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holliThe beginning of a thing. Not sure if I'm going to finish it, but I seem to want to try. I've got a whole novel's worth of stuff in my head for this, but it remains to be seen if it'll ever make its way onto the page. If anyone wants to help by prodding me into writing more, it would surely be appreciated.
Policemen have their own walk. It's called "proceeding," and it is the gentle, rolling gait of every law enforcement officer in the history of the multiverse. It is a constant, like the deliberate dimness of sergeants or the missing three dollars in the tea kitty. Or like the way a running man will catch a watchman's eye...
***
Sam Vimes, twenty-one years old and a newly minted corporal, was proceeding down Attic Bee Street in a not untroubled state of mind. On the face of it, he should have had very little to feel uneasy about. He was, after all, the scion of Ankh-Morpork's wealthiest family, son of the Watch Commander, and promoted not though the nepotism that advanced so many well-bred young men, but through the patient solving of a nasty murder. Sam was still rather proud of that.
It was just that all his good fortune made him rather more noticeable that he was used to being; his parents certainly had a high profile, but Sam had always enjoyed a little more obscurity. Mostly because any news organization interested in changing that state of affairs had, previously, caught seven kinds of hell from Dad.
There was a news-stand on the corner. Sam couldn't help but wince as he passed it. It was the way his own face seemed to grimace at him, as if in pained sympathy, from half the covers.
That bloody article! "Ankh's Most Eligible Bachelor." It was such a *lot* of nonsense, but Dad said you could never underestimate how much nonsense the magazine-buying portion of the public was willing to consume. Dad said a lot of things like that, and Sam found he was very rarely wrong.
The article itself wasn't actually that bad, although it got his eye color wrong, listed his hobbies as painting watercolors and pursuing great justice, and included a truly terrifying fold-out poster that was now in pride of place on the bedroom walls of twelve-year-old girls across the city. No, the *real* problem was that the article seemed to have announced an open season on him, Sam Vimes, and every eligible young lady in the city-- and their mothers-- had taken their romantic crossbows down from above the mantel and begun polishing, as it were, the stocks.
Sergeant Colon's granddaughters had been bad enough, Sam thought to himself as he proceeded down the busy sidewalk. But this was an order of magnitude more alarming.
It's lucky that Sam had a Watchman's instincts, because most people would have been, by this point, much too distracted to notice a single running man in the crowded street. But Sam *was* a Watchman, and quite a good one, so no number of personal problems would have kept Sam from noticing the figure, carrying a satchel, shoving his way through the crowd. A girl was following him, running with the single-minded determination of the recently robbed. Sam sighed, and reached for his bell.
The man was running towards him, which was lucky. Sam angled out into the crowded street to intercept him-- once the thief realized there was a copper in the way, he'd have to try to dodge him, or arrow off into an alley, or possibly drop the satchel and feign sudden-onset amnesia, which someone had actually tried on Sam's friend Gordon once when they were lance-constables.
What Sam was not expecting was for the man to spot him, start frantically waving his free arm, and shout "Officer! Officer!" But life in the big city was full of surprises.
The thief reached Sam a moment ahead of the girl, and pushed Sam into her path. The two of them immediately began conducting a screaming argument over Sam's helmet. Sam winced.
"--showed her my license, I did--"
"--and what kind of a city are you running here, I ask you--"
"--chased me all the way from Goosegate, and the missus says I'm not to strain meself--"
"--tried to tell me it was some sort of a licensed theft, of all things--"
"--mad, sir, I really think--"
"--completely insane--"
A small crowd had begun to gather already, with the typical Ankh-Morpork enthusiasm for street theatre. Sam sighed. "Sir, if you could just-- miss, really, if you would calm down for a moment--" No response. Sam took off his helmet, unholstered his truncheon, and hit one with the other, producing a resounding clang that silenced the man, the girl, and the fellow selling sausages to the bystanders.
"That's better," Sam said. "Sir. Miss. Mr. Dibbler. If you could all be quiet for a moment, I think we can get this sorted out, hm?"
Everyone looked suitably chastened, although Sam noticed Mr. Dibbler taking the opportunity to pocket the change he'd been about to hand a man.
