Thud! (Discworld 34)

"You know I won"t have magic used in the Watch," Vimes went on. As he sat down in the semi-darkness, a coiled-up hosepipe ambushed him from above, as they do, and he had to wrestle it to the shed floor.

"I do, sir, and I respect you for it, although there are those that think you are a damn silly fool."

"Well. .: Vimes said, trying to put "damn silly fool" behind them, "the fact is, I must get to Koom Valley very fast. Er ... very fast indeed."

"One might say- magically fast?" said Ridcully.

"As it were," said Vimes, fidgeting. He really hated having to do this. And what had he sat on?

"Mmm," said Ridcully. "But without, I imagine, any significant hocus-pocus? You appear uncomfortable, sir!"

Vimes triumphantly held up a large onion. "Sorry," he said, tossing it aside. "No, definitely no pocus. Possibly a little hocus. I just need an edge. They"ve got a day"s start on me." ;Er ... hang there, commander," said Sir Reynold. "Of course." "So what you mean is, people can come and look at the pictures, and the pictures, for their part, are looked at?

"Rather like that, yes," said the curator. He thought for a moment, aware that this probably wasn"t sufficient, and added, "but dynamicaleah.

"You mean the people are moved by the pictures, sir?" said Carrot.

"Yes!" said Sir Reynold, with huge relief. "Well done! That"s just hwhat happens. And we"ve had the Rascal on public display for years. We even have a stepladder in case people hwant to examine the mountains. Sometimes people come in with a bee in their bonnet that one of the warriors is pointing to some barely visible cave or something. Frankleah, if there was some secret, I hwould have found it by now. There was no point to the theft!

"Unless someone had found the secret and didn"t want anyone else to find it," said Vimes.

"That hwould be rather a coincidence, hwouldn"t it, commander? It"s not as if anything has changed just recently. Mr Rascal didn"t turn up and paint another mountain! And, although I hate to say this, just destroying the painting would have been enough."

Vimes walked around the table. All the bits, he thought, I must have all the bits by now.

Let"s start with this legend of a dwarf turning up, nearly dead, weeks after the battle, babbling about treasure.

All right, then it might have been this talking cube thing, Vimes thought. He survived the battle, hid out somewhere, and he"s got this thing and it"s important. He"s got to get it somewhere safe ... No, maybe he"s got to get people to listen to it. And of course he doesn"t take it with him, "cos there"s still likely to be trolls wandering the area and right now they"ll be in a mood to club first and try to think up some questions later. He needs some bodyguards.

He gets as far as some humans, but when he"s leading them back to the place where it"s hidden he finally dies.

Forward two thousand years. Would a cube last that long? Hell, they bob up in molten lava!

So it"s lying there. Methodia Rascal comes along, looking for ... a nice view, or something, and he looks down and there it is? Well, I"ll have to accept that he did, because he found it and got it talking, who knows how. But he couldn"t stop it. He drops it down the well. The dwarfs find it. They listen to the box, but hate what they hear. They hate it so much that Hamcrusher has four miners killed just because they heard it too. So why the painting? It shows what the box is talking about? Where the box is? If you"ve got the box in your hand, isn"t that it?

Anyway, who says it was the voice of Bloodaxe doing the speaking? It could be anybody. Why would you believe what was said?

He was aware of Sir Reynold talking to Carrot ...

"... said to your Sergeant Colon here, the painting is set several miles from hwhere the actual battle hwas fought. It"s in entirely the hwrong part of Koom Valleah! That"s just about the one thing both sides are agreed on!"

"So why did he set it there?" said Vimes, staring at the table as if hoping to draw a clue from it by willpower alone.

"Who knows? It"s all Koom Valleah. There"s about two hundred and fifty square miles of the place. I imagine he just chose somewhere that looked dramatic."

"Would you chaps like a cup of tea?" said Lady Sybil, from the door. "I felt a bit at a loose end, so I made a pot. And you should be getting your head down, Sam."

Sam Vimes looked panicky, a figure of authority caught once again in a domestic situation.

"Oh, Lady Sybil, they took the Rascal!" said Sir Reynold. "I know it belonged to your family!"

"My grandfather said it was just a damn nuisance," said Sybil. "He used to let me unroll it on the floor of the ballroom. I used to name all the dwarfs. We looked for the secret, because he said there was hidden treasure and the painting showed you where it was. Of course, we never found it, but it kept me quiet on rainy afternoons."

"Oh, it wasn"t great art," said Sir Reynold. "And the man was quite mad, of course. But somehow it spoke to people:

"I wish it"d say something to me," said Vimes. "You really don"t need to make tea for people, dear. One of the officers-"

"Nonsense! We must be hospitable," said Sybil.