Thud (22 page)

He reached Cheery and Carrot, who were staring at the distant fires of the dwarfs.

“We think we might be getting a result, sir,” said Carrot.

“I damn well hope so! What’s happening with the dwarfs?”

“No so much singing, sir,” Cheery reported.

“Glad to hear it.”

“We
could
handle them, though, couldn’t we, sir?” said Carrot. “With the golem officers on our side, too? If it came to it?”

Of course we couldn’t, Vimes’s mind supplied, not if they mean it. What we could is die valiantly. I’ve seen men die valiantly. There’s no future in it.

“I don’t want it to come to it, Captain—” Vimes stopped. A deeper shadow had moved among the shadows.

“What’s the password?” he said quickly.

The shadowy figure, who was cloaked and hooded, hesitated.

“Pathword? Excthuthe me, I’ve got it written down thome-where—” it began.

“Okay, Igor, come on in,” said Carrot.

“How did you know it wath me, thur?” said Igor, ducking under the barricade.

“Your aftershave,” said Vimes, winking at the captain. “How did it go?”

“Jutht as you thaid, thur,” said Igor, pushing his hood back. “Inthidentally, thur, I have thcrubbed the thlab well and my couthin Igor ith thtanding by to lend a hand. In cathe of any little acthidenth, thur…”

“Thank you for thinking of that, Igor,” said Vimes, as if Igors ever thought of anything else. “I hope it won’t be needed.”

He looked up and down the Cham. The rain was falling harder now. Just once, the copper’s friend had turned up when he really needed it. Rain tended to dampen martial enthusiasm.

“Anyone seen Nobby?” he said.

A voice from the shadows said, “Here, Mister Vimes! Been here five minutes!”

“Why didn’t you sing out, then?”

“Couldn’t remember the password, sir! I thought I’d wait ’til I heard Igor say it!”

“Oh, come on in. Did it work?”

“Better’n you’d imagine, sir!” said Nobby, rain pouring down his cloak.

Vimes stood back. “Okay, lads, then this is
it.
Carrot and Cheery, you head for the dwarfs, me and Detritus will take the trolls. You know the drill. Lines to advance slowly, and no edged weapons. I repeat,
no
edged weapons until it’s that or die. Let’s do this like coppers, okay? On the signal!”

He hurried back up the line of barricades as fast as the stir ran along the ranks of the watchmen.

Detritus was waiting stoically. He grunted when Vimes arrived.

“Clubs have jus’ about stopped, sir,” he reported.

“I heard, Sergeant.” Vimes took off his oiled leather cloak and hung it on the barricade. He needed his arms free.

“By the way, how did it go in Turn Again Lane?” he said, stretching and breathing deeply.

“Oh, wonnerfuI, sir,” said Detritus happily. “Six alchemists an’ fifty pound o’ fresh Slide. In an’ out, quick an’ sweet, all banged up in the Tanty.”

“Didn’t know what hit ’em, eh?” said Vimes.

Detritus looked mildly offended at this. “Oh no, sir,” he said. “I made sure they knew
I
hit ’em.”

And then Vimes spotted Mr. Pessimal, still where he had left him, his face a pale disc in the shadows. Well, enough of that game. Maybe the little tit would have learned something, standing here in the rain, waiting to be caught between a couple of screaming mobs. Maybe he’d had time to wonder what it was like to spend your life going through moments like that. A bit harder than pushing paper, eh?

“If I was you, I’d just wait here, Mr. Pessimal,” he said as kindly as he could manage. “This might be a bit rough in parts.”

“No, Commander,” said A. E. Pessimal, looking up.

“What?”

“I have been paying attention to what has been said, and intend to face the foe, Commander,” said A. E. Pessimal.

“Now see here, Mr. Pessi…er, see here, A. E.,” said Vimes, putting his hand on the little man’s shoulder. He stopped. A. E. Pessimal was trembling so much that his chain mail was faintly jingling. Vimes persevered. “Look, go on home, eh? This isn’t where you belong.” He patted the shoulder a few times, totally nonplussed.

