some more discworld
Jul. 10th, 2011 09:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hollior, the further adventures of Young Sam.
Sam, much to his chagrin, had a title. As the son of a duke he was a Lord anyway, which was bad enough, but the firstborn son of the Duke of Ankh had a courtesy title, which meant that Sam had to be introduced at posh parties as the Viscount of Oxbury. There was no such place as Oxbury, at least not in the last nine hundred years, and being the Viscount of it was complete nonsense, but that didn't mean a thing to the people who announced you at posh parties. They went right on doing it regardless.
It did have one advantage. Over the years, Sam had taken to separating out all the posh nonsense in his life and assigning it to the Viscount. He could be plain Sam Vimes, who was an ordinary copper like his dad; the Viscount of Oxbury was some rich bugger who was going to grow up to be a duke. It made it much easier to forget that plain Sam Vimes was as much of a fiction as the Viscount.
As he walked back to Treacle Mine Road, Sam thought about Meg, and wondered if he shouldn’t have told her his real name from the start. But that would have meant her knowing about the Viscount, and somehow Sam suspected that the Viscount couldn’t have had the sort of real, genuine conversation he’d had with Meg. He couldn’t imagine her telling the Viscount about her granny, certainly.
Sam was deep enough in thought that Penny was nearly able to catch him unawares at the entrance to the Watch House. But the sun flashed off her red hair as she approached him, and he dragged himself out of his brown study in time to smile at her and hold the Watch House door open.
Nevertheless, she rolled her eyes at him as she ducked under his arm. “Shoegazing again, Sam?” she asked. Penny thought Sam lived in his own head too much; in all fairness, sometimes Sam thought the same thing. He followed her into the squad room, which was quiet; a few coppers were writing their reports at the low tables, and the sergeant at the high desk looked bored. Penny gave her a wave, and the sergeant nodded back.
Penny Ironfoundersson was the reason Sam could sympathize with Gordon when his younger sisters were giving him trouble. Despite being entirely unrelated, she had taken up the role of puncturer of Sam’s ego and underminer of his self-image with some glee, and took every opportunity to deflate his head, if ever it should swell. Sam didn’t think he was particularly full of himself, but then, he had Penny around to ensure that he remained so.
Despite her role as critic, Sam rather liked Penny. She had her mother’s sense of humor and her father’s genuine fondness for the city and its people; she knew everyone, and seemed to like them even if she did make fun of them from time to time. She was remarkably level-headed, for a sixteen-year-old. If Sam was Ankh-Morpork’s favorite son, then Penny was surely her favorite daughter.
She didn’t want to be a copper, though. Sam found that slightly baffling. She had a copper’s instinct for sticking her nose where it wasn’t wanted, but she had decided years ago that she wanted to be a newspaper reporter, the policeman’s natural enemy. She seemed to be sticking to it, too, despite Sam’s best attempts at making her see sense.
Despite not wanting to follow her parents into the best job in the world, Penny spent quite a lot of time at the Watch House. Quite a lot of her friends who’d already finished school were coppers, not to mention her mum and dad, and like Sam she’d grown up underfoot at the Yard and the various Watch Houses.
“How’s school, Penny?” Sam asked. “Going well, I hope?”
Penny only shrugged. “The student newspaper still won’t let me cover anything *exciting*. And when I’ve got an inside scoop, too!”
“Dinner-table conversation’s not really meant to be reported on, you know,” Sam said, shaking his head.”
“Then Mum and Dad shouldn’t discuss grisly murders over supper, should they? And on that note,” she added, brightening up, “have you had any word on the Rag-and-Bone Man?”
“I told you not to call him that,” said Sam. “And no. There haven’t been any more... bodies. And you’re not supposed to know if there are, anyway.”
“I *told* you,” said Penny. “Dinner-table conversation. And it’s bad enough you’re making me sit on the story of the year-- not telling me when there’s news would be simply unforgivable.”
“I’ll tell you,” said Sam, “but only to keep you from trying to figure it out for yourself, and getting into trouble.”
“And because I have all the good blackmail material on you,” said Penny. “I know where the pictures are hidden.”
“They’re washtub iconographs from when I was a baby, not blackmail material,” Sam said, lowering his voice and glancing round at the rest of the squad room. “And they’re not even hidden! Mum keeps them in albums on the drawing room shelves!”
