Guards! Guards!

with a sense of humor…whose infectious fun completely engulfs you…. The Dickens of the twentieth century.”
    Mail on Sunday (London)
    “Pratchett is a comic genius.”
    Express (London)
    “Pratchett demonstrates just how great the distance is between one-or two-joke writers and the comic masters whose work will be read into the next century.”
    Locus
    “As always he is head and shoulders above the best of the rest. He is screamingly funny. He is wise. He has style.”
    Daily Telegraph (London)
    “Terry Pratchett does for fantasy what Douglas Adams did for science fiction.”
    Today (Great Britain)
    “What makes Terry Pratchett’s fantasies so entertaining is that their humor depends on the characters first, on the plot second, rather than the other way around. The story isn’t there simply to lead from one slapstick pratfall to another pun. Its humor is genuine and unforced.”
    Ottawa Citizen
    “Terry Pratchett is more than a magician. He is the kindest, most fascinating teacher you ever had.”
    Harlan Ellison
    “Delightful…. Logically illogical as only Terry Pratchett can write.”
    Anne McCaffrey

B OOKS BY T ERRY P RATCHETT
    The Carpet People
    The Dark Side of the Sun Strata
    Truckers
    Diggers
    Wings
    Only You Can Save Mankind
    Johnny and the Dead
    Johnny and the Bomb
    The Unadulterated Cat
(with Gray Jollife)
    Good Omens
(with Neil Gaiman)
    T HE D ISCWORLD S ERIES
    The Color of Magic*
    The Light Fantastic*
    Equal Rites*
    Mort
    Sourcery
    Wyrd Sisters
    Pyramids
    Guards! Guards!
    Eric
(with Josh Kirby)
    Moving Pictures
    Reaper Man
    Witches Abroad
    Small Gods*
    Lords and Ladies*
    Men at Arms*
    Soul Music*
    Interesting Times*
    Maskerade*
    Feet of Clay*
    Hogfather*
    Jingo*
    The Last Continent*
    Carpe Jugulum*
    The Fifth Elephant*
    The Truth*
    Mort: A Discworld Big Comic
(with Graham Higgins)
    The Streets of Ankh-Morpork
(with Stephen Briggs)
    The Discworld Companion
(with Stephen Briggs)
    The Discworld Mapp

    *Published by HarperCollins

Copyright
    This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
    GUARDS! GUARDS! . Copyright © 1989 by Terry and Lyn Pratchett. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
    Mobipocket Reader April 2007 ISBN 978-0-06-144049-6
    10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1



About the Publisher
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    United Kingdom
    HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
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    United States
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    http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com

1 All this was untrue. The truth is that even big collections of ordinary books distort space, as can readily be proved by anyone who has been around a really old-fashioned secondhand bookshop, one of those that look as though they were designed by M. Escher on a bad day and has more staircases than storys and those rows of shelves which end in little doors that are surely too small for a full-sized human to enter. The relevant equation is: Knowledge = power = energy = matter = mass; a good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.

1 A figgin is defined in the Dictionary of Eye-Watering Words as “a small short-crust pasty containing raisins.” The Dictionary would have been invaluable for the Supreme Grand Master when he thought up the Society’s oaths, since it also includes welchet (“a type of waistcoat