Thud! - Terry Pratchett [58]
“I can feel the atmosphere in a mine, sir. Any dwarf can. And that one is rancid with fear and dread and horrible confusion. And there’s worse things in the Deeps than the Following Dark.”
Vimes had a momentary vision of vengeful darkness rising through caves like a tide, faster than a man could run…
…which was stupid. You couldn’t see dark.
Hold on, though…sometimes you could. Back in the old days, when he was on nights all the time, he’d known all the shades of darkness. And sometimes you got darkness so thick that you almost felt you had to push your way through it. Those were nights when horses were skittish, and dogs whined, and down in the slaughterhouse district the animals broke out of their pens. They were inexplicable, just like those nights that were quite light and silvery even though there was no moon in the sky.
He’s learned, then, not to use his little lantern. Light only ruined your vision, it blinded you. You stared into the dark until it blinked. You stared it down.
“Captain, I’m getting a bit lost here,” said Vimes. “I didn’t grow up in a mine. Are these signs drawn up because dwarfs think bad things are going to happen and want to ward them off, or think the mine deserves the bad things happening, or because they want the bad things to happen?”
“Can be all three at once,” said Carrot, wincing. “It can get really intense when a mine goes bad.”
“Oh, good grief!”
“Oh, it can be awful, sir. Believe me. But no one would ever draw the worst of the signs and want it to happen. Just the drawing wouldn’t be enough, anyway. You have to want it to happen with your very last breath.”
“And which one is that?”
“Oh, you don’t want to know, sir.”
“No, I did ask,” said Vimes.
“No. You really don’t want to know, sir. Really.”
Vimes was about to start yelling, but he stopped to think for a moment.
“Actually, no, I don’t think I do,” he agreed. “This is all about hysteria and mysticism. It’s just weird folklore. Dwarfs believe it. I don’t. So…how did you get the vurms to form that sign?”
“Easy, sir. You just smear the wall with a piece of meat. That’s a feast for vurms. I wanted to shake Ardent up a bit. Make him nervous, like you taught me. I wanted to show him I knew about signs. I am a dwarf, after all.”
“Captain, this is probably not the time to break it to you, but—”
“Oh, I know people laugh, sir. A six-foot dwarf! But being a human just means being born to human parents. That’s easy. Being a dwarf doesn’t mean being born to dwarfs, though it’s a good start. It’s about certain things you do. Certain ceremonies. I’ve done them. So I’m a human and a dwarf. The deep-downers find it a bit hard to deal with that.”
“It’s mystic again, is it?” said Vimes wearily.
“Oh yes, sir.” Carrot coughed. Vimes recognized that particular cough. It meant that bad news was on the captain’s mind and he was wondering how to shape it to fit the available not-going-totally-postal space in Vimes’s head.
“Out with it, Captain.”
“Er…this little chap turned up,” said Carrot, opening his hand. The Gooseberry imp sat up.
“I ran all the way, Insert Name Here,” it said proudly.
“We spotted it jogging along the gutter,” said Carrot. “It wasn’t hard to see, glowing pale green like that.”
Vimes pulled the Gooseberry box out of his pocket and put it on the floor. The imp climbed inside.
“Ooh, that feels so good,” it said. “Don’t talk to me about rats and cats!”
“They chased you? But you’re a magical creature, aren’t you?” said Vimes.
“They don’t know that!” said the imp. “Now, what was it…oh, yes. You asked me about the night soil removal. Over the past three months the extra honey wagon load has averaged forty tons a night.”
“Forty tons? That’d fill a big room! Why didn’t we know about it?”
“You did, Insert Name Here!” said the imp proudly. “But they were leaving from every gate, you see, and probably no guard ever spotted more than one or two extra carts.”
“Yes, but they turned in reports every night! Why didn’t we spot it?”
There was an awkward pause.
The imp coughed. “Um…no one read the reports, Insert Name Here.