Men at Arms - Terry Pratchett [35]
“Samuel!”
Vimes adjusted his cravat as best he could.
He’d faced trolls and dwarfs and dragons, but now he was having to meet an entirely new species. The rich.
It was always hard to remember, afterwards, how the world looked when she was dans une certaine condition, as her mother had delicately called it.
For example, she remembered seeing smells. The actual streets and buildings…they were there, of course, but only as a drab monochrome background against which the sounds and, yes, the smells seared like brilliant lines of…colored fire and clouds of…well, of colored smoke.
That was the point. That was where it all broke down. There were no proper words afterwards for what she heard and smelled. If you could see an eighth distinct color just for a while, and then describe it back in the seven-colored world, it’d have to be…“something like a sort of greenish-purple”. Experience did not cross over well between species.
Sometimes, although not very often, Angua thought she was very lucky to get to see both worlds. And there was always twenty minutes after a Change when all the senses were heightened, so that the world glowed in every sensory spectrum like a rainbow. It was nearly worth it just for that.
There were varieties of werewolf. Some people merely had to shave every hour and wear a hat to cover the ears. They could pass for nearly normal.
But she could recognize them, nevertheless. Werewolves could spot another werewolf across a crowded street. There was something about the eyes. And, of course, if you had time, there were all sorts of other clues. Werewolves tended to live alone and take jobs that didn’t bring them into contact with animals. They wore scent or aftershave a lot and tended to be very fastidious about their food. And kept diaries with the phases of the moon carefully marked in red ink.
It was no life, being a werewolf in the country. A stupid chicken went missing and you were a number one suspect. Everyone said it was better in the city.
It was certainly overpowering.
Angua could see several hours of Elm Street all in one go. The mugger’s fear was a fading orange line. Carrot’s trail was an expanding pale green cloud, with an edge that suggested he was slightly worried; there were additional tones of old leather and armor polish. Other trails, faint or powerful, criss-crossed the street.
There was one that smelled like an old privy carpet.
“Yo, bitch,” said a voice behind her.
She turned her head. Gaspode looked no better through canine vision, except that he was at the center of a cloud of mixed odors.
“Oh. It’s you.”
“’S’right,” said Gaspode, feverishly scratching himself. He gave her a hopeful look. “Just askin’, you understand, just gettin’ it over with right now, for the look of the thing, for wossname’s sake as it might be, but I s’pose there’s no chance of me sniffing—”
“None.”
“Just askin’. No offense meant.”
Angua wrinkled her muzzle.
“How come you smell so bad? I mean, you smelled bad enough when I was human, but now—”
Gaspode looked proud.
“Good, innit,” he said. “It didn’t just happen. I had to work at it. If you was a true dog, this’d be like really great aftershave. By the way, you want to get a collar, miss. No one bothers you if you’ve got a collar.”
“Thanks.”
Gaspode seemed to have something on his mind.
“Er…you don’t rip hearts out, do you?”
“Not unless I want to,” said Angua.
“Right, right, right,” said Gaspode hurriedly. “Where’re you going?”
He broke into a waddling, bow-legged trot to keep up with her.
“To have a sniff around Hammerhock’s place. I didn’t ask you to come.”
“Got nothing else to do,” said