Thud!

by Terry Pratchett

  It was hard to know much else right now, because she was thinking with her nose. That was the problem with the wolf times; the nose took charge.

  Currently, Angua was searching the alleys around Treacle Street, spiraling out from the dwarf mine. She prowled onwards in a world of color; smells overlaid one another, drifting and persisting. The nose was also the only organ that can see backwards in time.

  She’d already visited the spoil heap on the waste ground. There was the smell of troll there. It had got out that way, but there was no point in following a trail that cold. Hundreds of street trolls wore lichen and skulls these days. But the foul, oily stuff, that was a smell that was clinging to her memory. The little devils must have some other ways in, right? And you had to move the air around in a mine, right? So some trace of that oil would find its ways out along with the air. They probably wouldn’t be strong, but she didn’t need them to be. A trace of it was all she needed. It would be more than enough.

  As she padded through the alleys, and leapt walls into midnight yards, she kept clenched in her jaws the little leather bag that was a friend to any thinking werewolf, such a creature being defined as one who remembers that your clothes don’t magically follow you. The bag held a lightweight silk dress and a large bottle of mouthwash, which Angua considered to be the greatest invention of the last hundred years.

  She found what she was looking for behind Broad Way: it stood out against the familiar organic smells of the city as a tiny black ribbon of stench that left zigzags in the air as breezes and the passage of carts had dragged it this way and that.

  She began to move with more care. This wasn’t an area like Treacle Street; people with money lived here, and they often spent that money on big dogs and DISPROPORTIONATE RESPONSE signs in their driveways. As it was, she heard the rattle of chains and the occasional whine as she slunk along. She hated being attacked by large, ferocious dogs. It always left a mess and the mouthwash was afterwards never strong enough.

  The thread of stink was floating through the railings of Empirical Crescent, one of the city’s great architectural semi-precious gems. It was always hard to find people prepared to live there, however, despite the general desirable nature of the area. Tenants seldom stayed for more than a few months before moving hurriedly, sometimes leaving all their possessions behind.*

  She sailed over the railing with silence and ease and landed on all fours on what had once been gravel path. Residents in the crescent seldom did much gardening, since even if you planted bulbs you could never be sure whose garden they’d come up in.

  Angua followed her nose to a patch of rampant thistles. Some molding bricks in a circle marked what must have been an old well.

  The oily stink was heavy here, but there was a fresher, far more complex smell that raised the hairs on Angua’s neck.

  There was a vampire down there.

  Someone had pulled away the weeds and debris, including the inevitable rotting mattress and decomposing armchair.* Sally? What was she doing here?

  Angua pulled a brick out of the rotted edging and let it drop. Instead of a splash, there was a clear, wooden thump.

  Oh well. She went back to human to get down; claws were fine, but some things were better done by monkeys. The sides were, of course, slimy, but so many bricks had fallen out over the years that the descent turned out to be easier than she’d expected. And it was only about sixty feet deep, built in the days when it was widely believed that any water that supported so many little whiskery swimming things must be healthy.

  There were fresh planks in the bottom. Someone—and surely it could only have been the dwarfs—had broken into the well down here, and laid a couple of planks across it. They had dug this far, and stopped. Why? Because they’d reached the well?

  There was dirty water, or water-like liquid, just under the planks. The tunnel was a bit wider here, and dwarfs had been here—she sniffed—a day ago, no more. Yes. Dwarfs had been here, had fished around, and had then all left at once. They hadn’t even bothered to tidy up. She could smell it like a picture.

  She crept forward, the tunnels mapping themselves in her nostrils. They weren’t nicely finished, like the tunnels Ardent moved in. They were rougher, with lots of zigzags and blind alleys. Rough planks and balks of timber held back the fetid mud of the plains, which was nevertheless oozing through everywhere. These tunnels weren’t built to last; they were there for a quick and definitely dirty job, and all they had to do was survive until it was done.

