Men at Arms - Terry Pratchett [26]
Lord Vetinari bent over his paperwork again, and did not even look up when there was a distant, muffled cry. Instead, he reached down and rang a small silver bell.
A clerk hurried up.
“Go and fetch the ladder, will you, Drumknott?” he said. “Dr. Cruces seems to have fallen in the hoho.”
The back door to the dwarf Bjorn Hammerhock’s workshop lifted off the latch and creaked open. He went to see if there was anyone there, and shivered.
He shut the door.
“Bit of a chilly breeze,” he said, to the room’s other occupant. “Still, we could do with it.”
The ceiling of the workshop was only about five feet above the floor. That was more than tall enough for a dwarf.
Ow, said a voice that no one heard.
Hammerhock looked at the thing clamped in the vice, and picked up a screwdriver.
Ow.
“Amazing,” he said. “I think that moving this tube down the barrel forces the, er, six chambers to slide along, presenting a new one to the, er, firing hole. That seems clear enough. The triggering mechanism is really just a tinderbox device. The spring…here…has rusted through. I can easily replace that. You know,” he said, looking up, “this is a very interesting device. With the chemicals in the tubes and all. Such a simple idea. Is it a clown thing? Some kind of automatic slap-stick?”
He sorted through a bin of metal offcuts to find a piece of steel, and then selected a file.
“I’d like to make a few sketches afterwards,” he said.
About thirty seconds later there was a pop and a cloud of smoke.
Bjorn Hammerhock picked himself up, shaking his head.
“That was lucky!” he said. “Could have been a nasty accident there.”
He tried to fan some of the smoke away, and then reached for the file again.
His hand went through it.
AHEM.
Bjorn tried again.
The file was as insubstantial as the smoke.
“What?”
AHEM.
The owner of the strange device was staring in horror at something on the floor. Bjorn followed his gaze.
“Oh,” he said. Realization, which had been hovering on the edge of Bjorn’s consciousness, finally dawned. That was the thing about death. When it happened to you, you were among the first to know.
His visitor grabbed the device from the bench and rammed it into a cloth bag. Then he looked around wildly, picked up the corpse of Mr. Hammerhock, and dragged it through the door toward the river.
There was a distant splash, or as close to a splash as you could get from the Ankh.
“Oh dear,” said Bjorn. “And I can’t swim, either.”
THAT WILL NOT, OF COURSE, BE A PROBLEM, said Death.
Bjorn looked at him.
“You’re a lot shorter than I thought you’d be,” he said.
THIS IS BECAUSE I’M KNEELING DOWN, MR. HAMMERHOCK.
“That damn thing killed me!”
YES.
“That’s the first time anything like that has ever happened to me.”
TO ANYONE. BUT NOT, I SUSPECT, THE LAST TIME.
Death stood up. There was a clicking of knee joints. He no longer cracked his skull on the ceiling. There wasn’t a ceiling any more. The room had gently faded away.
There were such things as dwarf gods. Dwarfs were not a naturally religious species, but in a world where pit props could crack without warning and pockets of fire damp could suddenly explode they’d seen the need for gods as the sort of supernatural equivalent of a hard hat. Besides, when you hit your thumb with an eight-pound hammer it’s nice to be able to blaspheme. It takes a very special and strong-minded kind of atheist to jump up and down with their hand clasped under their other armpit and shout, “Oh, random fluctuations-in-the-space-time-contiuum!” or “Aaargh, primitive-and-outmoded-concept on a crutch!”
Bjorn didn’t waste time asking questions. A lot of things become a shade urgent when you’re dead.
“I believe in reincarnation,” he said.
I KNOW.
“I tried to live a good life. Does that help?”
THAT IS NOT UP TO ME. Death coughed. OF COURSE,…SINCE YOU BELIEVE IN REINCARNATION…YOU’LL BE BJORN AGAIN.
He waited.
“Yes. That’s right,” said Bjorn. Dwarfs are known for their sense of humor, in a way. People point them out and say: “Those little devils haven’t got a sense of humor.”
UM. WAS