"You didn"t tell me that!" said the imp, holding its head in its hands. "You just said no interruptions! I"m really, really sorry-"
Shine forgotten, Vimes looked around desperately at the nearby buildings. There wasn"t much use for clacks towers down here where the slaughterhouse district met the docks, but he spotted the big semaphore tower atop the dock superintendent"s office.
"Get up there!" he ordered, opening the box. "Tell them you"ve come from me and this is priority one, right? They"re to tell Pseudopolis Yard where I"m starting from! I"ll cross the river on Misbegot Bridge and head along Prouts! The officers at the Yard will know what this is all about! Go!"
The imp went from despair to enthusiasm in an instant. It saluted. "Yes indeed, sir. The BluenoseTM Integrated Messenger Service will not let you down, Insert Name Here. I shall interface right away!" It leapt down and became a disappearing blur of green.
Vimes ran down to the dockside and began to race upriver, past the ships. The docks were always too crowded and the road was an obstacle course of bales and ropes and piles of crates, with an argument every ten yards. But Vimes was a runner by nature, and knew all the ways to make progress in the city"s crowded streets. He dodged and leapt, jinked and weaved and, where necessary, barged. A rope tripped him up; he rolled upright. A stevedore barged into him; Vimes laid him out with an uppercut and speeded up in case the man had chums around.
This was important ...
A shiny four-horse carriage swung out of Monkey Street, with two footmen clinging to the back of it. Vimes speeded up in a desperate burst, grabbed a handhold, pulled himself up between the astonished footmen, dragged himself across the swaying roof and dropped down on the seat beside the young driver.
"City Watch," he announced, flashing his badge. "Keep going straight ahead!"
"But I"m supposed to turn left on to-"the young man began.
"And give it a touch of the whip, if you please," said Vimes, ignoring him. "This is important!"
"Oh, right! Death-defying high-speed chase, is it?" said the coachman, enthusiasm rising. "Right! I"m the boy for that! You"ve got your man right here, sir. D"you know, I can make this carriage go along for fifty yards on two wheels? Only old Miss Robinson won"t let me. Right side or left side, just say the word! Hyah! Hyah!"
Look, just-" Vimes began, as the whip cracked overhead.
"O"course, getting the horses to run along on two legs was the trick. Actually, it"s more of a hop, you might say," the coachman went on, turning his hat around for minimum wind resistance. "Here, want to see my wheelie?"
"Not especially," said Vimes, staring ahead.
"The hooves don"t "alf raise sparks when I do me wheelie, I can tell you! Hyah!"
The scenery was blurring. Ahead was the cut-through leading to Two Pint Dock. It was normally covered by a swing bridge
-normally.
It was swung now. Vimes could see the masts of a ship being warped out of the dock and into the river.
"Oh, don"t you bother about that, sir," yelled the coachman beside him. "We"ll go along the quay and jump it!"
"You can"t jump a two-master with a four-horse carriage, man!"
"I bet you can if you aim between the masts, sir! Hyah! Hyah!"
Ahead of the coach, men were running for cover. Behind it, the footmen were seeking other employment. Vimes pushed the boy back into his seat, grabbed a handful of reins, put both feet against the brake lever, and hauled.
The wheels locked. The horses began to turn. The coach slid, the metal rims of the wheels sending up sparks and the throaty scream of metal. The horses turned some more. The coach began to swing, dragging the horses with it, whirling them out like fairground mounts. Their hooves made trails of fire across the cobblestones. At this point Vimes let go of everything, gripped the underside of the seat with one hand, held on to the rail with the other, shut his eyes and waited for all the noise to die away.
Blessedly, it did. Only one little sound remained: a petulant banging on the coach roof caused, probably, by a walking stick. A querulous, elderly female voice could be heard saying: "Johnny? Have you been driving fast again, young man?"
"A bootlegger"s turn!" Johnny breathed, looking at a team of four steaming horses now facing back the way they"d come. "I am
impressed!"
He turned to Vimes, who wasn"t there.
The men moving the ship had dropped their ropes and run at the sight of coach and four spinning down the road towards them. The dock entrance was narrow. A man could easily scramble up a rope on to the deck, run across the ship and let himself down on to the cobbles on the other side. And this a man had just done.
Vimes, speeding along, could see that Misbegot Bridge was going to be a struggle. An overloaded hay wagon had wedged itself between the rickety houses that line the bridge, ripped out part of someone"s upper storey, and had shed some of its load in the process. There was a fight going on between the carter and the unimpressed owner of the new bungalow. Valuable seconds were spent struggling over and through the hay until he was hurrying through the backed-up traffic to the other end of the bridge. Ahead
of him was the wide thoroughfare known as Prouts, full of vehicles