"Sorry, sir," said the thief. The girl blushed furiously and looked away.
"Now," said Sam, "Miss. You're recently arrived to the city, I'm guessing?"
Her mouth formed an O of astonishment. "How did you--"
"Newcomers tend to be a little... taken aback by their first experience with the Thieves' Guild," said Sam. "It's very common. I think they do an introductory pamphlet now, usually."
"I tried to give her one," the thief said, aggrieved. "But she just kicked me on the knee and started shouting."
"He tried to take my books," said the young lady, in the tones of one who has every confidence that all would be made clear by this statement.
“I offered her an out-of-towner’s discount!” the thief countered.
“Right,” Sam said. He held out a hand for the satchel, and the thief handed it over, with some reluctance. It was astonishingly heavy; Sam’s arm sagged under the weight. “Sir. I think you may have to write this one off as a loss. Ask your Guild representative to come ‘round Treacle Mine Road and talk to me if there’s any trouble. And miss...?” He raised an eyebrow at the young lady, waiting for a name.
She flushed again. Sam found himself noticing that she looked rather nice with pink cheeks; she was a pale girl, his own age or a little older, freckled a little, with a cloud of dark curly hair tied back from her face. “Meg, officer. Meg Garlick. And I *am* sorry for the trouble, but I really need those books.” She eyed the satchel rather hungrily, and when Sam handed it over she snatched it back and began to rifle through it, making sure that nothing was missing.
The thief left, grumbling, and the crowd dispersed. Miss Garlick finished taking inventory of her bookbag, and sighed with relief. “Everything’s here. If he’d taken Aubergine’s Anatomy I might have hit him, in all honesty.”
“Are you a student, then?” Sam asked.
She nodded. “Trainee doctor at the Free Hospital. I’m just down from Lancre this week; my first day’s tomorrow. Specializing in obstetrics,” she added, which would have been gibberish to most people in this city, but most people in this city didn’t grow up in a house with the Lady Sybil Free Hospital’s namesake, and two-thirds of its Board of Directors.
“You want to be a midwife, then?”
She brightened up considerably, once she realized that Sam knew what she was talking about. It made her eyes sparkle, which Sam rather liked. “Not quite,” she said, “but I trained with some really amazing midwives back home. And I suppose a good bit of my practice will be standard midwifery. But I came to the city to learn the really complicated stuff. What to do when the midwife’s toolkit* isn’t any good. That sort of thing.” She paused, then, and shook her head. “But I’m being frightfully rude. I don’t even know your name, and you’ve been so helpful.”
Later, Sam couldn’t say why he’d done it. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision, and Sam was usually the sort who thought things out, weighed the pros and cons before making any big choice. But something in his hindbrain took over his mouth, and he found himself saying, “Sam Ramkin, miss. It’s very nice to meet you.”
It wasn’t, technically, a lie. Ramkin was his middle name, and it was Mum’s maiden name; he had a perfect right to it. But it wasn’t the name that Miss Garlick would have known instantly as one of the most famous in Ankh-Morpork, the name that said “rich bugger and a duke in waiting besides.” It was not, in short, a name that Meg would recognize. Sam had more than enough of girls who recognized his name, just lately. Maybe that was why he did it.
So Meg smiled at him, without a hint of recognition flickering in her dark eyes. “It’s nice to meet you, too, Sam,” she said. “And please, call me Meg.”
*Sam also happened to be one of the few people in the city whose own birth might not have happened, if not for the existence of a toolkit larger and more complex than the average midwife’s. This was a fact he devoutly wished he did not know. Parents tend to take a sort of evil relish in telling their children the stories of their own births, and Sam’s were no exception. When he got into really spectacular trouble as a boy, Mum had liked to remind him how many hours she’d been in labor.
***
Miss Garlick-- Meg-- ended up walking with him for the rest of his patrol. She was headed his way in any case, she said, and Sam was the first person she’d met in the city who’d been really nice to her.
