Raising Steam (Discworld 40)

‘I’ll prowl the area until my back-up gets here. I’m expecting the cart and Igorina for the forensics,’ said Angua. ‘If you hear something screaming it might be me, but don’t worry. Commander Vimes has no time for senseless saboteurs.’

There was a pause, and Adora Belle said gravely, ‘There’s something I think you ought to see. Look under this pile of timber: this dwarf looks very, very dead and horribly mutilated. I assume he probably tripped and fell when he was setting fire to the tower. What do you think, captain?’

Carefully, Captain Angua looked at the corpse and said, ‘He’s lost an ear.’

Adora Belle said, ‘Well, apropos of nothing at all, I understand that when goblins get truly riled up they go all frisky and look for souvenirs.’

‘But I’m quite certain, of course, that none of your clacks goblins would be getting up to anything like that, right?’ Angua asked.

Distantly, Adora Belle replied, ‘Yes, having been almost burned alive by dwarf extremists would be shrugged off as another day in the office and not something to get very excited about.’

She looked at the captain quizzically, who said, ‘Quite so. Undoubtedly any injuries were caused by the incompetence of the terrorists themselves.’

‘Why, yes, indeed, yes,’ said Adora Belle.

‘Wasn’t it amazing how one of them managed to chew his own ear off?’ Angua observed.

‘So, can Shine on the Moon come out of hiding now?’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Angua carefully, ‘I didn’t hear what you said over the cracking of the tower.’

The silence in Lord Vetinari’s study was absolute. Nevertheless, the tread of Drumknott’s approach contrived to make it even more silent as the secretary handed his lordship a little slip of paper and told him that a second clacks tower had been torched by people calling themselves, in translation, ‘The Only True Dwarfs’.

Drumknott waited while not a muscle moved in Lord Vetinari’s face before he said, ‘Let it be known that enemy action on the clacks system will be followed by the death of not only those who did it but also those who ordered it to be done, whoever they are. Send this to every embassy, consulate and head of state. Action this night, please.’

Still speaking calmly, Lord Vetinari continued, ‘It is also time, I think, to let the dark clerks deal with the more unusual suspects. I’m sure your concludium has given you some clues, Drumknott, and of course we will assist in any way possible. The Low King must be … unhappy about this. Although the stricken clacks tower was ours, we know that the impact of this problem falls in the last event on the King himself. Therefore, send him a message on the black clacks and let him know that I myself and, undoubtedly, Lady Margolotta will support any new plan he chooses to make. The grags have once again broken a solemn accord and that, Drum knott, batters the pillars of the world and not inconsiderably. After all, if you can’t trust governments, whom can you trust?’

There was a subtle cough from Drumknott and his smile at that point was more like a grimace. Before the secretary was released to his private office and its other intrigues, Lord Vetinari continued fishing in his own stream of consciousness, and said, ‘I seldom get angry, Drumknott, as you know, but I am angry now. I should be grateful if you would send for Commander Vimes in his other incarnation as Blackboard Monitor Vimes. I require his assistance and I don’t think he will be a happy man – which, from my point of view, has no downside in these circumstances. Please put the message out to Mister Trooper that this is not the time to be a nice person.’

He went on, ‘This isn’t war. This is a crime. There will be a punishment.’

Rhys Rhysson, Low King of the dwarfs, was a dwarf of keen intelligence, but he sometimes wondered why someone with that intelligence would go into dwarfish politics, let alone be King of the Dwarfs. Lord Vetinari had it so easy he must hardly know he was born! The King thought humans were, well, reasonably sensible, whereas there was an old dwarf proverb which, translated, said, ‘Any three dwarfs having a sensible conversation will always end up having four points of view’.

It wasn’t quite as bad as all that, but it was near enough these days, he told himself, as he looked over at the assembled members of his council in which, according to the rules, he was the first among equals. He had read somewhere in the scrolls that they owed him fealty, whatever that was. It sounded like a kind of porridge.

