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reached the stairwell at the far end. That took him—walking now, and rather less sure of his future—to the top floor. Let’s see, he’d been here before…yes, there was a door ajar, and a glimpse of mops and buckets suggested that this was a janitor’s closet.
    With, at the far end, a ladder leading up to the roof.
    Vimes carefully cocked the crossbow.
    So Carcer had a Watch crossbow, too. They were good classic single-shot models, but they took a while to reload. If he fired at Vimes and missed, then that was the only shot he’d get. After that…you couldn’t plan.
    Vimes climbed the ladder, and an old song came back.
    “They rise feet up, feet up, feet up…” he hissed under his breath.
    He stopped just below the edge of the open trapdoor onto the leads. Carcer wouldn’t fall for the old helmet-on-stick trick, not with just one shot available. He’d just have to risk it.
    Vimes thrust his head up, turned it quickly, ducked out of sight for a moment and then came through the opening in a rush. He rolled clumsily when he hit the leads, and rose into a crouch. There was no one else there. He was still alive. He breathed out.
    A sloping, gabled roof rose up beside him. Vimes crept along, wedged himself against a chimney stack peppered with splinters of wood, and glanced up at the tower.
    The sky above it was livid blue-black. Storms picked up a lot of personality as they rolled across the plains, and this one looked like a record breaker. But brilliant sunlight picked out the Tower of Art and, at the top, the tiny dots of Buggy’s frantic signal…
    O…O…O…
    Officer In Trouble. A brother is hurtin’.
    Vimes spun around. There was no one creeping up on him. He eased himself around the chimneys and there, tucked between another couple of stacks and out of sight of everyone except Vimes and the celestial Buggy, was Carcer.
    He was taking aim.
    Vimes turned his head to spot the target.
    Fifty yards away, Carrot was picking his way across the top of the University’s High Energy Magic Building.
    The bloody fool was never any good at concealment. Oh, he ducked and crept, and, against all logic, that made him more noticeable. He didn’t understand the art of thinking himself invisible. And there he was, furtively shlepping through the debris on the roof and looking as inconspicuous as a big duck in a small bathtub. And he’d come without backup.
    The fool…
    Carcer was aiming carefully. The roof of the HEMB was a maze of abandoned equipment and Carrot was moving along behind the raised platform that held the huge bronze spheres known throughout the city as the Wizards’ Balls, which discharged surplus magic if—or, more usually, when—experiments in the hall below fouled up. Carrot, screened by all that, was not making such a good target, after all.
    Vimes raised his crossbow.
    Thunder…rolled. It was the roll of a giant iron cube down the stairways of the gods, a crackling, thudding crash that tore the sky in half and shook the building.
    Carcer glanced up and saw Vimes.

     

    “Wotcha doin’, mifter?”
    Buggy didn’t budge from the telescope. A crowbar wouldn’t have separated him at this point.
    “Shut up, ye daft corbies!” he muttered.
    Both men below had fired, and both men had missed because they were trying to fire and dodge at the same time.
    Something hard prodded Buggy’s shoulder.
    “Wot’s happ’nin’ , mifter?” said the insistent voice.
    He turned. There were a dozen bedraggled ravens behind him, looking like little old men in ill-fitting black cloaks. They were Tower of Art birds. Hundreds of generations of living in a highly charged magical environment had raised the intelligence level of what had been bright creatures to begin with. But, although the ravens were intelligent, these weren’t hugely clever. They just had a more persistent kind of stupidity, as befitted birds for whom the exciting panorama of the city below was a kind of daytime TV.
    “Push off !” shouted