  So…the diggers had been looking for something, but weren’t sure where it was until they were within, what, about twenty feet of it, when they’d…smelled it? Detected it? The last stretch to the well was dead straight. By then, they knew where they were going.

  Angua crept on, almost bending double to clear the low ceiling until she gave up and went back to wolf. The tunnel straightened out, with the occasional side passage that she ignored, although they smelled long. The vampire smell was still an annoying theme in the nasal symphony, and it came close to drowning the reek of foul water oozing from the walls. Here and there, vurms had colonized the ceiling. So had bats. They stirred.

  And then there was another scent as she passed a tunnel opening. It was quite faint, but it was unmistakably the whiff of corruption. A fresh death…

  Three fresh deaths. At the end of a short side tunnel were the bodies of two, no, three dwarfs, half-buried in mud. They glowed. Vurms had no teeth, Carrot had told her. They waited until the prospective meal became runny of its own accord. And, while they waited for the biggest stroke of luck ever to have come their way, they celebrated. Down here, in a world far away from the streets, the dwarfs would dissolve in light.

  Angua sniffed.

  Make that very fresh—

  “They found something,” said a voice behind her. “And then it killed them.”

  Angua leapt.

  The leap wasn’t intentional. Her hindbrain arranged it all by itself. The front brain, the bit that knew that sergeants should not attempt to disembowel lance constables without provocation, tried to stop the leap in mid-air, but by then simple ballistics were in charge. All she managed was a mid-air twist, and struck the soft wall with her shoulder.

  Wings fluttered a little way off, and there was a drawn-out organic sound, a sound that conveyed the idea that a slaughterhouse man was having some difficulty with a tricky bit of gristle.

  “You know, Sergeant,” said the voice of Sally, as if nothing had happened, “you werewolves have it easy. You stay one thing and you don’t have any problems with body mass. Do you know how many bats I have to become for my body weight? More than a hundred and fifty, that’s how many. And there’s always one, isn’t there, that gets lost or flies the wrong way? You can’t think straight unless you get your bats together. And I’m not even going to touch on the subject of reassimilation. It’s like the biggest sneeze you can think of. Backwards.”

  There was no point in modesty, not down here in the dark. Angua forced herself to change back, every brain cell piling in to outvote tooth and claw. Anger helped.

  “Why the hell are you here?” she said, when she had a mouth that worked.

  “I’m off duty,” said Sally, stepping forward. “I thought I’d see what I could find.” She was totally naked.

  “You couldn’t have been so lucky!” Angua growled.

  “Oh, I don’t have your nose, Sergeant,” said Sally, with a sweet smile. “But I was using a hundred and fifty pretty good flying ones, and they can cover a lot of ground.”

  “I thought vampires could rematerialize their clothes,” said Angua accusingly. “Otto Chriek can!”

  “Females can’t. We don’t know why. It’s probably part of the whole underwired-nightdress business. That’s where you score again, of course. When you’re in one hundred and fifty bat bodies, it’s quite hard to remember to keep two of them carrying a pair of pants.” Sally looked up at the ceiling, and sighed. “Look, I can see where this is going. It’s go
ing to be about Captain Carrot, isn’t it…”

  “I saw the way you were smiling at him!”

  “I’m sorry! We can be very personable! It’s a vampire thing!”

  “You were so keen to impress him, eh!”

  “And you aren’t? He’s the kind of man anyone would want to impress!”

  They watched each other warily.

  “He is mine, you know,” said Angua, feeling the nascent claws strain under her fingernails.

  “You’re his, you mean!” said Sally. “You know it works like that. You trail after him!”

  “I’m sorry! It’s a werewolf thing!” Angua yelled.

  “Hold it!” Sally thrust both hands in front of her in a gesture of peace. “There’s something we’d better sort before this goes any further!”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yes. We’re both wearing nothing, we’re standing in what, you may have noticed, is increasingly turning into mud, and we’re squaring up to fight. Okay. But there’s something missing, yes?”

