Thud (27 page)

Vimes stared at Detritus a moment, and then looked back at Brick.

“Mr. Brick, tell me how you got into the mine, will you?” he said.

“I told the other polisman—” Brick began.

“Now you tell Mister Vimes!” growled Detritus. “Right now!”

It took a little while, with pauses for bits of Brick’s mind to shunt into position, but Vimes assembled it like this:

The wretched Brick had been cooking up Scrape with some fellow gutter trolls in an old warehouse in the maze of streets behind Park Lane, had blundered down into the cellar looking for a cool place to watch the display, and the floor had given way under him. By the sound of it, he’d fallen a long way, but to judge by the troll’s natural state, he probably floated down like a butterfly. He’d ended up in a tunnel, “like a mine, y’know, wi’ alI wood holdin’ der roof up,” and had wandered along it in the hope that it led back to the surface or something to eat.

He didn’t start to worry until he came out into a far grander tunnel, and the words “dwarfs” finally reached a bit of his brain with nothing to do but listen.

A troll in a dwarf mine goes on the rampage. It was one of those givens, like a bull in a china shop. But Brick seemed refreshingly free of hatred toward anyone. Provided the world supplied enough things beginning with
s
to make his head go “bzzz!,” and the city had no shortage of these, he didn’t much care about what else it did. Brick, down in the gutter, had even dropped below that horizon. No wonder Chrysophrase’s shakedown hadn’t corralled him. Brick was something you stepped over.

It might even have occurred to Brick, standing there in the dark with the sound of dwarf voices in the distance, to be afraid. And then he’d seen, through a big round doorway, one dwarf hold up another and hit it over the head. It was cave-gloomy, but trolls had good night vision, and there were always the vurms. The troll hadn’t made out details and was not particularly interested in seeing any. Who cared what dwarfs did to one another? So long as they didn’t do it to him, he didn’t see a problem. But when the dwarf that had done the bashing started to shout,
then
there was a problem, large as life.

A big metal door right by him had slammed open and hit him in the face. When he peered out from behind it, it was to see several armed dwarfs running past. They weren’t interested in what might be behind the door, not yet. They were doing what people do, which is run toward the source of the shouting. Brick, on the other hand, was only interested in getting as far away from the shouting as possible, and, right here, was an open door. He took it and ran, not stopping until he was out in the fresh night air.

There had been no pursuit. Vimes wasn’t surprised. You needed a special kind of mind to be a guard. It was one that was prepared to be in a body that stood and looked at nothing very much for hours on end. Such a mind did not command high wages. Such a mind, too, would not be likely to start a search by looking in the tunnel it just arrived by. It would not be the sharpest knife in the drawer.

And so, aimlessly, without intent, malice, or even curiosity, a wandering troll had wandered into a dwarf mine, spotted a murder through a drug-addled perception, and wandered out again. Who could plan for anything like that? Where was the logic? Where was the sense?

Vimes looked at the watery, fried-egg eyes, the emaciated frame, the thin dribble of gods-knew-what from a crusted nostril. Brick wasn’t telling lies. Brick had enough trouble dealing with things that
weren’t
made up.

“Tell Mister Vimes about the big
wukwuk
,” Detritus prompted.

“Oh, yeah,” said Brick. “Dere was dis big
wukwuk
in der cave.”

“I think I’m missing a vital point here,” said Vimes.

“A
wukwuk
is what you make wi’ charcoal an’ niter an’ Slab,” said the sergeant. “All rolled up in paper, like a cigar, you know? He said it was—”

“We call dem
wukwuks
’cos dey looks like…you know, a wukwuk,” said Brick, with an embarrassed grin.

“Yes, I’m getting the picture,” said Vimes wearily. “And did you try to smoke it?”

“Nosir. It was
big,
” said Brick. “All rolled up in their cave, jus’ by the manky ol’ tunnel I fell into.”

Vimes tried to fit this into his thinking, and left it out for now. So…a dwarf did it? Right. And right now he believed Brick, although a bucket of frogs would make a better witness. No sense in pushing him further right now, anyway

“Okay,” he said. He reached down and came up with the mysterious stone that had been left on the floor of the office. It was about eight inches across, but curiously light. “Tell me about Mr. Shine, Brick. Friend of yours?”

