Thud (34 page)

“What was it that spoke? Was it a cube?” Click/click.

“Yes. It was dug up. It said it spoke with the voice of B’hrian Bloodaxe.”

Vimes heard a gasp from Bashfullsson, and caught Fred Colon’s eye. He jerked his head toward the cell-block door, and mouthed a couple of words.

“Wasn’t he a famous dwarf king?” said Vimes. Click/click.

“Yes. He commanded the dwarfs at Koom Valley,” said Helmclever.

“And what did this voice say?” said Vimes. Click/click. And a third click from behind Vimes as Fred Colon locked the door and stood in front of it, looking impassive.

“I do not know. Ardent said was about the battle. He said it was lies.”

“Who killed Grag Hamcrusher?” Click/click.

“I do not know. Ardent called me to the meeting and said there was terrible fighting among the grags. Ardent said one of them killed him in the dark, with a mining hammer, but none knew who. They were all struggling together.”

All dressed alike, Vimes thought. Just shapes, if you can’t see their wrists…

“Why did they want to kill him?” Click/click.

“They had to stop him destroying the words! He was screaming and hitting the cube with the hammer!”

“There are…sensitive areas on a cube, and it is possible that if they are touched in the wrong order, all the sound will vanish,” whispered Bashfullsson.

“I should think the hammer would do the trick whatever it hit!” said Vimes, turning his head.

“No, Commander. Devices are immensely tough.”

“They must be!”

Vimes turned back to Helmclever.

“It’s wrong to destroy lies, but it’s okay to kill the miners?” he said. Click.

He heard the hiss of Bashfullsson’s intake of breath. Well, yes, perhaps that could have been better put. There was no answering move. Helmclever hung his head.

“It was
wrong
to kill the miners,” he whispered. “And why not destroy lies? But it is wrong to think these thoughts, so I…I said nothing. The old grags were angry and upset and confused, so Ardent took charge. He said one dwarf killing another underground, everyone knew that was no business of humans. He said he could make it all right. He said everyone must listen to him. He told the dark guards to take the body to the new outer chamber. And…he told me to fetch my club…”

Vimes glanced at Bashfullsson and mouthed the word “Club?” He got an emphatic nod in return.

Helmclever sat hunched in silence, and then raised one hand slowly and moved a troll. Click.

Click/click. Click/click. Click/click. Vimes tried to spare a few brain cells for the game while his mind raced and tried to piece the random information spilling out of Helmclever.

So…It all starts when they come here looking for this magic cube, which can speak…

“Why did they come to the city? How did they know the cube was here?” Click/click.

“When I went to begin my training, I took a copy of the
Codex
. Arden confiscated it, but then they called me to a meeting and said it was very important and they would honor me by letting me go with them to the city. Ardent told me it was a great opportunity. Grag Hamcrusher had a mission, he said.”

“They hadn’t even known about the painting?”

“They lived under a mountain. They believe that humans are not real. But Ardent is smart. He said there were always rumors that something had come out of Koom Valley.”

I bet he
is
smart, Vimes thought. So they come here, do a little light pastoral work and rabble-rousing, and search for the cube in a very dwarfish way. They find it. But the poor bastards who were doing the digging hear what it’s got to say. Well, everyone knows dwarfs gossip, so the dark guards make sure these four don’t have a chance to.

Click/click. Click/click.

Then friend Hamcrusher doesn’t like what he hears, either. He wants to destroy this thing. In the struggle in the dark, one of the other grags does the world a favor and fetches him a crack on the noggin. But, whoops, big mistake, because the mob is going to miss him and his jolly urging to wholesale troll slaughter. You know how dwarfs gossip, and you can’t kill ’em all. So while it’s still just us together in the dark, we need a plan! Forward, Mr. Ardent, who says “I know! We’ll take the corpse out to a tunnel that a troll just might have got into, and bash its head in with a club. A troll did it. What right-thinking dwarf could possibly believe anything else?”

Click/click.

“Why the candles?” said Vimes. “The old grags had been sitting in brilliant candlelight when I saw them.” Click/click.

“The grags ordered it,” Helmclever whispered. “They feared what might come for them in darkness.”