“I still know where they a-are,” Penny replied in a singsong voice.
Sam did his best to glower at her. Despite being the son of a man with a near-legendary glower, this was singularly ineffective. Sam wished he’d managed to inherit either of his parents’ airs of authority, which to him seemed to come to them as naturally as breathing. The best he could do was competent politeness, which worked for most basic coppering but really didn’t put much in the way of quivering fear into the hearts of criminals and lowlifes. It certainly didn’t work on Penny.
“You know, if you want me to tell you what happening with the Rag-- with my case, this is not the best way to go about it,” Sam pointed out.
“Yes, but it’s such *fun*,” Penny said. “Oh, all right, Sam, I’ll stop. Really, have you had any word on the case?”
“Not for a week,” Sam said. “And I like it that way. It might mean it’s over.”
“You don’t really think that, do you?”
“No,” Sam admitted. “But I wish I did.”
Penny took that seriously, at least. “Sorry, Sam,” she said. “I’ll leave you be. Just try not to get too wrapped up in the case.”
“I’ll do my best,” Sam said, and smiled at her until she looked reassured, and climbed the stairs up to Captain Angua’s office.
***
What Penny called the Rag-and-Bone Man Case, and Sam refused to call anything the sort, was the sort of case that makes most coppers wish they’d gotten a nice quiet job as a grocer instead. But it was Sam’s case, because he’d done well on his first murder, and because he’d discovered the first body. Bodies. Well. It was complicated, and that was what made this case the sort that made coppers go prematurely grey.
Six weeks ago, Sam had been first on the scene when a body was dragged out of the river. It had been in the river for some time, but that didn’t quite explain why it was covered in ropy, unhealed scars, or why its arms and legs were all different lengths, or why it made the Igor on duty in Forensics throw a huge stroppy fit and storm out in the middle of a shift. Once Igor had calmed down, and the rest of Forensics had taken a look, it had been determined that the corpse had been sewn together from several other corpses, all of them already dead, and that what Igor had really been objecting to was the profligate waste of body parts. And the sloppy technique.
Since then four more corpses, each a little less inexpertly-made than the last, had been found in various parts on the city. Sam had also uncovered a rash of unreported grave-robbings, all from pauper’s tombs in the city’s least-cared-for cemetaries. Working that out had been a tricky piece of coppering, too.
The trouble was, the last two corpses had healed-over scars. Whoever Sam’s mystery monster-maker was, he was getting better at it: his last two creations had lived, after a fashion, for at least a little while.
Sam’s first suspect had been one of the city’s many Igors, although he hadn’t been able to narrow it down much beyond that. Igors were widely suspected of doing this sort of thing already, by the average citizen, and though Sam was not an average citizen he still considered the possibility. Igors had the technical know-how, after all, and they were skilled transplant surgeons. Perhaps his mystery bodies belonged to an Igor getting in some after-hours practice, doing the surgeon’s equivalent of building models in his spare time?
But every Igor he spoke to assured him this could not be the case. Building entire bodies out of spare parts was quite against the Code of the Igors*, violating their central precept of preserving life and ensuring that everyone got the parts they needed. “No,” said the Watch’s own Igor, “thith lookth like clathic mad thience to me, Corporal Vimes. You get thith thort of thing in Uberwald from time to time-- thome bugger with a medical degree and a limited underthanding of how long brainth last on ice. It never ended well.”
“*Do* brains last long on ice?” Sam asked, appalled but a little fascinated nontheless.
“Not very well,” Igor answered cheerfully, happy to be talking about his specialty. “You thee, just about any other body part can be brought round with a good bolt of lightning, but brainth have got no shelf-life at all. Once they’re dead, they’re dead, and lightning thcrambles them thomething awful.”
“So the body we found in the river--” Sam began, who was beginning to feel a bit queasy.
“Wouldn’t have worked for a minute. The parts are bad enough-- dayth old, most of them-- but the brain’th jutht too dead to be any good. Whoever made thith couldn’t have hoped he’d get it up and walking.”
“So why do it?”
Igor shrugged, one shoulder going up noticeably higher than the other. “Who knowth? Practith, I’m betting. We’ll see more from him, you mark my wordth.”