When his secretary, Aeron, had returned from a recent visit to Ankh-Morpork, he had described a foot-the-ball game he witnessed, which had, at its centre, a referee. Right now, Rhys was feeling something of what the referee had to go through since all the balls were kicked right at him. How could you be the Low King in a realm where even the factions had factions and those factions had microscopic factions? He envied, oh how he envied, Diamond King of Trolls who, apparently, gave instruction and advice to his myriad subjects. After which they said thank you, something that the Low King didn’t hear very often. Diamond King spoke for all trolls everywhere. The dwarfish race, however, had fractured now almost to the point of disarray and all of this ended up as a problem the Low King had to deal with.

There was today, obviously, an agenda or, rather, a regrettably large number of agendas, one for every faction. Glumly, Rhys wondered what the word was for a large number of agendas, and decided that the term should be a living death of agendaritis. It was the deep-down grags that gave him nightmares because, well, there was something offensive about those thick leather clothes and conical hats. After all, he thought, we’re all dwarfs together, are we not? Tak never mentioned that dwarfs should cover their faces in the society of their friends. It struck Rhys that this practice was deliberately provocative and, of course, disdainful.

Now, on the everlasting agenda, dwarfs from every mine were grumbling about the exodus of the young to the big cities. And, of course, they all had reasons for why this might be the case, all of them wrong. Anyone who wasn’t a dwarf who preferred to live in darkness, in every meaning

of the word, knew that the reason the younger generation was now overwhelming Ankh-Morpork, for example, was simply down to those very same grumblers and their activities. On the other hand, those he thought of as progressive dwarfs, the type who would quite happily have a troll as a friend, were bearing down on him, the King, about their race’s tendency to drive itself into a kind of purdah.

There was a great cloud of misunderstanding in the Low King’s hall, which on every side appeared almost wilful, as if any dispute, however insignificant, had to be thrashed through to the bitter end. It was something in the dwarf psyche. We spend too much time indoors, Rhys thought. He sighed when he realized that Ardent, whose voice had become unbearably loud, now had the floor.

Ardent was a dwarf that the King would have liked to see present at a mine disaster, preferably underneath it. However, Ardent had followers, stupid followers, and he also had powerful friends. And that was it. Politics. Politics was like those little wooden sliding-picture games for children: you had to move all of the pieces in the hope of finding a place where the whole picture slotted together.

At the moment Ardent was insinuating that, in truth, the mining of fat in the Schmaltzberg fat mines was not truly dwarfish, a comment which led an elderly dwarf, whom the King recognized as Sulien Heddwyn, to get to his feet.

Heddwyn put his hands on his axe and said, ‘My father was a fat miner. My grandfather was a fat miner. And so was my grandmother, she was a very fat miner and I was a miner when I was a minor. My mother gave me a tiny pick as soon as I was old enough to hold it. Every one of my relatives back to the dive of the Fifth Elephant was a fat miner and I’ll tell you, the export income from the Plains for our purest fats is what keeps this town running. So I won’t take an insult like this from a b’zugda-hiarafn21 too afraid to look at the sunshine.’

The sound of metal on metal echoed around the hall, followed by silence, with everyone waiting to see what was going to happen next. And that meant Rhys Rhysson had to break that silence. After all, he was, was he not, the Low King, the Low King of all the dwarfs?

He smiled, well aware that one wrong word from him would send shock-waves around the cavern and the result, whatever it was, would be his fault. Such is the fate of those who work only for the propagation of peace over warfare, and the way of the conscientious facilitator is a path strewn with thorns.

He looked at the angry councillors brandishing weapons around the huge table. It was as if being a dwarf meant that you lived in a permanent state that the term ‘grumpiness’ simply couldn’t convey. A conference of dwarfs was, in their language, a confusion of dwarfs.

His voice low, Rhys spoke. ‘For what purpose am I King? I will tell you. In a world where we formally recognize trolls, humans and, these days, all manner of species, even goblins, unreconstructed elements of dwarfdom persist in their campaign to keep the grags auditing all that is dwarfish.’