Thud! - Terry Pratchett [33]
Dat mine wi’ dem dwarfs, was dat real? You go an’ find a place to lie down and watch der pretty pichturs, suddenly you’re in dis dwarf hole? That couldna bin real! Only…word on der street was dat some troll had got into a dwarf hole, yeah, and everyone was lookin’ for dat troll an’ not to shake him by der han’…Der word said der Breccia wanted to find out real hard, and by der sound of it dey were not happy. Not happy that some dwarf who’d been puttin’ der bad word on the clans was off’ed by a troll? Were dey mad? Actually, it didn’t matter if dey was mad or not, ’cos dey had ways of asking questions dat didn’t heal for months, so he better be keepin’ out dere way.
On der oder hand…a dwarf wouldn’t know one troll from anoder, right? And no one else had seen him. So act normal, right? He’d be fine. He’d be fine. Anyway, it couldna bin him…
It occured to Brick—yeah, dat’s my name, knew it all der time—that he still had a bit of the white powder at the bottom of the bag. All he needed to do now was find a startled pigeon and some alcohol, any alcohol at all, and he be fine. Yeah. Fine. Nothin’ to worry about at all…
Yeah.
When Vimes stepped out into the brilliant daylight, the first thing he did was draw a deep breath. The second thing he did was draw his sword, wincing as his sore hand protested.
Fresh air, that was the stuff. He’d felt quite dizzy down there, and the tiny cut on his hand itched like mad. He’d better get Igor to take a look at it. You could probably catch anything in the muck down there.
Ah, that was better. He could feel himself cooling down. The air down there had made him feel really strange.
The crowd was a lot more like a mob now, but he saw at the second glance that it was what he thought of as a plum-cake mob. It doesn’t take many people to turn a worried, anxious crowd into a mob. A shout here, a shove there, something thrown here…and with care, every hesitant, nervous individual is being drawn into a majority that does not, in fact, exist.
Detritus was still standing like a statue, apparently oblivious to the growing din. But Ringfounder…damn. He was arguing hotly with people at the front of the crowd. You never argued! You never got drawn in!
“Corporal Ringfounder!” he bellowed. “To me!”
The dwarf turned as a halfbrick sailed over the heads of the mob and clanged off his helmet. He went over like a tree.
Detritus moved so fast that he was halfway through the crowd before the dwarf hit the cobbles. His arm dipped into the press of bodies and hauled up a struggling figure. He spun around, thudded back through the gap that hadn’t had time to close yet, and was beside Vimes before Ringfounder’s helmet had stopped rolling.
“Well done, Sergeant,” said Vimes out of the corner of his mouth. “Did you have a plan for the next bit?”
“I’m more der tactical kind, sir,” said Detritus.
Oh, well. At time like this you didn’t argue, and you didn’t step back. Vimes pulled out his badge and held it up.
“This dwarf is under arrest for assaulting a Watch officer!” he shouted. “Let us through, in the name of the law!”
And, to his amazement, the crowd went quiet, like a lot of children when they sense that this time the teacher is really, really angry. Perhaps it was the words on the badge, he thought. You couldn’t rub them out.
In the silence, another halfbrick dropped out of the free hand of the dwarf in Detritus’s very solid custody. Years later, Vimes would shut his eyes and still be able to recall the crunch it made when it hit the ground.
Angua stood up, with the unconscious Ringfounder in her arms.
“He’s concussed,” she said. “And I suggest, sir, that you turn around, just for a moment?”
Vimes risked a glance. Ardent—or, at least, a leather-shrouded dwarf that could