Unseen Academicals (Discworld 37)

'Gentlemen,' said Ridcully. 'I am humbled that as soon as I have an idea about what something is, it turns out that you all knew what it was. I am amazed.'

'Excuse me,' said Dr Hix, 'but I don't have a clue what you're talking about.'

'You are out of touch! You've been spending too long underground, sir!' said the Lecturer in Recent Runes sternly.

'You don't often let me out, that's why! And can I remind you that I have to maintain a vital line of cosmic defence in this establishment here with a staff of exactly one? And he's dead!'

'You mean Charlie? I remember old Charlie, keen worker nevertheless,' said Ridcully.

'Yes, but I have to keep rewiring him all the time,' sighed Hix. 'I do try to keep you abreast of things in my monthly reports. I hope you read them... ?'

'Tell me, Doctor Hix,' said Ponder, 'did you experience anything unusual when that young lady was speaking so eloquently?'

'Well, yes, I had a pleasant moment of happy recollection about my father.'

'So did we all, I am sure,' said Ponder. There was sombre nodding around the table. 'I never knew my father. I was brought up by my aunts. I had d¨¦j¨¤ vu without the original vu.'

'And it wasn't magic?' suggested the Lecturer in Recent Runes.

'No. Religion, I suspect,' said Ridcully. 'A god invoked, that sort of thing.'

'Not invoked, Mustrum,' said Dr Hix. 'Summoned by bloodshed!'

'Oh, I hope not,' said Ridcully, getting to his feet. 'I would like to try a little experiment this afternoon, gentlemen. We will not talk about football, we will not speculate about football, we will not worry about football - '

'You are going to make us play it, aren't you?' said the Lecturer in Recent Runes glumly.

'Yes,' said Ridcully, more than somewhat miffed at the spoiling of a perfectly good peroration. 'Just a little kick-about to help us get some hands-on experience of the game as it is played.'

'Er. Strictly, under the new rules, by which I mean the ancient rules we are taking as our model, hands-on experience means no hands,' said Ponder.

'Well pointed out, that man. Put the word out, will you? Football practice on the lawn after lunch!'

One thing you had to remember when dealing with dwarfs was that while they shared the same world as you did, metaphorically they thought about it as if it were upside down. Only the richest and most influential of dwarfs lived in the deepest caverns. For a dwarf, a penthouse in the centre of the city would be some kind of slum. Dwarfs liked it dark and cool.

It didn't stop there. A dwarf on the up and up was really on his uppers, and upper-class dwarfs were lower class. A dwarf who was rich, healthy and had respect and his own rat farm justifiably felt at rock bottom and was held in low esteem. When you talked to dwarfs, you turned your mind upside down. The city, too. Of course, when you dug down in Ankh-Morpork you just found more Ankh-Morpork. Thousands of years of it, ready to be dug out and shored up and walled in with the shiny dwarf brick.

It was Lord Vetinari's 'Grand Undertaking'. The city's walls corseted it like a fetishist's happiest dream. Gravity offered only a limited supply of up, but the deep loam of the plain had a limitless supply of down.

Glenda was surprised, therefore, to find Shatta right at the surface in the Maul, alongside the really posh dress shops that were for human ladies. That made sense, however; if you were going to make a scandalous profit selling clothes, it made sense to camouflage yourself amongst other shops doing the same thing. She wasn't sure about the name, but apparently shatta meant 'a wonderful surprise' in Dwarfish, and if you started to laugh about that sort of thing then you would never have time to pause for breath.

She approached the door with the apprehension of one who is certain that the moment she sets foot inside she will be charged five dollars a minute for breathing and then be held upside down and have all her wealth removed with a hook.

And it was, indeed, classy. But it was dwarf classy. That meant an awful lot of chain mail, and enough weaponry to take over a city-but if you paid attention, you realized it was female chain mail and weaponry. That was how things were happening, apparently. Dwarf women had got fed up with looking like dwarf men all the time and were metaphorically melting down their breastplates in order to make something a little lighter and with adjustable straps.

Juliet had explained this on the way down, although, of course, Juliet did not use the word 'metaphorically', it being several syllables beyond her range. There were battle-axes and war hammers, but all with that certain feminine touch: one war axe, apparently capable of cleaving a backbone lengthwise, was beautifully engraved with flowers. It was another world, and as she stood just inside the doorway looking around, Glenda felt relieved that there were other humans in the place. In fact, there were quite a few, and that was surprising. One of them, a young human woman with steel boots six inches high, gravitated towards them as if drawn by a magnet-and given the amount of ferrous metal on her body, a magnet was something she would never pass in a hurry. She was holding a tray of drinks.

'There's black mead, red mead and white mead,' she said, and then lowered her voice by a few decibels and three social classes. 'Actually, the red mead is really sherry and all the dwarf ladies are drinking it. They like not having to quaff.'

'Do we have to pay for this?' said Glenda nervously.

'It's free,' said the girl. She indicated a bowl of small black things on the tray, each one pierced with a cocktail stick, and said slightly hopelessly, 'And do try the rat fruit.'

Before Glenda could stop her, Juliet had taken one and was chewing enthusiastically.

'What part of a rat is its fruit?' asked Glenda. The girl with the tray did not look directly at her.

'Well, you know shepherd's pie?' she said.