“Not that anyone’s been awful, I mean,” she amended quickly. “Even that thief was polite. But no one really seems to go out of their way here, you know? At home, when someone new moves in they’ve got half the town coming round to introduce themselves before they’re done unpacking. I haven’t even met any of my neighbors yet.”
“That’s life in the big city, I’m afraid,” Sam said. “People keep to themselves a bit more here.” When they weren’t gawking, at any rate.
“Did you grow up here, then?” Meg asked.
“‘Fraid so,” Sam answered. “Born and bred. I don’t even like walking on surfaces that aren’t cobblestoned.” He *had* been to the country; he just didn’t see the point of all that space. “What’s Lancre like?”
Meg though about her answer before she gave it. “Small,” she said at last. “Nice, but small. Everyone knows everything about everyone else, which can get a bit tiring, and it’s hard to feel grown-up when everyone you know still thinks of you as being about seven.”
“Well, I know what *that* feels like,” Sam said. “My-- my dad’s a copper, too, and I was just about raised in a Watch House. So most of my commanding officers have changed my nappies, which makes things a bit uncomfortable sometimes.” Inwardly, it occurred to Sam that talking about his nappies was probably not the best subject to bring up around a pretty girl who, he found, he had a growing interest in. He tried not to let the cringe show on his face.
But Meg only laughed. “Oh, I know exactly what you mean!” she said. “Mum’s specialty was herbs, not midwifery, but she’s worked with all the best midwives in the Ramtops. I trained under the woman who delivered me. I never quite shook the feeling that she saw me as quite bright, for an infant.”
Sam only knew a little about Meg’s home country-- they’d studied geography in school, but the Ramtops had only been lightly covered. He did know one thing about that part of the world, though.
“So your mum-- is she, er, a witch, then?”
But Meg didn’t seem to take it amiss. “Only part-time. She tried to retire when she married Dad, but it didn’t take. So I grew up around witches.”
“Haven’t met many witches, here,” Sam said. “There’s a few in the city, but they don’t tend to need coppers.” Which he approved of entirely. Like wizards, witches rarely broke the sorts of laws he was called on to enforce. And you hardly ever saw Things from the Dungeon Dimensions in the city these days; it seemed the magical community had got a lot stricter about that kind of thing in Sam’s lifetime.
Sam’s patrol was nearly over, and Meg was nearly back to her flat, but Sam found himself reluctant to part ways with her just yet. “Er,” he said, suddenly awkward, “would you like to get lunch with me some time? Since you’re new here, and don’t know what’s good yet?”
Meg smiled at him, and Sam relaxed a little. “That sounds lovely. It was very nice to meet you, Sam. How about Saturday? I’m sure I’ll need the break, after my first few days at the hospital.”
“Saturday sounds fine,” Sam said, but he was distracted, suddenly, by the realization that they were approaching a newsstand. He wondered what the odds were that Meg would notice that she was walking with front-page news. Pretty good, he wagered: she seemed like an observant sort of girl. And there was no way to steer her round it without her noticing the change of direction, either; there was nothing for it but to try to keep her attention on him and hope for the best...
But it turned out that he needn’t worry. The man at the newsstand was putting out the afternoon editions, covering up the morning papers with Sam’s picture on the cover. A small, solemn crowd began to gather as he wrote the new headlines on his chalkboard.
“What’s everyone looking so grim about?” Meg asked. “Is something wrong?”
“It’s the latest news on his Lordship,” Sam explained. “He took a turn for the worse last night, so everyone’s been a little worried. But look-- the palace says he’s doing better. Even had a bit of lunch.”
And indeed, the crowd round the newsstand looked distinctly relieved. The lead headline on the chalkboard said “VETINARI TAKES TOAST, TEA.” Another said “DOCTORS PREDICT SUPPER FOR HIS LORDSHIP.”
“People are paying attention that closely?” Meg asked, puzzlement clear on her face. “I mean, I heard he was ill, but it seems a bit, well, morbid, to track the poor man like this.”
“I think it’s something you have to be Morporkian to understand,” said Sam. “Sorry. But we’re all very worried about Lord Vetinari.”
Because Lord Vetinari was dying. And nobody knew what would happen next...
