced at his other flanker. "I think now would be a good time to see about finding Vetinari. He's probably in the Palace by now, trying to organize, the fool."

"Of courrrrse," Marvel Maid said. "It would be my pleasurrrre."

He eyed her askance. "Don't take too much pleasure in it. Wouldn't be good PR. Plus, we don't have that much time."

"Yes, Manly Man," she said, rolling her eyes and looking petulant.

"Which means no torture."

"Very well."

"Just lock him up somewhere and have done with it, all right? Palace dungeons are good!" he called. She was already fading into the lower smog levels, but she did at least pause to wink at him.

Manly Man stared after her for a moment. And shrugged.

(1) To be honest, even a not very sharp eye could probably have done the job. But it was a sharp eye that ended up doing so, is the point(2).

(2) Pun not even slightly intended. No, indeed.

*

In fact, Vetinari was in the Library, humming a jolly little tune to himself. The Librarian was watching him, with appropriate discretion, of course, and looking as worried as an orangutan can look while still retaining that basic orangutan nonchalance.

The man had come in, rolling the omniscope in front of him, a little while ago, and he did not appear to be interested in leaving again.

Also, Hex had followed him. On spindly little legs. The dome, and the unhappy tubing, and all. It was a little horrifying. The Librarian was keeping as far away as possible, while Hex made sad little skudding circles that in a human might have been interpreted as moping around waiting for someone to get back.

There were worrying whirring noises, too.

Vetinari himself was somewhere deep in the labyrinth of shelves, now, the only sign of him the humming and, of course, the rope, one end of which had been tied to the reception desk, the other end of which was looped around Vetinari's cane.

"Ook?" the orangutan tried.

If Vetinari replied, he was too far away for his voice to carry. In any case, the Librarian was pretty sure he hadn't, because he was a bit of a bastard(1) that way.

The Librarian could have followed the Patrician, of course. But in the end he decided against it. Which was just as well, because the Patrician was at that moment on his way to an obscure Roundworld bookshop and while black-robed old men can just about get away with existing in obscure Roundworld bookshops, three hundred pound orangutans cannot.

Vetinari emerged from an impossibly small door, which would have been larger on the inside had it in fact had an inside, and glanced at the bored young woman who was shelving books. Or rather, on closer examination, who wasn't shelving books but was in fact hiding them cleverly behind previously shelved books so's to avoid actually having to shelve them. How curious.

"I was wondering if you had any..." - he hesitated - "...dee see comics?"

The woman yelped and whirled around. He hoped, privately, that she spoke plain Morporkian, but from her dumbfounded expression he rather doubted it. She was goggling impressively. She had quite a good face for goggling. Freckly, like.

"Uh... yes," she said, proving him wrong, although she was still staring at him. "Where did you come from?"

Vetinari pointed mutely to the door.

"How -"

"It's bigger than it looks," he said gravely.

"Oh. Right. Yeah. Obviously. Why are you wearing a dress? Never mind, don't answer that, I don't want to know. What did you say you wanted? Something comics?"

"Dee see comics, yes," he said, relieved.

"That'll be downstairs," she said. She looked at him again. "And - why do you have a rope tied to your walking stick?"

He opened his mouth. She hit herself on the forehead. "Never mind! Never mind! Customer friendly, customer friendly," she mumbled, and trotted off.

Downstairs proved to be a dusty and miserable place where old books went to die. It made Vetinari feel rather at home. "Here?"

"Yep," she said, rooting through some mysterious stacks, which were making bizarre noises(2). "Aha!"

He extended a hand, into which she triumphantly slammed a largish sheaf of flimsy booklets, one on top of the other, each fronted with a lurid illustration of men in tight suits.

"Thank you," Vetinari said, and hobbled out of storage and back upstairs. The girl looked at the space where he had been, and after some thought said to herself, with great solemnity,

"What a weirdo."

The weirdo in question, fortunately, did not hear; he was by this point already sneaking back out through the impossible door and into the more hazy in-between halls of L-space, which do not belong to any particular library but the UU's noble institution. The rope led him back.

He was humming again by the time he emerged out under the huge glass dome.

The Librarian sniffed, and glared balefully at him. "Oooook."

"Yes, I've been on a different planet," Vetinari said calmly, "there's no need to be like that."

"Eek."

"I was quite careful."

"Eeeek!"

"I can't help but think that my species is rather besides the point."

"Ook."

"Could you," Vetinari said, with the sigh of a man who is sitting on his considerable patience to keep it from getting away from him, "put that aside for a moment and think about how we could possibly go about barricading the doors?"

"OOK?"

"Yes, I believe so."

"Oook."

"Ah. Well, then."

The Librarian snorted and knuckled over to the massive entrance, where after some fiddly manipulations in which being three hundred pounds of muscle came in helpful, he bolted the two doors with the requisite steel bolt and locked all sixteen locks, three of which wanted particular shafts of light to be unlocked.

"Ook ook."

"I am very happy, thank you. That will do nicely."

"Eek," the Librarian grumbled.

At which point there was a great knocking that left dents in the wood. "Vetinarrri!" screamed a shrill voice from outside, "I know you arrre in therrre!"

Vetinari gave the sliver of Marvel Maid visible through the thin crack between said doors a mild look. "I am," he agreed. "I think you may find thousand-year-old spell-reinforced oak somewhat difficult to penetrate quickly, though. In any case, it seems a bit counterintuitive, since I believe your only goal is to lock me up...? And I believe you will want to get back to Manly Man. Soon."

There was a brief respite from the pounding. Then: "We'll be back forrr you laterrr."

"I don't doubt it," he said politely.

"Don't think you'rrre getting away with anything," she snapped. "Because you'rrre not."

"I wouldn't dream of it."

"Well, good."

There was a scrape, as of something extremely heavy being dragged up against the door.

"Remember," she hissed, "I will be back!"

And then silence.

"Well," said Vetinari, easing himself into a handy chair and giving all the other thinking entities(3) in the room a bright smile, "I think that went rather well, don't you?"

(1) Note to the reader: of course, all of the Librarian's narration is translated idiomatically from Orangutan, but the literal meanings of few words are of special interest. In this case, bastard would be more exactly phrased as 'a suspiciously hairless ape of indeterminate birth'.

(2) He needn't have worried. This being the Roundworld, there was nothing so fatal as, say, what had on occasion evolved in the paperwork of the late Commander Vimes' desk; only a few new species of cockroaches and some reasonably innocuous, not at all sentient moldy sandwiches.

(3) To wit: Hex, the Librarian, the .303 bookworm semiconscious and dazed thanks to careful misapplication of a grimoire, a herd of thesauri venturing dangerously near the edges of the shelves, which he made sure to wink at out of the corner of his eye, and approximately half of the books themselves. Conscious minds are a tricky thing to count, in thaumically rich environments like the Library.

A/N: Hi! It's been a while! I hope you're all enjoying yourselves! I know I am, what with AP testing and end-of-year projects! Haha. Anyway, updates will probably continue to be slow for some time, but perhaps not quite as delayed as this one was. Look on the bright side, that's what I always say.