Destiny (Very Early Morning May 29th)
People were, of course, getting hurt. One or two people were even dying in the fighting. It should have looked like the decisive and final struggle for the fate of Ankh Morpork, something to be celebrated in expensive and elaborate paintings for generations to come.
What it actually looked like, from afar, was nothing more than a schoolboy Fracas. Death walked amid the carnage, entirely invisible and untouched, and considered the dead.
"What, where are those bastards, I'm gonna get em," one said, standing up and looking around. "Oh… oh, wait. Are you… Death?"
I AM. YOU ARE DEAD.
"But… who wins?"
THE CARRION CROWS? I DO NOT KNOW. I DO NOT CARE. IT IS OVER NOW, FOR YOU.
"Can't I just stick around a little while, as a ghost? I gotta see what happens and whether the monarchy is restored once and for all!"
THERE IS NO SUCH THING.
Death was very busy lately. A lot of deaths were just not happening. Something with time was coming unspooled so that deaths were suddenly occurring willy nilly, off schedule, with no sense or reason to it at all. Death was as close to married to these schedules… not that he would have gotten married either way, so having to do all the research to find the right routes to do his duty only for five of them to be alive and ten of them dead was a hassle.
"Well, I say I'm going to be a ghost haunting the world until Ankh-Morpork has a King again. Why shouldn't ghosts do that?"
VERY WELL.
He moved on, working fast as he kept an eye on the two scuffling pairs. Lord Ramkin had four more strong years before a sudden and inexplicable accident, but then Vimes was part of how everything was messing up. A small part and he still did not see the whole picture, but something had come unmoored. Something had died, and something far more important than an idea or some God. But it was not Death's job to examine the fabric of Time. Death was his domain, and so he quickly dealt with the other one, a rebel who was dancing mad but didn't want to try to stay. Death had no power over where people went, and so if they wanted to insist they'd stay ghosts… then they would.
You get what you ask for, which of course meant that if he cared to pay attention he'd see a lot of entitled people declare they were going to eternal paradise and a lot of insecure humble people downplaying their virtues. It was all of a piece. Once the souls went up, who cared where they went down? That wasn't Death's department.
He passed Vimes, and Ramkin, and felt it. Ah, yes.
At least one person was dying on time… or the new time which had been appointed a few days ago. Lord Snapcase lay in bed, groaning, "What? What happened?" the soul of Lord Snapcase said. He was floating above a body with a stab wound right into his throat. It had been a quick death in his sleep, and now he blinked. "Wuh… who are you?"
A prat or someone with a great deal more self-regard than Death had might say 'Your future' or any number of things. But he was no Assassin, and so he got quickly to the point. "YOU ARE DEAD."
"I… what… how?"
"I DO NOT KNOW." He did not care either, but as he looked at the soul and felt that same odd stirring of curiosity. It was easier to tamp it down when faced with Lords and the Great. Those were the easy ones to put off with a few mental shrugs. But something felt different in a way he didn't quite grasp. He was not used to being a person, and it would be another life and quite a few decades before he would begin to try to ape the Human, to try to play Monkey See, Monkey Do with the refuse of humanity. Death was not who he would eventually become, and looking at someone like Snapcase, you could almost pity him for who he met.
"But… surely someone must know who killed me? The maids, the…"
Death did not respond.
The Goddess of Fate who watched on was frowning through the godly equivalent of a crystal ball. It just happened to look like a crystal ball that she'd nicked from a Wizard, but this was not true at all! After all, it was a crystal ball that could read minds, or at least make educated guesses, and this Goddess of Fate knew the future. But what she didn't know was what was wrong. She kept on watching different people, Gods and Death, and all the other anthropomorphic personifications that were out there,and none of them seemed to understand just what was happening.
This worried her because it was She who was of the narrative, she who saw the future and the past and then wrote a bunch of gossip about it to spread around, She who was one of the unsung Goddesses who was known just enough to keep a set of powers she'd purloined just like she HADN'T the crystal ball. She'd also purloined this house from a little old lady, and she really did have to go in a bit, didn't she. Uberwald was a dangerous place at the most normal of times, and while she was a Goddess she tended to go incognito. She'd thought that Uberwald was where the disruption must have happened.
But all the Igors apparently said that there was nothing bad going on at all. Just a normal day in Uberwald.
She didn't remember… well, there was something that didn't quite make sense about all of it, and she couldn't figure it out. It was like when someone changed their hair color slightly and asked, "Does anything look different?" and you have to admit that you barely pay attention to them and don't care about how they look enough to notice whether anything is actually different. It was like that, but for the whole world.
She stomped out of the small room to go check on something.
