Thud! (Discworld 34)

"It must have been. Trolls don"t clean their feet much, but walking mud all the way? Not a chance."

"And they don"t leave their clubs behind, either," growled Vimes. "So it"s a set-up, right? But it turns out there really was a troll! Was Angua sure?"

"Positive, sir," said Carrot. "We"ve always trusted her nose before. Sorry, sir, she had to go and get some fresh air. She was straining her senses as it was, and she got a lungful of that smoke."

"I can imagine," said Vimes. Hells" bells, he thought. We were right on the point where I could tell Vetinari that it looked like some kind

of half-baked inside job faked to look as though a troll did it, and we find out there was a troll. Huh, so much for relying on the evidence.

Sally coughed politely. "Ardent was shocked and frightened when the captain found the skull, sir," she said. "It wasn"t an act. I"m certain of it. He was near collapse with terror. So was Helmclever, the whole time. "Thank you for that, lance-constable," said Vimes gravely. "I suspect I shall feel the same way when I go out there with a megaphone and shout, "Hello, boys, welcome to the replay of Koom Valley! Hey, let"s hold it right here in the city!""

"I don"t think you should actually put it like that, sir," said Carrot.

"Well, yes, I"ll probably try to be a bit more subtle, since you mention it," said Vimes.

"And it"d be at least the sixteenth battle referred to as Koom Valley," Carrot went on, "or seventeenth if you include the one in Vilinus Pass, which was more of a fracas. Only three of them were in the original Koom Valley, the one immortalized in Rascal"s painting. It"s said to be quite accurate. Of course, it took him years."

"An amazing work," said Sybil, not looking up from her darning. "It used to belong to my family before we gave it to the museum, you know."

"Isn"t progress a wonderful thing, captain?" said Vimes, pouring as much sarcasm into his tone as possible, since Carrot was so bad at recognizing it. "When we have our Koom Valley, our friend Otto will be able to take a colour iconograph of it in a fraction of a second. Wonderful. It"s been a long time since this city was last burned to the ground."

He ought to be springing into action. Once upon a time, he would have done. But now, perhaps he should take these precious moments to work out what he should do before he sprang.

Vimes tried to think. Don"t think of it all as one big bucket of

snakes. Think of it as one snake at a time. Try to sort it out. Now, what needs to be done first?

Everything.

All right, try a different approach.

"What are these mine signs all about?" he said. "That Helmclever sort of drew one at me. I saw one on the wall, too. And you drew one.

""The Following Dark"," said Carrot. "Yes. It was scrawled all over the place."

"What does it mean?"

"Dread, sir," said Carrot earnestly. "A warning of terrible things to come.

"Well, if one of those little sods so much as surfaces with one of those flame weapons in his hand that will be true. But you mean they scrawl it on walls?"

Carrot nodded. "You have to understand about a dwarf mine, sir. It"s a kind of-"

-emotional hothouse, was how Vimes understood it, although no dwarf would ever describe it that way. Humans would have gone insane living like that, cramped together, no real privacy, no real silence, seeing the same faces every day for years on end. And since there were a lot of pointy weapons around, it"d only be a matter of time before the ceilings dripped blood.

Dwarfs didn"t go mad. They stayed thoughtful and sombre and keen on their job. But they scrawled mine-sign.

It was like an unofficial ballot, voting by graffiti, showing your views on what was going on. In the confines of a mine any problem was everyone"s problem, stress leapt from dwarf to dwarf like lightning. The signs earthed it. They were an outlet, a release, a way of showing what you felt without challenging anyone (because of all the pointy weapons).

The Following Dark: We await what follows with dread. Another translation might mean, in effect: Repent, ye sinners!

"There are hundreds of runes for darkness," said Carrot. "Some of them are part of ordinary dwarfish, of course, like the Long Dark. There"s plenty like that. But some are ..."

"Mystical?" Vimes suggested.

"Unbelievably mystical, sir. There"s books and books about them. And the way dwarfs think about books and words and runes ... well, you wouldn"t believe it, sir. W- They think the world was written, sir. All words have enormous power. Destroying a book is worse than murder to a deep-downer."

"I"ve rather gathered that," said Blackboard Monitor Vimes. "Some deep-downers believe that the dark signs are real," Carrot went on.