Ok, I said spoilers in the header, so I’m not going to use annoying black boxes… final warning… still here? good:
Is the ‘event’ referred to by Lu-tse (the one that sends Vimes back in time) the same event that occurs in ‘Thief of Time’? The location is right, the weather is right, the fact that it’s to do with time is right… the residents of the city wouldn’t have noticed, because time froze once the clock started, and it was all back to normal once it was stopped…
There’s no supporting evidence in the book (other than the above, and Lu-tse being present) but I wonder if this is what PTerry is referring to?
That’s an interesting point. I hadn’t thought of that one before. You may be right, except that in Thief of Time Lu-Tze and Lobsand had just arrived in the city when the clock stopped time, but in Night Watch there’s a group of Monks working with Lu-Tze.
Of course, they’d already established that the History Monks had field agents, so maybe they were dealing with the after-effects of the time-stop, and so these events were “later” while being simultaneous, if you see what I mean and you probably don’t.
I don’t think it matters for the plot, but I’ve been thinking it probably was the same event–something he put in there as a little in joke to please his regular readers. I suspect photopat has it exactly right.