Thud! (Discworld 34)

Vimes walked around the table. All the bits, he thought, I must have all the bits by now.

Let"s start with this legend of a dwarf turning up, nearly dead, weeks after the battle, babbling about treasure.

All right, then it might have been this talking cube thing, Vimes thought. He survived the battle, hid out somewhere, and he"s got this thing and it"s important. He"s got to get it somewhere safe ... No, maybe he"s got to get people to listen to it. And of course he doesn"t take it with him, "cos there"s still likely to be trolls wandering the area and right now they"ll be in a mood to club first and try to think up some questions later. He needs some bodyguards.

He gets as far as some humans, but when he"s leading them back to the place where it"s hidden he finally dies.

Forward two thousand years. Would a cube last that long? Hell, they bob up in molten lava!

So it"s lying there. Methodia Rascal comes along, looking for ... a nice view, or something, and he looks down and there it is? Well, I"ll have to accept that he did, because he found it and got it talking, who knows how. But he couldn"t stop it. He drops it down the well. The dwarfs find it. They listen to the box, but hate what they hear. They hate it so much that Hamcrusher has four miners killed just because they heard it too. So why the painting? It shows what the box is talking about? Where the box is? If you"ve got the box in your hand, isn"t that it?

Anyway, who says it was the voice of Bloodaxe doing the speaking? It could be anybody. Why would you believe what was said?

He was aware of Sir Reynold talking to Carrot ...

"... said to your Sergeant Colon here, the painting is set several miles from hwhere the actual battle hwas fought. It"s in entirely the hwrong part of Koom Valleah! That"s just about the one thing both sides are agreed on!"

"So why did he set it there?" said Vimes, staring at the table as if hoping to draw a clue from it by willpower alone.

"Who knows? It"s all Koom Valleah. There"s about two hundred and fifty square miles of the place. I imagine he just chose somewhere that looked dramatic."

"Would you chaps like a cup of tea?" said Lady Sybil, from the door. "I felt a bit at a loose end, so I made a pot. And you should be getting your head down, Sam."

Sam Vimes looked panicky, a figure of authority caught once again in a domestic situation.

"Oh, Lady Sybil, they took the Rascal!" said Sir Reynold. "I know it belonged to your family!"

"My grandfather said it was just a damn nuisance," said Sybil. "He used to let me unroll it on the floor of the ballroom. I used to name all the dwarfs. We looked for the secret, because he said there was hidden treasure and the painting showed you where it was. Of course, we never found it, but it kept me quiet on rainy afternoons."

"Oh, it wasn"t great art," said Sir Reynold. "And the man was quite mad, of course. But somehow it spoke to people:

"I wish it"d say something to me," said Vimes. "You really don"t need to make tea for people, dear. One of the officers-"

"Nonsense! We must be hospitable," said Sybil.

"Of course people tried to copy it," said the curator, accepting a cup. "Oh dear, they hwere terrible! A painting fifty feet long and ten feet deep is really quite impossible to copy with any kind of accuraceah-"

"Not if you lay it out on the ballroom floor and get a man to make you a pantograph," said Sybil, pouring tea. "This teapot really is a disgrace, Sam. Worse than the urn. Doesn"t anyone ever clean it out?"

She looked up at their faces. "Did I say something wrong?" she said.

"You made a copy of the Rascal?" said Sir Reynold.

"Oh, yes. The whole thing, to a scale of one in five," said Sybil. "When I was fourteen. It was a school project. We were doing dwarf history, you see, and, well, since we owned that painting it was too good to miss. You know what a pantograph is, don"t you? It"s a very simple way of making larger or smaller copies of a painting, using geometry, some wooden levers and a sharp pencil. Actually I did it as five panels ten feet square, that"s full size, to make sure I got all the detail, and then I did the one-fifth scale version to display it as poor Mr Rascal wanted it displayed. I got full marks from Miss Turpitude. She was our maths teacher, you know, she wore her hair in a bun with a pair of compasses and a ruler stuck in it? She used to say that a girl who knew how to use a set square and protractor would go a long way in life."

"What a shame you no longer have it!" said Sir Reynold.

"Why should you say that, Sir Reynold?" said Sybil. "I"m sure I"ve still got it somewhere. I had it hanging up from the ceiling of my room for some time. Let me think ... Did we take it with us when we moved? I"m sure-" She looked up brightly. "Ah, yes. Have you ever been up into the attics here, Sam?"

"No!" said Vimes.

"Now"s the time, then."

"I"ve never been on a Girls" Night Out before," said Cheery, as they walked, a little uncertainly, through the night-time city. "Was that last bit supposed to happen?"

"What bit was that?" said Sally.

"The bit where the bar was set on fire."