Jingo

A vision of 71-hour Ahmed's big curved sword presented itself for his attention. So…

…let's assume that Ahmed was Khufurah's servant or bodyguard, and he'd found out…

No, how could that work? Who'd tell him?

Well, maybe he'd found out somehow, and that meant that he might also know who'd paid the man…

Vimes sat back. It was still a mystery but he'd solve it, he knew he would. He'd assemble the facts, analyse them, look at them from every angle with an open mind, and find out exactly how Lord Rust had organized it.

Rank bad hat! He didn't have to sit still for something like that, especially from a man who rhymed “house” with “mice”.

His eye was caught by the ancient book. General Tacticus? Every kid knew about him. Ankh-Morpork had ruled a huge empire and a lot of it had been in Klatch, thanks to him. Except there wasn't any thanks for him, strangely enough. Vimes had never quite known why, but the city seemed to be rather ashamed of the general.

One reason, of course, was that he'd ended up fighting Ankh-Mopork. The city of Genua had run out of royalty, inbreeding having progressed to the point where the sole remaining example consisted mostly of teeth, and senior courtiers had written to Ankh-Morpork asking for help.

There'd been a lot of that sort of thing, Vimes had been surprised to learn. The little kingdoms of the Sto Plains were for ever scrounging spare royalty off one another. The King had sent Tacticus out of sheer exasperation. It's hard to run a proper empire when you're constantly getting blood-stained letters on the lines of: Dear sire, I beg to inform you that we have conquered Betrek, Smale and Ushistan. Please send AM$20,000 back pay. The man never knew when to stop. So he was hastily made a duke and packed off to Genua, whereupon his first action was to consider what was that city's greatest military threat and then, having identified it, to declare war on Ankh-Morpork.

But what else had anyone expected? He'd done his duty. He'd brought back heaps of spoils, lots of captives and, almost uniquely among Ankh-Morpork's military leaders, most of his men. Vimes suspected that this last fact was one reason why history didn't approve. There was a suggestion that this was, in some way, not playing fair.

“Veni, vidi, vici.” That was what the man was supposed to have said when he'd conquered… where? Pseudopolis, wasn't it? Or Al-Khali? Or Quirm? Maybe Sto Lat? That was in the old days when you attacked anyone else's city on principle, and went back and did them over again if they looked like getting up. And in those days, you didn't care if the world watched. You wanted them to watch, and learn. “Veni, vidi, vici.” I came, I saw, I conquered.

As a comment it always struck Vimes as a bit too pat. It wasn't the sort of thing you came up with on the spur of the moment, was it? It sounded as if he had worked it out. He'd probably spent long evenings in his tent, looking up in the dictionary short words beginning with V and trying them out… Veni, vermini, vomui, I came, I got ratted, I threw up? Visi, veneri, vamoosi, I visited, I caught an embarrassing disease, I ran away? It must have been a big relief to come up with three short acceptable words. He probably made them up first, and then went off to see somewhere and conquer it.

He opened the book at random.

“It is always useful to face an enemy who is prepared to die for his country,” he read. “This means that both you and he have exactly the same aim in mind.”

“Hah!”

“Bingeley-bingeley b—”

Vimes's hand slammed down on the box.

“Yes? What is it?”

“Three oh five pee em. Interview with Cpl Littlebottom re Missing Sgt Colon,” said the demon sulkily.

“I never arranged anything like– Who told you—? Are you telling me that I've got an appointment and I don't know about it?”

“That's right.”

“So how do you know about it?”

“You told me to know about it. Last night,” said the demon.

“You can tell me about appointments I don't know about?” said Vimes.

“They're still appointments sine qua appointments,” said the demon. “They exist, as it were, in appointment phase space.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Look,” said the demon patiently, “You can have an appointment at any time, right? So therefore any appointment exists in potentia–”

“Where's that?”

“Any particular appointment simply collapses the waveform,” said the demon. “I merely select the most likely one from the projected matrix.”

“You're just making this up,” said Vimes. “If you were right, then any second now—”

Someone knocked at the door. It was a polite, tentative tap.

Vimes didn't take his eyes off the smirking demon.