The Quirmian crisis was eventually buried six feet deep in diplomacy and tamped down hard; with luck, it would neither rise again nor come to the keen noses at the Times. Drumknott's working day returned to its usual fourteen hours, and His Lordship started leaving the office again on those errands whose purpose hadn't grown much clearer now that Drumknott was included. Dropping in unexpectedly at the Royal Bank and the Mint he could understand, but why waste an hour taking tea with a banker's wife afterwards? Why visit a perfectly ordinary clacks tower or a dwarf metal refinery experimenting with bauxite ores? On one occasion they hadn't even gone anywhere, just been driven along the Ankh while His Lordship frowned silently at the ice-bound barges.

There were reasons; Drumknott never doubted that. When it came to bringing together loose threads of happenstance into a spider-web of purpose, the gods had nothing on Lord Vetinari.

In most cases. It began to seem that the thing that had happened between them would stay just that: a thing that had happened. A thread dangling in the air forever, connecting to nothing. His Lordship still hadn't mentioned it, let alone touched him or shown any other sign of wanting it to recur. Drumknott thought of taking action himself--he lay awake planning strategies and reading Nasus's The Art of Getting Your End Away and other such unhelpful books--but it had a look of painful futility, like walking into a locked door twice. He could make what had happened happen again, perhaps, but he couldn't see a way to make it happen differently.

The thing about Lord Vetinari's plans was that they were as invisible as spider-webs until you were in them. One night at about seven o'clock, after a day of concerted labour and no break for the crossword puzzle, Lord Vetinari put his pen down with the kind of nonchalance that implied a good deal of hidden chalance. "I believe our work is finished for today."

"It is, sir?" It was true they'd got through everything that couldn't wait, but that ordinarily meant making a start on tomorrow's work.

"I believe so," he repeated. His expression shed a few layers of impassivity, like a glacier on a warm day. "Rufus, will you come to bed?"

Drumknott had nearly said yes out of sheer astonishment--he had the shape of the word on his tongue--when the obscure map of his discontent came clear at last. The problem was here, and the solution was there, and a single way led from one to the other. One route, and not a safe or certain one.

He thought of Lord Vetinari travelling under the sea to Leshp, offering a surrender in Klatch, waiting in prison to see if he'd reckoned the odds well enough. If Ankh-Morpork would survive, and if he would.

"I had thought it was a simple question," His Lordship said.

"It's not, my lord." Drumknott set a hand on the edge of the desk to steady himself. He took a deep breath and threw the dice. "Or rather, the answer's not simple. I'll gladly come to Havelock Vetinari's bed, if he wants me. But I will not lie down with my master the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork. Not again."

"That," His Lordship said, as slowly as if he had to invent new words to do it, "is the most ridiculous thing anyone has ever said to me. And it has a good deal of competition."

"It's the truth, sir. When -"

"You make it sound as if I . . . but it was you who . . . and I thought . . ." He shut his mouth hard, trapping the wandering sentence. "I gave you pleasure. I took nothing for myself."

"That's true. And you didn't let me give you anything, either. You wanted nothing, you needed nothing. You were untouchable."

"That is a perverse interpretation."

"I don't think so, sir. Who is more powerful than the man who needs nothing?"

"That's . . . no, it's not nonsense. It's true in most circumstances. But in this case you have misunderstood."

"I don't think I have. I . . . I know you. Better than anyone else does, at least." Drumknott only realised he'd paused for a denial when one didn't come. "You're the best ruler this city's ever had because you take nothing for yourself. Because you rule yourself. But . . . I don't know why, but you're a despot to yourself. Everything's an exercise of power--the sleepless nights, the meals you don't eat, this freezing cold office. If you could, you'd live on tea and paperwork."

"I would certainly get a lot more done if that were possible."

"You're not a machine for getting things done. You're a man of flesh and blood. And you're in a kind of prison. You built it up around yourself, your own prisoner and your own gaoler. But now you've lost the key."

"I suppose that you, knowing me as you do, have discovered it?"

"Possibly. I should very much like to find out."

In silence, His Lordship capped the inkwell and rearranged the objects on his desk into a more orderly order. "You read novels, don't you, Rufus?"

"Ye-es."

"I thought so." He nodded, confirming something to himself. "What is it that you want of me, exactly?"

The question, however unyieldingly phrased, was at least a question and not a refusal. Drumknott breathed through his strangling hope and said, "To touch you."

"Ah." His Lordship nudged a paperweight fractionally to the right. "I had an excellent rhetorical education, you know. I can recognise figures of speech. I even remember all their names; that one was antanaclasis." He got up and went to the window; unasked, Drumknott came after him and stood at his side. "If all you wanted was the literal, the matter would be simpler."