***
Sam’s dad said the trouble was that Lord Vetinari had done his job too well. He’d remade the city to his own design, and everyone was secretly afraid that the web would come untangled without the sober, black-clad spider who had sat in its middle for more than thirty years. Oh, he’d picked a successor, and everyone claimed to have every confidence in Mr. Lipwig, who’d done such wonderful things with the Post Office and the Bank and the Tax Bureau, not to mention all the work he’d done with the Underground.
But no one could quite shake the fear that a world with a Vetinari-shaped hole in it would simply fall to pieces, like an arch without its keystone. For people Sam’s age, who’d grown up in a city shaped by Vetinari’s vision, it was like imagining the sky without the sun in it.
This was nearly impossible to convey to someone who had been in the city les than forty-eight hours, but Sam did his best. “Oh,” said Meg, when he finished his fumbling explanation. “I think-- I think I see. It’s like when my godmother died. Everyone thought she’d be there forever, and suddenly she wasn’t.”
“Did it feel a bit like the world was ending?” Sam asked, smiling weakly.
Meg didn’t smile back. “It did, actually. But the surprising thing was-- life went on.”
“That’s good to hear,” Sam said. “Reassuring, like. I suppose it’s just a difference of scale.”
“Granny was the heart and soul of witchcraft in the Ramtops,” Meg said. “She told us all what we were, just by existing. There wasn’t a person or a place in Lancre that hadn’t felt her influence. I think none of us quite knew who we were, without her.” They’d stopped walking, standing to one side of the crowd at the newsstand. Sam wondered how the conversation had got so serious, but it seemed almost natural to be talking about something so weighty with Meg. She took him seriously, and he felt it only fair that he do the same.
“Then you do know why we’re watching his Lordship so closely,” Sam said. “I don’t know if he’s the heart and soul of Ankh-Morpork; maybe he’s its brain. But he’s something vital, anyway, and we’re not at all sure what we’re going to do without him.”
Meg simply nodded. “I’m glad I met you, Sam Ramkin. I feel a little more at home here already.” And she walked off, into the bustle of the street. Sam stood there a few moments longer, turning his helmet over in his hands, before he walked the rest of the way back to Treacle Mine Road.
Policemen have their own walk. It's called "proceeding," and it is the gentle, rolling gait of every law enforcement officer in the history of the multiverse. It is a constant, like the deliberate dimness of sergeants or the missing three dollars in the tea kitty. Or like the way a running man will catch a watchman's eye...
***
Sam Vimes, twenty-one years old and a newly minted corporal, was proceeding down Attic Bee Street in a not untroubled state of mind. On the face of it, he should have had very little to feel uneasy about. He was, after all, the scion of Ankh-Morpork's wealthiest family, son of the Watch Commander, and promoted not though the nepotism that advanced so many well-bred young men, but through the patient solving of a nasty murder. Sam was still rather proud of that.
It was just that all his good fortune made him rather more noticeable that he was used to being; his parents certainly had a high profile, but Sam had always enjoyed a little more obscurity. Mostly because any news organization interested in changing that state of affairs had, previously, caught seven kinds of hell from Dad.
There was a news-stand on the corner. Sam couldn't help but wince as he passed it. It was the way his own face seemed to grimace at him, as if in pained sympathy, from half the covers.
That bloody article! "Ankh's Most Eligible Bachelor." It was such a *lot* of nonsense, but Dad said you could never underestimate how much nonsense the magazine-buying portion of the public was willing to consume. Dad said a lot of things like that, and Sam found he was very rarely wrong.
The article itself wasn't actually that bad, although it got his eye color wrong, listed his hobbies as painting watercolors and pursuing great justice, and included a truly terrifying fold-out poster that was now in pride of place on the bedroom walls of twelve-year-old girls across the city. No, the *real* problem was that the article seemed to have announced an open season on him, Sam Vimes, and every eligible young lady in the city-- and their mothers-- had taken their romantic crossbows down from above the mantel and begun polishing, as it were, the stocks.
Sergeant Colon's granddaughters had been bad enough, Sam thought to himself as he proceeded down the busy sidewalk. But this was an order of magnitude more alarming.
