Free Night Watch by Terry Pratchett

forgetfulness.
    “You’re Snouty ,” he said. “Right? Some bloke broke your nose and it never got set properly! And your eyes water all the time, which is why they gave you permanent jail duty—”
    “Do I know you, mister?” said Snouty, peering at Vimes through suspicious, running eyes.
    “Me? No. No!” said Vimes hastily. “But I’ve heard people talk about you. Practically runs the Watch House, they said. Very fair man, they said. Firm but fair. Never spits in the gruel, never widdles in the tea. And never confuses his fruit, either.”
    The visible parts of Snouty’s face contorted into the resentful scowl of someone who can’t quite keep up with the script.
    “Oh yeah?” he managed. “Well, hnah, I’ve always kept a clean cell, that’s very true.” He looked a little nonplussed at the development, but managed another scowl. “You stay there, mister, and I’ll go an’ tell the captain you woke up.”
    Vimes went back and lay on the bunk, staring at the badly spelled and anatomically incorrect graffiti on the ceiling. For a while there was a raised voice from upstairs, with an occasional intrusive “hnah!” from Snouty.
    Then he heard the jailer’s footsteps on the stairs again.
    “Well, well, well,” he said in the tone of someone looking forward to seeing a third party get what was coming to them. “Turns out the captain wants to see you right away. Now, are you gonna let me shackle you, hnah, or do I call the lads down?”
    Gods protect you, Vimes thought. Maybe it was true that the blow that had spread Snouty’s nose across his face had scrambled his brain. You had to be a special kind of idiot to try to handcuff a dangerous prisoner all by yourself. If he’d tried it with Carcer, for example, he’d have been a dead idiot five minutes ago.
    The jailer opened the door. Vimes stood up and presented his wrists. After a second’s hesitation, Snouty handcuffed him. It always paid to be nice to a jailer; you might not get handcuffed behind your back. But a man with both hands in front of him had quite a lot of freedom.
    “You go up the stairs first,” said Snouty and reached down and picked up a rather more-efficient-looking crossbow than Vimes had seen last night. “And if you even try to walk fast, mister, I’ll shoot you, hnah, where you die slow.”
    “Very fair,” said Vimes. “Very fair.”
    He walked up the steps very carefully, hearing Snouty’s heavy breathing right behind him. Like many people of limited intellectual scope, Snouty did take what he could do very seriously. He’d shown a refreshing lack of compunction about pulling that trigger, for one thing.
    Vimes reached the top of the stairs and remembered to hesitate.
    “Hnah, turn left, you,” said Snouty behind him. Vimes nodded to himself. And then first on the right. It was all coming back to him, in a great wave. This was Treacle Mine Road. This was his first Watch House. This was where it all began.
    The captain’s door was open. The tired-looking old man behind the desk glanced up.
    “Be seated,” said Tilden coldly. “Thank you, Snouty.”
    Vimes had mixed memories of Captain Tilden. He had been a military man before being given this job as a kind of pension, and that was a bad thing in a senior copper. It meant he looked to Authority for orders, and obeyed them, whereas Vimes found it better to look to Authority for orders and then filter those orders through a fine mesh of common sense, adding a generous scoop of creative misunderstanding and maybe even incipient deafness if circumstances demanded, because Authority rarely descended to street level. Tilden set too great a store by shiny breastplates and smartness on parade. You had to have some of that stuff, that was true enough. You couldn’t let people slob around. But although he’d never voice the view in public, Vimes liked to see a bit of battered armor around the place. It showed that someone had been battering it. Besides, when you were