When the Circus Comes to Town

Antony Von Lipwig bid his adoring public and fond goodnight and staggered up the stairs. The Patrician’s Palace was lousy with spiral staircases—all fine marble and carefully polished by a beleaguered housekeeping staff. Of course, he should quit thinking of the palace as the Patrician’s and start thinking of it as his, now oughtn’t he?

Flushed with victory and more than a couple glasses of champagne, he really wasn’t paying close attention to his surroundings. He pushed open the door to the Patrician’s—his—office and paused on the threshold, a whiff of cigar smoke hanging on the air. The smell was thick and dark and cloying, similar to the long, slender cigarettes favored by his mother in his youth, and completely different. “Hello?” he inquired into the soft darkness. A hiss of a gas lamp igniting and yellow light flooded the room. Antony could see the clean, blank desk blotter, the empty inbox and outbox, the crisp if bland wallpaper and somehow blander carpet, and, of course, the chair.

In his growing age, Lord Vetinari-may-he-rest-forever commissioned a swiveling desk chair from a madman. It was meant for ease of turning, but, like many things in the late lordship’s possession, became another piece of dramaturgy. He would sit in the chair and face away from a visitor, staring out of the picture window and into his city, and then, slowly and with the utmost menace, he would turn the chair to face his visitor. It was a small thing, really. And it was terrifying.

That chair now faced out the picture window. At the top Antony could see just the crest of a dark-haired head, and a moment of pure dread did the work of an entire thermos of Klatchian coffee. Because what if his lordship were not truly dead?

And on a related note, what if the person in that chair was there to assassinate Antony?

“I think congratulations are in order,” the chair’s occupant said at last. And the chair turned. Slowly and with the utmost menace.

Antony could not move; his feet felt rooted to the bland floral carpeting even as he gaped in unblinking horror. “You’re dead.”

Sam Vimes grinned. It was not a nice grin. His teeth gleamed too sharp and too white in the lamplight, his face haggard and scarred from a hard life and strangely pale. He did not come in a copper’s uniform, nor in ducal regalia, but in commoner’s clothes twenty years out of date, all in shades of dusty black. Last, an axe laying across his knees drew Antony’s eye, and for some reason this was the detail that ratcheted his heart rate to dangerous levels. Because Antony, as a well-to-do young man, had gone on a Grand Sneer in his youth and he knew the stories not only of Stoneface Vimes the Regicide, but of Sam Vimes the Butcher, Sam Vimes the Equalizer, Sam Vimes the Blackboard Monitor. All the stories featured an axe. Vetinari wasn’t the only one with a flair for dramaturgy.

“Please, do come in,” Vimes ordered. Antony’s feet obeyed without any input from his brain. The door behind him creaked and then shut with a slam, apparently of its own volition. Vimes’ eyes glowed in the lamplight, bottomless and dark except around the edges, gold there. Inhuman. “Have a seat, lad.” Antony dropped into the guest chair like a sack of potatoes.

He swallowed. “Are you going to kill me?”

“Kill you,” Vimes grumbled. He rummaged in his pockets for a moment and produced a fat cigar. He tucked it between his teeth and lit the end, puffed a few times and then squinted at Antony through the wisps of blue-gray smoke. “Why should I kill you, Mr. Lipwig?”

“Why else would you lurk in the shadows of the Oblong Office on the day of my inauguration, sitting in my chair and holding an axe?” Unbidden, outrage mingled with terror had Antony’s voice shaking toward the end.

Vimes watched him and puffed, face thoughtfully blank. “It really wasn’t my intention to be so, let’s say, melodramatic.” His lips curled unhappily at the thought. “I really don’t go in much for drama. I just wanted to have a word with you about the tyranny. And I thought to myself, ‘Better bring the axe to let him know the carrot comes with the stick,’ and then I thought ‘Don’t want to disturb the party, better wait in the office,’ but it was nice and dark in here, ‘Best not to waste lamp oil before it matters.’” He waved a hand through a plume of cigar smoke. “It all just sort of adds up when I’m not looking. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Do you know what I pulled out of my closet to wear this evening?”

