Men at Arms (Discworld 15)

He shut the door.

'Bit of a chilly breeze,' he said, to the room's other occupant. 'Still, we could do with it.'

The ceiling of the workshop was only about five feet above the floor. That was more than tall enough for a dwarf.

Ow, said a voice that no-one heard.

Hammerhock looked at the thing clamped in the vice, and picked up a screwdriver.

Ow.

'Amazing,' he said. 'I think that moving this tube down the barrel forces the, er, six chambers to slide along, presenting a new one to the, er, firing hole. That seems clear enough. The triggering mechanism is really just a tinderbox device. The spring . . . here . . . has rusted through. I can easily replace that. You know,' he said, looking up, 'this is a very interesting device. With the chemicals in the tubes and all. Such a simple idea. Is it a clown thing? Some kind of automatic slap-stick?'

He sorted through a bin of metal offcuts to find a piece of steel, and then selected a file.

'I'd like to make a few sketches afterwards,' he said.

About thirty seconds later there was a pop and a cloud of smoke.

Bjorn Hammerhock picked himself up, shaking his head.

'That was lucky!' he said. 'Could have been a nasty accident there.'

He tried to fan some of the smoke away, and then reached for the file again.

His hand went through it.

AHEM.

Bjorn tried again.

The file was as insubstantial as the smoke.

'What?'

AHEM.

The owner of the strange device was staring in horror at something on the floor. Bjorn followed his gaze.

'Oh,' he said. Realization, which had been hovering on the edge of Bjorn's consciousness, finally dawned. That was the thing about death. When it happened to you, you were among the first to know.

His visitor grabbed the device from the bench and rammed it into a cloth bag. Then he looked around wildly, picked up the corpse of Mr Hammerhock, and dragged it through the door towards the river.

There was a distant splash, or as close to a splash as you could get from the Ankh.

'Oh dear,' said Bjorn. 'And I can't swim, either.'

THAT WILL NOT, OF COURSE, BE A PROBLEM, said Death.

Bjorn looked at him.

'You're a lot shorter than I thought you'd be,' he said.

THIS IS BECAUSE I'M KNEELING DOWN, MR HAMMER-HOCK.

'That damn thing killed me!'

YES.