It's lucky that Sam had a Watchman's instincts, because most people would have been, by this point, much too distracted to notice a single running man in the crowded street. But Sam *was* a Watchman, and quite a good one, so no number of personal problems would have kept Sam from noticing the figure, carrying a satchel, shoving his way through the crowd. A girl was following him, running with the single-minded determination of the recently robbed. Sam sighed, and reached for his bell.
The man was running towards him, which was lucky. Sam angled out into the crowded street to intercept him-- once the thief realized there was a copper in the way, he'd have to try to dodge him, or arrow off into an alley, or possibly drop the satchel and feign sudden-onset amnesia, which someone had actually tried on Sam's friend Gordon once when they were lance-constables.
What Sam was not expecting was for the man to spot him, start frantically waving his free arm, and shout "Officer! Officer!" But life in the big city was full of surprises.
The thief reached Sam a moment ahead of the girl, and pushed Sam into her path. The two of them immediately began conducting a screaming argument over Sam's helmet. Sam winced.
"--showed her my license, I did--"
"--and what kind of a city are you running here, I ask you--"
"--chased me all the way from Goosegate, and the missus says I'm not to strain meself--"
"--tried to tell me it was some sort of a licensed theft, of all things--"
"--mad, sir, I really think--"
"--completely insane--"
A small crowd had begun to gather already, with the typical Ankh-Morpork enthusiasm for street theatre. Sam sighed. "Sir, if you could just-- miss, really, if you would calm down for a moment--" No response. Sam took off his helmet, unholstered his truncheon, and hit one with the other, producing a resounding clang that silenced the man, the girl, and the fellow selling sausages to the bystanders.
"That's better," Sam said. "Sir. Miss. Mr. Dibbler. If you could all be quiet for a moment, I think we can get this sorted out, hm?"
Everyone looked suitably chastened, although Sam noticed Mr. Dibbler taking the opportunity to pocket the change he'd been about to hand a man.
"Sorry, sir," said the thief. The girl blushed furiously and looked away.
"Now," said Sam, "Miss. You're recently arrived to the city, I'm guessing?"
Her mouth formed an O of astonishment. "How did you--"
"Newcomers tend to be a little... taken aback by their first experience with the Thieves' Guild," said Sam. "It's very common. I think they do an introductory pamphlet now, usually."
"I tried to give her one," the thief said, aggrieved. "But she just kicked me on the knee and started shouting."
"He tried to take my books," said the young lady, in the tones of one who has every confidence that all would be made clear by this statement.
“I offered her an out-of-towner’s discount!” the thief countered.
“Right,” Sam said. He held out a hand for the satchel, and the thief handed it over, with some reluctance. It was astonishingly heavy; Sam’s arm sagged under the weight. “Sir. I think you may have to write this one off as a loss. Ask your Guild representative to come ‘round Treacle Mine Road and talk to me if there’s any trouble. And miss...?” He raised an eyebrow at the young lady, waiting for a name.
She flushed again. Sam found himself noticing that she looked rather nice with pink cheeks; she was a pale girl, his own age or a little older, freckled a little, with a cloud of dark curly hair tied back from her face. “Meg, officer. Meg Garlick. And I *am* sorry for the trouble, but I really need those books.” She eyed the satchel rather hungrily, and when Sam handed it over she snatched it back and began to rifle through it, making sure that nothing was missing.
The thief left, grumbling, and the crowd dispersed. Miss Garlick finished taking inventory of her bookbag, and sighed with relief. “Everything’s here. If he’d taken Aubergine’s Anatomy I might have hit him, in all honesty.”
“Are you a student, then?” Sam asked.
She nodded. “Trainee doctor at the Free Hospital. I’m just down from Lancre this week; my first day’s tomorrow. Specializing in obstetrics,” she added, which would have been gibberish to most people in this city, but most people in this city didn’t grow up in a house with the Lady Sybil Free Hospital’s namesake, and two-thirds of its Board of Directors.
“You want to be a midwife, then?”
