Thud! (Discworld 34)

"No! It won"t. Because you"ve got a werewolf and a vampire down here, understand? I"m having a really bad hair day and she"s got toothache! We come up in ten minutes looking human or we come up anyway! What?" There was more whispering. "Why a beetroot? Why in gods" names is a girly show likely to contain a beetroot? What? Okay. Will an apple do? Nobby, Lance-Constable Humpeding needs an apple, urgently. Or something else that she can bite. Now, jump to it!"

Coffee was only a way of stealing time that should by rights belong to your slightly older self. Vimes drank two cups, and had a wash and at least an attempt at a shave that made him feel quite human if he ignored the sensation that parts of his head were stuffed with warm cotton wool. At last, deciding that he felt as good as it was going to get and could probably handle quite long questions, he was ushered into the Oblong Office of the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork.

"Ah, commander," said Lord Vetinari, looking up after a considered interval and pushing aside some paperwork. "Thank you for coming. It seems that congratulations are in order. So I am told."

"And why"s that, sir?" said Vimes, putting on his special blank talking-to-Vetinari face.

"Come now, Vimes. Yesterday it looked as if we would be having a species war right in the middle of the city, and suddenly we are not. Those gangs were quite fearsome, I gather."

"Most of "em were asleep or squabbling amongst themselves by the time we arrived, sir. We just had to tidy them away," Vimes volunteered.

"Yes indeed," said Vetinari. "It was quite astonishing, really. Do sit down, by the way. It really is not necessary for you to stand in front of me like a corporal on a charge." 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.

"Oh, I don"t have your nose, sergeant," said Sally, with a sweet smile. "But I was using a hundred and fifty-five pretty good flying ones, and they can cover a lot of ground."

"I thought vampires could rematerialize their clothes," said Angua accusingly. "Otto Chriek can!"

"Females can"t. We don"t know why. It"s probably part of the whole underwired nightdress business. That"s where you score again, of course. When you"re in one hundred and fifty bat bodies it"s quite hard to remember to keep two of them carrying a pair of pants." Sally looked up at the ceiling and sighed. "Look, I can see where this is going. It"s going to be about Captain Carrot, isn"t it ...?,

"I saw the way you were smiling at him!"

"I"m sorry! We can be very personable! It"s a vampire thing!"

"You were so keen to impress him, eh?"

"And you aren"t? He"s the kind of man anyone would want to impress!"

They watched one another warily.

"He is mine, you know," said Angua, feeling the nascent claws strain under her fingernails.

"You"re his, you mean!" said Sally. "You know it works like that. You trail after him!"

"I"m sorry! It"s a werewolf thing!" Angua yelled.

"Hold it!" Sally thrust both hands in front of her in a gesture of peace. "There"s something we"d better sort before this goes any further!"