  “And that is…?”

  “A paying audience? We could make a fortune.” Sally winked. “Or we could do the job we came here to do.”

  Angua forced her body to relax. She should have been saying that. She was the sergeant, wasn’t she?

  “All right, all right,” she said. “We’re both here, okay? Let’s leave it at that. Were you saying that these dwarfs were killed by some…thing from the well?”

  “Possibly. But if they were, it used an axe,” said Sally. “Take a look. Scrape some of the mud away. It’s been oozing over them since I arrived. That’s probably why you missed it,” she added generously.

  Angua hauled one dwarf out of the shining slime.

  “I see,” she said, letting the body fall back. “This one hasn’t been dead two days. Not much effort made to hide them, I see.”

  “Why bother? They’ve stopped pumping out these tunnels, the props look pretty temporary, the mud’s coming back. Besides, who’d be stupid enough to come down here?”

  A piece of wall slithered down, with a sticky, organic, cow-pat sort of noise. Little plops and trickles filled the tunnel. Ankh-Morpork’s underworld was stealthily reclaiming its own.

  Angua closed her eyes and concentrated. The slime reek, the vampire’s smell, and the water that was now ankle-deep all jostled for attention, but this was competition time. She couldn’t let a vampire take the lead. That would be so…traditional.

  “There were other dwarfs,” she murmured. “Two—no, three…er, four more. I’m getting…the black oil. Distant blood. Down the tunnel.” She stood up so sharply that she nearly hit her head on the tunnel roof. “C’mon!”

  “It’s getting a bit unsafe—”

  “We could solve this! Come on! You can’t be afraid of dying!”

  Angua plunged away.

  “And you think spending a few thousand years buried in sludge is likely to be fun?” shouted Sally, but she was talking only to dripping mud and fetid air. She hesitated a moment, groaned, and followed Angua.

  Further along the main tunnel there were more passages branching off. On either side, rivers of mud, like cool lava, were already flowing out of them. Sally splashed past something that looked like a huge copper trumpet, turning gently on the current.

  The tunnel was better built here than the ones nearer the well. And there, at the end of it, was a pale light, and Angua, crouched by one of the big, round dwarf doors. Sally paid her no attention. She barely glanced at the dwarf slumped with his back against the bottom of the door.

  Instead, she stared at the symbol scrawled large on the metal. It was big and crude, and might be a round, staring eye with a tail, and it gleamed with the greeny-white glow of vurms.

  “He wrote it in his blood,” said Angua, without looking up. “They left him for dead, but he was only dying, you see. He managed to make it to here, but the killers had shut the door. He scratched at it, smell here, and he’s worn away his fingernails. Then he made that sign in his own warm blood and sat here, holding the wound shut, watching the vurms turn up. I’d say he’s been dead for eighteen hours or so. Hmm?”

  “I think we should get out of here right now,” said Sally, backing away. “Do you know what that sign means?”

  “I know it’s mine sign, that’s all. Do you know what it means?”

  “No, but I know it’s one of the really bad ones. It’s not good seeing it here. What are you doing with that body?” Sally backed away further.

  “Trying to find out who he was,” said Angua, searching the dwarf’s clothing. “It’s the sort of thing we do in the Watch. We don’t stand around getting worried about drawings on the wall. What’s the problem?”

  “Right now?” said the vampire. “He’s…oozing a bit…”

  “If I can stand it, so can you. You see a lot of blood in this job. Don’t attempt to drink it, that’s my advice,” said Angua, still rummaging. “Ah…he’s got a rune necklace. And…” she pulled a hand out of the dead dwarf’s jerkin, “can’t make this out very well, but I can smell ink, so it may be a letter. Okay. Let’s get out of here.” She stood up. “Did you hear me?”

  “The sign was written by someone dying,” said Sally, still keeping her distance.

  “Well?”

  “It’s probably a curse.”