“Commander Vimes!” snapped the inspector.

“Er, yes?”A. E. Pessimal turned up to Vimes a face wetter than the drizzle rightly accounted for.

“I am an acting constable, am I not?”

“Well, yes, I know I
said
that, but I did not expect you to take it
seriously
…”

“I am a serious man, Commander Vimes. And there is no place I would rather be now than here!” Acting Constable Pessimal said, his teeth chattering. “And no time I’d rather be here than now! Let’s
do
this, shall we?”

Vimes looked at Detritus, who shrugged his massive shoulders. Something was happening here, in the mind of a little man whose back he could probably break with one hand.

“Oh, well, if you say so,” he said hopelessly. “You heard the inspector, Sergeant Detritus. Let’s
do
this, shall we?”

The troll nodded, and turned to face the distant troll encampment. He cupped his hands and bellowed a string of trollish, which bounced off the buildings.

“Something we can all understand, perhaps?” said Vimes as the echoes died away.

A. E. Pessimal stepped forward, taking a deep breath.

“C’mon if you think you’re hard enough!”
he screamed wildly.

Vimes coughed. “Thank you, Mr. Pessimal,” he said weakly. “I imagine that should do it.”

T
he moon was somewhere
beyond the clouds, but Angua didn’t
need to see it. Carrot once had a special watch made for her birthday. It was a little moon that turned right around, black side and white side, every twenty-eight days. It must have cost him a lot of money, and Angua now wore it on her collar, the one item of clothing that she could wear all month around. She couldn’t bring herself to tell him she didn’t need it. You
knew
what was happening.

It was hard to know much else right now, because she was thinking with her nose. That was the problem with the wolf times; the nose took charge.

Currently, Angua was searching the alleys around Treacle Street, spiraling out from the dwarf mine. She prowled onwards in a world of color; smells overlaid one another, drifting and persisting. The nose was also the only organ that can see backwards in time.

She’d already visited the spoil heap on the waste ground. There was the smell of troll there. It had got out that way, but there was no point in following a trail that cold. Hundreds of street trolls wore lichen and skulls these days. But the foul, oily stuff, that was a smell that was clinging to her memory. The little devils must have some other ways in, right? And you had to move the air around in a mine, right? So some trace of that oil would find its ways out along with the air. They probably wouldn’t be strong, but she didn’t need them to be. A trace of it was all she needed. It would be more than enough.

As she padded through the alleys, and leapt walls into midnight yards, she kept clenched in her jaws the little leather bag that was a friend to any thinking werewolf, such a creature being defined as one who remembers that your clothes don’t magically follow you. The bag held a lightweight silk dress and a large bottle of mouthwash, which Angua considered to be the greatest invention of the last hundred years.

She found what she was looking for behind Broad Way: it stood out against the familiar organic smells of the city as a tiny black ribbon of stench that left zigzags in the air as breezes and the passage of carts had dragged it this way and that.

She began to move with more care. This wasn’t an area like Treacle Street; people with money lived here, and they often spent that money on big dogs and
DISPROPORTIONATE RESPONSE
signs in their driveways. As it was, she heard the rattle of chains and the occasional whine as she slunk along. She hated being attacked by large, ferocious dogs. It always left a mess and the mouthwash was afterwards never strong enough.

The thread of stink was floating through the railings of Empirical Crescent, one of the city’s great architectural semi-precious gems. It was always hard to find people prepared to live there, however, despite the general desirable nature of the area. Tenants seldom stayed for more than a few months before moving hurriedly, sometimes leaving all their possessions behind.
*

She sailed over the railing with silence and ease and landed on all fours on what had once been gravel path. Residents in the crescent seldom did much gardening, since even if you planted bulbs you could never be sure whose garden they’d come up in.

Angua followed her nose to a patch of rampant thistles. Some molding bricks in a circle marked what must have been an old well.

The oily stink was heavy here, but there was a fresher, far more complex smell that raised the hairs on Angua’s neck.

There was a vampire down there.

Someone had pulled away the weeds and debris, including the inevitable rotting mattress and decomposing armchair.
*
Sally? What was she doing here?