And they had.
*”Wathte not, want not.”
Sam, much to his chagrin, had a title. As the son of a duke he was a Lord anyway, which was bad enough, but the firstborn son of the Duke of Ankh had a courtesy title, which meant that Sam had to be introduced at posh parties as the Viscount of Oxbury. There was no such place as Oxbury, at least not in the last nine hundred years, and being the Viscount of it was complete nonsense, but that didn't mean a thing to the people who announced you at posh parties. They went right on doing it regardless.
It did have one advantage. Over the years, Sam had taken to separating out all the posh nonsense in his life and assigning it to the Viscount. He could be plain Sam Vimes, who was an ordinary copper like his dad; the Viscount of Oxbury was some rich bugger who was going to grow up to be a duke. It made it much easier to forget that plain Sam Vimes was as much of a fiction as the Viscount.
As he walked back to Treacle Mine Road, Sam thought about Meg, and wondered if he shouldn’t have told her his real name from the start. But that would have meant her knowing about the Viscount, and somehow Sam suspected that the Viscount couldn’t have had the sort of real, genuine conversation he’d had with Meg. He couldn’t imagine her telling the Viscount about her granny, certainly.
Sam was deep enough in thought that Penny was nearly able to catch him unawares at the entrance to the Watch House. But the sun flashed off her red hair as she approached him, and he dragged himself out of his brown study in time to smile at her and hold the Watch House door open.
Nevertheless, she rolled her eyes at him as she ducked under his arm. “Shoegazing again, Sam?” she asked. Penny thought Sam lived in his own head too much; in all fairness, sometimes Sam thought the same thing. He followed her into the squad room, which was quiet; a few coppers were writing their reports at the low tables, and the sergeant at the high desk looked bored. Penny gave her a wave, and the sergeant nodded back.
Penny Ironfoundersson was the reason Sam could sympathize with Gordon when his younger sisters were giving him trouble. Despite being entirely unrelated, she had taken up the role of puncturer of Sam’s ego and underminer of his self-image with some glee, and took every opportunity to deflate his head, if ever it should swell. Sam didn’t think he was particularly full of himself, but then, he had Penny around to ensure that he remained so.
Despite her role as critic, Sam rather liked Penny. She had her mother’s sense of humor and her father’s genuine fondness for the city and its people; she knew everyone, and seemed to like them even if she did make fun of them from time to time. She was remarkably level-headed, for a sixteen-year-old. If Sam was Ankh-Morpork’s favorite son, then Penny was surely her favorite daughter.
She didn’t want to be a copper, though. Sam found that slightly baffling. She had a copper’s instinct for sticking her nose where it wasn’t wanted, but she had decided years ago that she wanted to be a newspaper reporter, the policeman’s natural enemy. She seemed to be sticking to it, too, despite Sam’s best attempts at making her see sense.
Despite not wanting to follow her parents into the best job in the world, Penny spent quite a lot of time at the Watch House. Quite a lot of her friends who’d already finished school were coppers, not to mention her mum and dad, and like Sam she’d grown up underfoot at the Yard and the various Watch Houses.
“How’s school, Penny?” Sam asked. “Going well, I hope?”
Penny only shrugged. “The student newspaper still won’t let me cover anything *exciting*. And when I’ve got an inside scoop, too!”
“Dinner-table conversation’s not really meant to be reported on, you know,” Sam said, shaking his head.”
“Then Mum and Dad shouldn’t discuss grisly murders over supper, should they? And on that note,” she added, brightening up, “have you had any word on the Rag-and-Bone Man?”
“I told you not to call him that,” said Sam. “And no. There haven’t been any more... bodies. And you’re not supposed to know if there are, anyway.”
“I *told* you,” said Penny. “Dinner-table conversation. And it’s bad enough you’re making me sit on the story of the year-- not telling me when there’s news would be simply unforgivable.”
“I’ll tell you,” said Sam, “but only to keep you from trying to figure it out for yourself, and getting into trouble.”
“And because I have all the good blackmail material on you,” said Penny. “I know where the pictures are hidden.”
“They’re washtub iconographs from when I was a baby, not blackmail material,” Sam said, lowering his voice and glancing round at the rest of the squad room. “And they’re not even hidden! Mum keeps them in albums on the drawing room shelves!”