  “So? We didn’t kill him,” said Angua, getting to her feet with some difficulty.

  They looked down at the liquid mud now rising to their knees.

  “Do you think it cares?” said Sally matter-of-factly.

  “No, but I think there may be another way out in that last tunnel we passed,” said Angua, looking back along the tunnel.

  She pointed. Scuttling along with blind determination, a line of vurms marched along the dripping roof almost as fast as the mud flowed down below. They were heading into the side tunnel in a glowing stream.

  Sally shrugged. “It’s worth a try, yes?”

  They left, and the sound of their splashing soon died away.

  Slowly the mud rose, rustling in the gloom. The trail of vurms gradually disappeared overhead. The vurms that made the sign remained though, because such a feast as this was worth dying for.

  Their glow winked out, one insect at a time.

  The darkness beneath the world caressed the sign, which flamed red and died.

  Darkness remained.

  On this day in 1802, the painter Methodia Rascal tried putting the thing under a heap of old sacks, in case it woke up the Chicken, and finished the last troll, using his smallest brush to paint the eyeballs.

  It was five a.m. Rain rustled out the sky, not hard, but with a gentle persistence.

  In Sator Square, and in the Plaza of Broken Moons, it hissed on the white ash of the bonfires, occasionally exposing the orange glow, which would briefly sizzle and spit.

  A family of gnolls were sniffing around, each one dragging his or her little cart. A few officers were keeping an eye on them. Gnolls weren’t choosy about what they collected, provided it didn’t actually struggle, and even then there were rumors.

  But they were tolerated. Nothing cleaned up the place like a gnoll.

  From here, they looked like little trolls, each with a huge compost heap on its back. That represented everything it owned, and mostly what it owned was rotten.

  Sam Vimes winced at the pain in his side. Just his luck. Two coppers injured in the entire damn affair, and he had to be one of them? Igor had done his best, but broken ribs were broken ribs, and it’d be a week or two before the suspicious green ointment made much difference. His hand twinged in sympathy with them, too.

  Still, he enjoyed a bit of a warm glow about the whole thing. They had used good, old-fashioned policing, and since good, old-fashioned policemen are invariably outnumbered, he’d employed the good, old-fashioned police methods of cunning, deceit, and any damn weapon you could lay your hands on.

  It had hardly been a fight at all. The dwarfs had mostly been sitting and singing gloomy songs, bec
ause they fell over when they tried to stand up, or had tried to stand up and were now lying down and snoring. The trolls were, on the other hand, mostly upright, but went over when you pushed them. One or two, a little clearer in the head than the others, had put up a ponderous and laughable fight but had fallen to that most old-fashioned of police methods: the well-placed boot. Well, most of them had. Vimes shifted to ease the aching in his side; he should have seen that one coming.

  But all’s well that ends well, eh? No deaths at all, and just to put a little cherry on the morning cake, he had in his hand an early-morning edition of the Times, in which a leading article deplored the gangs stalking the city and wondered if the Watch was “up to the job” of cleaning up the streets.

  Well, yes, I think we are, you pompous twerp. Vimes struck a match on a plinth and lit a cigar in recognition of a petty but darkly satisfying triumph. Gods knew they needed one. The Watch had taken a pounding over the whole damn Koom Valley thing, and it was good to hand the lads something to be proud of for a change. All in all, it was definitely a Result—

  He stared at the plinth. He didn’t remember what statue had once been there. It celebrated generations of graffiti artists now.

  A piece of troll graffiti adorned it now, obliterating everything done by the artists who used mere paint. He read:

  MR. SHINE!

  HIM DIAMOND!

  Mine sign, city scrawl, he thought. Thing go bad, and people are moved to write on the walls…“Commander!”

  He turned. Captain Carrot, armor gleaming, was hurrying toward him, his face, as usual, radiating an expression of a hundred percent pure Keen.

  “I thought I told everyone not on prisoner duty to get some sleep, Captain?” said Vimes.