She brightened up considerably, once she realized that Sam knew what she was talking about. It made her eyes sparkle, which Sam rather liked. “Not quite,” she said, “but I trained with some really amazing midwives back home. And I suppose a good bit of my practice will be standard midwifery. But I came to the city to learn the really complicated stuff. What to do when the midwife’s toolkit* isn’t any good. That sort of thing.” She paused, then, and shook her head. “But I’m being frightfully rude. I don’t even know your name, and you’ve been so helpful.”
Later, Sam couldn’t say why he’d done it. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision, and Sam was usually the sort who thought things out, weighed the pros and cons before making any big choice. But something in his hindbrain took over his mouth, and he found himself saying, “Sam Ramkin, miss. It’s very nice to meet you.”
It wasn’t, technically, a lie. Ramkin was his middle name, and it was Mum’s maiden name; he had a perfect right to it. But it wasn’t the name that Miss Garlick would have known instantly as one of the most famous in Ankh-Morpork, the name that said “rich bugger and a duke in waiting besides.” It was not, in short, a name that Meg would recognize. Sam had more than enough of girls who recognized his name, just lately. Maybe that was why he did it.
So Meg smiled at him, without a hint of recognition flickering in her dark eyes. “It’s nice to meet you, too, Sam,” she said. “And please, call me Meg.”
*Sam also happened to be one of the few people in the city whose own birth might not have happened, if not for the existence of a toolkit larger and more complex than the average midwife’s. This was a fact he devoutly wished he did not know. Parents tend to take a sort of evil relish in telling their children the stories of their own births, and Sam’s were no exception. When he got into really spectacular trouble as a boy, Mum had liked to remind him how many hours she’d been in labor.
***
Miss Garlick-- Meg-- ended up walking with him for the rest of his patrol. She was headed his way in any case, she said, and Sam was the first person she’d met in the city who’d been really nice to her.
“Not that anyone’s been awful, I mean,” she amended quickly. “Even that thief was polite. But no one really seems to go out of their way here, you know? At home, when someone new moves in they’ve got half the town coming round to introduce themselves before they’re done unpacking. I haven’t even met any of my neighbors yet.”
“That’s life in the big city, I’m afraid,” Sam said. “People keep to themselves a bit more here.” When they weren’t gawking, at any rate.
“Did you grow up here, then?” Meg asked.
“‘Fraid so,” Sam answered. “Born and bred. I don’t even like walking on surfaces that aren’t cobblestoned.” He *had* been to the country; he just didn’t see the point of all that space. “What’s Lancre like?”
Meg though about her answer before she gave it. “Small,” she said at last. “Nice, but small. Everyone knows everything about everyone else, which can get a bit tiring, and it’s hard to feel grown-up when everyone you know still thinks of you as being about seven.”
“Well, I know what *that* feels like,” Sam said. “My-- my dad’s a copper, too, and I was just about raised in a Watch House. So most of my commanding officers have changed my nappies, which makes things a bit uncomfortable sometimes.” Inwardly, it occurred to Sam that talking about his nappies was probably not the best subject to bring up around a pretty girl who, he found, he had a growing interest in. He tried not to let the cringe show on his face.
But Meg only laughed. “Oh, I know exactly what you mean!” she said. “Mum’s specialty was herbs, not midwifery, but she’s worked with all the best midwives in the Ramtops. I trained under the woman who delivered me. I never quite shook the feeling that she saw me as quite bright, for an infant.”
Sam only knew a little about Meg’s home country-- they’d studied geography in school, but the Ramtops had only been lightly covered. He did know one thing about that part of the world, though.
“So your mum-- is she, er, a witch, then?”
But Meg didn’t seem to take it amiss. “Only part-time. She tried to retire when she married Dad, but it didn’t take. So I grew up around witches.”
“Haven’t met many witches, here,” Sam said. “There’s a few in the city, but they don’t tend to need coppers.” Which he approved of entirely. Like wizards, witches rarely broke the sorts of laws he was called on to enforce. And you hardly ever saw Things from the Dungeon Dimensions in the city these days; it seemed the magical community had got a lot stricter about that kind of thing in Sam’s lifetime.
