“Just clearing up a few things, sir,” said Carrot. “Lord Vetinari sent a message down to the Yard. He wants a report. I thought I’d better tell you, sir.”
“I was just thinking, Captain,” said Vimes expansively. “Should we put up a little plaque? Something simple? It could say something like BATTLE OF KOOM VALLEY NOT FOUGHT HERE, GRUNE THE 5TH, YEAR OF THE PRAWN. Could we get them to do a bloody stamp? What do you think?”
“I think you need to get some sleep yourself, Commander,” said Carrot. “And technically, it isn’t Koom Valley until Saturday.”
“Of course, monuments to battles that didn’t take place might be stretching things a bit, but a stamp—”
“Lady Sybil really worries about you, sir.” Carrot broadcast concern.
The fizz in Vimes’s head subsided. As if awakened by the reference to Sybil, the debtors of his body queued up to wave their overdue IOUs: feet—dead tired and in need of a bath; stomach—gurgling; ribs—on fire; back—aching; brain—drunk on its own poisons. Bath, sleep, eat…good ideas. But still must do things…
“How’s our Mr. Pessimal?” he said.
“Igor’s fixed him up, sir. He’s a bit amazed at all the fuss. Now, I know I can’t order you to go and see his lordship—”
“No, you can’t, because I am a commander, Captain,” said Vimes, still fuzzily intoxicated on exhaustion.
“—but he can and he has, sir. And your coach will be waiting for you outside the palace when you come out. That’s Lady Sybil’s orders, sir,” said Carrot, appealing to higher authority.
Vimes looked up at the ugly bulk of the palace. Suddenly, clean sheets seemed such a sweet idea.
“Can’t face him like this,” he murmured.
“I had a word with Secretary Drumknott, sir. Hot water, a razor, and a big cup of coffee will be waiting in the palace.”
“You thought of everything, Carrot…”
“I hope so, sir. Now off you—”
“But I thought of something, eh?” said Vimes, swaying cheerfully. “Better dead drunk than just dead, eh?”
“It was a classic ruse, sir,” said Carrot reassuringly. “One for the history books. Now, off you go, sir. I’m going to have a look for Angua. She hasn’t slept in her bed.”
“But at this time of the month—”
“I know, sir. She hasn’t slept in her basket, either.”
In a dank cellar that once was an attic and was now half-full of mud, the vurms poured out of a small hole where wooden planks had long since worn away.
A fist punched up. Soggy timber split and crumbled.
Angua pulled herself up into this new darkness, then reached down to help Sally, who said: “Well, here’s another fine mess.”
“Let’s hope so,” said Angua. “I think we need to go up at least one more level. There’s an archway here. Come on.”
There had been too many dead ends, forgotten stinking rooms and false hopes, and altogether too much slime.
After a while, the smell became almost tangible, and then it managed to become just another part of the darkness. The women wandered and scrambled from one dripping, fetid room to another, testing the muddy walls for hidden doors, searching for even a pinprick of light in the ceilings hanging with interesting but horrible growths.
Now they heard music. Five minutes wading and slithering brought them to a blocked-in doorway, but since it had been filled by the more modern Ankh-Morpork mortar of sand, horse dung, and vegetable peelings, several bricks had already fallen out. Sally removed most of the rest with one punch.
“Sorry about that,” she said. “It’s a vampire thing.”
The cellar behind the demolished wall had some barrels in it, and looked as though it was regularly used. There was a proper door, too. Rather dull, repetitive music filtered down from between the boards. There was a trapdoor in them.
“O-kay,” said Angua. “There’s people up there, I can smell them—”
“I count fifty-seven hearts beating,” said Sally. Angua gave her a Look.
“You know, that’s one particular talent I’d keep to myself, if I was you,” she said.
“Sorry, Sergeant.”
“It’s not the sort of thing people want to hear,” Angua went on. “I mean, I personally am quite capable of crushing a man’s skull in my jaws, but I don’t go around telling everyone.”
“I shall make a note of it, Sergeant,” said Sally, with a meekness that was quite possibly feigned.
“Good. Now…what do we look like? Swamp monsters?”
“Yes, Sergeant. Your hair looks dreadful. Just like a great lump of green slime.”
“Green?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“And my emergency dress is back down there somewhere,” said Angua. “It’s past dawn, too. Can you, er, go bats now?”
“In daylight? One hundred and fifty disoriented bits of me? No! But you could get out as a wolf, couldn’t you?”
“I’d kind of prefer not to be a slime monster coming through the floor, if it’s all the same to you,” said Angua.
“Yes, I can see that. It does not pay to advertise.” Sally flicked away a lump of nameless ooze. “Ugh, this stuff is foul.”
“So, the best we can hope for is that when we make a run for it, no one will recognize us,” said Angua, pulling a lump of wobbly green stuff from her hair. “At least we—oh, no…”
“What’s wrong?” said Sally.
“Nobby Nobbs! He’s up there! I can smell him!” She pointed urgently at the boards overhead.