“Mr. Shine is everywhere!” said Brick fervently. “Him diamond!”

“Well, half an hour ago he was in this building,” said Vimes. “Detritus?”

“Sir?” said the sergeant, a guilty look spreading across his face.

“What do
you
know about Mr. Shine?” said Vimes.

“Er…he a bit like a troll god…” Detritus muttered.

“Don’t get many gods in here, as a rule,” said Vimes. “Someone’s pinched the secret of fire, have you seen my golden apple? It’s amazing how often we don’t get that sort of thing in the crime book. He’s a troll, is he?”

“Kinda like a…a king,” said Detritus, as if every word was being dragged from him.

“I thought trolls didn’t have kings these days,” said Vimes. “I thought every clan ruled itself.”

“Right, right,” said Detritus. “Look, Mister Vimes, he Mr. Shine, okay? We don’t talk about him much.” The troll’s expression was a mixture of misery and defiance. Vimes decided to go for a weaker target.

“Where did you find him, Brick? I just want to—”

“He came callin’ to help you!” snarled Detritus. “What you doin,’ Mister Vimes? Why you go on askin’ questions? Wi’ the dwarfs you have pussy feet, must not upset ’em, oh no, but what you do if dey was trolls, eh? Kick down der door, no problem! Mr. Shine bring you Brick, give you good advice, an’ you talk like he bein’ a bad troll! I’m hearin’ now where Captain Carrot, he tellin’ the dwarfs he the Two Brothers. You fink that make me happy? We know dat lyin’ ol’ dwarf lie, yes! We groan at it lyin,’ yes! You want to see Mr. Shine, you show humble, you show respec,’ yes!”

This is Koom Valley again, thought Vimes. He’s never seen Detritus this angry, at least at him. The troll was just
there
, reliable and dependable. At Koom Valley, two tribes had met, and no one blinked.

“I apologize,” he said, blinking. “I didn’t know. No offense was meant.”

“Right!” said Detritus, his huge hand thumping on the table.

The spoon jumped out of Brick’s empty soup bowl. The mysterious rock ball rolled across the table, with an inevitable little trundling noise, and cracked open on the floor.

Vimes looked down at two neat halves.

“It’s full of crystals,” he said. Then he looked closer. There was a piece of paper in one broken, glittering hemisphere.

He picked it up and read: Pointer & Pickles, Crystals, Minerals & Tumbling Supplies, No. 3 Tenth Egg Street, Ankh-Morpork.

Vimes put this down carefully, and picked up the two pieces of the stone. He pushed them together, and they fitted with the merest hairline crack. There was no sign that any glue had ever been used.

He looked up at Detritus.

“Did you know that was going to happen?” he said.

“No,” said the troll. “But I fink Mr. Shine did.”

“He’s given me his address, Sergeant.”

“Yeah. So maybe he want you to visit,” Detritus conceded. “Dat is a honor, all right. You don’t find Mr. Shine, Mr. Shine find you.”

“How did he find
you
, Mr. Brick?” said Vimes.

Brick gave Detritus a panicky look. The sergeant shrugged.

“He pick me up one day. Gimme food,” Brick mumbled. “He show me where to come for more. He tole me t’keep off’f the stuff, too. But…”

“Yes…?” Vimes prompted.

Brick waved a pair of scarred, knobbly arms in a gesture that said, far more coherently than
he
could, that there was the whole universe on one side and Brick on the other, and what could anyone do against odds like that?

And so, he’d been handed over to Detritus, Vimes thought. That evened the odds somewhat.

He stood up, and nodded to Detritus.

“Should I take anything, Sergeant?”

The troll thought about this. “No,” he said, “but maybe dere’s some finkin’ you could leave behind.”

I
should be in charge
of the mine raid, thought Vimes. We
might be starting a war, after all, so I’m sure people would like to think that someone high up was there when it happened. So, why do I think it’s more important that I see the mysterious Mr. Shine?