"We could start with the literal." Drumknott raised his hand to the window and touched the other man's reflected face. "And see what follows."

There was a long pause. Drumknott waited to see if the island would sink.

A hand brushed his, the fingers slightly warmer than the glass. "I can make no promises."

"I know."

"Then will you come to bed?"

Drumknott looked from the mirrored face to the real one. "Yes, Havelock."

Havelock didn't smile--it wasn't, somehow, a moment for smiling--but the set of his mouth softened. "Come along, then." He went not to the double doors that led to the anteroom, but to a spot along an inner wall. "I want to show you something." He pulled aside the edge of a worn tapestry. "There's a flaw in the wood here, do you see it? Press it hard, and then find the latch here -" he reached up to an almost-invisible join between two oak panels "and pull down. Always in that order." A panel slid back. Drumknott trailed him into a narrow, dusty passageway, trying to memorise a stream of instructions. "Stay along the left wall here . . . that board's unworn for a reason, don't ever step on it . . . since it's between noon and midnight, touch this bit of moulding twice . . . when you're four steps up, go back one and wait five seconds . . ." They arrived at what seemed to be a featureless bit of wall; Havelock pointed out a shallow depression in the plaster. "A handspan and a half above that--my hands, not yours--there's a spot to press. When you hear a click, then . . . yes." There was a keyhole where there hadn't been anything before. Havelock drew a key from somewhere in the depths of his robe and turned it twice. "I'll give you a key, but always knock first anyway if I'm in the room. There are other defences that I engage from the inside." He pushed the door open and they went into the bedroom.

"Good gods," Drumknott said.

The room was warm. Heaped coals glowed in the fireplace, and the scuttle was full to overflowing--easily a night's worth. Perhaps in case that wasn't sufficient, the bed had been moved nearer the fire. But the really extraordinary thing was that it was a different bed, wide enough for two. It was covered with a coarse wool blanket--no room Havelock lived in would ever be luxurious--but there were two plump pillows where before there'd been a single limp one.

"Yes, I thought you might like it."

"Thank you," Drumknott said. It was a gift, another bestowal of pleasure, like the way Havelock had touched him. And yet not exactly a repetition, because Havelock couldn't hold back from his own share of this.

"You're most welcome." Havelock set a candle down on the small chest at the head of the bed. "Perhaps we could light a few more, if you don't mind? I find that I rather like to . . . "

To see, Drumknott thought. The one desire he'd indulged, last time, and still he could barely speak of it. "Of course I don't mind." He moved a couple of tall pillar candles closer to the bed and lit them, then locked the room's unsecret door. "Is the housemaid going to - ?"

"I told Miss Furlotte not to come back after seven o'clock."

That would certainly start the servants guessing, if the bed and the fire hadn't done already. And they weren't likely to guess wrong.

Havelock answered his look--or read his mind--with a shrug. "So long as it doesn't end up in the Times, I'm not terribly concerned. To most of the city it will be merely another rumour, and far from the most interesting."

"And to the rest?" Some of His Lordship's enemies could distil a dram of truth from a tun of gossip with unfortunate facility.

"It will be a tool to use against me. We must ensure that they don't find the task an easy one. I fear you've taken your last solitary walk through the city, Rufus."

"I think," he answered, ignoring a twinge of unmerited nostalgia for those walks, "it's a price that isn't beyond my means." He'd be a little more constrained; Havelock, he hoped, a little more free.

Havelock smiled, and he smiled back. He let the moment stretch taut, holding Havelock's gaze, and opened the top clasp of his robe. He bared himself to the candlelight and the warm air, wondering if Havelock had hoped for this when he ordered the fire built up.

By the time Drumknott had removed robe and coat and neckcloth and was unbuttoning his shirt, he felt himself growing shy. By the breeches he knew he was bright red, but he kept on. Gift for gift, trust for trust. He even managed not to cup his hands over his sex, although he had to fold them behind his back to keep the resolution.

"Rufus . . . " Havelock took a step towards him, his heavy robe stirring the air; Drumknott felt it on his naked skin.

"Would you let me see you, too?"

"Oh. Yes. Of course." He wrenched at the neck of his robe. It wasn't so much the haste of eagerness, Drumknott thought, as the haste of someone trying to get it over with.

"May I?" Drumknott moved Havelock's hands aside.

Havelock seemed to look through him for a moment, then said, "Yes, if you like."

