Ankh-Morpork society is street society. There is always something interesting going on. At the moment, the driver of a two-horse fruit wagon was holding the Dean six inches in the air by the scruff of the Dean’s robe and was threatening to push the Dean’s face through the back of the Dean’s head.
“It’s peaches, right?” he kept bellowing. “You know what happens to peaches what lies around too long? They get bruised. Lots of things around here are going to get bruised.”
“I am a wizard, you know,” said the Dean, his pointy shoes dangling. “If it wasn’t for the fact that it would be against the rules for me to use magic in anything except a purely defensive manner, you would definitely be in a lot of trouble.”
“What you doing, anyway?” said the driver, lowering the Dean so he could look suspiciously over his shoulder.
“Yeah,” said a man trying to control the team pulling a lumber wagon, “what’s going on? There’s people here being paid by the hour, you know!”
“Move along at the front there!”
The lumber driver turned in his seat and addressed the queue of carts behind him. “I’m trying to,” he said. “It’s not my fault, is it? There’s a load of wizards digging up the godsdamn street!”
The Archchancellor’s muddy face peered over the edge of the hole.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Dean,” he said, “I told you to sort things out!”
“Yes, I was just asking this gentleman to back up and go another way,” said the Dean, who was afraid he was beginning to choke.
The fruiterer turned him around so that he could see along the crowded streets. “Ever tried to back up sixty carts all at once?” he demanded. “It’s not easy. Especially when everyone can’t move because you guys have got it so’s the carts are backed up all around the block and no one can move because everyone’s in someone else’s way, right?”
The Dean tried to nod. He had wondered himself about the wisdom of digging the hole at the junction of the Street of Small Gods and Broad Way, two of the busiest streets in Ankh-Morpork. It had seemed logical at the time. Even the most persistent undead ought to stay decently buried under that amount of traffic. The only problem was that no one had thought seriously about the difficulty of digging up a couple of main streets during the busy time of day.
“All right, all right, what’s going on here?”
The crowd of spectators opened to admit the bulky figure of Sergeant Colon of the Watch. He moved through the people unstoppably, his stomach leading the way. When he saw the wizards, waist deep in a hole in the middle of the road, his huge red face brightened up.
“What’s this, then?” he said. “A gang of international crossroads thieves?”
He was overjoyed. His long-term policing strategy was paying off!
The Archchancellor tipped a shovelful of Ankh-Morpork loam over his boots.
“Don’t be stupid, man,” he snapped. “This is vitally important.”
“Oh, yes. That’s what they all say,” said Sergeant Colon, not a man to be easily steered from a particular course of thought once he’d got up to mental speed. “I bet there’s hundreds of villages in heathen places like Klatch that’d pay good money for a nice prestigious crossroads like this, eh?”
Ridcully looked up at him with his mouth open.
“What are you gabbling about, officer?” he said. He pointed irritably to his pointy hat. “Didn’t you hear me? We’re wizards. This is wizard business. So if you could just sort of direct the traffic around us, there’s a good chap—”
“—these peaches bruise as soon as you even look at ’em—” said a voice behind Sergeant Colon.
“The old idiots have been holding us up for half an hour,” said a cattle drover who had long ago lost control of forty steers now wandering aimlessly around the nearby streets. “I wants ’em arrested.”
It dawned on the sergeant that he had inadvertently placed himself center stage in a drama involving hundreds of people, some of them wizards and all of them angry.
“What are you doing, then?” he said weakly.
“We’re burying our colleague. What does it look like?” said Ridcully.
Colon’s eyes swiveled to an open coffin by the side of the road. Windle Poons gave him a little wave.
“But…he’s not dead…is he?” he said, his forehead wrinkling as he tried to get ahead o
f the situation.
“Appearances can be deceptive,” said the Archchancellor.