Thud!

by Terry Pratchett

  “Yes, did you bite someone clever?” said Angua.

  “I am a Black Ribboner, Sergeant,” said Sally meekly. “And I’m naturally good at languages. While we’re alone, Captain, can I mention something else?”

  “Certainly,” said Carrot, trying the wheel on one of the closed doors.

  “I think a lot of things are wrong here, sir. There was something very strange about the way Ardent reacted to that skull. Why would he think the troll was still here, after all that time?”

  “A troll getting into a dwarf mine can do a lot of damage before it’s stopped,” said Carrot.

  “Ardent really wasn’t expecting that skull, sir,” said Sally, pressing on. “I heard his heart racing. It terrified him. Er…something more, sir. There’s lots of city dwarfs here. Dozens. I can feel their hearts, too. There are six grags. Their hearts beat very slowly. And there are other dwarfs, too. Strange ones, and only a few of them. Maybe ten.”

  “That’s useful to know, lance constable, thank you very much.”

  “Yes, I don’t know how we managed before you came,” said Angua. She walked quickly over to the other side of the dank room so that they wouldn’t see her face.

  She needed fresh air, not the pervasive, clinging, old-root-cellar reek of this place. Her head was full of shouting. The Temperance League? “Not One Drop”? Did anyone believe that for one minute? But everyone wanted to fall for it, because vampires could be so charming. Of course they were! It was part of being a vampire! It was the only way to get people to stay the night in the dreadful castle! Everyone knew a leopard couldn’t change his shorts! But no, stick on a stupid black ribbon and learn the words for “Lips that touch Ichor shall never touch Mine” and they fall for it every time. But werewolves? Well, they were just sad monsters, weren’t they? Never mind that life was a daily struggle with the inner wolf, never mind that you had to force yourself to walk past every lamppost, never mind that in every petty argument you had to fight back the urge to settle it all with just one bite.

  Never mind that, because everyone knew that a creature that was a wolf and a human combined was a kind of dog. They were expected to behave.

  Part of her was shouting that this wasn’t so, that this was just PLT and the known effects of a vampire’s presence, but somehow, now, with the smells around her becoming so strong that they were approaching solidity, she did not want to listen. She wanted to smell the world, she was practically climbing into her own nose.

  After all, that was why she was in the Watch, wasn’t it? For her nose?

  New smell, new smell…

  Sharp blue-gray of lichen, the browns and purples of old carrion, undertones of wood and leather…even as a full wolf, she’d never tasted the air so forensically as this. Something else, sharp, chemical…The air was full of the smell of damp and dwarfs, but these little traces ran through it like a piccolo hornpipe through a requiem, and formed one thing…

  “Troll,” she croaked. “Troll. Troll with skull belt and head-locks. On Slab, or something like it! Troll!” Angua was almost barking at the far door now. “Open the door! This way!”

  She was barely needing her eyes now, but there on the metal of the door, in charcoal, someone had drawn a circle with two diagonal lines through it.

  Suddenly Carrot was by her side. At least he had the decency not to say “Are you sure?” as he rattled the big wheel. The door was locked.

  “I don’t think there’s water behind this,” he said.

  “Oh, really?” Angua managed. “You know that was just…to keep us out!”

  Carrot turned. Running toward them was a squad of dwarfs. They were heading for the door as though quite oblivious to the presence of the watchmen.

  “Don’t let them go through first!” said Angua through gritted teeth. “Trail is…faint!”

  Carrot drew his sword with one hand and held up his badge with the other.

  “City Watch!” he roared. “Lower your weapons, please! Thank you!”

  The squad slowed, which meant that, in the nature of these things, those at the back piled into the hesitant ones in front.

  “This is a crime scene!” Carrot announced. “I am still the smelter! Mr. Ardent, are you there? Do you have guards on the other side of this door?”

  Ardent pushed through the throng of dwarfs.

  “No, I believe not,” he said. “Is the troll still behind it?”

  Carrot glanced at Sally, who shrugged. Vampires had never developed the ability to listen for troll hearts. There was no point.

  “Possibly, but I don’t think so,” said Carrot. “Please unlock it. We might yet find a trail!”

  “Captain Carrot, you know that the safety of the mine must always come first!” said Ardent. “Of course you must give chase. But first we will open the door, and make certain there is no danger behind it. You must concede us that.”

  “Let them,” hissed Angua. “It’ll be a clearer scent. I’ll be okay.”

  Carrot nodded, and whispered back: “Well done!”

  Under her flesh, she felt her tail want to wag. She wanted to lick his face. It was the dog part of her doing the thinking. You’re a good dog. It was important to be a good dog.

  Carrot pulled her aside as a couple of dwarfs approached the door purposefully.

  “But it’s long gone,” she murmured as two more dwarfs came up behind the first two. “The scent’s twelve hours old, at least—”

  “What are they doing?” said Carrot, half to himself. The two new dwarfs were covered from head to toe in leather, like Ardent, but wore chain mail over the top of it; their helmets were quite unadorned, but covered the whole face and head, with only a slit for the eyes. Each dwarf carried a large black pack on his back and held a lance in front of him.

  “Oh no,” said Carrot,” surely not here—”

  At a word of command, the door was swung open, revealing only darkness beyond.

  The lances spat flame, long yellow tongues of it, and the black dwarfs walked slowly along behind them. Smoke, heavy and greasy, filled the air.

  Angua fainted.

  Darkness.

  Sam Vimes struggled up the hill, tired to the bone.

  It was warm, warmer than he’d expected. Sweat stung his eyes. Water splashed under his feet and made his boots slip. And, ahead, up the slope, a child was screaming.

  He knew he was shouting. He would hear the breath wheezing in his throat, could feel his lips moving, but he couldn’t hear the words he was reciting over and over again.

  The darkness felt like cold ink. Tendrils of it dragged at his mind and his body, slowing him down, dragging him back…

  And now they came at him with flames—

  Vimes blinked, and found himself staring at the fireplace. The flames flicked peacefully.

  There was the swish of a dress as Sybil came back into the room, sat down, and picked up her darning.

  He watched her dully. She was darning his socks. They had maids in this place and she darned his socks. It wasn’t as if they didn’t have so much money that he could have a new pair of socks every day. But she’d picked up the idea that it was a wifely duty, and so she did it. It was comforting, in a strange sort of way. It was only a shame that she wasn’t, in fact, any good at mending holes, so Sam ended up with sock heels that were huge welts of criss-crossing wool. He wore them anyway, and never mentioned it.

  “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 on
e 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.”