Men At Arms

Начало книги

Corporal Carrot, Ankh-Morpork City Guard (Night Watch), sat down in his nightshirt, took up his pencil, sucked the end for a moment, and then wrote:

Carrot paused for a moment and stared out of the small dusty bedroom window at the early evening sunlight sidling across the river. Then he bent over the paper again.

Carrot stared out of the window again. His big honest forehead wrinkled with effort as he tried to think of something positive to say about Corporal Nobbs.

It began, as many things do, with a death. And a burial, on a spring morning, with mist on the ground so thick that it poured into the grave and the coffin was lowered into cloud.

A small greyish mongrel, host to so many assorted doggy diseases that it was surrounded by a cloud of dust, watched impassively from the mound of earth.

Various elderly female relatives cried. But Edward d’Eath{1} didn’t cry, for three reasons. He was the eldest son, the thirty-seventh Lord d’Eath, and it was Not Done for a d’Eath to cry; he was — just, the diploma still had the crackle in it — an Assassin, and Assassins didn’t cry at a death, otherwise they’d never be stopping; and he was angry. In fact, he was enraged.

Читать дальше →