Thud (19 page)

“A weapon that fires flame,” he said slowly.

“Yes, sir,” said Carrot.

“Dwarfs have weapons that fire flame.”

“The deep-downers use them to explode pockets of mine gas,” said Carrot. “I never expected to see them here!”

“It’s a weapon if some bastard points it at me!” said Vimes. “How much gas did they expect to find in Ankh-Morpork?”

“Sir? Even the
river
catches fire in a hot summer!”

“Okay, okay. I’ll grant you that,” Vimes conceded unwillingly. “Make sure the word gets out, will you? Anyone seen aboveground with one of those things, we’ll shoot first and there will be no
point
in asking questions afterwards. Good grief, that’s all we need. Have you got anything
more
to tell me, Captain?”

“Well, afterwards we did get to see Hamcrusher’s body,” said Carrot. “What can I say? On his wrist the
draht
that identifies him, and his skin was pale. There was a terrible wound on the back of his head. They say it’s Hamcrusher. I can’t prove it. What I can say is that he didn’t die where they said he did, or when they said he did.”

“Why?” said Vimes.

“Blood, sir,” said Sally. “There should have been blood everywhere. I looked at the wound. What that club hit over the head was already a corpse, and he wasn’t killed in that tunnel.”

Vimes took several slow breaths. There was so much bad stuff here you needed to take it one horror at a time.

“I’m worried, Captain,” he said. “Do you know why? It’s because I’ve got a feeling that very soon I’m going to be asked to confirm that there’s evidence that a troll did the deed. Which, my friend, will be like announcing the outbreak of war.”

“You did ask us to investigate, sir,” said Carrot.

“Yes, but I didn’t expect you to come back with the wrong result! The whole thing stinks! That clay from Quarry Lane
was
planted, wasn’t it?”

“It must have been. Trolls don’t clean their feet much, but walking mud all the way? Not a chance.”

“And they don’t leave their clubs behind, either,” growled Vimes. “So it’s a setup, right? But it turns out there really
was
a troll! Was Angua
sure
?”

“Positive, sir,” said Carrot. “We’ve always trusted her nose before. Sorry, sir, she had to go and get some fresh air. She was straining her senses as it was, and she got a lungful of that smoke.”

“I can imagine,” said Vimes. Hell’s bells, he thought. We were right on the point where I could tell Vetinari that it looked like some kind of half-baked inside job faked to look as though a troll did it, and we find out there
was
a troll. Huh…so much for relying on the evidence.

Sally coughed politely. “Ardent was shocked and frightened when the captain found the skull, sir,” she said. “It wasn’t an act. I’m certain of it. He was near collapse with terror. So was Helmclever, the whole time.”

“Thank you for that, lance constable,” said Vimes gravely. “I suspect I shall feel the same way when I go out there with a mega-phone and shout ‘Hello, boys, welcome to the replay of Koom Valley! Hey, let’s hold it right here in the city!’ ”

“I don’t think you should actually put it like that, sir,” said Carrot.

“Well, yes, I’ll probably try to be a bit more subtle, since you mention it,” said Vimes.

“And it’d be at least the sixteenth battle referred to as Koom Valley,” Carrot went on, “or seventeen, if you include the one in Vilinus Pass, which was more of a fracas. Only three of them were in the original Koom Valley, the one immortalized in Rascal’s painting. It’s said to be quite accurate. Of course, it took him years.”

“An amazing work,” said Sybil, not looking up from her darning. “It used to belong to my family before we gave it to the museum, you know.”

“Isn’t progress a wonderful thing, Captain?” said Vimes, pouring as much sarcasm into his tone as possible, since Carrot was so bad at recognizing it. “When we have
our
Koom Valley, our friend Otto will be able to take a color iconograph of it in a fraction of a second. Wonderful. It’s been a long time since this city was last burned to the ground.”

He ought to be springing into action. Once upon a time, he would have done. But now, perhaps he should take these precious moments to work out what he should
do
before he sprang.

Vimes tried to think. Don’t think of it all as one big bucket of snakes. Think of it as one snake at a time. Try to sort it out. Now, what needs to be done first?

Everything.

All right, try a different approach.

