‘So there no way out. Because way out is way in, too, and if no one know about tunnels, then it ’cos no way in.’
‘But they’ve got to lead somewhere.’
‘Okay.’
Black mud, more or less dry, made a path at the bottom of the tunnel. There was slime on the walls, too, indicating that at some point in the recent past the tunnel had been full of water. Here and there huge patches of fungi, luminous with decay, cast a faint glow over the ancient stonework.[21]
Cuddy felt his spirits lift as he plodded through the darkness. Dwarfs always felt happier underground.
‘Bound to find a way out,’ he said.
‘Right.’
‘So … how come you joined the Watch, then?’
‘Hah! My girl Ruby she say, you want get married, you get proper job, I not marry a troll what people say, him no good troll, him thick as a short plank of wood.’ Detritus’ voice echoed in the darkness. ‘How about you?’
‘I got bored. I worked for my brother-in-law, Durance. He’s got a good business making fortune rats for dwarf restaurants. But I thought, this isn’t a proper job for a dwarf.’
‘Sound like easy job to me.’
‘I had the devil of a time getting them to swallow the fortunes.’
Cuddy stopped. A change in the air suggested a vaster tunnel up ahead.
And, indeed, the tunnel opened into the side of a much larger one. There was deep mud on the floor, in the middle of which ran a trickle of water. Cuddy fancied he heard rats, or what he hoped were rats, scuttle away into the dark emptiness. He even thought he could hear the sounds of the city — indistinct, intermingled — filtering through the earth.
‘It’s like a temple,’ he said, and his voice boomed away into the distance.
‘Writing here on wall,’ said Detritus.
Cuddy peered at the letters hacked deeply into the stone.
‘ “VIA CLOACA”,’ he said. ‘Hmm. Well, now … via is an old word for street or way. Cloaca means …’{59}
He peered into the gloom.
‘This is a sewer,’ he said.
‘What that?’
‘It’s like … well, where do trolls dump their … rubbish?’ said Cuddy.
‘In street,’ said Detritus. ‘Hygienic.’
‘This is … an underground street just for … well, for crap,’ said Cuddy. ‘I never knew Ankh-Morpork had them.’
‘Maybe Ankh-Morpork didn’t know Ankh-Morpork had them,’ said Detritus.
‘Right. You’re right. This place is old. We’re in the bowels of the earth.’
‘In Ankh-Morpork even the shit have a street to itself,’ said Detritus, awe and wonder in his voice. ‘Truly, this a land of opportunity.’
‘Here’s some more writing,’ said Cuddy. He scraped away some slime.
‘ “Cirone IV me fabricat”,’ he read aloud. ‘He was one of the early kings, wasn’t he? Hey … do you know what that means?’
‘No one’s been down here since yesterday,’ said Detritus.
‘No! This place … this place is more than two thousand years old. We’re quite probably the first people to come down here since—’
‘Yesterday,’ said the troll.
‘Yesterday? Yesterday? What’s yesterday got to do with it?’
‘Footprints still fresh,’ said Detritus.
He pointed.
There were footprints in the mud.
‘How long have you lived here?’ said Cuddy, suddenly feeling very conspicuous in the middle of the tunnel.
‘Nine-er years. That is the number of years I have lived here. Nine-er,’ said Detritus, proudly. ‘It only one of a large … number of numbers I can count to.’
‘Have you ever heard of tunnels under the city?’
‘No.’
‘Someone knows about them, though.’
‘Yes.’
‘What shall we do?’
The answer was inevitable. They’d chased a man into the pork futures warehouse, and nearly died. Then they’d ended up in the middle of a small war, and nearly died. Now they were in a mysterious tunnel where there were fresh footprints. If Corporal Carrot or Sergeant Colon said, ‘And what did you do then?’, neither of them could face up to the thought of saying ‘We came back.’
‘The footprints go this way,’ said Cuddy, ‘and then they return. But the ones coming back aren’t so deep as the ones going. You can see they’re later ones because they’re over the top of the other ones. So he was heavier going than he was coming back, yes?’
‘Right,’ said Detritus.
‘So that means …?’
‘He lose weight?’
‘He was carrying something, and he left it … up ahead somewhere.’
They stared at the darkness.
‘So we go and find what it was?’ said Detritus.
‘I think so. How do you feel?’
‘Feel okay.’
Different species though they were, their minds had focused on a single image, involving a muzzle flash and a lead slug singing through the subterranean night.
‘He came back,’ said Cuddy.
‘Yes,’ said Detritus.
They looked at the darkness again.
‘It has not been a nice day,’ said Cuddy.
‘That the truth.’
‘I’d just like to know something, in case … I mean … look, what happened in the pork store? You did all that maths! All that counting!’
‘I … dunno. I saw it all.’
‘All what?’
‘Just all of it. Everything. All the numbers in the world. I could count them all.’
‘What did they equal?’
‘Dunno. What does equal mean?’
They trudged on, to see what the future held.
The trail led eventually into a narrower tunnel, barely wide enough for the troll to stand upright. Finally they could go no further. A stone had dropped out of the roof and rubble and mud had percolated through, blocking the tunnel. But that didn’t matter because they’d found what they were looking for, even though they hadn’t been looking for it.
‘Oh dear,’ said Detritus.
‘Very definitely,’ said Cuddy. He looked around vaguely.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘I reckon these tunnels are usually full of water. They’re well below the normal river level.’
He looked back to the pathetic discovery.
‘There’s going to be a lot of trouble about this,’ he said.
‘It’s his badge,’ said Carrot. ‘Good grief. He’s holding it so tight it’s cut right into his hand.’
Technically Ankh-Morpork is built on loam, but what it is mainly built on is Ankh-Morpork; it has been constructed, burned down, silted up, and rebuilt so many times that its foundations are old cellars, buried roads and the fossil bones and middens of earlier cities.
Below these, in the darkness, sat the troll and the dwarf.
‘What we doing now?’
‘We ought to leave it here and fetch Corporal Carrot. He’ll know what to do.’
Detritus looked over his shoulder at the thing behind them.
‘I don’t like that,’ he said. ‘It not right to leave it here.’
‘Right. Yes, you’re right. But you’re a troll and I’m a dwarf. What do you think would happen if people saw us carrying that along the streets?’
‘Big trouble.’
‘Correct. Come on. Let’s follow the footprints back out.’
‘Supposing it gone when we come back?’ said Detritus, lumbering to his feet.
‘How? And we’re following the tracks out, so if whoever it was who put it there comes back, we’ll run straight into them.’
‘Oh, good. I glad you said that.’
Vimes sat on the edge of his bed while Angua bandaged his hand.
‘Captain Quirke?’ said Carrot. ‘But he’s … not a good choice.’
21
It didn’t need to. Cuddy, belonging to a race that worked underground for preference, and Detritus, a member of a race notoriously nocturnal, had excellent vision in the dark. But mysterious caves and tunnels always have luminous fungi, strangely bright crystals or at a pinch merely an eldritch glow in the air, just in case a human hero comes in and needs to see in the dark. Strange but true.