A man scurried out of the office of Lord Havelock Vetinari, not checking the door as it slammed shut behind him. Hands covering his face, he was grateful and relieved to have gotten away. I didn’t wait long after that. But you never waited long to see Vetinari. Or you waited all day.
He came to the door, opening it gingerly after its recent slam-trauma and I was immediately surprised by both the office, and the man himself. Surprised by the man, a short, greying gentleman in a suit. Respectable. Professional. His office was surprising because a kitchen knife was embedded in the wall above his desk. He ushered me inside, sat me opposite him and said, “so you’ve heard rumours about me, have you?”
Of course he knew. Thunder crackled in the distance, and rain began to fall, fizzing gently on contact with the roof. Sitting calmly at this very desk, Vetinari would hear everything going on in the city through his many eyes and ears. Start a number of rumours about himself, and find out about the ones he had not. Because his multitude of eyes and ears knew what I wanted – which was scary – so did he. But none of his eyes and ears were as calm, collected and chillingly terrifying as the two just above his nose. He started talking – the interview had begun.
Shipped off to the Assassin’s Guild, age 9, by his wealthy parents, the childhood of Havelock Vetinari took an ‘unexpected’ turn when it was revealed the Guild gave you an education, as well as teaching you how to kill people – a “fortunate and unusual coincidence”. This time in the Guild made him so feared he only needed to tap the shoulder of Lord Winder, a ruler of the city, for him to die out of shock. After a relatively successful run in the Guild, Vetinari left, age 30, to continue travelling the Discworld. Prominent destinations in his travel included Uberwald, where he met a diplomat – Baroness von Uberwald, who taught him the ups and downs of politics, and the Counterweight continent, where he mined gold. However, he eventually returned to Ankh-Morpork and succeeded the Mad Lord Snapcase to rule the city.
He stops talking, and taps his nose with a forefinger, knowingly. I am disappointed that he will not elaborate on his rise to power which is, as far as I can tell, undocumented. Gradually, he carries on talking, changing the subject.
Vetinari’s main philosophy is ‘don’t fix what ain’t broken’. This is exemplified by the room we are in – an old but functional room that had served as his office for many years. Water dripped through a decent hole in the ceiling into a bucket on the floor. This bucket was midway through the decomposition process – it had been used to clean up acid rain many times. Unsurprisingly, Vetinari did not mind this, as long as you were able to work there. Leaks would be fixed by the end of the week, though. He believes people dislike change. His aim is to, where possible, avoid it.
Gazing out the window, he stops talking again. On the street below, a two-man fight has broken out. The Day Watch walk past, having just finished the mid-day patrol. Both men are arrested. Vetinari smiles to himself; when things become broken, they are fixed very quickly.
His attention shifts steadily back to me, and he carries on talking. “The other reason I’ve been in power so long, is that I ensure the other Guilds all hate each other more than they hate me”. He hopes the city will remain as politically stable as it has been in recent times, for the foreseeable future. His tone while he says this suggests he will take personal steps to ensure this is the case.
Standing slowly and stretching, he informs me the interview is over. We walk back to the main entrance through a labyrinth of corridors. While we do this, he compares his rule to “a room full of people bickering and shouting at each other, and in the middle of it all, one man quietly doing his own thing”.
You had to hand it to Lord Vetinari. If you didn’t, he sent men to take it away.