Thud (48 page)
Authors: Terry Pratchett
“It goes HRUUUGH! It is a hippopotamus!
That is not my cow!”
Nevertheless, it was close enough for now.
Terry Pratchett’s novels have sold more than forty million (give or take a few million) copies worldwide. He lives in England.
www.terrypratchettbooks.com
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The Carpet People
The Dark Side of the Sun
Strata
The Bromeliad Trilogy*: Truckers
•
Diggers
•
Wings
Only You Can Save Mankind*
Johnny and the Dead*
Johnny and the Bomb
The Unadulterated Cat
(with Gray Jollife)
Good Omens
(with Neil Gaiman)
The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents*
The Wee Free Men*
A Hat Full of Sky*
The Discworld Books
The Color of Magic*
The Light Fantastic*
Equal Rites*
Mort*
Sourcery*
Wyrd Sisters*
Pyramids*
Guards! Guards!*
Eric
(with Josh Kirby)*
Moving Pictures
Reaper Man*
Witches Abroad*
Small Gods*
Lords and Ladies*
Men at Arms*
Soul Music*
Feet of Clay*
Interesting Times*
Maskerade*
Hogfather*
Jingo*
The Last Continent*
Carpe Jugulum*
The Fifth Elephant*
The Truth*
Thief of Time*
Night Watch*
Monstrous Regiment*
Going Postal*
Where’s My Cow?*
(with Melvyn Grant)
The Last Hero
(with Paul Kidby)*
The Art of Discworld
(with Paul Kidby)*
Mort: A Discworld Big Comic
(with Graham Higgins)
The Streets of Ankh-Morpork
(with Stephen Briggs)
The Discworld Companion
(with Stephen Briggs)
The Discworld Mapp
(with Stephen Briggs)
*Published by HarperCollins
Jacket design and illustration by Scott McKowan
Author photograph by Robin Matthews
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THUD
! Copyright © 2005 by Terry and Lyn Pratchett. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of PerfectBound™.
PerfectBound™ and the PerfectBound™ logo are trademarks of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
Mobipocket Reader August 2005 ISBN 0-06-088886-5
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pratchett, Terry
Thud!: a novel of Discworld / Terry Pratchett—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN-10: 0-06-081522-1 (alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-06-081522-6
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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*This was a bit of a slur on Nobby, Vimes had to admit. Like many other officers, Nobby was human. It was just that he was the only one who had to carry a certificate to prove it.
*As in ‘Ol’ Fred thought he said
custard
officer and volunteered!’ Since this is an example of office humor, it doesn’t actually have to be funny.
*Anoia is the Ankh-Morpork Goddess of Things That Get Stuck in Drawers.
*Vimes had never got on with any game much more complex than darts. Chess in particular had always annoyed him. It was the dumb way the pawns went off and slaughtered their fellow pawns while the kings lounged about doing nothing that always got to him; if only the pawns united, maybe talked the rooks around, the whole board could’ve been a republic in a dozen moves.
*Vimes maintained three trays: In, Out, and Shake It All About; the last one was where he put everything he was too busy, angry, tired, or bewildered to do anything about.
*The better class of gods, anyway. Not the ones with the tentacles, obviously.
*Vimes had got around to a Clean Desk policy. It was a Clean Floor strategy that eluded him at the moment.
*Troll lore says that living creatures actually move backwards through time. It’s complicated.
*Empirical Crescent was just off Park Lane, in what was generally a high-rent district. The rents would have been higher still were it not for the continued existence of Empirical Crescent itself, which, despite the best efforts of the Ankh-Morpork Historical Preservation Society, had still not been pulled down.
This was because it had been built by Bergholt Stuttley Johnson, better known to history as Bloody Stupid Johnson, a man who combined in one frail body such enthusiasm, self-delusion, and
creative
lack of talent that he was, in many respects, one of the great heroes of architecture. Only Bloody Stupid Johnson could have invented the thirteen-inch foot and a triangle with three right angles in it. Only Bloody Stupid Johnson could have twisted common matter through dimensions it was not supposed to go. And only Bloody Stupid Johnson could have done all this by accident.
His highly original multidimensional approach to geometry was responsible for Empirical Crescent. On the outside it was a normal terraced crescent of the period, built of honey-colored stone with the occasional pillar or cherub nailed on. Inside, the front door of No. 1 opened into the back bedroom of No. 15, the ground-floor front window of No. 3 showed the view appropriate to the second floor of No. 9, and smoke from the dining-room fireplace of No. 2 came out of the chimney of No. 19
*But it was okay to throw your rubbish into the garden, because it might not be your garden you were throwing it into.
*That is to say, every dragon breeder not currently occupying a small artistic urn.
*A famous Ankh-Morpork gutter sport, second only to dead-rat conkers. Turd races in the gutter appear to have died out, despite an attempt to take them upmarket with the name Poosticks.
*Making Fred Colon possibly unique in the annals of jail history.
*Who wasn’t
an
Igor, but was merely called one. It was best not to have fun with him on this subject, and especially not to ask him to sew your head back on.
*Patience is a key virtue among dwarfs.
They say there’s one in every police station. Constable Visit-The-Ungodly-With-Explanatory-Pamphlets was enough for two.
*That was a phrase of Sybil’s that got to him. She’d announce at lunch, “we must have the pork tonight, it needs eating up.” Vimes never had an actual problem with this, because he’d been raised to eat what was put in front of him, and do it quickly, too, before someone else snatched it away. He was just puzzled at the suggestion that he was there to do the food a favor
*The university porters, or bledlows, who doubled, with rather more enthusiasm, as its under-proctors, a private police force. They commanded their nickname for being thick-shelled, liable to turn red when hot, and having the smallest brain for their size of any known creature.
*And even then had been belaboring mountain goats on apparently sheer cliff faces and, while pebbles slid and bounced around him, was clearly accusing them of obstructing his right to roam. Eric believed very firmly that the Land Belonged To The People, and also that he was more The People than anyone else was. Eric went everywhere with a map encased in waterproof material, on a string around his neck. Such people are not to be trifled with.
*But as it happened, it was all blamed on people from another world, so that was all right.