Witches Abroad (Discworld 12)

'Only we've had a big fall in gallery nine,' said the King. 'It looks bad. A very promising vein of gold-bearing quartz is irretrievably trapped.'

One of the dwarfs beside him muttered something.

'Oh, yeah. And some of the lads,' said the King vaguely. 'And then you turn up. So the way I look at it, it's probably fate.'

Granny Weatherwax shook the snow off her. hat and looked around.

She was impressed, despite herself. You didn't often see proper dwarf halls these days. Most dwarfs were off earning big money in the cities down in the lowlands, where it was much easier to be a dwarf - for one thing, you didn't have to spend most of your time underground hitting your thumb with a hammer and worrying about fluctuations in the international metal markets. Lack of respect for tradition, that was the trouble these days. And take trolls. There were more trolls in Ankh-Morpork now than in the whole mountain range. Granny Weatherwax had nothing against trolls but she felt instinctively that if more trolls stopped wearing suits and walking upright, and went back to living under bridges and jumping out

* Many of the more traditional dwarf tribes have no female pronouns, like 'she' or 'her'. It follows that the courtship of dwarfs is an incredibly tactful affair.

and eating people as nature intended, then the world would be a happier place.

'You'd better show us where the problem is,' she said. 'Lots of rocks fallen down, have they?'

'Pardon?' said the King.

It's often said that eskimos have fifty words for snow.*

This is not true.

It's also said that dwarfs have two hundred words for rock.

They don't. They have no words for rock, in the same way that fish have no words for water. They do have words for igneous rock, sedimentary rock, metamorphic rock, rock underfoot, rock dropping on your helmet from above, and rock which looked interesting and which they could have sworn they left here yesterday. But what they don't have is a word meaning 'rock'. Show a dwarf a rock and he sees, for example, an inferior piece of crystalline sulphite of barytes.

Or, in this case, about two hundred tons of lowgrade shale. When the witches arrived at the disaster site dozens of dwarfs were working feverishly to prop the cracked roof and cart away the debris. Some of them were in tears.

'It's terrible . . . terrible,' muttered one of them. 'A terrible thing.'

Magrat lent him her handkerchief. He blew his nose noisily.

'Could mean a big slippage on the fault line and then we've lost the whole seam,' he said, shaking his head. Another dwarf patted him on the back.

'Look on the bright side,' he said. 'We can always drive a horizontal shaft off gallery fifteen. We're bound to pick it up again, don't you worry.'

* Well, not often. Not on a daily basis, anyway. At least, not everywhere. But probably in some cold countries people say, 'Hey, those eskimos! What a people! Fifty words for snow! Can you believe that? Amazing!' quite a lot.

L

'Excuse me,' said Magrat, 'there are dwarfs behind all that stuff, are there?'

'Oh, yes,' said the King. His tone suggested that this was merely a regrettable side-effect of the disaster, because getting fresh dwarfs was only a matter of time whereas decent gold-bearing rock was a finite resource.

Granny Weatherwax inspected the rockfall critically.

'We shall have to have everyone out of here,' she said. 'This is goin' to have to be private."

'I know how it is,' said the King. 'Craft secrets, I expect?'

'Something like that,' said Granny.

The King shooed the other dwarfs out of the tunnel, leaving the witches alone in the lantern light. A few bits of rock fell out of the ceiling.

'Hmm,' said Granny.

'You've gone and done it now,' said Nanny Ogg.

'Anything's possible if you set your mind to it,' said Granny vaguely.