Thud (11 page)

Ardent sighed and rubbed his eyes.

“Busy night?” said Vimes.

“Commander, I understand that you were young and may not have realized what you were doing, but
you
must understand that to us you appear to be proud of being complicit in the most heinous of crimes: the destruction of words.”

“Sorry? Rubbing out ‘A is for Apple’ is a capital crime?”

“One that would be unthinkable for a true dwarf,” said Ardent.

“Really? But I have the trust of the Low King himself,” said Vimes.

“So I understand. There are six venerable grags below us, Commander, and in their eyes, the Low King and his kind have strayed from the true seam. He is,” Ardent rattled off a sentence in staccato dwarfish, too fast for Vimes to catch it, and then translated: “Wishy-washy. Dangerously liberal. Shallow. He has seen the light.”

Ardent was watching him carefully. Think hard. From what Vimes could remember, the Low King and his circle had been pretty crusty types. But
these
people think they’re soppy liberals.

“Wishy-washy?” he said.

“Indeed. I invite you, therefore, to derive from that statement something of the nature of those I serve below.”

Ah, thought Vimes. There’s something there. Just a hint. Friend Ardent is a thinker.

“When you say ‘he has seen the light’ you
sound
as if you mean ‘corrupted,’ ” he said.

“Something like that, yes. Different worlds, Commander. Down here, it would be unwise to trust your metaphors. To see the light is to be blinded. Do you not know that in the darkness, the eyes open wider?”

“Take me to see these people down below,” said Vimes.

“They will not listen to you. They will not even look at you. They have nothing to do with the World Above. They believe it is a kind of bad dream. I have not
dared
tell them about your ‘newspapers,’ printed every day and discarded like rubbish. The shock would kill them.”

But dwarfs invented the printing engine, Vimes thought.

Obviously, they were the wrong kind of dwarf. I’ve seen Cheery throw stuff in the wastepaper basket, too. It seems like nearly all dwarfs are the wrong sort, eh?

“What exactly is your job, Mr. Ardent?” said Vimes.

“I am their chief liaison with the World Above. The steward, you could say.”

“I though that was Helmclever’s job?”

“Helmclever? He orders the groceries, relays my orders, pays the miners, and so on. The chores, in fact,” said Ardent disdainfully. “He is a novice, and his job is to do what I tell him. It is
I
who speaks to the grags.”

“You talk to bad dreams on their behalf?”

“You could put it that way, I suppose. They would not let a proud word-killer become a smelter. The idea would be abominable.”

They glared at each other.

Once again, we end up in Koom Valley, Vimes told himself. They won’t—

“Permission to make a suggestion?” said Angua quietly.

Two heads turned. Two mouths said: “Well?”

“The…smelter. The seeker of the truth. Must they be a dwarf?”

“Of course!” said Ardent.

“Then what about Captain Carrot? He’s a dwarf.”

“We know of him. He is an…anomaly,” said Ardent. “His claim to dwarfishness is debatable.”

“But most dwarfs in the city accept that he’s a dwarf,” said Angua. “And he’s a copper, too.”

Ardent flopped back into his seat. “To your dwarfs here, yes, he is a dwarf. He would be unacceptable to the grags.”

“There’s no dwarf law that says a dwarf can’t be more than six feet tall, sir.”

“The grags
are
the law, woman,” Ardent snapped. “They interpret laws that go back for tens of thousands of years.”

“Well, ours don’t,” said Vimes. “But murder is murder anywhere. The news has got out. You’ve already got the dwarfs and the trolls simmering nicely, and this will bring it all right to the boil. Do you
want
a war?”

“With the trolls? That is—”

“No, with the city. A place inside the walls where the law doesn’t run? His lordship won’t accept that one.”

“You would not dare!” said the dwarf.

“Look into my eyes,” said Vimes.

“There are far more dwarfs than there are watchmen,” said Ardent, but the amused expression had fled.

