#500 notes!

GERRY: Can I use your wastepaper bin?

GERTRUDE: Yes, it’s just– Wait. Surely you didn’t bring it here!

GERRY: Well, yeah, I, uh –

GERTRUDE: Gerard, we’ve talked about this. Bringing unvetted artefacts or books into the Archive is incredibly dangerous.

GERRY: It’s locked away!

...Gertrude, at least, would argue that he's not really very careful at all.

But he is one other thing, that basically no one else is when it comes to Leitners:

Unafraid.

Gerry doesn't give a shit about how dangerous these books are. He's cautious enough, he knows how much trouble they can cause, but he's been hunting them for practically his whole life and they don't really scare him that much anymore. Compared to Gertrude here, he's downright blasé about the threat they pose.

And because he's not scared of them, these books that thrive off of people's fear can't really hurt him much, after all.

But in the books after that (and particularly by the time you get to Going Postal)? There’s barely a Vetinari scene without him, and there's a major increase in the number of scenes with just the two of them. Suddenly Drumknott is whispering information - and even corrections - in Vetinari’s ear, Vetinari is monologuing to him about philosophy and asking for his opinion, they're doing a double-act to keep visitors on their toes during meetings. They're a team, not just a politician and his secretary.

And I'm thinking about how, after the events of The Truth, Vetinari must have dug for the details on everything that happened. And he must have learned, either from the Watch or Drumknott himself, that Drumknott saw a man who looked like Vetinari attack him, and still argued for Vetinari’s innocence in the incident. That Drumknott chose to distrust the evidence of his own eyes before he would even consider distrusting Vetinari.

How rare must that be, for one of the most powerful political figures on the continent? To have earned that sort of loyalty and trust from someone, that the thought of betrayal never even crossed his mind?