“Um…”

“A blue sweater with some egg down the front of it. I pull it on because it’s my favorite and it’s very comfortable, and the next thing I know I look down and I’m in full evening dress like I’m going to the theater later or something.” He blew smoke out of his nose, like an outraged dragon. “I hate this condition. Willikins used to say I looked like a badly shaven upstart.”

“That seems rude?” Antony offered, at a loss.

Vimes glowered. “I like being a badly shaven upstart! Now I skip shaving a couple days and you know what Margolotta-godsdamn-von-Uberwald says? She says I look devilishly rakish. Me! Rakish!”

Antony, usually a quick and diplomatic thinker, was coming to a conclusion. It was a very large conclusion, he felt. Kind of like trying to look at a mountain when you were standing on it; there were rocks and goats and a definite slope, but if you didn’t know any better it might take you a moment’s thought or a very long fall to figure out where you were. “Your condition?” he said weakly.

“You know, it’s all well and good for the eternal youth—ha!—and the power and what have you, but I miss my damn boots most of all. Cardboard soles, could really feel the cobbles beneath your feet. I bought a new pair about four years ago and the soles haven’t worn out yet,” he sighed, morose. “They shine, even. Boots have no business shining.” He turned the axe handle over in his hands a few times before looking down as if just realizing it was there.

“You are dead, then,” Antony marveled.

“We prefer differently alive,” Vimes sniffed. “I made the mistake of bringing Reg Shoe with me to a meeting. Now all the ribboners are running around with his slogans, showing up at protests, causing a fracas.”

“A fracas,” Antony echoed dully. A sudden pang of sympathy clenched at him. This is what Vetinari dealt with on the regular.

“And that brings me to you,” Vimes said. Something in his tone, or perhaps his eyes, had Antony replaying the conversation, looking for the clue. A vampire couldn’t be a straightforward copper; a vampire couldn’t barge into a party, open with “I’m an undead, mean, nasty bastard so listen up!” and speak his piece. No, better to step lightly around the subject until Antony swallowed it hook, line and sinker. He took a moment to curse himself for a fool; that was one of his father’s favorite tricks of the trade. Vimes grinned his nasty grin and hefted the axe. “Now that I have your attention, take a look at this. See this blade? I’d say it’s dwarven made but I honestly have no idea. All I know is it’s sharp as hell and it’s surprisingly well balanced for something meant to chop wood.

“So, my dear patrician, you have the office,” Vimes gestured grandly at the Oblong Office, pivoting in the chair as he did so, “We’ll call this the carrot. And now you see my new favorite toy,” the lamplight flashed across the wicked sharp blade, “and we’ll call this the stick. I took an oath to protect and serve. I do what I can. I help the police with ongoing investigations in an unofficial capacity, and I find justice where I can. I know quite a few of the officers in the City Watch, and I know the ones who would have what it takes to serve and protect the city, even if it meant protecting it from, say, you.” He gestured with the axe at Antony. He could hear air particles slicing across that keen edge. “And while I know some of them wouldn’t bat an eye at clapping you in irons, or pursuing you across international borders, or even parting your head from your shoulders, it doesn’t mean I’m happy about it.”

Antony blinked. “How do you mean?” he asked slowly. From the stories he heard of Vimes, it was impossible to follow his thought processes until well after the fact, and only then with a guide fluent in Vimese, specializing in the Bullshit dialect. Vetinari, at least, had Lady Sybil-may-she-rest-in-peace to confer with after the most twisted of his stunts.

“I mean that good cops do the job in front of them, and sometimes the job entails something ugly. I mean that if you put my people in an awkward position, where a good cop has to make a choice between doing the Right Thing and failing Ankh-Morpork, or doing the Wrong Thing and becoming a bad cop, then I’m going to step in.”

“You would rather become a regicide than allow one of your, your Sammies get their hands dirty?”

