Thud! (Discworld 34)

"Captain!"

They turned. Someone was hurrying through the gate. He had two swords strapped to his back.

"Ah, Special Constable Hancock," said Carrot, stepping forward. "Do you have something for me?"

"Er, yes, captain." Hancock looked nervously at Vimes.

"This is official business, Andy," said Vimes, reassuringly.

"Not much to give you, sir. But I asked around, and a young lady sent at least two self-coded droppers to Bonk in the last week. That means it goes to the main tower and gets handed over to whoever turns up with the right authorization. We don"t have to know who they are."

"Well done," said Carrot. "Any description?"

"Young lady with short hair is the best I could get. Signed the message "Aicalas"."

Vimes burst out laughing. "Well, that"s about it. Thank you, Special Constable Hancock, very much."

"Crime on the clacks is going to be a growing problem," said Carrot sadly, when they were alone again.

"Quite likely, captain," said Vimes. "But here and now we know that our Sally is not being straight with us."

"We can"t be certain it"s her, sir," said Carrot.

"Oh no?" said Vimes happily. "This quite cheers me up. It"s one of the lesser-known failings of the vampire. No one knows why. It goes with having big windows and easily torn curtains. A sort of undeath-wish, you might say. However clever they are, they can"t resist thinking that no one will recognize their name if they spell it backwards. Let"s go."

Vimes turned back to head into the building, and noticed a small, neat figure standing patiently by the door. It had the look of someone who was quite happy to wait. He sighed. I bargain without an axe in my hand, eh?

"Breakfast, Mr Bashfullsson?" he said.

"This is all rather fun," said Sybil an hour later, as the coaches headed out of the city. "Do you remember when we last went on holiday, Sam?"

"That wasn"t really a holiday, dear," said Vimes. Above them, Young Sam swung back and forth in a little hammock, cooing. "Well, it was very interesting, all the same," said Sybil. "Yes, dear. Werewolves tried to eat me."

Vimes sat back. The coach was comfortably upholstered and well sprung. At the moment, while it threaded through the traffic, the magical loss of weight was hardly noticeable. Would it mean anything? How fast could a bunch of old dwarfs travel? If they really had taken a big wagon, the coaches would catch them tomorrow, when the mountains were still a distant prospect. In the meantime, at least he could get some rest.

He pulled out a battered volume entitled Walking in the Koom Valley, by Eric Wheelbrace, a man who apparently had walked on just about everything bigger than a sheep track in the Near Ramtops.  It had a sketch map, the only actual map of the valley Vimes had seen. Eric wasn"t a bad sketch artist.

Koom Valley was ... well, Koom Valley was basically a drain, And even then had been belabouring mountain goats on apparently sheer cliff faces and, while pebbles slid and bounced around him, was clearly accusing them of obstructing his Right to Roam. Eric believed very firmly that The Land Belonged To The People, and also that he was more The People than anyone else was. Eric went everywhere with a map, encased in waterproof material, on a string around his neck. Such people are not to be trifled with.

that"s what it was: nearly thirty miles of soft limestone rock edged by mountains of harder rock, so what you had would have been a canyon if it wasn"t so wide. One end was almost on the snowline, the other merged into the plains.

It was said that even clouds kept away from the desolation that was Koom Valley. Maybe they did, but that didn"t matter. The valley got the water anyway, from meltwater and the hundreds of waterfalls that poured over its walls from the mountains that cupped it. One of those falls, the Tears of the King, was half a mile high.

The Koom River didn"t just rise in this valley. It leapt and danced in this valley. By the time it was halfway down, it was a crisscrossing of thundering waters, forever merging and parting. They carried and hurled great rocks, and played with whole fallen trees from the dripping forests that colonized the scree built up against the walls. They gurgled into holes and rose again, miles away, as fountains. They had no mappable course - a good storm higher up the mountains could bring house-sized rocks and half a stricken woodland down in the flood, blocking the sinkholes and piling up dams. Some of these could survive for years, becoming little islands in the leaping waters, growing little forests and little meadows and colonies of big birds. Then some key rock would be shifted by a random river, and within an hour it would all be gone.

Nothing that couldn"t fly lived in the valley, at least for long. The dwarfs had tried to tame it, back before the first battle. It hadn"t worked. Hundreds of dwarfs and trolls had been swept up in the famous flood, and many had never been found again. Koom Valley had taken them all into its sinkholes and chambers and caverns, and had kept them.

There were places in the valley where a man could drop a coloured cork into a swirling sinkhole and then wait for more than twenty minutes before it bobbed up on a fountain less than a dozen yards away.

There was hardly any sound now. Perhaps sound was unable to keep up.

"Sir?" said Willikins quietly.

"Yes?" said Vimes, his eyes streaming.

"It took us less than a minute to go that last mile. I timed us between milestones, sir."

"Sixty miles an hour? Don"t be daft, man! A coach can"t go that fast!"