Sam’s patrol was nearly over, and Meg was nearly back to her flat, but Sam found himself reluctant to part ways with her just yet. “Er,” he said, suddenly awkward, “would you like to get lunch with me some time? Since you’re new here, and don’t know what’s good yet?”
Meg smiled at him, and Sam relaxed a little. “That sounds lovely. It was very nice to meet you, Sam. How about Saturday? I’m sure I’ll need the break, after my first few days at the hospital.”
“Saturday sounds fine,” Sam said, but he was distracted, suddenly, by the realization that they were approaching a newsstand. He wondered what the odds were that Meg would notice that she was walking with front-page news. Pretty good, he wagered: she seemed like an observant sort of girl. And there was no way to steer her round it without her noticing the change of direction, either; there was nothing for it but to try to keep her attention on him and hope for the best...
But it turned out that he needn’t worry. The man at the newsstand was putting out the afternoon editions, covering up the morning papers with Sam’s picture on the cover. A small, solemn crowd began to gather as he wrote the new headlines on his chalkboard.
“What’s everyone looking so grim about?” Meg asked. “Is something wrong?”
“It’s the latest news on his Lordship,” Sam explained. “He took a turn for the worse last night, so everyone’s been a little worried. But look-- the palace says he’s doing better. Even had a bit of lunch.”
And indeed, the crowd round the newsstand looked distinctly relieved. The lead headline on the chalkboard said “VETINARI TAKES TOAST, TEA.” Another said “DOCTORS PREDICT SUPPER FOR HIS LORDSHIP.”
“People are paying attention that closely?” Meg asked, puzzlement clear on her face. “I mean, I heard he was ill, but it seems a bit, well, morbid, to track the poor man like this.”
“I think it’s something you have to be Morporkian to understand,” said Sam. “Sorry. But we’re all very worried about Lord Vetinari.”
Because Lord Vetinari was dying. And nobody knew what would happen next...
***
Sam’s dad said the trouble was that Lord Vetinari had done his job too well. He’d remade the city to his own design, and everyone was secretly afraid that the web would come untangled without the sober, black-clad spider who had sat in its middle for more than thirty years. Oh, he’d picked a successor, and everyone claimed to have every confidence in Mr. Lipwig, who’d done such wonderful things with the Post Office and the Bank and the Tax Bureau, not to mention all the work he’d done with the Underground.
But no one could quite shake the fear that a world with a Vetinari-shaped hole in it would simply fall to pieces, like an arch without its keystone. For people Sam’s age, who’d grown up in a city shaped by Vetinari’s vision, it was like imagining the sky without the sun in it.
This was nearly impossible to convey to someone who had been in the city les than forty-eight hours, but Sam did his best. “Oh,” said Meg, when he finished his fumbling explanation. “I think-- I think I see. It’s like when my godmother died. Everyone thought she’d be there forever, and suddenly she wasn’t.”
“Did it feel a bit like the world was ending?” Sam asked, smiling weakly.
Meg didn’t smile back. “It did, actually. But the surprising thing was-- life went on.”
“That’s good to hear,” Sam said. “Reassuring, like. I suppose it’s just a difference of scale.”
“Granny was the heart and soul of witchcraft in the Ramtops,” Meg said. “She told us all what we were, just by existing. There wasn’t a person or a place in Lancre that hadn’t felt her influence. I think none of us quite knew who we were, without her.” They’d stopped walking, standing to one side of the crowd at the newsstand. Sam wondered how the conversation had got so serious, but it seemed almost natural to be talking about something so weighty with Meg. She took him seriously, and he felt it only fair that he do the same.
“Then you do know why we’re watching his Lordship so closely,” Sam said. “I don’t know if he’s the heart and soul of Ankh-Morpork; maybe he’s its brain. But he’s something vital, anyway, and we’re not at all sure what we’re going to do without him.”
Meg simply nodded. “I’m glad I met you, Sam Ramkin. I feel a little more at home here already.” And she walked off, into the bustle of the street. Sam stood there a few moments longer, turning his helmet over in his hands, before he walked the rest of the way back to Treacle Mine Road.
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