Drumknott set his mind to buttons and points, clear little problems for his nervousness to work itself out on. Outer robe, inner robe, long shirt and braies and old-fashioned wool hosen, and a thin austere body underneath it all. Blue veins and black hair. The scar on Havelock's thigh, as jagged and white as the Ramtops on a map. So many bones announcing themselves under his skin. His chest belling out in an indrawn breath every time Drumknott touched him.

"Thank you," Drumknott said when everything was off, and didn't wait for an answer before stretching up to kiss him.

At first it was just like their previous kiss: closed lips on closed lips, and Havelock not exactly joining in the spirit of the venture. Drumknott persisted, trying to let it build. Like writing, he thought, one word follows the next until it feels natural, until the sentence was always there and could never have been any different. He remembered the best kisses he'd ever known (the man who'd given them had been the one wonderful part of that Ephebian holiday) and adapted them--a little slower, a little less vehement, moving lightly, careful to encourage and not insist.

Eventually Havelock's mouth moved against his a little, pressed back a little. When the kiss ended, he didn't pull away from Drumknott's hand on his shoulder. "That was rather more . . . pleasant than I recalled. And not so messy."

Messy? Kissing was messy, Drumknott supposed, if you stopped to think about it. Someone else's mouth, tongue, teeth, saliva--revolting if considered too closely. But no one who was enjoying a kiss stopped to think. Whomever Havelock had kissed before, Drumknott concluded, hadn't deserved the privilege. "I'm glad," he said, and eased a hand round to Havelock's back, to the linked bones that stood out like knots in a whip. "Would you like to do it again?"

Without more than a few seconds' thought, Havelock kissed him, half imitation and half experiment. Drumknott felt him testing, discarding what he didn't like--anything too deep, too messy--and elaborating what he did, building variations on brushing, nibbling, light sucking, delicate movements of the tongue. He grew almost eloquent and Drumknott grew hard, pressed aching against Havelock's leg.

"Bed?" he asked, a slurred whisper.

"An excellent idea."

They pulled aside the blanket and lay on the old linen sheet, soft from a hundred washings; Havelock's asceticism had circled accidentally back and become sensuality. It was like the stern, close-clipped beard Drumknott had always wanted to feel against his skin, the precise fingers he'd always wanted to taste. He tasted them now, kissing from wrist to fingertip and drawing them into his mouth one by one. Havelock's eyes squeezed shut in what Drumknott decided, from his arrhythmic breathing, must be pleasure. Afterwards, Drumknott wiped each finger dry with the frayed edge of the sheet.

From Havelock's face and his fingers, Drumknott crept downwards, touching his arms and neck, his shoulders, his chest, stopping to kiss and be kissed, fighting the urgency that grew as Havelock touched him much less chastely. At last he slid the flat of his hand down Havelock's belly and along the widening patch of rough hair to his sex. Havelock gasped, his whole body jerking. He'd been half stiff already, and his member swelled in Drumknott's encircling hand. His face contorted and his shoulders strained at every movement.

Drumknott had thought to take Havelock's sex in his mouth, but now, seeing that slow self-abandonment, he wanted to stay face-to-face. He remembered something else he'd learnt in Ephebe. Still lying on his side, he guided Havelock's sex between his thighs. His own organ was squeezed and rubbed between their bodies as Havelock cautiously thrust.

"Is this -"

"Yes," he said, and pulled Havelock's hips roughly against his own.

Sensations flared in him like sparks, bright and brief--the tickling of the hair on his coillons, the random spasms of Havelock's hand, the wordless sounds they both made, the blue flicker as Havelock's eyes closed and opened and closed again. They were kissing wetly, messily, mouths slipping. A sudden expanding tension pulled him irrevocably to climax, and he jerked his hips clumsily, his sex pulsing in sharp exquisite bursts.

Havelock groaned and pushed him onto his back, rolling on top of him. Misty-headed, sated, Drumknott clung as Havelock's whole body pushed at him, face buried in his neck, hips snapping. It almost hurt, too much now for his oversensitive skin, but he'd wanted this desire. He moved with it, whispering word-fragments in Havelock's ear as he shuddered, as the rhythm broke in a hot spurt between Drumknott's legs.

For a minute or two Havelock lay spread over him, as loose and warm as a blanket, then seemed to remember himself little by little. The fist clenched in Drumknott's hair opened into fingers, petting him apologetically. With a sigh, Havelock reached past him, fumbling for something in the bedside chest. He produced two handkerchiefs, gave one to Drumknott, and slid aside onto the mattress. They mopped themselves off in worrisome silence. It was hard to tell what Havelock was thinking; harder, strangely enough, in the bedroom than in the office.