“What are these mine signs all about?” he said. “That Helmclever sort of drew one at me. I saw one on the wall, too. And you drew one.”

“‘The Following Dark,’” said Carrot. “Yes. It was scrawled all over the place.”

“What does it mean?”

“Dread, sir,” said Carrot earnestly. “A warning of terrible things to come.”

“Well, if one of those little sods so much as surfaces with one of those flame weapons in his hand, that
will
be true. But…you mean they scrawl it on walls?”

Carrot nodded. “You have to understand about a dwarf mine, sir. It’s a kind of—”

—emotional hothouse, was how Vimes understood it, although no dwarf would ever describe it that way. Humans would have gone insane living like that, cramped together, no real privacy, no real silence, seeing the same faces every day for years on end. And since there were a lot of pointy weapons around, it’d only be a matter of time before the ceilings dripped blood.

Dwarfs didn’t go mad. They stayed thoughtful and somber and keen on their job. But they scrawled mine sign.

It was like an unofficial ballot, voting by graffiti, showing your views on what was going on. In the confines of a mine, any problem was everyone’s problem, stress leapt from dwarf to dwarf like lightning. The signs grounded it. They were an outlet, a release, a way of showing what you felt without challenging anyone (because of all the pointy weapons).

The Following Dark: We await what follows with dread. Another translation might mean, in effect: Repent, ye sinners!

“There are hundreds of runes for darkness,” said Carrot. “Some of them are part of ordinary dwarfish, of course, like the Long Dark. There’s plenty like that. But some are…”

“Mystical?” Vimes suggested.

“Unbelievably mystical, sir. There’s books and books about them. And the way dwarfs think about books and words and runes…well, you wouldn’t believe it, sir. W—they think the world was
written
, sir. All words have enormous power. Destroying a book is worse than murder to a deep-downer.”

“I’ve rather gathered that,” said Blackboard Monitor Vimes.

“Some deep-downers believe that the dark signs are real,” Carrot went on.

“Well, if you can see the writing on the wall—” Vimes began.

“Real like alive, sir,” said Carrot earnestly. “Like they exist somewhere down in the dark under the world, and they cause themselves to be written. There’s the Waiting Dark…that’s the dark that fills a new hole. The Closing Dark…I don’t know about that one, but there’s an Opening Dark, too. The Breathing Dark, that’s rare. The Calling Dark, very dangerous. The Speaking Dark, the Catching Dark. The Secret Dark, I’ve seen that. They’re all fine. But the Following Dark is a very bad sign. I used to hear the older dwarfs talking about that. They said it could make lamps go out, and much worse things. When people start drawing that sign, things have got very bad.”

“This is all very interesting, but—”

“Everyone in the mine is nervous as heck, sir. Tense like wires. Angua said she could smell it, but so could I, sir. I grew up in a mine. When something is wrong, everyone catches it. On days like that, sir, my father used to stop all mining operations. You get too many accidents. Frankly, sir, the dwarfs are mad with worry. The Following Dark signs are everywhere. It’s probably the miners they’ve hired since they came here. They feel that something is very wrong, but the only thing they can do about it is sign.”

“Well, their top grag has been killed—”

“I can feel the atmosphere in a mine, sir. Any dwarf can. And that one is rancid with fear and dread and horrible confusion. And there’s worse things in the Deeps than the Following Dark.”

Vimes had a momentary vision of vengeful darkness rising through caves like a tide, faster than a man could run…

…which was stupid. You couldn’t
see
dark.

Hold on, though…sometimes you could. Back in the old days, when he was on nights all the time, he’d known all the shades of darkness. And sometimes you got darkness so thick that you almost felt you had to push your way through it. Those were nights when horses were skittish, and dogs whined, and down in the slaughterhouse district the animals broke out of their pens. They were inexplicable, just like those nights that were quite light and silvery even though there was no moon in the sky.

He’s learned, then, not to use his little lantern. Light only ruined your vision, it blinded you. You stared into the dark until it blinked. You stared it down.

“Captain, I’m getting a bit lost here,” said Vimes. “I didn’t grow up in a mine. Are these signs drawn up because dwarfs
think
bad things are going to happen and want to ward them off, or think the mine
deserves
the bad things happening, or because they
want
the bad things to happen?”

