Thud (39 page)

Vimes turned back to head into the building, and noticed a small, neat figure standing patiently by the door. It had the look of someone who was quite happy to wait. He sighed. I bargain without an axe in my hand, eh?

“Breakfast, Mr. Bashfullsson?” he said.

“T
his is all rather fun,”
said Sybil an hour later as the
coaches headed out of the city. “Do you remember when we last went on holiday, Sam?”

“That wasn’t really a holiday, dear,” said Vimes. Above them, Young Sam swung back and forth in a little hammock, cooing.

“Well, it was very interesting, all the same,” said Sybil.

“Yes, dear. Werewolves tried to eat me.”

Vimes sat back. The coach was comfortably upholstered and well sprung. At the moment, while it threaded through the traffic, the magical loss of weight was hardly noticeable. Would it mean anything? How fast could a bunch of old dwarfs travel? If they really had taken a big wagon, the coaches would catch them tomorrow, when the mountains were still a distant prospect. In the meantime, at least he could get some rest.

He pulled out a battered volume titled
Walking in the Koom Valley
, by Eric Wheelbrace, a man who apparently had walked on just about everything bigger than a sheep track in the Near Ramtops.
*

It had a sketch map, the only actual map of the valley Vimes had seen. Eric wasn’t a half-bad sketch artist.

Koom Valley was…well, Koom Valley was basically a drain, that’s what it was; nearly thirty miles of soft limestone rock edged by mountains of harder rock, so what you had would have been a canyon if it wasn’t so wide. One end was almost on the snowline, the other merged into the plains.

It was said that even clouds kept away from the desolation that was Koom Valley. Maybe they did, but that didn’t matter. The valley got the water anyway, from meltwater and the hundreds of waterfalls that poured over its walls from the mountains that cupped it. One of those falls, the Tears of the King, was half a mile high.

The Koom River didn’t just rise in this valley. It leapt and danced in this valley. By the time it was halfway down this valley, it was a crisscrossing of thundering waters, forever merging and parting. They carried and hurled great rocks, and played with whole fallen trees from the dripping forests colonizing the scree that had built up against the walls. They gurgled into holes and rose again, miles away, as fountains. They had no mapable course—a good storm higher up in the mountains could bring house-sized rocks and half a stricken woodland down in the flood, blocking the sinkholes and piling up dams. Some of these could survive for years, becoming little islands in the leaping waters, growing little forests and little meadows and colonies of big birds. Then some key rock would be shifted by a random river, and within an hour, it would all be gone.

Nothing that couldn’t fly lived in the valley, at least for long. The dwarfs had tried to tame it, back before the first battle. It hadn’t worked. Hundreds of trolls and dwarfs had been swept up in the famous flood, and many had ever been found again. Koom Valley had taken them all into its sinkholes and chambers and caverns, and had kept them.

There were places in the valley where a man could drop a colored cork into a swirling sinkhole and wait for more than twenty minutes before it bobbed up on a fountain less than a dozen yards away.

Eric himself had seen this trick done by a guide, Vimes read, who’d demanded half a dollar for the demonstration. Oh yes, people visited the valley, human sightseers, poets and artists looking for inspiration in the ragged, uncompromising wildness. And there were human guides who’d take them up there, for a hefty price. For a few extra dollars, they’d tell the history of the place. They’d tell you how the wind in the rocks, and the roaring of the waters, carried the sounds of ancient battle, continuing in death. They’d say, maybe all those trolls and dwarfs the valley took are still fighting, down there in the dark maze of caves and thundering torrents.

One admitted to Eric that when he was a boy, during a cool summer when the meltwaters were pretty low, he’d roped down into one of the sinkholes (because, like all such stories, the history of Koom Valley wouldn’t have been complete without rumors of vast treasures swept down into the dark) and had himself heard, above the sound of the water, battle noises and the shouting of dwarfs, no sir, honestly sir, it chilled my blood so it did, sir, why, thank you very much, sir…

Vimes sat up in his seat.

