Thud! - Terry Pratchett [126]
Someone had moved silently across the room. They’d made no noise but, nevertheless, their passage had stirred the air and changed the texture of the subtle night sounds.
They were at the window now. It was bolted shut, and a faint noise was probably the bolt being slipped back.
It was easy to tell when the window itself was opened; new scents flooded in.
There was a creak that possibly only a werewolf would have heard, followed by a sudden rustling of many leathery wings. Little leathery wings.
Angua shut her eye again. The little minx! Maybe Sally just didn’t care anymore? No point in trying to follow her, though. She debated the wisdom of shutting the window and bolting the door, just to see what excuses Sally came up with, but dismissed it. No good telling Mister Vimes yet, either, what could she prove? It’d all be put down to the werewolf/vampire thing…
And now Koom Valley stretched away ahead of Vimes, and he could see why he hadn’t made plans. You couldn’t make plans for Koom Valley. It’d laugh at them. It would push them away, like it pushed away roads.
“Of course, you’re seeing it at its best at this time of year,” said Cheery.
“By ‘best’ you mean—?” Vimes prompted.
“Well, it’s not actually trying to murder us, sir. And there’s the birds. And when the sun’s right, you get some wonderful rainbows.”
There were lots of birds. Insects bred like mad in the wide, shallow pools and dams that littered the floor of the valley in late spring. Most of them would be dry by the late summer, but for now Koom Valley was a smorgasbord of things that went bzz! And the birds had come up from the plains to feast on all of it. Vimes wasn’t good at birds, but they mostly looked like swallows, millions of them. There were nests on the nearest cliff, a good half mile away, and Vimes could hear the chattering from here. And where trees and rocks had piled up in dams, saplings and green plants had sprouted.
Below the narrow track the party had taken, water gushed from half a dozen caves and joined together for one wild waterfall into the plain.
“It’s all so…so alive,” said Angua. “I was expecting just barren rock.”
“Dat’s what it like up at der battle place,” said Detritus, spray glistening on his skin. “My dad took me up dere when we were comin’ to der city. He showed me dis kind o’ rocky place, hit me on der head, and said, ‘Remember.’ ”
“Remember what?” said Sally.
“He didn’t say. So I just, you know, gen’rally remembered.”
I didn’t expect this, Vimes thought. It’s so…chaotic. Oh, well, let’s get clear of the cliff wall, at least. All these bloody great boulders must have got here from somewhere.
“I can smell smoke,” Angua announced after a while as they made their way unsteadily across the debris-strewn track.
“Campfires from up the valley,” said Cheery. “Early arrivals, I expect.”
“You mean people queue up for a place in the battle?” said Vimes. “Watch this boulder, it’s slippery.”
“Oh, yes. The fighting doesn’t start until Koom Valley Day. That’s tomorrow.”
“Damn, I lost track. Will it affect us down here?”
Bashfullsson coughed politely. “I don’t think so, Commander. This area is too dangerous to fight in.”
“Well, yes, I can see it would be terrible if anyone got hurt,” said Vimes, climbing over a long heap of rotting timber. “That would spoil the day for everyone.”
Historical Re-creation, he thought glumly as they picked their way across, under, over, or through the boulders and insect-buzzing heaps of splintered timber, with streamlets running everywhere. Only we do it with people dressing up and running around with blunt weapons, and people selling hot dogs, and the girls all miserable because they can only dress up as wenches, wenching being the only job available to women in the olden days.
But the dwarfs and the trolls…they fight it again, for real. Like, perhaps, if they fight it enough times, they’ll get it right?
Now there was a hole in the track in front of him, half-blocked with the winter’s debris, but still managing to swallow a whole streamlet. It poured, foaming, into the depths. There