“You know what day it is, Ping?” said Colon.
“Er…twenty-fifth of May, sarge.”
“And you know what that means, Ping?”
“Er…”
“It means,” said Nobby, “that anyone important enough to ask where we're going—”
“—knows where we've gone,” said Fred Colon.
The door slammed behind them.
The cemetery of Small Gods was for the people who didn't know what happened next. They didn't know what they believed in or if there was life after death and, often, they didn't know what hit them. They'd gone through life being amiably uncertain, until the ultimate certainty had claimed them at the last. Among the city's bone orchards the cemetery was the equivalent of the drawer marked misc, where people were interred in the glorious expectation of nothing very much.
Most of the Watch got buried there. Policemen, after a few years, found it hard enough to believe in people, let alone anyone they couldn't see.
For once, it wasn't raining. The breeze shook the sooty poplars around the wall, making them rustle.
“We ought to have brought some flowers,” said Colon, as they made their way through the long grass.
“I could nick a few off some of the fresh graves, sarge,” Nobby volunteered.
“Not the kind of thing I want to hear you saying at this time, Nobby,” said Colon severely.
“Sorry, sarge.”
“At a time like this a man ought to be thinking of his immortal soul viz ah viz the endless mighty river that is History. I should do that, if I was you. Nobby.”
“Right, sarge. Will do. I see someone's doing it already, sarge.”
Up against one wall, lilac trees were growing. That is, at some point in the past a lilac had been planted there, and had given rise, as lilac will, to hundreds of whippy suckers, so that what had once been one stem was now a thicket. Every branch was covered in pale mauve blooms.