Thud! - Terry Pratchett [97]
“Willard Brothers ‘Good Girl!’ Flea Shampoo,” said Angua. “It brings out the gloss,” she added defensively. “Look, I want to get this clear, right? Just because we spent hours wading around under the city, and, okay, maybe saved each other’s lives once or twice, it does not mean we’re friends, okay? We just happened to…be there at the same time!”
“You do need some time off,” said Sally. “I was going to buy a drink for Tawneee anyway, to say thanks, and Cheery wants to tag along. How about it? We’ve been stood down for now. Time out for a little fun?”
Angua struggled with a seething snake’s nest of emotions. Tawneee had been very kind, and far more helpful than you might expect from someone wearing six inches of heel and four square inches of clothing.
“Come on,” said Sally encouragingly. “I don’t know about you, but it’s going to take a bit of effort to get the taste of that mud out of my mouth.”
“Oh, all right! But this doesn’t mean we’re bonding!”
“Fine. Fine.”
“I’m not a bondage kind of person,” Angua added.
“Yes, yes,” said Sally. “I can see that.”
Vimes sat and stared at his notebook. He’d got “talking cube” written down and circled.
Out of the corner of his ear, he could hear the sounds of the City Watch rising from below: the bustle in the yard of the Old Lemonade Factory, where the Specials were assembling again, just in case; the rattle of the hurry-up wagon; the general murmur of voices coming up through the floor…
After some thinking, he wrote “old well” and circled that, too.
He’d scrumped plums in the gardens of Empirical Crescent with all the other kids. Half the houses were empty, and no one cared much. Yes, there had been a well, but it had long been full up to the top with garbage, even then. Grass was growing on the top. They only found the bricks because they looked for them.
So, let’s say that anything buried right at the bottom, where the dwarfs had headed, had been dumped, oh, more than fifty, sixty years ago…
You seldom saw a dwarf in Ankh-Morpork even forty years ago, and they weren’t anything like rich or powerful enough to own a cube. They were hard workers, seeking—just possibly—a better life. So, what human would throw away a talking box worth a mountain of gold? He’d have to be bloody mad—
Vimes sat rigidly, staring at the scrawls on the page. In the distance, Detritus was barking a command at someone.
He felt like a man crossing a river on stepping-stones. He was nearly halfway across, but the next stone was just a bit too far and could only be reached with serious groinal stress. Nevertheless, his foot was waving in the air, and it was that or a soaking…
He wrote: “Rascal.” Then he circled the word several times, the pencil biting into the cheap paper.
Rascal must have been to Koom Valley. Let’s say he found a cube there, who knows how. Just lying there? Anyway, he brings it home. He paints his picture and goes mad, but somewhere along, the cube starts talking to him.
Vimes wrote “SPECIAL WORD?” He drew a circle around it so hard that his pencil broke.
Maybe he can’t find the word for “stop talking”? Anyway, he chucks it down a well…
He tried to write “Did Rascal ever live in Empirical Crescent?,” and then gave up and tried to remember it.
Anyway…then he dies and, afterwards, this damn book is written. It doesn’t sell many copies, but recently it’s republished and…ah, but now there’re lots of dwarfs in the city. Some of them read it, and something tells them that the secret is in this cube. They want to find out where it is. How? Damn. Doesn’t the book say the secret of Koom Valley is in the painting? Okay. Maybe he…somehow painted some kind of code into the painting to say where the cube was? But so what? What was so bad to hear that you killed the poor devils who heard it?
I think I’m looking at this wrong. It’s not my cow. It’s a sheep with a pitchfork. Unfortunately, it goes quack.
He was getting lost now, going all over the place, but he’d got a toe on the opposite stone and he felt he made some progress.