"So? We didn"t kill him," said Angua, getting to her feet with some difficulty.
They looked down at the liquid mud now rising to their knees.
"Do you think it cares?" said Sally, matter of factly.
"No, but I think there may be another way out in that last turning we passed," said Angua, looking back along the tunnel.
She pointed. Scuttling along with blind determination, a line of vurms marched across the dripping roof almost as fast as the mud flowed down below. They were heading into the side tunnel in a glowing stream.
Sally shrugged. "It"s worth a try, yes?"
They left, and the sound of their splashing soon died away. Slowly the mud rose, rustling in the gloom. The trail of vurms
gradually disappeared overhead. The vurms that made the sign
remained, though, because such a feast as this was worth dying for. Their glow winked out, one insect at a time.
The darkness beneath the world caressed the sign, which flamed
red and died.
Darkness remained.
On this day in 1802 the painter Methodia Rascal tried putting the thing under a heap of old sacks, in case it woke up the Chicken, and finished the last troll, using his smallest brush to paint the eyeballs.
It was five a.m. Rain rustled out of the sky, not hard, but with a gentle persistence.
In Sator Square, and in the Plaza of Broken Moons, it hissed on the white ash of the bonfires, occasionally exposing the orange glow, which would briefly sizzle and spit.
A family of gnolls were sniffing around, each one dragging his or her little cart. A few officers were keeping an eye on them. Gnolls weren"t choosy about what they collected, provided it didn"t actually struggle, and even then there were rumours. But they were tolerated. Nothing cleaned up the place like a gnoll.
From here, they looked like little trolls, each with a huge compost heap on its back. That represented everything it owned, and mostly what it owned was rotten.
Sam Vimes winced at the pain in his side. Just his luck. Two coppers injured in the entire damn affair, and he had to be one of them? Igor had done his best, but broken ribs were broken ribs and it"d be a week or two before the suspicious green ointment made much difference.
Still, he enjoyed a bit of a warm glow about the whole thing. They had used good old-fashioned policing, and since good oldfashioned policemen are invariably outnumbered, he"d employed the good old-fashioned police methods of cunning, deceit and any damn weapon you could lay your hands on.
It had hardly been a fight at all. The dwarfs had mostly been sitting and singing gloomy songs because they fell over when they tried to stand up, or had tried to stand up and were now lying down and snoring. The trolls were, on the other hand, mostly upright, but went over when you pushed them. One or two, a little clearer in the head than the others, had put up a ponderous and laughable fight
but had fallen to that most old-fashioned of police methods, the well-placed boot. Well, most of them had. Vimes shifted to ease the aching in his side; he should have seen that one coming.
But all"s well that ends well, eh? No deaths and, just to put a little cherry on the morning cake, he had in his hand an early edition of the Times in which a leading article deplored the gangs stalking the city and wondered if the Watch was "up to the job" of cleaning up the streets.
Well, yes, I think we are, you pompous twerp. Vimes struck a match on a plinth and lit a cigar in recognition of a petty but darkly satisfying triumph. Gods knew they needed one. The Watch had taken a pounding over the whole damn Koom Valley thing, and it was good to hand the lads something to be proud of for a change. All in all, it was definitely a Result
He stared at the plinth. He didn"t remember what statue had once been there. It celebrated generations of graffiti artists now.
A piece of troll graffiti adorned it, obliterating everything done by the artists who used mere paint. He read:
MR SHINE
HIM DIAMOND
Mine sign, city scrawl, he thought. Things go bad, and people are moved to write on the walls ...
"Commander!"
He turned. Captain Carrot, armour gleaming, was hurrying towards him, his face as usual radiating an expression of 100 per cent pure Keen.