““That’s it, Mister Vimes. No more knives. I can’t run. I surrender. No messing about this time. I give in, okay? Just arrest me? For old times’ sake?”
The Beast screamed inside Vimes. It screamed that no one would blame him for doing the hangman out of ten dollars and a free breakfast. Yeah, and you could say a swift stab now was the merciful solution, because every hangman knew you could go the easy way or the hard way and there wasn’t one in the country that’d let something like Carcer go the easy way. The gods knew the man deserved it…
…but young Sam was watching him, across thirty years.
When we break down, it all breaks down. That’s just how it works. You can bend it, and if you make it hot enough you can bend it in a circle, but you can’t break it. When you break it, it all breaks down until there’s nothing unbroken. It starts here and now.
He lowered the sword.”
Terry Pratchett, Night Watch
In which Terry Pratchett spends a whole book creating a character so morally despicable and such a proven threat (the last time he said he had no knives left he took slice out of Vimes’s face) that when Sir Terry gets up on a soapbox in 2002 to explain why in NO CIRCUMSTANCES is it okay for a cop to become judge jury and executioner, we understand that he really means NO circumstances.