Witches Abroad (Discworld 12)

'I didn't see any invisible runes,' she said.

' 'Corse not,' said Nanny. 'That's 'cos they're invisible.'

'Yeah,' said Granny Weatherwax. 'Don't be daft.'

The door swung open again.

'I spoke to the King,' said the voice.

'And what did he say?' said Granny expectantly.

'He said, “Oh, no! Not on top of everything else!”'

Granny beamed. 'I knew 'e would have heard of me,' she said.

In the same way that there are a thousand Kings of the Gypsies, so there are a thousand Kings of the Dwarfs. The term means something like 'senior engineer'. There aren't

any Queens of the Dwarfs. Dwarfs are very reticent about revealing their sex, which most of them don't consider to be very important compared to things like metallurgy and hydraulics.

This king was standing in the middle of a crowd of shouting miners. He* looked up at the witches with the expression of a drowning man looking at a drink of water.

'Are you really any good?' he said.

Nanny Ogg and Granny Weatherwax looked at one another.

'I think 'e's talking to you, Magrat,' said Granny.

'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.