Thud (35 page)

“As bad as wiping away a word?” said Vimes sourly. He felt more shaken up than he’d care to admit. He shouldn’t have slapped the table like that, but he’d been so
angry
. Now his hand hurt more than ever.

“Some would say it is far worse. His own guilt and fear killed Helmclever. It’s as if he had his own Summoning Dark in his head,” said Bashfullsson. “In a way, perhaps, we all have, Commander. Or something similar.”

“You know, your religion really messes people up,” said Vimes.

“Not in comparison to what they do to one another,” said Bashfullsson, calmly folding the dead dwarf’s hands across his chest. “And it is not a religion, Commander. Tak wrote the World and the Laws, and then He left us. He does not require that we think of Him, only that we think.”

He stood up. “I shall explain the situation to my fellows, Commander. Incidentally, I would ask you to take me with you to Koom Valley.”

“Did I say I was going to Koom Valley?” said Vimes.

“All right,” said the grag calmly. “Let’s say, then, that
should
the mood take you to go to Koom Valley, you will take me? I know the place, I know the history, I even know quite a lot about mine sign, especially the Major Darknesses. I may be useful.”

“You demand all that just for telling the truth?” said Vimes.

“As a matter of fact, no.
J’ds hasfak ’ds’
: ‘I bargain with no axe in my hand.’ I will tell the truth whatever you decide,” said Bashfullsson. “However, since you are not going to Koom Valley, Commander, I will not press you. It was only an idle thought.”

F
un.
What is it good for?

It’s not pleasure, joy, delight, enjoyment, or glee. It’s a hollow, cruel, vicious little bastard, a word for something sought with a hilarious couple of wobbly antennae on your head and the words
I WANT IT
! on your shirt, and it tends to leave you waking up with your face stuck to the street.

Somehow, Angua had acquired a magenta feather boa. It wasn’t her. It wasn’t anyone. It had just turned up. The sheer fakery of it made her more gloomy. Something was nagging at the back of her mind, and it annoyed her that she didn’t know what it was.

They had ended up in Biers, as she knew they would. It was the undead bar, although it tolerated anyone who wasn’t too normal.

It certainly tolerated Tawneee. She just didn’t get it, did she? The reason why men never talked to her? The trouble was, thought Angua, that Nobby wasn’t actually a bad…person. As such. As far as she knew, he’d always been faithful to Miss Pushpram, which was to say that when it came to being hit with a fish and then pelted with clams, he never thought of any other girl but her. He actually had quite a romantic soul, but it was encased in what could only be called…Nobby Nobbs.

Sally had accompanied Tawneee to the ladies’, which was always wise in Biers. Now Angua was staring at yet another cocktail menu, painted on a board above the bar, in a very shaky script, by Igor.
*

He’s done his best to flow with the zeitgeist, or would have done if he’d known what the word meant, but had totally failed to grasp the subtleties of the modern cocktail bar, so that the drinks on offer included

HAVIN YOU TEEF SMASHED IN BY A BIG STINKY FIST
HEAD NAILED TO THE DOOR
KICK INNA FORK
LIKE BIG LUMP OF STEEL HAMMER FRU YOU EARS
NECK BOLT

Actually, the Neck Bolt wasn’t too bad, Angua had to admit.

“’S’cuse me,” said Cheery, teetering on a bar stool, “but what was all that about Tawneee? I could see you and Sally nodding to each other!”

“That? Oh, it’s the jerk syndrome.” Angua remembered who she was talking to, and added: “Er…dwarfs probably don’t have that. It means…sometimes a woman is so beautiful that any man with half a brain isn’t going to
think
of asking her out, okay? Because it’s
obvious
that she’s far too grand for the likes of him. Are you with me?”

“I think so.”

“Well, that’s Tawneee. And, for the purposes of this explanation, Nobby has not got half a brain. He’s so used to women saying no when he asks them out that he’s not afraid of being blown off. So he asks her, because he figures, why not? And
she
, who by now thinks there’s something wrong with her, is so grateful she says okay.”

“But she
likes
him.”

“I know. That’s where it all gets strange.”