Vimes tapped the side of his nose. “For what it’s worth, I don’t plan on making it a habit.”

“I should hope not. Pray tell, what’s keeping you from taking the tyranny for yourself?” Antony had a hypothesis, but he wanted to see how Vimes would answer.

He hesitated for just a moment and then answered just a hair too quickly. “Politics doesn’t agree with me.”

“I see. Is that all, Your Grace?”

A muscle in Vimes’ face twitched at the title. “If you say ‘Do not let me detain you’ we are going to have a very long, earnest discussion, with the highlights being ‘Don’t do it’ and ‘Have I mentioned how sharp this axe is?’”

Antony pursed his lips. “I see. Then I’ll simply say, ‘Have a good night, Mister Vimes.’”

Alone in his new office, Antony Von Lipwig sat in the swivel chair the Duke vacated and stared out at the city. His city. What an absurd man, he thought to himself. Politics doesn’t agree with me indeed, saying it like a lie. Antony grew up with a conman for a father, and an activist for a mother; he knew the difference between lies posing as truth and truth posing as lies. He didn’t become Patrician by kissing babies, after all.

What must it be like, being a vampire and hating politics?

When Willikins passed away, an Igor came to the house to take the kinds of things a dead man doesn’t need anymore. What goes around comes around. Igor took what was needed, passed on the useful parts to needy people and never really left. He liked working under a vampire. An Igor working for a vampire knew where he stood.

“Bloody hells!” Vimes squawked, leaping a clear three feet in the air.

Usually an Igor stood exactly three centimeters behind his vampire, and got there on silent feet. “How wath your meeting with the Patrithian, marthter?”

Vimes dropped out of the rafters, glowering. “It went fine!” He made to smooth down his sweater, but seeing it never had any wrinkles while on him, the gesture seemed a moot point. “Young Sam?”

“Young marthter is abed the patht two hourth, thir. The houthe ith thafe.”

Vimes nodded. He didn’t need to check in on his son; Young Sam was a grown man at the age of thirty-four. Of course, some habits were harder to break than others, and he made it a point to be as obnoxiously fatherly as possible when he visited the city. Tomorrow he would demagnetize the storm drains and reinforce the shutters, but until then he could take a breather.

Igor peeled him out his vaguely shabby evening attire, politely ignoring his master’s muttered protests, and set the clothes aside. Vimes wasn’t a particularly large man: middling height, middling build, something about him projected height and width he simply didn’t have. Then again, that probably had nothing to do with the vampirism and everything to do with the air of wrathful suspicion that followed him. Igor fished the little bronze chip from one of his master’s pockets and set it on the dresser. Twenty-five years, and not a single drop. He unpinned the little black ribbon from the front of what was a fetching black opera cloak on Sam’s figure and was now a nubby blue sweater with egg dribble stained down the front, and set the ribbon beside the chip.

“Would marthter fanthy a thave?”

Freshly clothed in a billowing flannel nightshirt—in the closet Igor knew it had blue polka dots on it, but now were transformed into little blue bats—Sam Vimes scowled. “You know how I feel about that, Igor.”

“Lady Margolotta did thay you were—“

“Don’t say it—“

“rakithly handthome.”

“Agh!” Vimes turned on his heel and headed for the cellar. He drifted down the stairs, picked his way through the piles of abandoned dragon crates, feeding troughs, canning materials and the inexplicable horde of pickled beets until he reached the coffin. Well, it was more of a pinewood box, really, with a sheet and a pillow stuffed inside to prevent splinters. Lady Sybil, bless her heart, wanted to get him a posh coffin but sleeping in satin made him twitchy. He resisted coffins altogether for some time, but the hereditary paranoia and agoraphobia-fueled nightmares finally had him stomping into a funeral home and buying the first, cheapest coffin he could find.

“Thleep well, marthter,” Igor said before dropping the lid of the coffin on Vimes' glare.

He patted the lid and lurched back the way he came. Oh yes, you knew where you stood with vampires.