C
aptain Carrot had been busy.
The city dwarfs liked him. So
he’d done what Vimes could not have done, or at least have done well, which was take a muddy dwarf necklace to a dwarf home down in New Cobblers and explain to two dwarf parents how it had been found. Things had happened quite fast after that, and one other reason for the speed was that the mine was shut. Guards and workers and dwarfs seeking guidance on the path of dwarfdom had turned up, to be met with locked doors. Money was owing, and dwarfs got very
definite
about things like that. A lot of the huge body of dwarf lore was about contracts. You were supposed to get
paid
.

No more politics, Vimes told himself. Someone killed four of
our
dwarfs, not some crazy rabble-rouser, and left them down there in the dark. I don’t care who they are, they’re going to be dragged into the light. It’s the law. All the way to the bottom, all the way to the top.

But it’s going to be done by dwarfs. Dwarfs will go to that well, and dig out that mud again, and bring up the proof.

He walked into the main office. Carrot was there, along with half a dozen dwarf officers. They looked grim.

“All set?” said Vimes.

“Yes, sir. We’ll meet the others at Empirical Crescent.”

“You’ve got enough diggers?”

“All dwarfs are diggers, sir,” said Carrot solemnly. “There’s timber on the way, and winching gear, too. Some of the miners joining us helped dig that tunnel, sir. They knew those lads. They’re a bit bewildered and angry.”

“I’ll bet. They believe us, then, do they?” said Vimes.

“Er…more or less, sir. If the bodies aren’t there, though, we’re going to have some explaining to do.”

“Very true. Didn’t your lads know
what
they were digging for?”

“No, sir. They just got orders from the dark dwarfs. And different squads dug in different directions. A long way in different directions. As far as Money Trap Lane and Ettercap Street, they think.”

“That’s a big slice of the city!”

“Yessir. But there was something odd.”

“Do go on, Captain,” said Vimes. “We’re good at odd.”

“Every so often everyone had to stop work, and the foreign dwarfs listened at the walls with a big, er, thing, like an ear trumpet. Sally found something like that when she was down there.”

“They were listening? In soggy mud? Listening for what? Singing worms?”

“The dwarfs don’t know, sir. Trapped miners, they thought. I suppose it makes sense. A lot of the digging is through old stonework, so I suppose it’s possible that other miners could be trapped somewhere that’s got air.”

“Not to last for weeks, though, surely? And why dig in different directions?”

“It’s a puzzle, sir, there’s no doubt about it. But we’ll get to the bottom of it soon enough. Everyone’s very keen.”

“Good. But play down the Watch side, will you? This is a bunch of concerned citizens trying to find their loved ones after a reported mining disaster, okay? The watchmen are just helping them out.”

“You mean ‘remember I’m a dwarf,’ sir?”

“Thank you for that, Carrot. Yes, exactly,” said Vimes. “And now I’m off to see a legend with a name like a can of polish.”

As he went out, he noticed the Summoning Dark symbol. The PussyCat Club drinks menu had been put with some care on a shelf by the window, where it got maximum light. It glowed. Maybe this was because Frosted Hot Lips Rose had been designed to be seen across a crowded bar in poor light, but it seemed to float above the oh-so-funny sticky cocktail names like Just Sex, Pussy Galore, and No Brainer, making them look faded and unreal.

Someone—several ones, by the look of it—had lit candles in front of it, for when night came.

It mustn’t be kept in the dark, Vimes thought. I wish I wasn’t.

P
ointer and Pickles
was dusty. Dust was the keynote of the
shop. Vimes must have passed it a thousand times; it was that kind of shop, the kind you walked past. Dust and dead flies filled the little window, which nevertheless offered dim views of large lumps of rock, covered with dust, beyond.

The bell over the door gave a dusty jangle as Vimes entered the gloomy interior. The noise died away, and there was a definite feeling that this marked the end of the entertainment for today.

Then a distant shuffling was born in the heavy silence. It turned out to belong to a very old woman who appeared, at first sight, to be as dusty as the rocks she, presumably, sold. Vimes had his doubts even about that. Shops like this one often looked upon the selling of merchandise as, in some way, a betrayal of a sacred trust. As if to underline this, she was carrying a club with a nail in it.

When she was close enough for conversation, Vimes said: “I’ve come here to—”

“Do you believe in the healing power of crystals, young man?” snapped the woman, raising the club threateningly.