‘Or someone’s heart, anyway.’
‘Sam, really!’
‘All right, all right, but you must admit he does look a bit … odd.’
‘None of us can help the way we’re made, Sam.’
‘He looks as if he tried-Good grief …’
‘Oh, dear,’ said Lady Sybil.
Vimes was not against hunting, if only because AnkhMorpork seldom offered any better game than the large rats you got along the waterfront. But the sight of the walls of the new embassy might have been enough to make the keenest hunter take a step back and cry, ‘Oh, I say, hold on…’
The previous occupant had been keen on hunting, shooting and fishing and, to have covered every single wall with the resultant trophies, he must have been doing all three at the same time.
Hundreds of glass eyes, obscenely alive in the light of the fire in the huge hearth, stared down at Vimes.
‘It’s just like my grandfather’s study,’ said Lady Sybil. ‘There was a stag’s head in there that used to frighten the life out of me.’
‘There’s just about everything here. Oh, no …’
‘My gods,’ whispered Lady Sybil.
Vimes looked around desperately. Detritus was just entering, carrying some of the trunks.
‘Stand in front of it,’ Vimes hissed.
‘I’m not that tall, Sam! Or that wide!’
The troll looked up at them, then at the trophies, and then grinned. It’s colder up here, Vimes thought. He’s quicker on the uptake.* Even Nobby won’t play poker with him in the winter. Damn!
‘Something wrong?’ said Detritus.
Vimes sighed. What was the point? He’d spot it sooner or later.
‘I’m sorry about this, Detritus,’ he said, standing aside.
Detritus looked at the horrible trophy and nodded.
‘Yeah, dere used to be a lot of dat sort of fing in der old days,’ he said calmly, putting down the luggage. ‘Dey wouldn’t be de real diamond teef, o’course. Dey’d take dem out and put bigger glass ones in.’
‘You don’t mind?’ said Lady Sybil. ‘It’s a troll’s head! Someone actually mounted a troll’s head and put it on the wall!’
‘Ain’t mine,’ said Detritus.
‘But it’s so horrible!’
Detritus stood in thought for a moment and then opened the stained wooden box that contained all he had felt it necessary to bring.
*Detritus’s silicon-based brain was, as with most trolls, highly sensitive to changes in temperature. When the thermometer was very low he could be dangerously intellectual.
‘Dis is der old country, after all,’ he said. ‘So if it’d make you feel better…’
He pulled out a smaller box and rummaged among what appeared to be bits of rock and cloth until he found something yellowy-brown and round, like a shallow cup.
‘Should’ve bunged it away,’ he said, ‘but it’s all I got to remember my old granny by. She kept fings in it.’
‘It’s a bit of human skull, isn’t it?’ said Vimes at last.
‘Yep.’
‘Whose?’
‘Anyone ask dat troll dere his name?’ said Detritus, and the glint in his voice had a brittle edge to it for a moment. Then he carefully put the bowl away. ‘T’ings were diff’rent in dem days. Now you don’t chop our heads off an’ we don’t make drums outa your skin. Everyt’ing is hunky-dory. Dat’s all we have to know.’
He picked up the boxes again and followed Lady Sybil towards the staircase. Vimes took another look at the trophy head. The teeth were longer, far longer than they’d be on a real troll. A hunter’d have to be very brave and very lucky to go up against a fighting troll and survive. It’d be so much easier to go after an old one and later replace the ground-down stumps with sparkly fangs.
My gods, the things we do …
‘Igor?’ he said, as the odd-job man lurched past under the weight of two more bags.
‘Meth, your exthellenthy?’
‘I’m an excellency?’ said Vimes to Inigo.
‘Yes, your grace.’
‘And still my grace as well?’
‘Yes, your grace. You are His Grace His Excellency the Duke of Ankh, Commander Sir Samuel Vimes, your grace.’
‘Hang on, hang on. His Grace cancels out the Sir, I know that. It’s like having an ace in poker.’
‘Strictly speaking this is true, your grace, but great store is set by titles here and it is best to play with a full deck, mmph.’
‘I was once blackboard monitor at school,’ said Vimes sharply. ‘For a whole term. Would that help? Dame Venting said no one could clean a blackboard like me.’
