[A/N: Last chapter folks! I hope it doesn't disappoint too much]/

Chapter 7

The great printing presses were gunning at full speed, churning out reams of the most important paper that had ever passed through them. William looked in satisfaction at the headline, although his heart pounded nonetheless:

PATRICIAN DIES IN PALACE BLAZE!

Screamed the headline, and, just beneath, in letters almost as large,

HEROIC SECRETARY PERISHES IN RESCUE ATTEMPT!

~ Duke of Ankh leads the tributes. ~

Sacharissa came to stand next to him.

"I think you've made the right decision," she ventured, mistaking his silence for doubt, perhaps.

"I know I have," William replied, almost giddy. Like a schoolboy who has somehow escaped from pulling an enormous prank on the headmaster without ever expecting to, he knew he had already got away with it.

"And, you know, we know the truth," she pointed out, "Us, and the important people. Vimes, von Lipwig…the people who cared, they know."

"Yes, dear." He smiled happily at her.

"What decided you in the end?"

"Posterity," he replied, managing to sound both cryptic and pompous at the same time. Sacharissa shot him a penetrating look, but if she guessed at the half-truth, she let it pass. And it was partly true. The lie in the paper was the only lie he was telling today – or ever, in fact. But the fact was…the fact was he'd written it for Drumknott. If he'd told the truth, then what posterity would remember was only Vetinari, and in the end the dramatic tale of his passing would just be an interesting aside saying that the most notoriously unsentimental of men had died saving his secretary. Just that: 'his secretary', and the man's name wouldn't even appear in a footnote. Vetinari would, perhaps, be seen as a hero, but Drumknott would be forgotten. And William had decided that he just didn't want Drumknott to be forgotten, like all the other little people who weren't kings or generals or patricians but who served nonetheless, somehow got forgotten. There was already talk now of commissioning a statue of them – both of them. Probably Drumknott himself wouldn't give a jot either way whether he ended up written about or not (certainly he couldn't now he was dead), but William liked to think that Vetinari would be pleased. He abruptly realised that somehow, even though he was dead, he'd ended up doing what Vetinari wanted. Again. He smiled to himself, then addressed the noisy print room.

"Gentlemen, ladies; remember this day, and remember to tell your children the events of this day, because this isn't just news, it's history." And history had once meant just that: a story…and a story, after all, is only a lie you tell to tell the truth.

/

Death halted Binky at the end of the garden, and watched the two figures at the end of the field, aware of Albert arriving huffing and puffing at his side.

"What does he think he can do?" Albert groused, "It's not like they have any power."

I AM NOT CERTAIN THAT THEY NEED IT.

"No good will come of it," was Albert's opinion, although that seemed to be Albert's general outlook on everything. Death chose not to comment. After all, if you had to have faith in something, it had better be something you could make real.

PERHAPS I WILL INVITE THEM BACK FOR HOGSWATCH DINNER, he remarked to his servant, IT WILL BE NICE TO HAVE A GOOD CROWD FOR A CHANGE.

"Sir?"

THANK YOU ALBERT, THAT WILL BE ALL.

"Right you are then Sir," Albert replied, and wandered back up the garden, muttering something about running a bloody hotel, not a house to himself. Death got down from his horse, sheathing his scythe. Binky nuzzled into his robe, as he watched the two figures at the end of the field a moment longer. He became aware of a suspicious crunching noise, and looked sharply at Binky, who was munching contentedly on…

OH DEAR. AND I HADN'T FILLED IN THE DESTINATION BOX YET EITHER. THEY COULD END UP ANYWHERE.

/

Vetinari had expected to be alone, Drumknott realised, watching him watch de Worde seize the first copies of his paper from the press and start pontificating about something or other. He had always expected to be alone, in death as in life…and he would have carried on regardless. He would have done his duty. But at some point, some point in life when perhaps he had found himself less alone than he thought, he had allowed himself one human hope to the contrary; but it was only in the certainty of that formidable, inhuman knowing that he had taken a politician's gamble on it. When there was nothing else to lose. And he'd waited for him.

It was worth dying for; it was worth carrying on for, if you had nothing else to carry on for, and Vetinari had more to carry on for than even he knew, Drumknott vowed, because Vetinari had seen only one day, but he had seen glimpses of the future in Death's books, and he knew, knew with the iron certainty of knowledge, not mere faith, that it wouldn't just be them, not always…a door had been opened, and there'd be Vimes, who'd arrest the gods themselves, if Sybil didn't sit them down and give them a bloody good talking to first, and Carrot would lead the charge into Hell and rescue every soul in there, and von Lipwig would cheat the devil himself…legions of the little people, the people nobody had ever given a damn about. All those who had been lifted up, would rise up.

He glanced up at his former master, who turned away at last from the City, which disappeared beneath the mists. That blue-orbed gaze fixed instead upon him, those farseeing eyes that now gazed upon eternity without the mortal's limit to their vision; knowing, and implacable, but, somewhere, somehow, he had to believe, it was still him.

"Tell me Rufus," Vetinari remarked, and it was the voice he had always known; deep, and dry, and rendered human only by the resonance of the pain carried in it, "How do you find the afterlife?" Still, Drumknott hesitated a moment. For the first time, he understood what de Worde had always insisted about the power of words, of the right word, in the right place and, he added to himself, the right time…of the truth, and those moments when the words became the action themselves.

"I think," he said, with the stiff affront only a man who has just been through all of Death's mortality receipts is entitled to, "That it is very badly run."

"Yes," agreed Vetinari, and his saturnine features split into a death's head grin, "Somebody should do something about it." He turned to face the abyss once more, and, in a sudden panic, Drumknott seized his arm.

"Sir!" Vetinari's smile didn't waver, but it became a gentler one.

"I'm not Sir anymore, Rufus, and you don't have to follow me." But then why did you wait? Drumknott wanted to protest, then realised, Because you only hoped. Because you would never not give me the choice.

"I'm not following you," Drumknott replied, returning his gaze steadily, "I'm coming with you." Vetinari said nothing, but he nodded once, curtly, and his jaw worked a moment. Drumknott took a deep, existential breath, and slid his grip around to lock arms with him. Then, without warning, without looking back, and without hesitation, Vetinari stepped out over the brink, and strode out into the great beyond, his shrouded figure bearing its eerie light into the darkness of the void with it, the dancing magics all around him, and Rufus beside.

/

Epilogue

Moist von Lipwig, Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, shuffled along the corridor towards his bedroom in a most un-Patrician-like manner, stifling a yawn with his arm and disarranging the severe black robes in the process. For perhaps the eighty-eighth time since officially becoming the Tyrant of Ankh-Morpork, he wondered if he could have robes of state designed that were a little less tyrannical upon the person, to say nothing of slightly more exciting. Then, like the other eighty-seven times, he dismissed the thought. One could not be Patrician in a golden suit after all…well, not yet, anyway. It had only been six months, after all. You couldn't have too much change too fast. Still, something, oh, I don't know, a little less severe would really make a nice change. Hmm, he'd have to think about it. He had his image (or, as he was increasingly thinking of it, his Image) to consider, after all.

If only he knew, exactly, what his Image was supposed to be. So far it seemed to be a lot of faking of the sort he'd rather got used to the past few years. Pretending to know what he was talking about. Pretending to be ignorant when ignorance was called for and pretending omnicience when omnicience was called for. Pretending to be above it all. Pretending, above all, to be absolutely in control. One thing he was beginning to be more and more certain of was, ironically enough, the one thing he'd known right from the start. He couldn't pretend to be Vetinari. With that thought, his pace quickened, and he hurried into his private office. There was no light coming from the adjoining master bedroom, but then, it was past midnight, and he'd long since dissuaded his wife from waiting up for him.

He closed the intervening door, and, assured that all was secure and private, tiptoed carefully over to his desk, piled high and most untidily with papers, but it wasn't them he was after. Instead, he drew out a tiny key from a hidden pocket in the shadowy robes and unlocked a small drawer in the desk. The volume he took out was filled with dense, light paper, bound in thick, and in places slightly charred, leather. Moist couldn't quite resist a furtive look over his shoulder. Old habits died hard. He'd lied when he'd said that Vetinari's chair had been the only thing in his office that had survived, almost instinctively. Hidden away in a secret compartment, he'd found Vetinari's private journal, and, naturally, had kept it to himself. Not even Spike knew about it. Cracking the cipher had proven a fiendishly difficult task, but then again, that was the sort of challenge he'd been born to, and, indeed, it was almost as if it had been made for him. Now he had it and could finally read the contents.

With that familiar tingling of excitement running down the spine, he carefully opened the journal and began to decode the spidery handwriting. This was in fact the third time he'd opened it up and tried to begin. It had felt like sacrilege, somehow. To see a glimpse inside Vetinari's mind; to see the private thoughts behind the public face, and for such a mind as his – he'd been half-reluctant, almost not wanting to know, and, even, half-afraid. But then, didn't a wise man once say that knowledge is power? And, in the end, he just couldn't resist.

"All right, you bastard," he muttered, "You got me into this mess, you can damn well give me everything you've got." Which he hoped wasn't going to be something as mundane as Octeday 32nd, 8am. Had breakfast, got shouted at by Vimes. Diaries could be such a dreadful disappointment, but a journal…there was a word that promised, if he could pardon himself the pun, volumes. He stopped himself from looking over his shoulder again. There was a portrait of Vetinari hanging over the desk in his official office, ostensibly as a humbling mark of respect to his predecessor, but in actual fact to scare people (10) into behaving, but there was no Vetinari here, real or otherwise.

Slowly, he began to decipher and read, scanning, absorbing, vaguely aware at the back of his mind, that if he was going to stay awake, he should probably be doing some useful work…there was always so much of it. How on earth was one man supposed to keep on top of it? Hmm, something else that he'd been thinking about, something else to think about…

After a while, a sleepy voice floated out from the other room.

"Aren't you coming to bed dear?"

"In a little while," he replied, distractedly, watching the words unfurl before him in the flickering light of the candle.

…'The greatest trust between man and man is the trust of giving counsel. For in other confidences men commit the parts of life; their lands, their goods, their children, their credit, some particular affair: but to such they make their counsellors they commit the whole; by how much the more they are obliged to all faith and integrity…' After a little while, he turned the page.

END

…Her power was illusion – but illusion was her power – C Haigh: Elizabeth I

10. i.e., himself.

NOTES: The last entry in Vetinari's journal is actually lifted from Francis Bacon's Essay, Of Council. When I first read the excerpt of Vetinari's journal given in Feet of Clay it immediately struck me as sounding very Bacon-like, so much so that I ran back to his essay, Of Truth, but it's not a direct quote. This fic was partially inspired by this idea, partially by the alternative headline presented in the film The Day the Earth Caught Fire, and partially by my asking myself who the most unlikely man to defy Death would be, and could I make him do it believably? To which the answer came: Rufus Drumknott, and I hope so :) I didn't decide on which headline de Worde went with until about the third rewrite of this fic. It was a tough call.

Thanks for reading, and please review :)