He touched a strand of Havelock's damp, rumpled hair, and when that was accepted, set about rumpling it some more. "Was that . . . ?"

"It was pleasurable. Intensely so."

"But did you like it?"

An eyebrow twitched. "Have you let me out of prison, is that what you mean?"

"I suppose so." He looked away from those knowing eyes.

"Rufus. My dear boy." Havelock clasped his arm lightly, just above the elbow. "There are only prisons. We sit in our cells all our lives wishing for freedom, and when at last the key turns in the lock, we are taken out to face the hangman."

"That's horrible."

"Yes." He smiled, but the melancholy was visible in it, palimpsestic. "That does not make it any less true." With a fingertip, he traced the small scar on Drumknott's shoulder. "Igor did an excellent job. Does it give you much pain?"

"Very little. I was lucky." Drumknott laid his hand on Havelock's thigh, where it didn't quite cover the long, rippling scar. There were odd lumps and twists under the skin, distortions of the muscle. No wonder it troubled him. "How many times have people tried to kill you?"

"Eight, to my knowledge. That discounts some rather innovative school pranks, innumerable deposition plots, a strange illness I'm still uncertain about, a treason charge, and the time in my youth when Mr. Dibbler attempted to sell me a sausage."

Drumknott leaned in until he could feel Havelock's exhalations on his own face.

"Is that why you . . . approached me?" Havelock asked.

"It's not the reason, no. But it is why I spoke. I hadn't thought I ever would."

"Ah. The timing seemed too close to be coincidental."

"I thought you might die there in the Watch House. Alone. You deserve better than that, and I thought I might - gods, I am monstrously vain."

Beyond all expectation, Havelock embraced him. "Humility is an overvalued virtue." He gave Drumknott a tentative kiss; it still seemed a foreign language to him, hard to pronounce and grammatically thorny. "But if I died this minute, I would die alone. That is the nature of dying."

Drumknott felt a future desolation stretch back its long, cold arm and beckon. "I suppose you're right." He closed his eyes and tried to feel every inch of his body against Havelock's, all at once.

"I'm sorry. I did warn you that I'm not a kind man."

"Do you think I need kindness so badly? You're an honest man."

"Really? You're the only person who has ever thought that of me."

Drumknott ran a hand along Havelock's naked back. "I have a very particular point of view on the matter."

Havelock laughed, quick and surprised. "Yes, indeed. Let me tell you this then, in honesty. I said there are only prisons, and I meant it. But this cell of mine is more comfortable now. Larger, if you will."

"Warmer."

"Antanaclasis again. But yes, both literally and figuratively. And I am not displeased with the change."

center***/center

Drumknott woke alone once more. Havelock had covered him with the blanket and blown out most of the candles. In the near-absolute silence of deep night he could hear the scratch of a pen that needed trimming. He wrapped the blanket around himself--the fire was still burning, but lower than before--and went to the desk, laying a hand on Havelock's shoulder. Interrupting him at work felt slightly like a liberty, but here in this room he reckoned he was allowed them.

Havelock leaned, slightly but unmistakably, into his touch. "Do you know what I'm writing?"

The coded journal lay on the desk, half covered by a bunch of loose, closely-written leaves. "No," said Drumknott.

"It's a treatise on governance. For my successor." He crossed out one word and inserted another. "The problem with tyranny as a profession is that one cannot take an apprentice. The next Patrician will have no experience of rule. But there are two things he will have, I hope: this book, and you."

"In what sense -"

"The secretarial only." He smiled sideways at Drumknott. "The other, I leave to your discretion." A few more words took shape on the page. "I don't want my city broken by unskilled hands. And in the course of nature, you will outlive me." Turning in the chair, he looked up, unsmiling now, intent. "As you yourself have said, you know me. You know what I've done to build order and security in Ankh-Morpork. Will you teach him?"

The weight of it, as heavy as the city itself, loured on his shoulders. He wanted to refuse it. He wanted to say don't talk about dying. But he was Havelock Vetinari's man, and there was only one answer he could give, or ever had. "Yes."

"Thank you," Havelock said, in a quiet voice that thrummed down into Drumknott's bones. After another long look, he began writing again.

Such endless labour, for a time after his death, for a city that wouldn't thank him. Drumknott watched him for a moment, then asked, "Should I go?" Let him write in peace, if he felt the need.

"Hmm? No, not unless you wish it. I'm - give me a second - there." He pushed hard on a full stop. "I want to sleep a little myself, and I should like your company."

"Then you shall have it," Drumknott said, holding out a hand. "Come to bed."