“I still know where they a-are,” Penny replied in a singsong voice.
Sam did his best to glower at her. Despite being the son of a man with a near-legendary glower, this was singularly ineffective. Sam wished he’d managed to inherit either of his parents’ airs of authority, which to him seemed to come to them as naturally as breathing. The best he could do was competent politeness, which worked for most basic coppering but really didn’t put much in the way of quivering fear into the hearts of criminals and lowlifes. It certainly didn’t work on Penny.
“You know, if you want me to tell you what happening with the Rag-- with my case, this is not the best way to go about it,” Sam pointed out.
“Yes, but it’s such *fun*,” Penny said. “Oh, all right, Sam, I’ll stop. Really, have you had any word on the case?”
“Not for a week,” Sam said. “And I like it that way. It might mean it’s over.”
“You don’t really think that, do you?”
“No,” Sam admitted. “But I wish I did.”
Penny took that seriously, at least. “Sorry, Sam,” she said. “I’ll leave you be. Just try not to get too wrapped up in the case.”
“I’ll do my best,” Sam said, and smiled at her until she looked reassured, and climbed the stairs up to Captain Angua’s office.
***
What Penny called the Rag-and-Bone Man Case, and Sam refused to call anything the sort, was the sort of case that makes most coppers wish they’d gotten a nice quiet job as a grocer instead. But it was Sam’s case, because he’d done well on his first murder, and because he’d discovered the first body. Bodies. Well. It was complicated, and that was what made this case the sort that made coppers go prematurely grey.
Six weeks ago, Sam had been first on the scene when a body was dragged out of the river. It had been in the river for some time, but that didn’t quite explain why it was covered in ropy, unhealed scars, or why its arms and legs were all different lengths, or why it made the Igor on duty in Forensics throw a huge stroppy fit and storm out in the middle of a shift. Once Igor had calmed down, and the rest of Forensics had taken a look, it had been determined that the corpse had been sewn together from several other corpses, all of them already dead, and that what Igor had really been objecting to was the profligate waste of body parts. And the sloppy technique.
Since then four more corpses, each a little less inexpertly-made than the last, had been found in various parts on the city. Sam had also uncovered a rash of unreported grave-robbings, all from pauper’s tombs in the city’s least-cared-for cemetaries. Working that out had been a tricky piece of coppering, too.
The trouble was, the last two corpses had healed-over scars. Whoever Sam’s mystery monster-maker was, he was getting better at it: his last two creations had lived, after a fashion, for at least a little while.
Sam’s first suspect had been one of the city’s many Igors, although he hadn’t been able to narrow it down much beyond that. Igors were widely suspected of doing this sort of thing already, by the average citizen, and though Sam was not an average citizen he still considered the possibility. Igors had the technical know-how, after all, and they were skilled transplant surgeons. Perhaps his mystery bodies belonged to an Igor getting in some after-hours practice, doing the surgeon’s equivalent of building models in his spare time?
But every Igor he spoke to assured him this could not be the case. Building entire bodies out of spare parts was quite against the Code of the Igors*, violating their central precept of preserving life and ensuring that everyone got the parts they needed. “No,” said the Watch’s own Igor, “thith lookth like clathic mad thience to me, Corporal Vimes. You get thith thort of thing in Uberwald from time to time-- thome bugger with a medical degree and a limited underthanding of how long brainth last on ice. It never ended well.”
“*Do* brains last long on ice?” Sam asked, appalled but a little fascinated nontheless.
“Not very well,” Igor answered cheerfully, happy to be talking about his specialty. “You thee, just about any other body part can be brought round with a good bolt of lightning, but brainth have got no shelf-life at all. Once they’re dead, they’re dead, and lightning thcrambles them thomething awful.”
“So the body we found in the river--” Sam began, who was beginning to feel a bit queasy.
“Wouldn’t have worked for a minute. The parts are bad enough-- dayth old, most of them-- but the brain’th jutht too dead to be any good. Whoever made thith couldn’t have hoped he’d get it up and walking.”
“So why do it?”
Igor shrugged, one shoulder going up noticeably higher than the other. “Who knowth? Practith, I’m betting. We’ll see more from him, you mark my wordth.”
And they had.
*”Wathte not, want not.”
