Discworld Tourism Industry HQ

Here it is to live on my blog and yours forever:

Even shorn of her layers of protective clothing, Lady Sybil Ramkin was still toweringly big. Vimes knew that the barbarian hublander folk had legends about great chain-mailed, armor-bra’d, carthorse-riding maidens who swooped down on battlefields and carried off dead warriors on their cropper to a glorious roistering afterlife, while singing in a pleasing mezzo-soprano. Lady Ramkin could have been one of them. She could have led them. She could have carried off a battalion. When she spoke, every word was like a hearty slap on the back and clanged with the aristocratic self-assurance of the totally well-bred. The vowel sounds alone would have cut teak.

Vimes’s ragged forebears were used to voices like that, usually from heavily-armored people on the back of a war charger, telling them why it would be a jolly good idea, don’tcherknow, to charge the enemy and hit them for six. His legs wanted to stand to attention.

Prehistoric men would have worshiped her, and in fact had amazingly managed to carve life like statues of her thousands of years ago.

Goodbye Year of the Luminous Lemur, hello Year of the Curious Squid!

Discworld Textposts III

But that's not where the story goes. Carcer is awful, but he's still a person, and Vimes is still acting in his duty as a policeman, and that means certain rules have to be followed. And so he doesn't execute him on the spot, but arrests him and hands him over to the authorities. And Carcer will probably end up dead anyway—executed—but we as the audience never see it. It doesn't matter. He can't do harm anymore. The happy ending isn't the catharsis of seeing his miserable end, but the knowledge that Vimes stood in the face of becoming judge, jury and executioner and resisted it. And we, the audience, felt the temptation too and know we can and must resist it as well.

Commander Sir Samuel Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch: