Jingo - Terry Pratchett [4]
Vimes’s own lips moved. “Forebodings?”
“Dat’s der bunny.”
“Where does the word come from?”
Detritus shrugged. “Maybe it named after der soun’ you make just as a t’ousand ton of rock hit you.”
“Forebodings…” Vimes rubbed his chin. “Yeah. Well, I’ve got plenty of them…”
Landslides and avalanches, he thought. All the little snowflakes land, light as a feather—and suddenly the whole side of a mountain is moving…
Detritus looked at him slyly. “I know everyone say ‘Dem two short planks, dey’re as fick as Detritus’,” he said, “but I know which way der wind is blowin’.”
Vimes looked at his sergeant with a new respect.
“You can spot it, can you?”
The troll’s finger tapped his helmet twice, knowingly.
“It pretty obvious,” he said. “You see up on der roofs dem little chickies and dragons and stuff? And dat poor bugger on der Fieves’ Guild? You just has to watch ’em. Dey know. Beats me how dey always pointin’ der right way.”
Vimes relaxed a little. Detritus’s intelligence wasn’t too bad for a troll, falling somewhere between a cuttlefish and a line-dancer, but you could rely on him not to let it slow him down.
Detritus winked. “An’ it look to me like dat time when you go an’ find a big club and listen to grandad tellin’ you how he beat up all dem dwarfs when he was a boy,” he said. “Somethin’ in der wind, right?”
“Er…yes…” said Vimes.
There was a fluttering above him. He sighed. A message was coming in.
On a pigeon.
But they’d tried everything else, hadn’t they? Swamp dragons tended to explode in the air, imps ate the messages and the semaphore helmets had not been a success, especially in high winds. And then Corporal Littlebottom had pointed out that Ankh-Morpork’s pigeons were, because of many centuries of depredation by the city’s gargoyle population, considerably more intelligent than most pigeons, although Vimes considered that this was not difficult because there were things growing on old damp bread that were more intelligent than most pigeons.
He took a handful of corn out of his pocket. The pigeon, obedient to its careful training, settled on his shoulder. In obedience to internal pressures, it relieved itself.
“You know, we’ve got to find something better,” said Vimes, as he unwrapped the message. “Every time we send a message to Constable Downspout he eats it.”
“Well, he are a gargoyle,” said Detritus. “He fink it lunch arriving.”
“Oh,” said Vimes, “his lordship requires my attendance. How nice.”
Lord Vetinari looked attentive, because he’d always found that listening keenly to people tended to put them off.
And at meetings like this, when he was advised by the leaders of the city, he listened with great care because what people said was what they wanted him to hear. He paid a lot of attention to the spaces outside the words, though. That’s where the things were that they hoped he didn’t know and didn’t want him to find out.
Currently he was paying attention to the things that Lord Downey of the Assassins’ Guild was failing to say in a lengthy exposition of the Guild’s high level of training and value to the city. The voice, eventually, came to a stop in the face of Vetinari’s aggressive listening.
“Thank you, Lord Downey,” he said. “I’m sure we shall all be able to sleep a lot more uneasily for knowing all that. Just one minor point…I believe the word ‘assassin’ actually comes from Klatch?”
“Well…indeed…”
“And I believe also that many of your students are, as it turns out, from Klatch and its neighboring countries?”
“The unrivaled quality of our education…”
“Quite so. What you are telling me, in point of fact, is that their assassins have been doing it longer, know their way around our city and have had their traditional skills honed by you?”
“Er…”
The Patrician turned to Mr. Burleigh.
“We surely have superiority in weapons, Mr. Burleigh?”
“Oh, yes. Say what you like about dwarfs, but we’ve been turning out some superb stuff lately,” said the President of the Guild of Armorers.
“Ah. That at