"Er, let me try this another way. .:she said. "And I"m telling you this as another woma- female. .
Tawneee listened intently, and even the way in which she looked puzzled was unfair to the rest of her sex. When Angua had finished she watched the angelic expression hopefully.
"So what you"re saying, right," said Tawneee, "is that walking out
[1] Patience is a key virtue amongst dwarfs.
with Nobby is like going into a big posh restaurant and only eating the bread roll?"
"Exactly!" said Angua. "You"ve got it!"
"But I never really meet men. Granny told me not to act like a floozie."
"And you don"t think that working at " Angua began, but Sally cut in.
"Sometimes you need to flooze regularly," she said. "Haven"t you ever just gone into a bar and had a drink with a man?"
"No."
"Right," said Sally. She drained her glass. "I don"t like these Neck Bolts. Let"s go somewhere else and"- she paused -"open your mind to possibiliteesh."
It was odd, having Sybil in Pseudopolis Yard. It had been one of the Ramkin family houses before she"d given it to the Watch. She"d been a girl there. It had been her home.
Some apprehension of this crept into the chipped and stained souls of the watchmen. Men not known for the elegance of their manners found themselves automatically wiping their feet as they came in, and respectfully removing their helmets.
They spoke differently too, slowly and hesitantly, anxiously scanning the sentence ahead for expletives to delete. Someone even found a broom and swept up, or at least moved the dirt to a less obvious place.
Upstairs, in what had been until then the cash office, Young Sam slept peacefully in a makeshift bed. One day, Vimes hoped, he would be able to tell him that on one special night he"d been guarded by four troll watchmen. They"d been off duty but volunteered to come in for this, and were just itching for some dwarfs to try anything. Sam hoped the boy would be impressed; the most other kids could hope for was angels.
Vimes had commandeered the canteen, because it had a big enough table. He"d spread out a map of the city. A lot of the rest of the planking was occupied by pages from The Koom Valley Codex.
This wasn"t a game, this was a puzzle. A sort of, yes, jigsaw puzzle. And he ought to be able to do it, he reasoned, because he already had nearly all the corners.
"Ettercap Street, Money Trap Lane, Crybaby Alley, Scuttlebutt Court, The Jeebies, Pellicool Steps," he said. "Tunnels everywhere! They were lucky to find it after only three or four. Mr Rascal must have had lodgings in half the streets in the area. Including Empirical Crescent!"
"But hwhy?" said Sir Reynold Stitched. "I mean, hwhy dig tunnels everyhwhere?"
"Tell him, Carrot," said Vimes, drawing a line across the city.
Carrot cleared his throat. "Because they were dwarfs, sir, and deep-downers at that," he said. "It wouldn"t occur to them not to dig. And mostly it"d be just a matter of clearing out buried rooms in any case. That"s a stroll to a dwarf. And they were laying rails, so they could take the spoil out anywhere they wanted."
"Yes, but sureleah-" Sir Reynold began.
"They were listening out for something talking at the bottom of an old well," said Vimes, still bending over the map. "What chance that"d still be visible? And people can get a bit iffy when a bunch of dwarfs turn up and start digging holes in the garden."
"It"d be very slow, sureleah?"
"Well, yes, sir. But it would be in the dark, under their control, and secret," said Carrot. "They could go anywhere they wanted. They could zigzag around if they weren"t certain, they could home in with their listening tube, and they"d never have to speak to a human or see daylight. Dark, controllable and secret."
"Deep-downers in a nutshell," said Vimes.
"This is very exciting!" said Sir Reynold. "And they dug into the cellars of my museum?"
"Over to you, Fred," said Vimes, carefully drawing another line across the map.
"Er, right," said Fred Colon. "Er ... Nobby an" me found out where only a couple of hours ago," he said, thinking it wisest not to add "after Mister Vimes yelled at us and made us tell him every last detail and then sent us back and told us what to look for". What he did add was: "They were pretty clever, sir. The mortar even looked dirty. I bet you"re saying to yourself ahah, sir?"
"I am?" said Sir Reynold, bewildered. "I hwould normally say "my goodness"."