“So what you are telling me is that law is just a matter of numbers?” said Vimes, standing up. “I thought you dwarfs practically
worshiped
the idea of law. Is numbers all it is? I’ll swear in more men, then. Trolls, too. They’re citizens, just like me. Are you sure every dwarf is on your side? I’ll raise the regiments. I’ll have to. I know how things are run in Llamedos and Uberwald, but they are not run like that here. One law, Mr. Ardent. That’s what we’ve got. If I let people slam their front door on it, I might as well shut down the Watch.”

Vimes walked to the doorway. “That’s my offer. Now I’m going back to the Yard—”

“Wait!”

Ardent sat staring at the desktop, drumming his fingers on it.

“I do not have…seniority here,” he said.

“Let me talk to your grags. I promise to rub out no words.”

“No. They will not talk to you. They do not talk to humans. They are waiting below. They had word of your arrival. They are frightened. They do not trust humans.”

“Why?”

“Because you are not dwarfs,” said Ardent. “Because you are…a sort of bad dream.”

Vimes put his hand on the dwarf’s shoulder.

“Then let’s go downstairs, where you can talk to them about nightmares,” he said, “and you can point out which one is me.”

There was a long silence until Ardent said: “Very well. This is under protest, you understand.”

“I’ll be happy to make a note of that,” said Vimes. “Thank you for your cooperative attitude,” he added.

Ardent stood up and produced a ring of complex keys from his robes.

Vimes tried to keep track of the journey, but it was hard. There were twists and turns, in dim tunnels that seemed all alike. There was not a trace of water anywhere. How far did the tunnels go? How far down? How far out? Dwarfs mined through granite. They could probably
stroll
through river mud.

In fact, in most places, the dwarfs hadn’t so much mined as cleaned house, taking away the silt, tunneling from one ancient, dripping room to another. And, somehow, the water went away.

There were things, glittering, possibly magical, half seen in dark archways as they passed. And odd chanting. He knew dwarfish, in a the-axe-of-my-aunt-is-in-your-head kind of way, and it didn’t sound like that at all. It sounded like short words rattled out at very high speed.

And with every turn he felt the anger coming back. They were being led in circles, weren’t they? For no reason other than pique. Ardent forged ahead, leaving Vimes to blunder along behind and occasionally bump his head.

His temper was bubbling. This was nothing more than a bloody runaround! The dwarf didn’t care about the law, about him, about the world above. They undermine our city and they don’t obey our laws! There had been a damn murder. He admits it! Why am I putting up with this…this stupid playacting!

He was passing yet another tunnel mouth, but this one had a piece of board nailed across it. He pulled out his sword, yelled, “I wonder what’s down here?,” smashed the board, and set off down the tunnel with Angua following.

“Is this wise, sir?” she whispered, as they plunged along.

“No. But I’ve had it up to here with Mr. Ardent,” Vimes growled. “I tell you, another twisty tunnel and I’ll be back here with the heavy mob, politics or not.”

“Calm down, sir!”

“Well, everything he says and does is an insult! It makes my blood boil!” said Vimes, striding onwards and ignoring the shouts of Ardent behind him.

“There’s a door ahead, sir!”

“All right, I’m not blind! Just half-blind!” Vimes snapped.

He reached out. The big, round door had a wheel in its center, and dwarf runes chalked all over it.

“Can you read them, Sergeant?”

“Er…‘Mortal Danger! Flooding! No Entry!’ ” said Angua. “More or less, sir. They’re pressure doors. I’ve seen these used before, in other mines.”

“Chained shut, too,” said Vimes, reaching out. “Looks like solid iron—ow!”

“Sir?”

“Gashed my hand on a nail!” Vimes rammed his hand into a pocket, where, without fail, Sybil saw to it that a clean handkerchief was lodged on a daily basis.

“A nail in an iron door, sir?” said Angua, looking closely.

“A rivet, then. Can’t see a thing in this gloom. Why they—”

“You
must
follow me. This is a mine! There are dangers!” said Ardent, catching up with them.

“You still get flooding?” said Vimes.

“It is to be expected! We know how to cope! Now, stay close to me!”

“I’ll be more inclined to do that,
sir
, if I thought were taking a direct route!” said Vimes. “Otherwise I might look for shortcuts!”

“We are nearly there, Commander,” said Ardent, walking away. “Nearly there!”