Was that true? If that man had gone a little further, would he have found the little talking cube that Methodia Rascal had been unlucky enough to take home? Eric had dismissed it as an attempt to scrounge another dollar, and probably it was, but—no, the cube would surely have been long gone by then. Even so. It was an intriguing thought.

The driver’s hatch slid back.

“Outside the city, sir, clear road ahead,” Willikins reported.

“Thank you.” Vimes stretched, and looked across at Sybil. “Well, this is where we find out. Hang on to Young Sam.”

“I’m sure Mustrum wouldn’t do anything dangerous, Sam,” said Sybil.

“I don’t know about that,” said Vimes, opening the door. “I’m sure he wouldn’t
mean
to.”

He swung himself out and hauled himself on the roof of the coach, with a helping hand from Detritus.

The coach was moving well. The sun was shining. On either side of the highway, the cabbage fields lent their gentle perfume to the air.

Vimes settled down beside the butler.

“Okay,” he said. “Everyone holding on to something? Good. Let ’em go!”

Willikins cracked the whip. There was a mild jolt as the horses stretched, and Vimes felt the coach speed up.

And that seemed to be it. He’d expected something a little more impressive. They were gradually going faster, yes, but that in itself didn’t seem very magical.

“I reckon about twelve miles an hour now, sir,” said Willikins. “That’s pretty good. They’re running well without—”

Something was happening to the harnesses. The copper discs were sparking.

“Look at der cabbages, sir!” Detritus shouted.

On either side of the road, cabbages were bursting into flames and rocketing out of the ground. And still the horses went faster.

“It’s about power!” yelled Vimes, above the wind. “We’re running on cabbages! And the—”

He stopped. The rear two horses were rising gently in the air. As he stared, the lead pair rose, too.

He risked turning in his seat. The other coach was keeping up with them; he could clearly see Fred Colon’s pink face, staring ahead in rigid terror.

When Vimes turned back to look ahead, all four horses were off the ground.

And there was a fifth horse, larger than the other five, and transparent. It was visible only because of the dust and the occasional glint of light off an invisible flank; it was, in fact, what you got if you took away a horse but left the movement of a horse, the speed of a horse, the…spirit of a horse, that part of a horse which came alive in the rushing of the wind. The part of a horse that was, in fact, Horse.

There was hardly any sound now. Perhaps sound was unable to keep up.

“Sir?” said Willikins quietly.

“Yes?” said Vimes, his eyes streaming.

“It took us less than a minute to go that last mile. I timed us between milestones, sir.”

“Sixty miles in an hour? Don’t be daft, man! A coach can’t go that fast!”

“Just as you say, sir.”

A milestone flashed past. Out of the corner of his ear, Willikins heard Vimes counting under his breath until, before very long, another stone fell away behind them.

“Wizards, eh?” said Vimes weakly, staring ahead again.

“Indeed, sir,” said Willikins. “May I suggest that once we are through Quirm, we head straight across the grass country?”

“The roads up there are pretty bad, you know,” said Vimes.

“So I believe, sir. However, that will not, in fact, matter,” said the butler, not taking his eyes off the unrolling road ahead.

“Why not? If we try to go at speed over those rough—”

“I was referring obliquely, sir, to the fact that we are not precisely touching the ground anymore.”

Vimes, clinging with care to the rail, looked over the side. The wheels were turning idly. The road, just below them, was a blur. Ahead of them, the spirit of the horse galloped serenely onwards.

“There’s plenty of coaching inns around Quirm,” he said. “We could, er, stop for lunch?”

“Late breakfast, sir! Mail coach ahead, sir! Hold tight!”

A tiny square block on the road ahead was getting bigger quite fast. Willikins twitched on the reins, Vimes had a momentary vision of rearing horses, and the mail coach was a dwindling dot, soon hidden by the smoke of flaming brassicas.

“Dem milestones is goin’ past real fast now,” Detritus observed in a conversational tone of voice. Behind him, Brick lay flat on the roof of the coach with his eyes shut tight, having never before been in a world where the sky went all the way to the ground; there were brass rails around the top of the coach, and he was leaving fingerprints in them.

“Could we try braking?” said Vimes. “Look out! Haycart!”

