Thud! (Discworld 34)

"You threw it away," said the imp, full of reproach. "You always do. That"s why you never use the right commands, and that is why I did not "go away and stick my head up a duck"s bottom" yesterday. You have an appointment to see Lord Vetinari in half an hour."

"I will be busy" muttered Vimes.

"Would you like me to remind you again in ten minutes?"

"Tell me, what part of "Stick your head up a duck"s bottom" didn"t you understand?" Vimes replied, and plunged the thing back into his pocket.

So, it had been half an hour. Half an hour was enough. This was going to be drastic, but he"d seen the looks the dwarfs were giving Detritus. Rumour was an evil poison.

As he stepped forward, ready to go and summon Dorfl and all the problems that invading this place would entail, the door opened behind him.

"Commander Vimes? You may come in."

There was a dwarf in the doorway. Vimes could just make out his shape in the gloom. And for the first time he noticed the symbol chalked on the wall over the door: a circle, with a horizontal line through it.

"Sergeant Angua will accompany me," he said. The sign struck Vimes as vaguely unsettling; it seemed to be a stamp of ownership that was rather more emphatic than, for example, a little plaque saying "Mon Repos".

"The troll will stay outside," said the figure flatly.

"Sergeant Detritus will stand guard, along with Corporal Ringfounder," said Vimes.

This restatement of fact seemed to pass muster, suggesting that the dwarf probably knew a lot about iron but nothing about irony. The door opened further, and Vimes stepped inside.

The hall was bare, except for a few stacked boxes, and the air smelled of- What? Stale food. Old empty houses. Sealed-up rooms. Attics.

The whole house is an attic, Vimes thought. The thud, thud from below was really noticeable here. It was like a heartbeat.

"This way, if you please," said the dwarf, and ushered Vimes and Angua into a side room. Again, the only furnishings were more wooden boxes and, here and there, some well-worn shovels.

"We do not often entertain. Please be patient," said the dwarf, and backed out. The key clicked in the lock.

Vimes sat down on a box.

"Polite," said Angua. Vimes put one hand to his ear and jerked a thumb towards the damp, stained plaster. She nodded, but mouthed the word "corpse" and pointed downwards.

"Sure?" said Vimes.

Angua tapped her nose. You couldn"t argue with a werewolf"s nose.

Vimes leaned back against a bigger box. It was comfort itself to a man who"d learned to sleep leaning against any available wall.

The plaster on the opposite wall was crumbling, green with damp and hung with dusty old spider webs. Someone, though, had

scratched a symbol in it so deeply that bits of the plaster had fallen out. It was another circle, this time with two diagonal lines slashed through it. Some passion there; not what you"d expect around dwarfs.

"You are taking this very well, sir," said Angua. "You must know this is deliberate discourtesy."

"Being rude isn"t against the law, sergeant." Vimes pulled his helmet over his eyes and settled down.

The little devils! Play silly buggers with me, will they? Try to wind me up, will they? Don"t tell the Watch, eh? There are no no-go areas in this city. I"ll see to it they find that out. Oh yes.

There were more and more of the deep-downers in the city these days, although you very seldom saw them outside the dwarf areas. Even there, you didn"t actually see any of them as such, you just saw their dusty black sedan chairs being muscled through the crowds by four other dwarfs. There were no windows; there was nothing outside that a deep-downer could possibly want to see.

The city dwarfs regarded them with awe, respect and, it had to be said, a certain amount of embarrassment, like some honoured but slightly loopy relative. Because somewhere in the head of every city dwarf there was a little voice that said: you should live in a mine, you should be in the mountains, you shouldn"t walk under open skies, you should be a real dwarf. In other words, you shouldn"t really be working in your uncle"s pigment and dye factory in Dolly Sisters. However, since you are, you could at least try to think like a proper dwarf. And part of that meant being guided by the deepdowners, the dwarfs" dwarfs, who live in caves miles below the surface and never see the sun. Somewhere down there in the dark was true dwarfishness. They had the knowing of it, and they could guide you ...

Vimes had no problem with that at all. It made as much sense as what most humans believed, and most dwarfs were model citizens, even at two-thirds scale.

But deciding that murder could be kept in the family? thought Vimes. Not on my Watch!