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Four men sat in a room in the Patrician’s Palace, all of them drinking coffee and, technically, attending a meeting. Two wore black and two wore red- not from any special effort to be fashionable or coordinated (with the exception of one Lord Downey), but purely because of the requirements of their jobs, though Commander Vimes continued to complain that the dress uniform was actually more of a hindrance.
“Who would have thought,” said Archchancellor Ridcully, “that nowadays we’d all be back in the city, sitting in the Palace and drinking Klatchian coffee?”
“Drinking Klatchian coffee in a room full of books, no less,” said Lord Downey.
“As I recall, Downey,” said Vetinari, “you burned one of my books.”
“Books, plural?” said Vimes. “Luxury. I was lucky to have one book at all.”
“All we had in Lancre was the almanac,” said Ridcully, “and if you wanted to read that you had to grab it before someone used it to wipe their-”
“Anyway,” Vetinari said, successfully interrupting the Archchancellor before too much damage was caused, “I think you’re all very lucky I let you have whatever books you like in this city.” He sipped his coffee. “Quite frankly, when Snapcase was in charge, half the things in the University library would have been burned if he’d known about them.”
“Ah, that was proper oppression.” Downey stared into the distance, looking oddly nostalgic and misty-eyed. “I remember when we all had to cheese it out of the city in case he had us all murder each other, don’t you, DB?”
“Hah!” said Ridcully. “You were lucky. Over at the University we had to find our own motivation to kill each other- none of this murder-by-instructions for soft posh boys.” He ignored Downey’s obvious eyeroll and continued. “If we wanted to progress through the ranks it was dead men’s pointy red shoes, and the redder you could make ‘em before you took ‘em over, the better.”
Vimes snorted. “Motivation? Where I come from we couldn’t even afford to spend time on that sort of thing. You wanted to die in the Watch back then, you had to go out into the Shades and find someone else to do it for you, and if that didn’t work then you had to go all the way over to Rosie Palm’s and piss her off until the Agony Aunts threw you in the river. And even then you had to wait for the mud to drag you under.”
There was a moment of silence while the other three contemplated this, and then the Patrician carefully set down his cup.
“Right,” he said. “When I first took over this city I had to sleep in a different room every night. I had seven rotating food testers, two coded journals, and a pit full of scorpions left over from the last Patrician. I slept with a knife under my pillow. Sometimes two knives- and one in my sleeve, just in case I got ambushed on my way back from the lavatory. I’ve been turned into a lizard, thrown in my own dungeon, shot, poisoned, arrested for treason, and framed for attempted murder. And then there was the horrible business with Mr Hong and the takeaway on Dagon Street.”
“But you try to tell the kids today about that,” said Vimes. “They won’t believe you.”