Night Watch

growled Vimes, focusing, “there’s going to be trouble!”
    “Your Grace! Whatever has happened to you?” said the butler, pulling him into the hall.
    “Nothing!” said Vimes. “Just get me a fresh uniform, nice and quietly, and don’t let Sybil know—”
    He read everything in the way the butler’s face changed.
    “What’s happened to Sybil?”
    Willikins backed away. A bear would have backed away.
    “Don’t go up there, sir! Mrs. Content says it’s…all rather difficult, sir. Things aren’t, um, happening quite right…”
    “Is the child born?”
    “No sir, a-apparently not, sir. It’s rather…Mrs. Content says she’s trying everything but maybe we…ought to send for the doctors, sir.”
    “For a childbirth ?”
    Willikins looked down. After twenty unflappable years as a butler, he was shaking. No one deserved a confrontation with Sam Vimes at a time like this.
    “Sorry, sir…”
    “No!” snapped Vimes. “Don’t send for a doctor. I know a doctor! He knows all about…this sort of thing! He’d better!”
    He ran back outside in time to see a broomstick touch down on the lawn, piloted by the Archchancellor himself.
    “I thought I’d better come along anyway,” said Ridcully. “Is there anything—”
    Vimes swung himself onto it before the wizard could get off.
    “Take me to Twinkle Street. Can you do that?” he said. “It’s…important!”
    “Hang on, Your Grace,” said Ridcully, and Vimes’s stomach dropped into his legs as the stick climbed vertically. He made a small mental note to promote Buggy Swires and buy him the buzzard he’d always wanted. Anyone prepared to do this every day for the good of the city couldn’t be paid too much.
    He hadn’t had time to put a pair of drawers on. It was cold up there, but at least it was fast.
    “Try my left pocket,” said Ridcully, when they were well aloft. “There’s something that belongs to you, I believe.”
    Nervously, well aware of what a wizard’s pocket might hold, Vimes pulled out a bunch of paper flowers, a string of flags of all nations…and a silver cigar case.
    “Landed on the Bursar’s head,” said the Archchancellor, steering around a seagull. “I hope it’s not damaged.”
    “It’s…fine,” said Vimes. “Thank you. Er…I’ll put it back for now, shall I? Don’t seem to have any pockets on me at the moment.”
    It found its way back, Vimes thought. We’re home.
    “And a suit of ornamental armor landed in the High Energy Magic building,” Ridcully went on, “and, I am happy to report, it is—”
    “Very badly bent out of shape?” said Vimes. Ridcully hesitated. He was aware of Vimes’s feelings of gilt.
    “Excessively, your grace. Completely and irreparably bent out of shape because of quantum thingummies, I suspect.”
    Vimes shivered. He was still naked. Even the hated formal uniform would have helped up here. But it didn’t matter either way, now. Gilt and feathers and badges and feeling chilly…there were other things that mattered more, and always would.
    He jumped off the stick before it had stopped, stumbled in a circle, and fell against Dr. Lawn’s door, hammering on it with his fists.
    After a while, it opened a crack, and a familiar voice, changed only a little with age, said, “Yes?”
    Vimes thrust the door fully open.
    “Look at me, Doctor Lawn,” said Vimes.
    Lawn stared. “Keel?” he said. In his other hand he was holding the world’s biggest syringe.
    “Can’t be. They buried John Keel. You know they did,” said Vimes. He saw the huge instrument in the man’s hand. “What the hell were you going to do with that?”
    “Baste a turkey, as a matter of fact. Look, who are you, then, because you look like—”
    “Grab all your midwifing stuff and come with me now,” said Vimes. “All those funny tools you said worked so well. Bring ’em all. Right now. And I’ll make you the richest doctor that ever lived,” said Vimes, a man wearing nothing but mud and blood.
    Lawn gestured weakly toward the kitchen. “I’ll just have to take the turkey out—”
    “Stuff the turkey!”
    “I already—”
    “Come on!”
    The broomstick did not fly well with three on board, but it was faster than walking, and Vimes, at this point, knew he’d be incapable of anything else. He was out of breath and strength before he’d been home the first time. Merely standing upright was a test of endurance. It was the broomstick or crawling.
    Now it lumbered out of the sky and