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hadn’t got the joke.
    Trouble was, you couldn’t shoot someone for having an annoying laugh. And he was just standing there. If he ran, you could shoot him. Admittedly, it would be Detritus doing the shooting, and while with that bow it was technically possible to shoot to wound, the people you were wounding would probably be in the building next door.
    But Carcer was just waiting there, insulting the world by his existence.
    In fact he wasn’t merely standing there now. In one movement, he’d swung himself onto the lower slopes of the Library’s dome. The glass panes—at least, the glass panes that had survived the freak hail—creaked in the iron framework.
    “Stop right there!” Vimes bellowed. “And come down!”
    “Now where could I go?” said Carcer, grinning at him. “I’m just waiting for you to arrest me, right? Hey, I can see your house from up here!”
    What’s under the dome? thought Vimes. How high are the bookcases? There’s other floors in the Library, aren’t there? Like galleries? But you can definitely look up at the dome from the ground floor, right? If you were careful, could you swing onto a gallery from the edge of the dome? It’d be risky, but if a man knew he was going to swing anyway …
    Picking his way with care, he reached the edge of the dome. Carcer climbed up a little further.
    “I warn you, Carcer—”
    “Only high spirits, Mister Grace, haha! Can’t blame a man for trying to enjoy his last few minutes of freedom, can you?”
    I can see your house from up here …
    Vimes hauled himself onto the dome. Carcer cheered.
    “Well done, Your Vimes!” he said, easing himself toward the top.
    “Don’t mess me about, Carcer. It’ll go badly for you!”
    “Badder than it’s going to go anyway?” Carcer glanced down through a smashed pane.
    “Long way down, Mister Vimes. I reckon a man’d die instantly falling all that way, wouldn’t he?”
    Vimes glanced down, and Carcer leaped.
    It didn’t go the way he’d planned. Vimes had been tensed for something like this. After a complicated moment, Carcer was lying on the iron latticework, one arm under him, the other outflung and being banged heavily on the metal by Vimes. The knife it had held skidded away down the dome.
    “Gods, you must think I’m stupid,” Vimes growled. “You wouldn’t throw away a knife, Carcer, if you didn’t have another one!”
    Vimes’s face was close to the man’s now, close enough to look into the eyes above that chirpy grin and watch the demons waving.
    “You’re hurting me, and that’s not allowed!”
    “Oh, I wouldn’t want anything to happen to you, Carcer,” said Vimes. “I want to see you in front of his lordship. I just want to hear you admit something for once. I just want to see that bloody cheeky grin wiped off your face. Sergeant Detritus!”
    “Sah!” shouted the troll from his distant ridge.
    “Make a signal. I want people up here now. Me and Carcer are just going to stay nice and quiet here, so’s he doesn’t try any tricks.”
    “Right, sir.” With another distant clatter of doomed tiles, the troll disappeared from view.
    “You shouldn’t have sent Captain Carrot away,” muttered Carcer. “He doesn’t like watchmen bullying innocent civilians…”
    “It is true that he has yet to master some of the finer details of de facto street policing,” said Vimes, maintaining his grip. “Anyway, I’m not hurting you, I’m protecting you. Wouldn’t like you to fall all that way.”
    Thunder rumbled again. The sky wasn’t just storm-black now. There were pinks and purples in the clouds, as though the sky was bruised. Vimes could see the clouds moving like snakes in a sack, to an endless sullen rumbling. He wondered if the wizards had been messing about with the weather.
    Something was happening to the air. It tasted of burned metal and flints. A weathercock on top of the dome began to spin round and round.
    “I didn’t think you was stupid, Mister