“And what was it that might come?” Click…

Helmclever’s hand stopped in mid-air. For several seconds, nothing moved in the little circle of yellow light except the candle flames themselves; in the darkness beyond, the shadows craned to hear.

“I…cannot say,” whispered the dwarf. Click. Click/click…click…click.

Vimes glared at the board. Where’d that troll come from? Helmclever had wiped three dwarfs off the board in one go!

“Ardent said there’s always a troll. A troll got into the mine,” said Helmclever. “The grags said yes, that must have been it.”

“But they knew the truth!” Click/click…click…click. Three more dwarfs gone, just like that…

“Truth is what a grag says it is,” said Helmclever. “The sunlight world is a bad dream anyway. Ardent said no one was to speak about it. He said I was to tell all the guards…about the troll.”

Blame it on a troll, Vimes thought. For a dwarf, that came naturally. A big troll did it and ran away. This isn’t just a can of worms, it’s a nest of bloody vipers!

He stared at the board. Bloody hell. I’m running into a wall here. What am I left with? Brick saw a dwarf hitting another dwarf, but that wasn’t the murder—that was Ardent or someone giving Hamcrusher’s dead body that distinctive, bashed-by-a-troll look. I’m not actually certain that’s a major crime. The
murder
was done in the dark by one of six dwarfs, and the other five might not even know who did it! Okay, maybe I can say they conspired to conceal a crime…hold on…

“But it wasn’t Ardent who said that the
Watch
should not be told,” he said. “That was you, wasn’t it? Did you
want
me to be angry, Mr. Helmclever?” He moved a dwarf. Click.

Helmclever looked down.

Since no answer was forthcoming, Vimes captured the wandering troll and placed it beside the board.

“I did not think you would come.” Helmclever’s voice was barely audible. “Hamcrusher was…I think…I didn’t…Ardent said you wouldn’t worry, because the grag was such a danger. He said the grag had ordered the miners to be killed, and so now it was ended. But I thought it…I…it wasn’t right. Things were wrong! I heard you were full of pride. I had to get you…interested. He…he…”

“You thought I wouldn’t be? A troll is accused of murdering a dwarf, at a time like this, and I
wouldn’t
be interested?” said Vimes.

“Ardent said that you would not be, because no humans were involved. He said you would not care what happens to dwarfs.”

“He ought to get out in the fresh air more!”

Helmclever’s eyes and nose were running now, and dripping on the board. A storm stops the battle, Vimes thought. Then the dwarf lifted his head and wailed. “It was the club the troll Mr. Shine gave me for winning five games in a row,” he wailed. “He was my friend! He said I was as good as a troll, so I should have a club! I told Ardent it was a war trophy! But he took it and bashed that poor dead body!”

Water dripping on a stone, Vimes thought. And it depends on where the drops fall, right, Mr. Shine? What good has it done this poor devil? He wasn’t in the right job to have doubt enter his life!

“All right, Mr. Helmclever, thank you for this,” he said, sitting back. “There is just one thing, though. Do you know who sent those dwarfs to my house?”

“What dwarfs?”

Vimes stared into the weeping, red-rimmed eyes. Their owner was either telling the truth or the stage had missed a major talent.

“They came to attack me and my family,” he said.

“I…did hear Ardent talking to the captain of the guard,” Helmclever murmured. “Something about…a warning…”

“
A warning?
Do you call—” Vimes began and stopped when he saw Bashfullsson shaking his head. Right. Right. No point in taking it out on this one. He’s had all the stuffing knocked out of him in any case.

“They are very frightened now,” Helmclever said. “They don’t understand the city. They don’t understand why trolls are allowed here. They don’t understand people who don’t…understand them. They fear you. They fear everything, now.”

“Where have they gone?”

“I don’t know. Ardent said they would have gone now anyway, because they’ve got the cube and the painting,” said Helmclever. “He said the painting will show where there are more lies, and those can be destroyed. But they fear most of all the Summoning Dark, Commander. They can feel it coming for them.”

“It’s only a drawing,” said Vimes. “I don’t believe in it.”

“I do,” said Helmclever calmly. “It is in this room. How does it come? It comes in darkness and in vengeance and in disguise.”

