“Would you be kind enough to help me up onto the parapet, officer?”
Sergeant Colon hesitated. But the chap was a wizard. A man could get into serious trouble not helping wizards.
“Trying out some new magic, y’honor?” he said, brightly, helping the skinny but surprisingly heavy body up onto the crumbling stonework.
“No.”
Windle Poons stepped off the bridge. There was a squelch.*
Sergeant Colon looked down as the waters of the Ankh closed again, slowly.
Those wizards. Always up to something.
He watched for a while. After several minutes there was a disturbance in the scum and debris near the base of one of the pillars of the bridge, where a flight of greasy stairs led down to the water.
A pointy hat appeared.
Sergeant Colon heard the wizard slowly climb the stairs, swearing under his breath.
Windle Poons reached the top of the bridge again. He was soaked.
“You want to go and get changed,” Sergeant Colon volunteered. “You could catch your death, standing around like that.”
“Hah!”
“Get your feet in front of a roaring fire, that’s what I’d do.”
“Hah!”
Sergeant Colon looked at Windle Poons in his own private puddle.
“You been trying some special kind of underwater magic, y’honor?” he ventured.
“Not exactly, officer.”
“I’ve always wondered about what it’s like under water,” said Sergeant Colon, encouragingly. “The myst’ries of the deep, strange and wonderful creatures…my mum told me a tale once, about this little boy what turned into a mermaid, well, not a mermaid, and he had all these adventures under the s—”
His voice drained away under Windle Poons’ dreadful stare.
“It’s boring,” said Windle. He turned and started to lurch away into the mist. “Very, very boring. Very boring indeed.”
Sergeant Colon was left alone. He lit a fresh cigarette with a trembling hand, and started to walk hurriedly toward the Watch headquarters.
“That face,” he told himself. “And those eyes…just like whatsisname…who’s that bloody dwarf who runs the delicatessen on Cable Street…”
“Sergeant!”
Colon froze. Then he looked down. A face was staring up at him from ground level. When he’d got a grip on himself, he made out the sharp features of his old friend Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler, the Discworld’s walking, talking argument in favor of the theory that mankind had descended from a species of rodent. C.M.O.T. Dibbler liked to describe him as a merchant adventurer; everyone else liked to describe him as an itinerant pedlar whose moneymaking schemes were always let down by some small but vital flaw, such as trying to sell things he didn’t own or which didn’t work or, sometimes, didn’t even exist. Fairy gold is well known to evaporate by morning, but it was a reinforced concrete slab by comparison to some of Throat’s merchandise.
He was standing at the bottom of some steps that led down to one of Ankh-Morpork’s countless cellars.
“Hallo, Throat.”
“Would you step down here a minute, Fred? I could use a bit of legal aid.”
“Got a problem, Throat?”
Dibbler scratched his nose.