‘A useful fact, your grace, which may possibly be helpful in the event of a tie-break, mmph, mmhm,’ said Inigo, his face carefully blank.
‘We Igorth have alwayth preferred marthter,’ said Igor. ‘What wath it you were requiring?’
Vimes gestured towards the heads that covered every wall.
‘I want them taken down as soon as possible. I can do this, can’t I, Mister Skimmer?’
‘You are the ambassador, sir. Mmph, mmhm.’
‘Well, they’re coming down. All of them.’
Igor gave the camphor-smelling multitude a worried look. ‘Even the thordfith?’
‘Even the swordfish,’ said Vimes firmly.
‘And the thnow leopardth?’
‘Both of them, yes.’
‘What about the troll?’
‘Especially the troll. See to it.’
Igor could have been said to have looked as if his world had fallen down around his ears were it not for the fact that he already looked as if this had happened.
‘What do you want to do with them, marthter?’
‘That’s up to you. Throw them in the river, maybe. Ask Detritus about the troll … Maybe it should be buried or something. Is there any supper?’
‘There’th fresh walago*, noggit, thclott, thwinefleth and thauthageth,’ said Igor, still clearly upset about the trophies. ‘I’ll thop tomorrow, if her ladythip giveth me inthtructionth.’
‘Is swineflesh the same as pork?’ said Vimes. People in drought-stricken areas would have paid good money to have Igor pronounce ‘sausages’.
‘Yes,’ said Inigo.
‘And what’s in the sausages?’
‘Er … meat?’ said Igor, looking as though he was ready to run.
‘Good. We’ll give them a try.’
Vimes went upstairs and followed the sound of conversation until he reached a bedroom, where Sybil was laying clothes on a bed the size of a small country. Cheery was assisting her.
The walls were carved panels of wood. The bed was carved panels of wood. And the mad fretworker had been hard at work here, too. Only A kind of pastry made from curtains.
Buckwheat dumplings stuffed with stuff.
Bpread made from parsnips, and widely considered to be much tastier than the dull wheat kind.
the floors weren’t wood; they were stone, and radiated cold.
‘It’s a bit like the inside of a cuckoo clock, isn’t it?’ said Sybil. ‘Cheery has volunteered to be my lady’s maid for now.’
Cheery saluted.
‘Why not?’ said Vimes. After a day like this, a lady’s maid with a long flowing beard seemed perfectly normal.
‘The floors are a bit chilly, though. Tomorrow I’ll measure up for some carpets,’ said Sybil firmly. ‘I know we won’t be here long, but we ought to leave something for the next people.’
‘Yes, dear. That would be a good idea.’
‘There’s a bathroom through there,’ said Sybil, nodding. ‘There’s hot springs near here, apparently. They pipe them in. You’ll feel better for a hot bath.’
Ten minutes later Vimes was happy to agree. The water was a funny colour and smelled a little of what he would politely call bad eggs, but it was good and hot and he could feel it drawing the tension out of his muscles.
The distressing scent of second-hand baked beans sloshed around him as he lay back. At the other end of the huge bath the lump of pumice stone that he’d been using to rasp the dead skin off his feet banged against the side. Vimes watched it, unseeing, while he filed the thoughts of the day.
Things were starting to smell, just like the bathwater. The Scone of Stone had been stolen, had it? Now there was a coincidence.
It had been a complete shot in the dark. But lately he was on the lucky side when it came to nocturnal targets. Someone had pinched the replica Scone, and now the real one had gone missing, and someone in AnkhMorpork who was good at making rubber moulds had been found dead. You didn’t need the brains of Detritus in a snowdrift to suspect a connection.
A recollection nagged at him. Someone had said something and he’d thought it odd at the time but then something else had happened and it had gone out of his mind. Something about … a welcome to Bonk. Only …
Well, he was here. No doubt about that.
Absolute confirmation of the fact was brought forth half an hour later, at supper.
Vimes cut into a sausage and stared. ‘What is in these? All this … pink stuff?’ he demanded.
‘Er, that’s meat, your grace,’ said Inigo, on the other side of the table.