Vimes felt his skin twitch. Nobby looked around the grimy stone walls. Bashfullsson sat bolt upright in his chair. Even Fred Colon shifted uneasily.

This is just mystic stuff, Vimes told himself. It’s not even human mystic stuff. I don’t belive in it. So why does it feel a bit chilly in here?

He coughed. “Well, once it knows they’ve gone, I expect it’ll head out after them.”

“And it will come for me,” said Helmclever in the same calm voice. He folded his hands in front of him.

“Why? You didn’t kill anybody,” said Vimes.

“You don’t understand! They…they…when they killed the miners, one was not all the way dead, and, and, and we could hear him hammering on the door with his fists, and I stood in the tunnel and listened to him die and I
wished
him dead so that the noise would stop, but, but, but when it did, it went on in my head, and I could, I could, I could have turned the wheel but I was afraid of the dark guards who have no souls, and because of that the darkness will take mine…”

The little voice died away.

There was a nervous cough from Nobby.

“Well, thank you again,” said Vimes. Good grief, they really messed up his head, poor little sod.

And I’ve got nothing, he thought. I might get Ardent on a charge of falsifying evidence. I can’t put Brick in the witness box, because I’ll simply be proving that there
was
a troll in the mine. All I’ve got is young Helmclever here, who’s clearly unfit to testify.

He turned to Bashfullsson, and shrugged. “I think I’d like to keep our friend here tonight, for his own good. I can’t imagine there’s anywhere else for him to go. The statement he made is, of course, covered by…”

Now
his
voice trailed off as his memory nudged him. He turned back in his chair to glare at the sorrowful Helmclever.

“What painting?”
he said.

“The painting of the Battle of Koom Valley by Methodia Rascal,” said the dwarf, not looking up. “It’s very big. They stole it from the museum.”

“What?” said Fred Colon, who was making tea in the corner. “It was them?”

“What?
You
know about this, Fred?” Vimes demanded.

“We, yes, Mister Vimes, we did a report—”

“Koom Valley, Koom Valley, Koom Valley!” roared Vimes, slapping his hand down on the table so hard that the candlesticks jumped into the air. “A report? What the hell good’s a report? Have I got time these days to read reports? Why doesn’t someone
tell
me these thi—”

One candlestick rolled on to the floor and went out. Vimes grabbed for the other as it reached the edge of the table, but it spun away from his fingers and landed wick-first on the flagstones.

Darkness fell like an axe.

Helmclever groaned. It was a heartfelt, soul-creaking groan, like a death rattle from a living mouth.

“Nobby!”
screamed Vimes.
“Light a godsdamn match right now and that’s a godsdamn order!”

There was a frantic scrabbling in the dark, and then a match-head was a sudden supernova.

“Well, bring it here, man!” he shouted to Nobby. “Get those candles lit!”

Helmclever was still staring at the table, where the ill-tempered thump had scattered the remains of the game.

Vimes glanced down at the game board as the candle flames grew.

If you were the kind to see things, you’d say that the trolls and dwarfs had fallen in a rough circle around the central rock, while a few more dwarfs had rolled away in a line. You’d say, in fact, that from above, they formed the shape of a round eye. With a tail.

Helmclever gave a little sigh and slipped sideways onto the floor.

Vimes stood up to help him, and then remembered just in time about politics. He forced himself to back away, hands in the air.

“Mr. Bashfullsson?” he said. “I can’t touch him. Please?”

The grag nodded, and knelt down by the dwarf.

“No pulse, no heartbeat,” he announced after a few seconds. “I’m sorry, Commander.”

“Then it looks as though I’m now in your hands,” said Vimes.

“Indeed. In the hands of a dwarf,” said the grag, standing up. “Commander Vimes, I will swear that Helmclever was treated with nothing but concern and courtesy while I was here. And perhaps with more kindness from you than a dwarf might have a right to expect. His death is not on your hands. The Summoning Dark called him. Dwarfs will understand.”

“Well, I don’t! Why’d it kill him? What did the poor bugger do?”

“I think it’s more true to say that the
fear
of the Summoning Dark killed him,” said the grag. “He left a miner trapped, heard his cries in the dark, and did nothing. To all dwarfs, that is a terrible crime.”