“That only stops the wheels spinning, sir!” yelled Willikins as the cart went by with a
whoom
and fell back into the distance.

“Try pulling on the reins a little!”

“At this speed, sir?”

Vimes slid back the hatch behind him. Sybil had Young Sam on her knee, and was pulling a wooly jumper over his head.

“Is everything all right, dear?” he ventured.

She looked up and smiled. “Lovely, smooth ride, Sam. Aren’t we going rather fast, though?”

“Er…could you please sit with your back to the horses?” said Sam. “And hold on tight to Young Sam? It might be a bit…bumpy.”

He watched her shift seats. Then he shut the hatch, and yelled to Willikins.

“Now!”

Nothing seemed to happen. In Vimes’s mind, the milestones were already going
zip…zip
as they flashed past.

Then the flying world slowed, while in the fields on either side hundreds of burning cabbages leapt toward the sky, trailing oily smoke. The horse of light and air disappeared, and the real horses dropped gently to the road, going from floating statues to beasts in full gallop without a stumble.

He heard a brief scream as the rear coach tore past and swerved into a field full of cauliflowers, where, eventually, it squelched to a flatulent halt. And then there was stillness, except for the occasional thud of a falling cabbage. Detritus was comforting Brick, who’d not picked a good day to go cold turkey; it was turning out to be frozen roc.

A skylark, safely above cabbage range, sang in the blue sky. Below, except for the whimpering of Brick, all was silent.

Absentmindedly, Vimes pulled a half-cooked leaf off his helmet and flicked it away.

“Well, that was fun,” he said, his voice a little distant.

He got down carefully and opened the coach door.

“Everyone all right in here?” he said.

“Yes. Why have we stopped?” said Sybil.

“We ran out of…er, well, we just ran out,” said Vimes. “I’d better go and check that everyone else is all right…”

The milestone nearby proclaimed that it was but two miles to Quirm. Vimes fished out the Gooseberry as a red-hot cabbage smacked into the road behind him.

“Good morning!” he said brightly to the surprised imp. “What is the time, please?”

“Er…nine minutes to eight, Insert Name Here,” said the imp.

“So that would mean a speed slightly above one mile a minute,” mused Vimes. “Very good.”

Moving like a sleepwalker, he walked into the field on the other side of the road and followed the trail of stricken, steaming greens until he reached the other coach. People were climbing out of it.

“Everyone okay?” he said. “Breakfast today will be boiled cabbage, baked cabbage, fried cabbage—” he stepped smartly aside as a steaming cauliflower hit the ground and exploded “—and Cauliflower Surprise. Where’s Fred?”

“Looking for somewhere to throw up,” said Angua.

“Good man. We’ll take a minute or two to rest here, I think.”

With that, Sam Vimes walked back to the milestone, sat down next to it, put his arms around it, and held on tight until he felt better.

Y
ou could catch up
with the dwarfs long before they’re near
Koom Valley. Good grief, at the speed we did earlier you’d have to watch out in case you smash into the back of them!

Vimes’s thoughts nagged at him as Willikins drove the coach, at a very sedate speed, out of Quirue and then, on a clear stretch of road, unleashed the hidden horsepower until they were bowling along at forty miles every hour. That seemed quite fast enough.

No one was hurt, after all. You could get to Koom Valley by nightfall!

Yes, but that was not the plan.

Okay, he thought, but what was the plan, exactly? Well, it helped that Sybil knew more or less everybody, or at least everybody who was female, of a certain age, and who had been to the Quirm College for Young Ladies at the same time as Sybil. There appeared to be hundreds of them. They all seemed to have names like Bunny or Bubbles, they kept in touch meticulously, they’d all married influential or powerful men, they all hugged one another when they met, and went on about the good old days in Form 3b or whatever, and if they acted together, they could probably run the world or, it occurred to Vimes, might already be doing so.

They were Ladies Who Organize.

Vimes did his best, but he could never keep track of them. A web of correspondence held them all together, and he marveled at Sybil’s ability to be concerned over the problems of a child, whom she’d never met, of a woman she hadn’t seen in twenty-five years. It was a female thing.