‘Crime on the clacks is going to be a growing problem,’ said Carrot sadly, when they were alone again.
‘Quite likely, captain,’ said Vimes. ‘But here and now we know that our Sally is not being straight with us.’
‘We can’t be certain it’s her, sir,’ said Carrot.
‘Oh no?’ said Vimes happily. ‘This quite cheers me up. It’s one of the lesser-known failings of the vampire. No one knows why. It goes with having big windows and easily torn curtains. A sort of undeathwish, you might say. However clever they are, they can’t resist thinking that no one will recognize their name if they spell it backwards. Let’s go.’
Vimes turned back to head into the building, and noticed a small, neat figure standing patiently by the door. It had the look of someone who was quite happy to wait. He sighed. I bargain without an axe in my hand, eh?
‘Breakfast, Mr Bashfullsson?’ he said.
‘This is all rather fun,’ said Sybil an hour later, as the coaches headed out of the city. ‘Do you remember when we last went on holiday, Sam?’
‘That wasn’t really a holiday, dear,’ said Vimes. Above them, Young Sam swung back and forth in a little hammock, cooing.
‘Well, it was very interesting, all the same,’ said Sybil.
‘Yes, dear. Werewolves tried to eat me.’
Vimes sat back. The coach was comfortably upholstered and well sprung. At the moment, while it threaded through the traffic, the magical loss of weight was hardly noticeable. Would it mean anything? How fast could a bunch of old dwarfs travel? If they really had taken a big wagon, the coaches would catch them tomorrow, when the mountains were still a distant prospect. In the meantime, at least he could get some rest.
He pulled out a battered volume entitled Walking in the Koom Valley, by Eric Wheelbrace, a man who apparently had walked on just about everything bigger than a sheep track in the Near Ramtops.[19]It had a sketch map, the only actual map of the valley Vimes had seen. Eric wasn’t a bad sketch artist.
Koom Valley was… well, Koom Valley was basically a drain, that’s what it was: nearly thirty miles of soft limestone rock edged by mountains of harder rock, so what you had would have been a canyon if it wasn’t so wide. One end was almost on the snowline, the other merged into the plains.
It was said that even clouds kept away from the desolation that was Koom Valley. Maybe they did, but that didn’t matter. The valley got the water anyway, from meltwater and the hundreds of waterfalls that poured over its walls from the mountains that cupped it. One of those falls, the Tears of the King, was half a mile high.
The Koom River didn’t just rise in this valley. It leapt and danced in this valley. By the time it was halfway down, it was a criss-crossing of thundering waters, forever merging and parting. They carried and hurled great rocks, and played with whole fallen trees from the dripping forests that colonized the scree built up against the walls. They gurgled into holes and rose again, miles away, as fountains. They had no mappable course — a good storm higher up the mountains could bring house-sized rocks and half a stricken woodland down in the flood, blocking the sinkholes and piling up dams. Some of these could survive for years, becoming little islands in the leaping waters, growing little forests and little meadows and colonies of big birds. Then some key rock would be shifted by a random river, and within an hour it would all be gone.
Nothing that couldn’t fly lived in the valley, at least for long. The dwarfs had tried to tame it, back before the first battle. It hadn’t worked. Hundreds of dwarfs and trolls had been swept up in the famous flood, and many had never been found again. Koom Valley had taken them all into its sinkholes and chambers and caverns, and had kept them.
There were places in the valley where a man could drop a coloured cork into a swirling sinkhole and then wait for more than twenty minutes before it bobbed up on a fountain less than a dozen yards away.
Eric himself had seen this trick done by a guide, Vimes read, who’d demanded half a dollar for the demonstration. Oh yes, people visited the valley, human sightseers, poets and artists looking for inspiration in the rugged, uncompromising wildness. And there were human guides who would take them up there, for a hefty price. For a few extra dollars they’d tell the history of the place. They’d tell you how the wind in the rocks and the roaring of the waters carried the sounds of ancient battle, continuing in death. They’d say, maybe all those trolls and dwarfs the valley took are still fighting, down there in the dark maze of caves and thundering torrents.
One admitted to Eric that, when he was a boy and during a cool summer when the meltwaters were pretty low, he’d roped down into one of the sinkholes (because, like all such stories, the history of Koom Valley wouldn’t have been complete without rumours of vast treasuries, swept down into the dark) and had himself heard, above the sound of the water, battle noises and the shouting of dwarfs, no sir, honestly sir, it chilled my blood so it did, sir, why, thank you very much, sir…
Vimes sat up in his seat.
Was that true? If that man had gone a little further, would he have found the little talking cube that Methodia Rascal had been unlucky enough to take home? Eric had dismissed it as an attempt to scrounge another dollar, and probably it was, but— No, the cube would surely have been long gone by then. Even so, it was an intriguing thought.
The driver’s hatch slid back.
‘Outside the city, sir, clear road ahead,’ Willikins reported.
‘Thank you.’ Vimes stretched, and looked across at Sybil. ‘Well, this is where we find out. Hang on to Young Sam.’
‘I’m sure Mustrum wouldn’t do anything dangerous, Sam,’ said Sybil.
‘I don’t know about that,’ said Vimes, opening the door. ‘I’m sure he wouldn’t mean to.’
He swung himself out and hauled himself on to the roof of the coach, with a helping hand from Detritus.
The coach was moving well. The sun was shining. On either side of the highway the cabbage fields lent their gentle perfume to the air.
Vimes settled down beside the butler. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Everyone holding on to something? Good. Let ’em go!’
Willikins cracked the whip. There was a mild jolt as the horses stretched, and Vimes felt the coach speed up.
And that seemed to be it. He’d expected something a little more impressive. They were gradually going faster, yes, but that in itself didn’t seem very magical.
‘I reckon about twelve miles an hour now, sir,’ said Willikins. ‘That’s pretty good. They’re running well without—’
Something was happening to the harnesses. The copper discs were sparking.
‘Look at der cabbages, sir!’ Detritus shouted.
On either side of the road, cabbages were bursting into flame and rocketing out of the ground. And still the horses went faster.
‘It’s about power!’ yelled Vimes, above the wind. ‘We’re running on cabbages! And the—’
He stopped. The rear two horses were rising gently in the air. As he stared, the lead pair rose, too.
He risked turning in his seat. The other coach was keeping up with them; he could clearly see Fred Colon’s pink face staring in rigid terror.
When Vimes turned back to look ahead, all four horses were off the ground.
And there was a fifth horse, larger than the other four, and transparent. It was visible only because of the dust and the occasional glint of light off an invisible flank; it was, in fact, what you got if you took away a horse but left the movement of a horse, the speed of a horse, the… spirit of a horse, that part of a horse which came alive in the rushing of the wind. The part of a horse that was, in fact, Horse.
19
And even then had been belabouring mountain goats on apparently sheer cliff faces and, while pebbles slid and bounced around him, was clearly accusing them of obstructing his Right to Roam. Eric believed very firmly that The Land Belonged To The People, and also that he was more The People than anyone else was. Eric went everywhere with a map, encased in waterproof material, on a string around his neck. Such people are not to be trifled with.