“It’s much simpler for dwarfs,” said Cheery.

“I expect it is.”

“But probably not as much fun,” said Cheery, looking crestfallen.

Tawneee was returning. Angua ordered three Neck Bolts while Cheery hopefully negotiated for a Screaming Orgasm.
*
And then, with occasional assistance from Sally, Angua explained to Tawneee the facts of…well…
everything.

It took some while. You had to keep changing the shape of sentences to get them to fit into the currently available space in Tawneee’s brain. Angua clung to the idea, though, that the girl couldn’t be
that
stupid. She worked in a strip club, didn’t she?

“I mean, why do you think men pay to watch you onstage?” she asked.

“Because I’m very good,” said Tawneee promptly. “When I was ten, I got the Dancer of the Year Award in Miss Deviante’s ballet and tap class.”

“Tap-dancing?” said Sally, grinning. “Hey, why don’t you try that onstage?”

Angua closed her mind to the image of Tawneee tap-dancing. The club would probably burn to the ground.

“Er…let me try this another way…” she said. “And I’m telling you this as another woma—female…”

Tawneee listened intently, and even the way in which she looked puzzled was unfair to the rest of her sex.

When Angua had finished, she watched the angelic expression hopefully.

“So what you’re saying, right,” said Tawneee, “is that walking out with Nobby is like going into a big posh restaurant and only eating the bread roll?”

“Exactly!” said Angua. “You’ve got it!”

“But I never really
meet
men. Granny told me not to act like a floozy.”

“And you don’t think that working at—” Angua began, but Sally cut in.

“Sometimes you need to flooze regularly,” she said. “Haven’t you ever just gone into a bar and had a drink with a man?”

“No.”

“Right,” said Sally. She drained her glass. “I don’t like these Neck Bolts. Let’s go somewhere else and…” she paused, “open your mind to poshibiliteesh.”

I
t was odd,
having Sybil in Pseudopolis Yard. It had been one of
the Ramkin family homes before she’d given it to the Watch. She’d been a girl there. It had been her home.

Some apprehension of this crept into the chipped and stained souls of the watchmen. Men not known for the elegance of their manners found themselves automatically wiping their feet as they came in, and respectfully removing their helmets.

They spoke differently, too, slowly and hesitantly, anxiously scanning the sentence ahead for expletives to delete. Someone even found a broom and swept up, or at least moved the dirt to a less obvious place.

Upstairs, in what had been up until then the cash office, Young Sam slept peacefully in a makeshift bed. One day, Vimes hoped, he would be able to tell him that on one special night he’d been guarded by four troll watchmen. They’d been off duty but volunteered to come in for this, and were just
itching
for some dwarfs to try anything. Sam hoped the boy would be impressed; the most other kids could hope for was angels.

Vimes had commandeered the canteen, because it had a big enough table. He’d spread out a map of the city. A lot of the rest of the planking was occupied by pages from the
Koom Valley Codex
.

This wasn’t a game, this was a puzzle. A sort of, yes, jigsaw puzzle. And he ought to be able to do it, he reasoned, because he already had nearly all the corners.

“Ettercap Street, Money Trap Lane, Crybaby Alley, Scuttle-butt Court, the Jeebies, Pellicool Steps,” he said. “Tunnels everywhere! They were lucky to find it after only three or four. Mr. Rascal must have had lodgings in half the streets in the area. Including Empirical Crescent!”

“But hwhy?” said Sir Reynold Stitched. “I mean, hwhy dig tunnels everyhwhere?”

“Tell him, Carrot,” said Vimes, drawing a line across the city.

Carrot cleared his throat. “Because they were dwarfs, sir, and deep-downers at that,” he said. “It wouldn’t occur to them
not
to dig. And mostly it’d be just a matter of clearing out buried rooms, in any case. That’s a stroll, to a dwarf. And they were laying rails, so they could take the spoil out anywhere they wanted.”

“Yes, but sureleah—” Sir Reynold began.

“They were listening out for something talking at the bottom of an old well,” said Vimes, still bending over the map. “What chance that’d still be visible? And people can get a bit iffy when a bunch of dwarfs turn up and start digging holes in the garden.”