“Can be all three at once,” said Carrot, wincing. “It can get really
intense
when a mine goes bad.”

“Oh, good grief!”

“Oh, it can be awful, sir. Believe me. But no one would ever draw the worst of the signs and
want
it to happen. Just the drawing wouldn’t be enough, anyway. You have to want it to happen with your very last breath.”

“And which one is that?”

“Oh, you don’t want to know, sir.”

“No, I did ask,” said Vimes.

“No. You really don’t want to know, sir. Really.”

Vimes was about to start yelling, but he stopped to think for a moment.

“Actually, no, I don’t think I do,” he agreed. “This is all about hysteria and mysticism. It’s just weird folklore. Dwarfs believe it. I don’t. So…how did you get the vurms to form that sign?”

“Easy, sir. You just smear the wall with a piece of meat. That’s a feast for vurms. I wanted to shake Ardent up a bit. Make him nervous, like you taught me. I wanted to show him I knew about signs. I am a dwarf, after all.”

“Captain, this is probably not the time to break it to you, but—”

“Oh, I know people laugh, sir. A six-foot dwarf! But being a human just means being born to human parents. That’s easy. Being a dwarf doesn’t mean being born to dwarfs, though it’s a good start. It’s about certain things you do. Certain ceremonies. I’ve done them. So I’m a human
and
a dwarf. The deep-downers find it a bit hard to deal with that.”

“It’s mystic again, is it?” said Vimes wearily.

“Oh yes, sir.” Carrot coughed. Vimes recognized that particular cough. It meant that bad news was on the captain’s mind and he was wondering how to shape it to fit the available not-going-totally-postal space in Vimes’s head.

“Out with it, Captain.”

“Er…this little chap turned up,” said Carrot, opening his hand. The Gooseberry imp sat up.

“I ran all the way, Insert Name Here,” it said proudly.

“We spotted it jogging along the gutter,” said Carrot. “It wasn’t hard to see, glowing pale green like that.”

Vimes pulled the Gooseberry box out of his pocket and put it on the floor. The imp climbed inside.

“Ooh, that feels so good,” it said. “Don’t talk to me about rats and cats!”

“They chased you? But you’re a magical creature, aren’t you?” said Vimes.

“They don’t know that!” said the imp. “Now, what was it…oh, yes. You asked me about the night soil removal. Over the past three months the extra honey wagon load has averaged forty tons a night.”

“Forty tons? That’d fill a big room! Why didn’t we know about it?”

“You did, Insert Name Here!” said the imp proudly. “But they were leaving from every gate, you see, and probably no guard ever spotted more than one or two extra carts.”

“Yes, but they turned in reports every night! Why didn’t
we
spot it?”

There was an awkward pause.

The imp coughed. “Um…no one read the reports, Insert Name Here. They appear to be what we in the trade call write-only documents.”

“Wasn’t
anyone
supposed to be reading them?” Vimes demanded.

There was another thundering silence.

“I rather think you were, dear,” said Sybil, paying attention to her darning.

“But I’m in charge!” Vimes protested.

“Yes, dear. That’s the point, really.”

“But I can’t spend all my time shuffling bits of paper!”

“Then get someone else to do it, dear,” said Sybil.

“Can I do that?” said Vimes.

“Yes, sir,” said Carrot. “You’re in charge.”

Vimes looked at the imp, which gave him a willing grin.

“Can you go through
all
of my in-tray—”

“…floor…” murmured Sybil.

“—and tell me what’s important?”

“Happy to, Insert Name Here! Only one question, Insert Name Here. What
is
important?”

“Well, the fact that the honey wagons are carting a whole lot more muck out of the city is pretty damn important, don’t you think?”

“I wouldn’t know, Insert Name Here,” said the imp. “I do not, in fact, think
as such.
But I surmise that, if I had drawn your attention to such a fact a month ago, you would have told me to stick my head up a duck’s bottom.”

“That’s true,” said Vimes, nodding. “I probably would. Captain Carrot?”

“Sir!” said Carrot, sitting up straight.

“What’s the situation on the street?”