Angua pulled a brick out of the rotted edging and let it drop. Instead of a splash, there was a clear, wooden thump.

Oh well. She went back to human to get down; claws were fine, but some things were better done by monkeys. The sides were, of course, slimy, but so many bricks had fallen out over the years that the descent turned out to be easier than she’d expected. And it was only about sixty feet deep, built in the days when it was widely believed that any water that supported so many little whiskery swimming things
must
be healthy.

There were fresh planks in the bottom. Someone—and surely it could only have been the dwarfs—had broken into the well down here, and laid a couple of planks across it. They had dug this far, and stopped. Why? Because they’d reached the well?

There was dirty water, or water-like liquid, just under the planks. The tunnel was a bit wider here, and dwarfs had been here—she sniffed—a day ago, no more. Yes. Dwarfs had been here, had fished around, and had then all left at once. They hadn’t even bothered to tidy up. She could smell it like a picture.

She crept forward, the tunnels mapping themselves in her nostrils. They weren’t nicely finished, like the tunnels Ardent moved in. They were rougher, with lots of zigzags and blind alleys. Rough planks and balks of timber held back the fetid mud of the plains, which was nevertheless oozing through everywhere. These tunnels weren’t built to last; they were there for a quick and definitely dirty job, and all they had to do was survive until it was done.

So…the diggers had been looking for something, but weren’t sure where it was until they were within, what, about twenty feet of it, when they’d…smelled it? Detected it? The last stretch to the well was dead straight. By then, they knew where they were going.

Angua crept on, almost bending double to clear the low ceiling until she gave up and went back to wolf. The tunnel straightened out, with the occasional side passage that she ignored, although they smelled long. The vampire smell was still an annoying theme in the nasal symphony, and it came close to drowning the reek of foul water oozing from the walls. Here and there, vurms had colonized the ceiling. So had bats. They stirred.

And then there was another scent as she passed a tunnel opening. It was quite faint, but it was unmistakably the whiff of corruption. A fresh death…

Three fresh deaths. At the end of a short side tunnel were the bodies of two, no, three dwarfs, half-buried in mud. They
glowed.
Vurms had no teeth, Carrot had told her. They waited until the prospective meal became runny of its own accord. And, while they waited for the biggest stroke of luck ever to have come their way, they celebrated. Down here, in a world far away from the streets, the dwarfs would dissolve in light.

Angua sniffed.

Make that
very
fresh—

“They found something,” said a voice behind her. “And then it killed them.”

Angua leapt.

T
he leap wasn’t intentional.
Her hindbrain arranged it all by
itself. The front brain, the bit that knew that sergeants should not attempt to disembowel lance constables without provocation, tried to stop the leap in mid-air, but by then simple ballistics were in charge. All she managed was a mid-air twist, and struck the soft wall with her shoulder.

Wings fluttered a little way off, and there was a drawn-out organic sound, a sound that conveyed the idea that a slaughterhouse man was having some difficulty with a tricky bit of gristle.

“You know, Sergeant,” said the voice of Sally, as if nothing had happened, “you werewolves have it easy. You stay one thing and you don’t have any problems with body mass. Do you know how many bats I have to become for my body weight? More than a hundred and fifty, that’s how many. And there’s always one, isn’t there, that gets lost or flies the wrong way? You can’t think straight unless you get your bats together. And I’m not even going to touch on the subject of reassimilation. It’s like the biggest sneeze you can think of.
Backwards.
”

There was no point in modesty, not down here in the dark. Angua forced herself to change back, every brain cell piling in to outvote tooth and claw. Anger helped.

“Why the hell are you here?” she said, when she had a mouth that worked.

“I’m off duty,” said Sally, stepping forward. “I thought I’d see what I could find.” She was totally naked.

“You couldn’t have been so lucky!” Angua growled.

“Oh, I don’t have your
nose
, Sergeant,” said Sally, with a sweet smile. “But I was using a hundred and fifty pretty good flying ones, and they can cover a lot of ground.”