Thud! (Discworld 34)

The thread of stink was floating through the railings of Empirical Crescent, one of the city"s great architectural semi-precious gems. It was always hard to find people prepared to live there, however, despite the generally desirable nature of the area. Tenants seldom stayed for more than a few months before moving hurriedly, sometimes leaving all their possessions behind. [1]

She sailed over the railing with silence and ease and landed on all

[1] Empirical Crescent was just off Park Lane, in what was generally a high-rent district. The rents would have been higher still were it not for the continued existence of Empirical Crescent itself, which, despite the best efforts of the Ankh-Morpork Historical Preservation Society, had still not been pulled down.

This was because it had been built by Bergholt Stuttley Johnson, better known to history as "Bloody Stupid" Johnson, a man who combined in one frail body such enthusiasm, self-delusion and creative lack of talent that

he was, in many respects, one of the great heroes of architecture. Only Bloody Stupid Johnson could have invented the 13-inch foot and a triangle with three right angles in it. Only Bloody Stupid Johnson could have twisted common matter through dimensions it was not supposed to enter. And only Bloody Stupid Johnson could have done all this by accident.

His highly original multi-dimensional approach to geometry was responsible for Empirical Crescent. On the outside it was a normal terraced crescent of the period, built of honey-coloured stone with the occasional pillar or cherub nailed on. Inside, the front door of No. 1 opened into the back bedroom of No.15, the ground-floor front window of No.3 showed the view appropriate to the second floor of No.9, smoke from the dining-room fireplace of No. 2 came out of the chimney of No.19.

fours on what had once been a gravel path. Residents in the crescent seldom did much gardening, since even if you planted bulbs you could never be sure whose garden they"d come up in.

Angua followed her nose to a patch of rampant thistles. Some mouldering bricks in a circle marked what must have been an old well.

The oily stink was heavy here, but there was a fresher, far more complex smell that raised the hairs on Angua"s neck. There was a vampire down there.

Someone had pulled away the weeds and debris, including the inevitable rotting mattress and decomposing armchair. [1] Sally? What would she be doing here?

Angua pulled a brick out of the rotted edging and let it drop. Instead of a splash, there was a clear wooden thump.

Oh well. She went back to human to get down; claws were fine, but some things were better done by monkeys. The sides were of course slimy, but so many bricks had fallen out over the years that the descent turned out to be easier than she"d expected. And it was only about sixty feet deep, built in the days when it was widely believed that any water that supported so many little whiskery swimming things must be healthy.

There were fresh planks in the bottom. Someone - and surely it could only have been the dwarfs - had broken into the well down here and laid a couple of planks across it. They had dug this far, and stopped. Why? Because they"d reached the well?

There was dirty water, or water-like liquid, just under the planks. The tunnel was a bit wider here, and dwarfs had been here - she sniffed - a few days ago, no more. Yes. Dwarfs had been here, had fished around, and had then all left at once. They hadn"t even bothered to tidy up. She could smell it like a picture.

[1] It was okay to throw your rubbish into the garden, because it might not be your garden you were throwing it into.

She crept forward, the tunnels mapping themselves in her nostrils. They weren"t nicely finished like the tunnels Ardent moved in. They were rougher, with lots of zigzags and blind alleys. Rough planks and baulks of timber held back the fetid mud of the plains, which was nevertheless oozing through everywhere. These tunnels weren"t built to last; they were there for a quick and definitely dirty job and all they had to do was survive until it was done.

So ... the diggers had been looking for something, but weren"t sure where it was until they were within, what, about twenty feet of it, when they"d ... smelled it? Detected it? The last stretch to the well was dead straight. By then, they knew where they were going.

Angua crept on, almost bending double to clear the low ceiling until she gave up and went back to wolf. The tunnel straightened out again, with the occasional side passage that she ignored, although they smelled long. The vampire odour was still an annoying theme in the nasal symphony, and it came close to drowning the reek of foul water oozing from the walls. Here and there, vurms had colonized the ceiling. So had bats. They stirred.

And then there was another scent, as she passed a tunnel opening. It was quite faint, but it was unmistakably the whiff of corruption. A fresh death ... Three fresh deaths. At the end of a short side tunnel were the bodies of two, no, three dwarfs, half buried in mud. They glowed. Vurms had no teeth, Carrot had told her. They waited until the prospective meal became runny of its own accord. And, while they waited for the biggest stroke of luck ever to have come their way, they celebrated. Down here, in a world far away from the streets, the dwarfs would dissolve in light.

Angua sniffed.

Make that very fresh

"They found something," said a voice behind her. "And then it killed them."

Angua leapt.

The leap wasn"t intentional. Her hindbrain arranged it all by itself. The front brain, the bit that knew that sergeants should not attempt to disembowel lance-constables without provocation, tried to stop the leap in mid-air, but by then simple ballistics were in charge. All she managed was a mid-air twist, and struck the soft wall with her shoulder.

Wings fluttered a little way off, and there was a drawn-out organic sound, a sound that conveyed the idea that a slaughterhouse man was having some difficulty with a tricky bit of gristle.

"You know, sergeant," said the voice of Sally, as if nothing had happened, "you werewolves have it easy. You stay one thing and you don"t have any problems with body mass. Do you know how many bats I have to become for my bodyweight? More than a hundred and fifty, that"s how many. And there"s always one, isn"t there, that gets lost or flies the wrong way? You can"t think straight unless you get your bats together. And I"m not even going to touch on the subject of reassimilation. It"s like the biggest sneeze you can think of. Backwards."

There was no point in modesty, not down here in the dark. Angua forced herself to change back, every brain cell piling in to outvote tooth and claw. Anger helped.

"Why the hell are you here?" she said, when she had a mouth that worked.

"I"m off duty," said Sally, stepping forward. "I thought I"d see what I could find." She was totally naked.

"You couldn"t have been so lucky!" Angua growled.