“It’d be very slow, sureleah?”

“Well, yes, sir. But it would be in the dark, under their control, and secret,” said Carrot. “They could go anywhere they wanted. They could zigzag around if they weren’t certain, they could home in with their listening tube, and they’d never have to speak to a human or see daylight. Dark, controllable, and
secret.
”

“Deep-downers in a nutshell,” said Vimes.

“This is very exciting!” said Sir Reynold. “And they dug into the cellars of my museum?”

“Over to you, Fred,” said Vimes, carefully drawing a line across the map.

“Er, right,” said Fred Colon. “Er…Nobby an’ me found out where only a couple of hours ago,” he said, thinking it wisest not to add “after Mister Vimes yelled at us and made us tell him every last detail and then sent us back and told us what to look for.” What he
did
add was: “They were pretty clever, sir. The mortar even looked dirty. I bet you’re saying to yourself, ahah, sir?”

“I am?” said Sir Reynold, bewildered. “I hwould normalleah say ‘my goodness.’ ”

“I expect you’re saying to yourself, ahah, how were they able to build up the wall again after they’d got the muriel out, sir, and we reckon—”

“hWell, I imagine one dwarf stayed behind to make good, lay low, as you hwould say, and hwandered out in the morning,” said Sir Reynold. “There hwere people going in and out all the time. hWe hwere looking for a big painting, after all, not a person.”

“Yessir. We reckon one dwarf stayed behind to make good, lay low, and wandered out in the morning. There were people going in and out all the time. You were looking for a big painting, after all, not a person,” said Fred Colon. He’d been very pleased to come up with that theory, so he was going to say it out loud no matter what.

Vimes tapped the map. “And here, Sir Reynold, is where a troll called Brick fell through another cellar floor into their tunnel,” he said. “He also told us he saw something in the main mine, which sounds very much like the Rascal.”

“But, alas, you have not found it,” said Sir Reynold.

“I’m sorry, sir. It’s probably long gone out of the city.”

“But hwhy?” said the curator. “They could have studied it in the museum! hWe’re very interactive these days!”

“Interactive?”
said Vimes. “What do you mean?”

“hWell, people can…look at the pictures as much as they hwant,” said Sir Reynold. He sounded a little annoyed. People shouldn’t ask that kind of question.

“And the pictures do what, exactly?”

“Er…hang there, Commander,” said Sir Reynold. “Of course.”

“So what you mean is, people can come and look at the pictures, and the pictures, for their part, are looked at?”

“Rather like that, yes,” said the curator. He thought for a moment, aware that this probably wasn’t sufficient, and added: “But
dynamicaleah
.”

“You mean the people are
moved
by the pictures, sir?” said Carrot.

“Yes!” said Sir Reynold, with huge relief. “hWell done! That’s just hwhat happens. And hwe’ve had the Rascal on public display for years. hWe even have a stepladder, in case people hwant to examine the mountains. Sometimes people come in hwith a bee in their bonnet that one of the hwarriors is pointing to some bareleah visible cave or something. Frankleah, if there hwas some secret,
I
hwould have found it by now. There hwas no
point
to the theft!”

“Unless someone
had
found the secret and didn’t want anyone else to find it,” said Vimes.

“That hwould be rather a coincidence, hwouldn’t it, Commander? It’s not that anything has just changed recentleah. Mr. Rascal didn’t turn up and paint another mountain! And, although I hate to say this, just destroying the painting hwould have been enough.”

Vimes walked around the table. All the bits, he thought, I must have all the bits by now.

Let’s start with this legend of a dwarf turning up, nearly dead, weeks after the battle, babbling about treasure.

All right, then it might have been this talking cube thing, Vimes thought. He survived the battle, hid out somewhere, and he’s got this thing and it’s
important.
He’s got to get it somewhere safe…no, maybe he’s got to get people to
listen
to it. And, of course, he doesn’t take it with him, ’cos there’s still likely to be trolls wandering the area and right now they’ll be in a mood to club first and try to think up some questions later. He needs some bodyguards.