“You mean Corporal Nobbs? The little…man with the spots?” said Sally.
“We’re not under a Watch house, are we?” said Angua, looking around in panic.
“I don’t think so. Someone’s dancing, by the sound of it. But look, how can you smell one human in the middle of all…this?”
“It never leaves you, believe me.” The smell of old cabbage, acne ointment, and nonmalignant skin disease became transmuted, in Corporal Nobbs, into a strange odor that lay across the nose like a saw blade on a harp. It wasn’t bad, as such, but it was like its host: strange, ubiquitous, and hellishly difficult to forget.
“Well, he’s a fellow officer, isn’t he? Won’t he help us?” said Sally.
“We are naked, Lance Constable!”
“Only technically. This mud really sticks.”
“I mean underneath the mud!” said Angua.
“Yes, but if we had clothes on we’re be naked underneath them, too!” Sally pointed out.
“This is not the time for logic! This is the time for not seeing Nobby grinning at me!”
“But he’s seen you when you’re wolf-shaped, hasn’t he?” said Sally.
“So?” snapped Angua.
“Well, technically you’re naked then, aren’t you?”
“Never tell him that!”
Nobby Nobbs, a shadow in the warm red gloom, nudged Sergeant Colon.
“You don’t have to keep your eyes shut, Sarge,” he said. “It’s all legit. It’s an artistic celebration of the female body, Tawneee says. Anyway, she’s got clothes on.”
“Two tassels and a folded hanky is not clothes, Nobby,” said Fred, sinking down in his seat. The Pink PussyCat Club! Now, fair’s fair, he’d been in the army and Watch, and you couldn’t spend all that time in uniform without seeing a thing or two—or three, now he came to recollect—and it was true, as Nobby had pointed out, that the ballerinas down at the opera house didn’t leave a lot to the imagination, at least not to Nobby’s, but when all was said and done, ballet had to be Art, even though it was a bit short on plinths and urns, on account of being expensive to look at, and moreover, ballerinas didn’t whizz around upside down. And the worst of it was, he’d already spotted two people he knew in the audience. Fortunately they hadn’t seen him, which was to say that whenever he’d sneaked a glance their way, they were looking in completely the opposite direction.
“Now this bit is really hard,” whispered Nobby conv
ersationally.
“Er…is it?” Fred Colon closed his eyes again.
“Oh, yes. It’s the Triple Corkscrew—”
“Look, don’t the management object to you coming in here?” Fred managed, shifting even further down in his seat.
“Oh, no. They like having a watchman in,” said Nobby, still watching the stage. “They say it makes people behave. Anyway, I only come in so’s I can walk Betty home.”
“Betty being—?”
“Tawneee’s actually only her pole name,” Nobby said. “She says no one would be interested in an exotic dancer with a name like Betty. She says it sounds like she’d be better with a bowl of cake mixture.”
Colon shut his eyes, trying to banish a mental conjunction of the bronzed lithe figure on stage and a bowl of cake mixture.
“I think I could do with a breath of fresh air,” he groaned.
“Oh, not yet, Sarge. Broccolee’s on next. She can touch the back of her head with her foot, you know—”
“I don’t believe that!” said Fred Colon.
“She can, Sarge, I’ve seen—”
“I don’t believe there’s a dancer called Broccoli!”
“Well, she did used to be called Candi, Sarge, but then she heard that broccoli is better for you—”
“Corporal Nobbs!”
The sound appeared to be coming from under the table.
Nobby stared at Fred Colon, and then looked down.
“Yes?” he ventured, with caution.
“This is Sergeant Angua,” said the floor.
“Oh?” said Nobby.
“What is this place?” the voice continued.
“The Pink PussyCat Club, Sergeant,” said Nobby obediently.
“Oh, gods.” There was some conversation down below, and then the voice said: “Are there women up there?”
“Yes, Sergeant. Er…what are you doing down there, Sarge?”
“Giving you orders, Nobby,” said the voice from below. “Are there women up there?”
“Yes, Sarge. Lots.”
“Good. Please ask one to come down into the beer cellar. We’ll need a couple of buckets of warm water and some towels, got that?”
Nobby was aware that the musicians had stopped playing and Tawneee had paused in mid–drop-and-split. Everyone was listening to the talking floor.
“Yes, Sergeant,” said Nobby. “I’ve got it.”
“And some clean clothes. And…” There was subterranean whispering “…make that several buckets of water. And a scrubbing brush. And a comb. And another comb. And more towels. Oh, and two pairs of shoes, size six and…four and a half? Really? Okay. And is Fred Colon with you, or is that a stupid question?”
Fred cleared his throat.
“I’m here, Sergeant,” he reported. “But I only came along to—”
“Good. I want to borrow a set of your stripes. I’ve got a bad feeling about the next few hours and I don’t want anyone to forget I’m a sergeant. Got that, the pair of you?”
