"Well done, sergeant," said Vimes out of the corner of his mouth. "Did you have a plan for the next bit?"
"I"m more der tactical kind, sir," said Detritus.
Oh, well. At times like this you didn"t argue, and you didn"t step back. Vimes pulled out his badge and held it up.
"This dwarf is under arrest for assaulting a Watch officer!" he shouted. "Let us through, in the name of the law!"
And to his amazement, the crowd went quiet, like a lot of children when they sense that this time teacher is really, really angry. Perhaps it was the words on the badge, he thought. You couldn"t rub them out.
In the silence, another half-brick dropped out of the free hand of the dwarf in Detritus"s very solid custody. Years later, Vimes would shut his eyes and still be able to recall the crunch it made when it hit the ground.
Angua stood up, with the unconscious Ringfounder in her arms. "He"s concussed," she said. "And I suggest, sir, that you turn round, just for a moment?"
Vimes risked a glance. Ardent - or, at least, a leather-shrouded dwarf that could have been him - was standing in the shadows of the doorway. He had the attention of the crowd.
"We"re being allowed to go?" he said to Angua, nodding to the figure.
"I think the going is the thing, sir, don"t you?"
"You"ve got that right, sergeant. Detritus, keep a grip on that little bugger. Back to the nick, all of us."
The crowd parted to let them through, with barely a murmur. The silence followed them all the way back to the Watch House ...
... where Otto Chriek of the Times was waiting in the street, iconograph at the ready.
"Oh no you don"t, Otto," said Vimes, as his squad approached. "I"m standing on the public highway, Mister Vimes," said Otto meekly. "Smile, please. .
And took a picture of a troll officer holding a dwarf up in the air.
Oh well, said Vimes to himself, that"s Page One sorted out. And probably the bloody cartoon, too.
One dwarf in the cells, one in the tender loving care of Igor, Vimes thought as he trudged up the stairs to his office. And it"s only going to get worse. Those dwarfs were obeying Ardent, weren"t they? What would they have done if the dwarf had shaken his head?
He landed in his chair so hard that it rolled back a foot.
He"d met deep-down dwarfs before. They"d been weird, but he"d been able to deal with them. The Low King was a deep-downer, and Vimes had got on with him well enough, once you accepted that the fairytale dwarf in the Hogfather beard was an astute politician. He was a dwarf with vision. He dealt with the world. Ha, "he"d seen the light. But those in the new mine ...
He hadn"t seen them, even though they were sitting in a room made brilliant with the light of hundreds of candles. That seemed odd, since the grags themselves were completely shrouded in their pointy black leather. But maybe it was some mystic ceremony, and who"d look for sense there? Maybe you got a more holy dark in the midst of light? The brighter the light the blacker the shadow?
Ardent had spoken in a language that sounded like dwarfish, and out of the dark hoods had come answers and questions, all barked out in the same harsh brief syllables.
At one point Vimes was asked to repeat the meat of his statement made up above, which had seemed too far away now. He"d done so, and there"d been a long drawn out discussion in what he"d come to think of as Deep Dwarf. And all the time he felt that eyes he could not see were watching him very hard indeed. It didn"t help that his head had been aching like mad and there were shooting pains going up and down his arm.
And that was it. Had they understood him? He didn"t know. Ardent had said that they agreed with considerable reluctance. Had they? He hadn"t a clue, not a clue, to what had really been said. Would Carrot be given access to a crime scene that had not been interfered with in any way? Vimes grunted. Huh. What do you think, boys and girls?
He pinched his nose, and then stared at his right hand. Igor had gone on at length about "tiny invithible biting creatureth" and used some vicious ointment that probably killed anything of any size or visibility. It had stung like seven hells for five minutes, but then had gone and seemed to have taken the pain with it. Anyway, what mattered was that the Watch was officially on this case.
His eye was caught by the top sheet of paperwork in his in-tray [1] He groaned as he picked it up.
To: His Grace Sir Samuel Vimes, Commander of the Watch
From: Mr A E Pessimal, Inspector of the Watch Your Grace,
I hope you will not mind giving me as soon as possible the answers to the following questions:
1 What is Corporal "Nobby" Nobbs for? why do you employ a known petty thief."
2 I timed two officers in Broadway- earlier, and in the space of one hour they made no arrests. Why was this an economic use of their time