Sally shrugged. ‘It’s worth a try, yes?’
They left, and the sound of their splashing soon died away.
Slowly the mud rose, rustling in the gloom. The trail of vurms gradually disappeared overhead. The vurms that made the sign remained, though, because such a feast as this was worth dying for.
Their glow winked out, one insect at a time.
The darkness beneath the world caressed the sign, which flamed red and died.
Darkness remained.
On this day in 1802 the painter Methodia Rascal tried putting the thing under a heap of old sacks, in case it woke up the Chicken, and finished the last troll, using his smallest brush to paint the eyeballs.
It was five a.m. Rain rustled out of the sky, not hard, but with a gentle persistence.
In Sator Square, and in the Plaza of Broken Moons, it hissed on the white ash of the bonfires, occasionally exposing the orange glow, which would briefly sizzle and spit.
A family of gnolls were sniffing around, each one dragging his or her little cart. A few officers were keeping an eye on them. Gnolls weren’t choosy about what they collected, provided it didn’t actually struggle, and even then there were rumours. But they were tolerated. Nothing cleaned up the place like a gnoll.
From here, they looked like little trolls, each with a huge compost heap on its back. That represented everything it owned, and mostly what it owned was rotten.
Sam Vimes winced at the pain in his side. Just his luck. Two coppers injured in the entire damn affair, and he had to be one of them? Igor had done his best, but broken ribs were broken ribs and it’d be a week or two before the suspicious green ointment made much difference.
Still, he enjoyed a bit of a warm glow about the whole thing. They had used good old-fashioned policing, and since good old-fashioned policemen are invariably outnumbered, he’d employed the good old-fashioned police methods of cunning, deceit and any damn weapon you could lay your hands on.
It had hardly been a fight at all. The dwarfs had mostly been sitting and singing gloomy songs because they fell over when they tried to stand up, or had tried to stand up and were now lying down and snoring. The trolls were, on the other hand, mostly upright, but went over when you pushed them. One or two, a little clearer in the head than the others, had put up a ponderous and laughable fight but had fallen to that most old-fashioned of police methods, the well-placed boot. Well, most of them had. Vimes shifted to ease the aching in his side; he should have seen that one coming.
But all’s well that ends well, eh? No deaths and, just to put a little cherry on the morning cake, he had in his hand an early edition of the Times in which a leading article deplored the gangs stalking the city and wondered if the Watch was ‘up to the job’ of cleaning up the streets.
Well, yes, I think we are, you pompous twerp. Vimes struck a match on a plinth and lit a cigar in recognition of a petty but darkly satisfying triumph. Gods knew they needed one. The Watch had taken a pounding over the whole damn Koom Valley thing, and it was good to hand the lads something to be proud of for a change. All in all, it was definitely a Result—
He stared at the plinth. He didn’t remember what statue had once been there. It celebrated generations of graffiti artists now.
A piece of troll graffiti adorned it, obliterating everything done by the artists who used mere paint. He read:
Mine sign, city scrawl, he thought. Things go bad, and people are moved to write on the walls…
‘Commander!’
He turned. Captain Carrot, armour gleaming, was hurrying towards him, his face as usual radiating an expression of 100 per cent pure Keen.
‘I thought I told every officer not on prisoner duty to get some sleep, captain,’ said Vimes.
‘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 Day 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 creditors 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 rotted 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 had become 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 using 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.’