“It’s full moon,” Fred whispered to Nobby, as one man to another, and then he said aloud: “Yes, Sergeant. This may take a while—”
“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 a 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 von 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, which 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 he was going to, 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 among 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.”
“Don’t know what you mean, sir,” said Vimes, collapsing gratefully into a chair.
“You don’t? I was referring, Vimes, to the speed with which both parties managed to incapacitate themselves with strong liquor at the same time…?”
“I wouldn’t know anything about that, sir.” That was an automatic reaction; it made life simpler.
“No? It appears, Vimes, that while steeling themselves for the fracas to come, both the trolls and the dwarfs came into possession of what I assume they thought was beer…?”
“They had been on the pi—been drinking all day, sir,” Vimes pointed out.
“Indeed, Vimes, and possibly that is why the dwarf contingent were less than cautious in drinking copiously from beer that has been considerably…fortified? Areas of Sator Square, I gather, still smell faintly of apples, Vimes. One could come to believe, therefore, that what they were drinking was, in fact, a mixture of strong beer and scumble, which is, as you know, distilled from apples—”
“Uh, mostly apples, sir,” said Vimes helpfully.
“Quite. The cocktail is known as Fluff, I believe. As to the trolls, one might speculate that it would be very hard to find anything to make their beer even more dangerous than it palpably is, but I wonder if you have heard, Vimes, that an admixture of various metallic salts produces a drink known as luglarr, or ‘Big Hammer’?”
“Can’t say I do, sir.”
“Vimes, some of the flagstones in the plaza have actually been etched by the stuff!”
“Sorry about that, sir.”
Vetinari drummed his fingers on the table.
“What would you do if I asked you an outright question, Vimes?”
“I’d tell you a downright lie, sir.”
“Then I will not do so,” said Vetinari, smiling faintly.
“Thank you, sir. Nor will I.”
“Where are your prisoners?”
“We spread them around the Watch house yards,” said Vimes. “As they wake up, we hose ’em clean, take their names, give ’em a receipt for their weapon and a hot drink, and push ’em out into the street.”
“Their weapons are culturally very important to them, Vimes,” said Vetinari.
“Yeah, sir, I know. I myself have a strong cultural bias against getting my brains bashed in and my knees cut off,” said Vimes, stifling a yawn and wincing as his ribs objected.
“Indeed. Were there any casualties in the battle?”
“None that won’t heal.” Vimes grimaced. “I have to report that Mr. A. E. Pessimal sustained a broken arm and multiple bruises, though.”
Vetinari actually looked taken aback.
“The inspector? What was he doing?”
“Er…attacking a troll, sir.”
“I’m sorry? Mr. A. E. Pessimal attacked a troll?”
“Yessir.”
“A. E. Pessimal?” Vetinari repeated.
“That’s the man, sir.”
“A whole troll?”
“Yessir. With his teeth, sir.”
“Mr. A. E. Pessimal? You are sure? Small man? Very clean shoes?” “Yessir.”
Vetinari grabbed a helpful question from the g
athering throng. “Why?”
Vimes coughed. “Well, sir…”
…The troll mob was a tableau. Trolls stood or sat or lay where they had been when the Big Hammer had struck. There were a few slow imbibers who put up a bit of a fight, and one who had stuck with a bottle of looted sherry put up a spirited last-drop stand until golem Constable Dorfl picked him up bodily and bounced him on his head.
Vimes walked through it all, as the squad dragged or rolled slumbering trolls into neat lines to await the wagons. And then—
The day was not improving for Brick. He’d drunk a beer. Well, maybe more’n one. Where was der harm in dat?
And now, dere, right in front of him, wearing one o’ dem helmets an’ everyting, was, yeah, could be a dwarf, insofar as the fizzing, sizzling pathways of his brain were capable of deciding anything at all. What der hell, they decided, it wasn’t a troll and dat was what it was all about, right? An’ here was his club, right here in his han’—
Instinct caused Vimes to turn as a troll opened red eyes, blinked, and began to swing a club. Too slowly, too slowly in the suddenly frozen time, he tried to dive away, and he felt the club smash into his side and lift him, lift him up and tip him onto the ground. He could hear shouting as the troll lumbered forward, club raised again to make Vimes at one with the bedrock.
Brick became aware that he was being attacked. He stopped what he was doing and, with sparks going fwizzle! in his brain, looked down his right knee. Some little gnome or somethin’ was attacking him wi’ a blunt sword and kickin’ an’ screamin’ like a mad t’ing. He put it down to the drink, like der feelin’ that his ears were givin’ off flames, an’ brushed der fing away with a flip of his hand.
Vimes, helpless, saw A. E. Pessimal tumble across the plaza, and watched the troll turn back to the clubbing at hand. But Detritus, arriving behind it now, pulled it around with one shovelsized hand and here came the Detritus fist, like the wrath of gods.
For Brick, everything went dar—
“You wish me to believe,” said Lord Vetinari, “that Mr. A. E. Pessimal single-handedly attacked a troll?”