Thud! (Discworld 34)

"Good. And get someone to put out a message on the clacks, to every city watch and village constable between here and the mountains. Tell them to look out for a party of dark dwarfs. They"ve got what they came for and they"re doing a runner, I know it."

"You want they should try to stop "em?" the sergeant asked.

"No! No one should try it! Say they"ve got weapons that shoot fire! Just let me know where they"re headed!"

"I"ll tell dem dat, sir."

And I"m going home, Vimes repeated to himself. Everyone wants something from Vimes, even though I"m not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Hell, I"m probably a spoon. Well, I"m going to be Vimes, and Vimes reads Where"s My Cow? to Young Sam at six o"clock. With the noises done right.

He went home at a brisk walk, using all the little shortcuts, his mind sloshing backwards and forwards like thin soup, his ribs nudging him occasionally to say, yes, they were still there and twingeing. He arrived at the door just as Willikins was opening it.

"I shall tell her ladyship you are back, sir," he called out, as Vimes hurried up the stairs. "She is mucking out the dragon pens."

Young Sam was standing up in his cot, watching the door. Vimes"s day went soft and pink.

The chair was littered with the favoured toys of the hour - a rag ball, a little hoop, a woolly snake with one button eye. Vimes pushed them on to the rug, sat down and took off his helmet. Then he took off his damp boots. You didn"t need to heat a room after Sam Vimes had taken his boots off. On the wall the nursery clock ticked, and with every tick and tock a little sheep jumped back and forth over a fence. ;Er... "cos he won"t let me put a foot wrong, sir?" said Brick, as if reading it off a card.

"An" Brick here"s got something else to say to you, haven"t you, Brick?" said the maternal Detritus. "Go on, tell Mister Vimes."

Brick looked down at the table. "Sorry I tried to kill you, Mrs Vimes," he whispered.

"Well, we"ll see about that, shall we?" said Vimes, for something better to say. "By the way, I think you meant Mister Vimes, and I prefer it if only people who"ve fought alongside me call me Mister Vimes."

"Well, technic"ly Brick has fought-" Detritus began, but Vimes put down his coffee mug firmly. His ribs were aching.

"No, "in front of" is not the same thing as "alongside"; sergeant," he said. "It really isn"t."

"Not really his fault, sir, it was more a case o" mis-takeniden-tity" Detritus protested.

"You mean he didn"t know who I was?" said Vimes. "That didn"t seem to-"

"Nosir. He didn"t know who he was, sir. He thought he was a bunch o" lights and fireworks. Trust me, sir, I reckon I can make something o" this one. Please? Sir, he was out o" his brain on Big Hammer and still he was walkin" about!"

Vimes stared at Detritus for a moment and then looked back at Brick.

"Mr Brick, tell me how you got into the mine, will you?" he said.

"I told the other polisman-" Brick began.

"Now you tell Mister Vimes!" growled Detritus. "Right now!"

It took a little while, with pauses for bits of Brick"s mind to shunt into position, but Vimes assembled it like this:

The wretched Brick had been cooking up Scrape with some fellow gutter trolls in an old warehouse in the maze of streets behind Park Lane, had blundered down into the cellar looking for a cool place to watch the display, and the floor had given way under him. By the sound of it he"d fallen a long way, but to judge from the troll"s natural state he probably floated down like a butterfly. He"d ended up in a tunnel "like a mine, y"know, wi" all wood holdin" the roof up" and had wandered along it in the hope that it would lead back to the surface or something to eat.

He didn"t start to worry until he came out into a far grander tunnel and the word "dwarfs" finally reached a bit of his brain with nothing to do but listen.

A troll in a dwarf mine goes on the rampage. It was one of those givens, like a bull in a china shop. But Brick seemed refreshingly free of hatred towards anyone. Provided the world supplied enough things beginning with "S" to make his head go "bzzz!" - and the city had no shortage of these - he didn"t much care about what else it did. Brick, down in the gutter, had dropped below even that horizon. No wonder Chrysoprase"s shakedown hadn"t corralled him. Brick was something you stepped over.

It might even have occurred to Brick, standing there in the dark with the sound of dwarf voices in the distance, to be afraid. And then he"d seen, through a big round doorway, one dwarf hold up another and hit it over the head. It was cave-gloomy, but trolls had good night vision and there were always the vurms. The troll hadn"t made out details and was not particularly looking for them. Who cared what dwarfs did to one another? So long as they didn"t do it to him, he didn"t see a problem. But when the dwarf that had done the bashing started to shout, then there was a problem, large as life.

A big metal door right by him had slammed open and hit him in the face. When he peered out from behind it, it was to see several armed dwarfs running past. They weren"t interested in what might

be behind the door, not yet. They were doing what people do, which is run towards the source of the shouting. Brick, on the other hand, was interested only in getting as far away from the shouting as possible, and right here was an open door. He"d taken it, and run, not stopping until he was out in the fresh night air.

There had been no pursuit. Vimes wasn"t surprised. You needed a special kind of mind to be a guard. One that was prepared to be in a body that stood and looked at nothing very much for hours on end. Such a mind did not command high wages. Such a mind, too, would not be likely to start a search by looking in the tunnel it had just arrived by. It would not be the sharpest knife in the drawer.

And so, aimlessly, without intent, malice or even curiosity, a wandering troll had wandered into a dwarf mine, spotted a murder through a drug-raddled perception, and wandered out again. Who could plan for anything like that? Where was the logic? Where was the sense?