Thud! (Discworld 34)

Vimes looked closer. He hadn"t taken in much of the detail before the red mist descended. Oh yes, two stamps. They were very nearly identical. They both showed Koom Valley, a rocky area ringed by mountains. They both showed the battle. But in one, little figures of trolls were pursuing dwarfs from right to left, and, in the other, dwarfs were chasing trolls from left to right. Koom Valley, where the trolls ambushed the dwarfs and the dwarfs ambushed the trolls. Vimes groaned. Pick your own stupid history, a snip at ten pence, highly collectable.

"The Koom Valley Memorial Issue," he read. "But we don"t want them to remember it! We want them to forget it!"

"It"s only stamps, sir," said Cheery. "I mean, there"s no law against stamps. .."

"There ought to be one against being a bloody fool!"

"If there was, sir, we"d be on overtime every day!" said Cheery, grinning.

Vimes relaxed a little. "Yep, and no one could build cells fast enough. Remember the cabbage-scented stamp last month?

"Send your expatriate sons and daughters the familiar odour of home"? They actually caught fire if you put too many of them together!"

"I still can"t get the smell off my clothes, sir."

"There are people living a hundred miles away who can"t, I reckon. What did we do with the bloody things in the end?"

"I put them in No. 4 evidence locker and left the key in the lock," said Cheery.

"But Nobby Nobbs always steals anything that-" Vimes began.

"That"s right, sir!" said Cheery happily. "I haven"t seen them for weeks."

There was a crash from the direction of the canteen, followed by shouting. Something in Vimes, perhaps the very part of him that had been waiting for the first shoe, propelled him across the office, down the passage and to the canteen"s doorway at a speed that left dust spiralling on the floor.

What met his eyes was a tableau in various shades of guilt. One of the trestle tables had been knocked over. Food and cheap tinware was strewn across the floor. On one side of the mess was troll Constable Mica, currently being held between troll Constables Bluejohn and Schist; on the other was dwarf Constable Brakenshield, currently being lifted off the ground by probably human Corporal Nobbs and definitely human Constable Haddock.

There were watchmen at the other tables too, all caught in the act of rising. And, in the silence, audible only to the fine-tuned ears of a man searching for it, was the sound of hands pausing an inch away from the weapon of choice, and very slowly being lowered.

"All right," said Vimes, in the ringing vacuum. "Who"s going to be the first to tell me a huge whopper? Corporal Nobbs?"

"Well, Mister Vimes," said Nobby Nobbs, lowering the mute Brakenshield to the floor,". .. er ... Brakenshield here ... picked up Mica"s ... yes, picked up Mica"s mug by mistake, as it were ... and

... we all spotted that and jumped up, yes. .: Nobby speeded up, the really steep fibs now successfully negotiated,". .. and that"s how the table got knocked over ... "cos," and here Nobby"s face assumed an expression of virtuous imbecility that was really quite frightening to see, "he"d have really hurt himself if he"d taken a swig of troll coffee, sir."

Inside, Vimes sighed. As stupid lame excuses went, it wasn"t actually a bad one. For one thing it had the virtue of being completely unbelievable. No dwarf would come close to picking up a mug of troll espresso, which was a molten chemical stew with rust sprinkled on the top. Everyone knew this, just as everyone knew that Vimes could see that Brakenshield was holding an axe over his head and Constable Bluejohn was still frozen in the act of wrenching a club off Mica. And everyone knew, too, that Vimes was in the mood to sack the first bloody idiot to make a wrong move and, probably, anyone standing near him.

"That"s what it was, was it?" said Vimes. "So it wasn"t, as it might be, someone making a nasty remark about a fellow officer and others of his race, perhaps? Some little bit of stupidity to add to the mess of it that"s floating around the streets right now?"

"Oh, nothing like that, sir," said Nobby. "Just one of them ... things.

"Nearly a nasty accident, was it?" said Vimes. "Yessir!"

"Well, we don"t want any nasty accidents, do we, Nobby ...

"No sir!"

"None of us want nasty accidents, I expect," said Vimes, looking around the room. Some of the constables, he was grimly glad to see, were sweating with the effort of not moving. "And it"s so easy to have em, when your mind isn"t firmly on the job. Understood?"

There was a general muttering.

"I can"t hear you!"

This time there were audible riffs on the theme of "Yessir!"

"Right," snapped Vimes. "Now get out there and keep the peace,

because as sure as hell you won"t do it in here!" He directed a special