Two minutes later, a little old man with a broom showed up. "Hm," he said, and then peered in the crystal ball, and around the messy, tangled room. It was filled with the riches of a thousand prop departments, overstuffed and completely absurd… it looked approximately what an actor thought the world looked like if they stopped existing once they stepped off a stage.
The Sweeper, of course, did not even pay it any mind. He swept over to the crystal ball and looked into it. "Ah. Yes. Vimes."
He was not just remembering it, of course. But there was a lot to do, and sometimes you let things run on until you saw something going off course. The trousers of time had stopped existing, and yet Time itself had not. He didn't know what this meant, but he was beginning to have suspicions, and it all came down to a simple fact, one which made watching Death… very apropros.
*******
As they rolled and tumbled, they were interrupted by the oddest thing. A boy, a herald, ran in. "Lord Snapcase is dead!" he yelled.
"Lord Snapcase is dead!" he repeated.
"Lord Snapcase is dead!" He insisted.
And slowly, the fighting began to die down. Vimes had his hand on Lord Ramkin's throat and he was doing his best to choke the other man, but it was hard when there was an elbow in his kidneys, digging away as the Duke was trying to make it all the way through. They pulled apart all at once… and so did the others. Vetinari, who had just slit someone's throat, pulled his hand away with all the innocence of a saint, as if he wasn't associated with the body. Four had died, and Vimes was vaguely proud to see that his side had the better of it. Two and two, yes… oh, ye Gods, what was he going to say?
(They died for nothing because it was a petty squabble?)
But a half-dozen of the enemy were on the ground wounded, and only one or two of their own. They were winning, but now it didn't matter and everyone was shuffling back, except of course for Gruwyn, who had his bloody axe right at someone's unmentionables, and had not gotten the signal that the fight was over.
"A dwarf?" Lord Ramkin asked. "You have a… dwarf?"
"Signed up, just like everyone else," Vimes panted. He had bruises that he was going to be feeling for weeks to come, but his blood was racing as well. It wasn't a good thing, mostly, but at least he was alive. "Now, are you going to give up? Snapcase is dead… nobody's going to keep on fighting. They would if I died, I'm just some Commander. But everyone who's still fighting, they're not doing it for… for that monarch you're dreaming of. They were doing it because they thought Snapcase was something he wasn't. Or that he was exactly what he was and that it was a good way to make some quick coin. But now it isn't…"
Ramkin reached out and punched him in the jaw, and when he staggered back… took off running and before anyone could so much as raise a crossbow was around the corner, going unusually fast for a man his age. A few others took the chance to flee.
He knew what would be happening. The word would spread faster than expected, and most people would throw down their arms. What were they fighting for otherwise? The revolutionaries were in the palace, and there was no obvious successor.
Just like that… the war was over. It'd be a bad bet to keep on fighting, but perhaps some poor suckers would do so anyways.
Vimes stood up and didn't say anything stupid like, "He'll never get away." Maybe he'd be caught, but Lord Ramkin seemed like the sort of man who could force his way through a crowd of guards through sheer willpower alone. There was every chance that he was going to do just that: get away. There was every chance that Vimes had just missed a key opportunity. But there was even more chance that it just didn't matter…
He was tired, and he could imagine it now. The rats would be fleeing the sinking ship, and he rubbed his jaw and looked around. Vetinari was smirking, no doubt wondering what he was about to do.
That was a very good question.
*****
The news spread fast. By dawn, word had reached every corner of the city and soldiers by the hundreds laid down their arms or switched sides. People who had held revolutionary pictures of Snapcase in their houses hurried to try to find those of the new Patrician, were told that they weren't going ot have a Patrician anymore, and then just stared in dumb confusion at the absurdity of that statement.
No Patricians? For the first time in generations, barring a few moments here and there, Ankh Morpork was Patricianless. It was a devastating tragedy, and additionally it left many rudderless… and many more celebrating in the streets and selling merchandise vaguely themed to fit the new… Republic, perhaps? Nobody was quite sure, but everyone was starting to think about how they could make a buck out of it.
A new day was dawning, but in Ankh-Morpork it looked much like previous days. But also very, very different… all at once.
Pick some scenes to see (Choose 3)
[] CMOT Dibbler's patriotic dogs!
[] The Ankh Scrounge!
[] The Wizard's Balls
[] The Council of the People?!
[] A Vimes Always Stumbles Home
[] Get Your Man.
[] Moss Grows On…
[] The Runaway Scrape…
******
A/N: We near, don't we, the big grand epilogue. Everything is going well… oh, sure, there are some loose ends, but surely… surely they aren't sequel hooks?