A
imless and hopeless,
the troll wandered…

His name was Brick, although currently he couldn’t remember this. His head ached. It really
ached.
It was der Scrape that did it. What did dey always say? When you sinkin’ to where you was cookin’ up Scrape, you was so low even der cockroaches had to bend down to spit on you?

Last night…what had happenin’? What bits did he see, what bits did he do, what bits in der thumpin,’ scaldin’ cauldron of his brain were real? The bit with der giant wooly elephants,
dey
prob’ly weren’t real. He was pretty sure there weren’t any giant wooly elephants in dis city, ’cos if der were, he would’ve seen ’em before, and dere’d be big steamin’ turds in der streets an’ similar, you wouldn’t miss ’em…

He was called Brick because he had been born in the city, and trolls, being made of metamorphorical rock, ofter take on the nature of the local rocks. His hide was a dirty orange, with a network of horizontal and vertical lines; if Brick stood up close to a wall, he was quite hard to see. But most people didn’t see Brick anyway. He was the kind of person whose mere existence is an insult to all decent folk, in their opinion.

Dat mine wi’ dem dwarfs, was
dat
real? You go an’ find a place to lie down and watch der pretty pichturs, suddenly you’re in dis dwarf hole? That couldna bin real! Only…word on der street was dat some troll had got into a dwarf hole, yeah, and
everyone
was lookin’ for dat troll an’ not to shake him by der han’…Der word said der Breccia wanted to find out
real
hard, and by der sound of it dey were not happy. Not happy that some dwarf who’d been puttin’ der bad word on the clans was
off’ed
by a troll? Were dey mad? Actually, it didn’t matter if dey was mad or not, ’cos dey had ways of asking questions dat didn’t heal for months, so he better be keepin’ out dere way.

On der oder hand…a dwarf wouldn’t know one troll from anoder, right? And no one else had seen him. So act normal, right? He’d be fine. He’d be fine. Anyway, it couldna bin him…

It occured to Brick—yeah, dat’s my name, knew it all der time—that he still had a bit of the white powder at the bottom of the bag. All he needed to do now was find a startled pigeon and some alcohol, any alcohol at all, and he be fine. Yeah. Fine. Nothin’ to worry about at all…

Yeah.

W
hen Vimes stepped out
into the brilliant daylight, the first
thing he did was draw a deep breath. The second thing he did was draw his sword, wincing as his sore hand protested.

Fresh air, that was the stuff. He’d felt quite dizzy down there, and the tiny cut on his hand itched like mad. He’d better get Igor to take a look at it. You could probably catch
anything
in the muck down there.

Ah, that was better. He could feel himself cooling down. The air down there had made him feel really strange.

The crowd was a lot more like a mob now, but he saw at the second glance that it was what he thought of as a plum-cake mob. It doesn’t take many people to turn a worried, anxious crowd into a mob. A shout here, a shove there, something thrown
here
…and with care, every hesitant, nervous individual is being drawn into a majority that does not, in fact, exist.

Detritus was still standing like a statue, apparently oblivious to the growing din. But Ringfounder…damn. He was arguing hotly with people at the front of the crowd. You
never
argued! You never got drawn in!

“Corporal Ringfounder!” he bellowed. “To me!”

The dwarf turned as a halfbrick sailed over the heads of the mob and clanged off his helmet. He went over like a tree.

Detritus moved so fast that he was halfway through the crowd before the dwarf hit the cobbles. His arm dipped into the press of bodies and hauled up a struggling figure. He spun around, thudded back through the gap that hadn’t had time to close yet, and was beside Vimes before Ringfounder’s helmet had stopped rolling.

“Well done, Sergeant,” said Vimes out of the corner of his mouth. “Did you have a plan for the next bit?”

“I’m more der tactical kind, sir,” said Detritus.

Oh, well. At time like this you didn’t argue, and you didn’t step back. Vimes pulled out his badge and held it up.

“This dwarf is under arrest for assaulting a Watch officer!” he shouted. “Let us through, in the name of the law!”

And, to his amazement, the crowd went quiet, like a lot of children when they sense that
this
time the teacher is really, really angry. Perhaps it was the words on the badge, he thought. You couldn’t rub
them
out.