‘Can’t really answer that, sir,’ he said, adopting a variant on his talking-to -Vetinari approach. ‘But…’
‘Yes?’
‘I’d wonder … you know, if I was a king … I’d wonder why people were happier living in squalor in AnkhMorpork than staying back home … sir.’
‘Ah. You’re telling me how I should think, now?’
‘No, sir. Just how I think. There’s dwarf bars all over AnkhMorpork, and they’ve got mining tools wired to the wall, and there’s dwarfs in ‘em every night quaffing beer and singing sad songs about how they wish they were back in the mountains digging for gold. But if you said to them, fine, the gate’s open, off you go and send us a postcard, they’d say, “Oh, well, yeah I’d love to, but we’ve just got the new workshop finished … Maybe next year we’ll go to Uberwald.”’
‘They come back to the mountains to die,’ said the King.
‘They live in AnkhMorpork.’
‘Why is this, do you think?’
‘I couldn’t say. Because no one tells them how to, I suppose.’
‘And now you want our gold and iron,’
said the King. ‘Is there nothing we can keep?’
‘Don’t know about that either, sir. I wasn’t trained for this job.’
The King muttered something under his breath. Then, much louder, he said, ‘I can offer you no favours, your excellency. These are difficult times, see.’
‘But my real job is finding things out,’ said Vimes, ‘If there is anything that I could do to-‘
The King thrust the papers at Vimes. ‘Your letters of accreditation, your excellency. Their contents have been noted!’
And that shuts me up, Vimes thought.
‘I would ask you one thing, though,’ the King went on.
‘Yes, sir?’
‘Really thirty men and a dog?’
‘No. There were only seven men. I killed one of them because I had to.’
‘How did the others die?’
‘Er, victims of circumstance, sir.’
‘Well, then … your secret is safe with me. Good morning, Miss Littlebottom.’
Cheery looked stunned.
The King gave her a brief smile. ‘Ah, the rights of the individual, a famous AnkhMorpork invention, or so they say. Thank you, Dee, his excellency was just leaving. You may send in the Copperhead delegation.’
As Vimes was ushered out he saw another party of dwarfs assembled in the anteroom. One or two of them nodded at him as they were herded in.
Dee turned back to Vimes. ‘I hope you didn’t tire his majesty.’
‘Someone else has already been doing that, by the look of it.’
‘These are sleepless times,’ said the Ideas Taster.
‘Scone turned up yet?’ said Vimes innocently.
‘Your excellency, if you persist in this attitude a complaint will go to your Lord Vetinari!’
‘He does so look forward to them. Was it this way out?’
It was the last word said until Vimes and his guards were back in the coach and the doors to daylight were opening ahead of them.
Out of the corner of his-eye Vimes saw that Cheery was shaking.
‘Certainly hits you, doesn’t it, the cold air after the warmth underground…’ he ventured.
Cheery grinned in relief. ‘Yes, it does,’ she said.
‘Seemed quite a decent sort,’ said Vimes. ‘What was that he muttered when I said I hadn’t been trained?’
‘He said, “Who has?”, sir.’
‘It sounded like it. All that arguing … it’s not a case of sitting on the throne and saying, “Do this, do that,” then.’
‘Dwarfs are very argumentative, sir. Of course, many wouldn’t agree. But none of the big dwarf clans are happy about this. You know how it is the Copperheads didn’t want Albrecht, and the Schmaltzbergers wouldn’t support anyone called Glodson, the AnkhMorpork dwarfs were split both ways, and Rhys comes from a little coalmining clan near Llamedos that isn’t important enough to be on anyone’s side …’
‘You mean he didn’t get to be king because
everyone liked him but because no one disliked him enough?’
‘That’s right, sir.’
Vimes glanced at the crumpled letters that the King had thrust into his hand. By daylight he could see the faint scribble on one corner. There were just two words.
MIDNIGHT, SEE?
Humming to himself, he tore the piece of paper off and rolled it into a ball.
‘And now for the damn vampire,’ he said.
‘Don’t worry, sir,’ said Cheery. ‘What’s the worst she can do? Bite your head off?’
‘Thank you for that, corporal. Tell me … those robes some of the dwarfs were wearing. I know they wear them on the surface so they’re not polluted by the nasty sunlight, but why wear . them down there?’
‘It’s traditional, sir. Er, they were worn by the … well, it’s what you’d call the knockermen, sir.’
‘What did they do?’
‘Well, you know about firedamp? It’s a gas you get in mines sometimes. It explodes.’
Vimes saw the images in his mind as Cheery explained …
The miners would clear the area, if they were lucky. And the knockerman would go in wearing layer after layer of chainmail and leather, carrying his sack of wicker globes stuffed with rags and oil. And his long pole. And his slingshot.
Down in the mines, all alone, he’d hear the knockers. Agi Hammerthief and all the other things that made noises, deep under the earth.
There could be no light, because light would mean sudden, roaring death. The knockerman would feel his way through the utter dark, far below the surface.
There was a type of cricket that lived in the mines. It chirruped loudly in the presence of firedamp. The knockerman would have one in a box, tied to his hat.
When it sang, a knockerman who was either very confident or extremely suicidal would step back, light the torch on the end of his pole and thrust it ahead of him. The more careful knockerman would step back rather more, and slingshot a ball of burning rags into the unseen death. Either way, he’d trust in his thick leather clothes to protect him from the worst of the blast.
Initially the dangerous trade did not run in families, because who’d marry a knockerman? They were dead dwarfs walking. But sometimes a young dwarf would ask to become one; his family would be proud, wave him goodbye, and then speak of him as if he was dead, because that made it easier.
Sometimes, though, knockermen came back. And the ones that survived went on to survive again, because surviving is a matter of practice. And sometimes they would talk a little of what they heard, all alone in the deep mines … the tap-tapping of dead dwarfs trying to get back into the world, the distant laughter of Agi Hammerthief, the heartbeat of the turtle that carried the world.
Knockermen became kings.
Vimes, listening with his mouth open,
wondered why the hell it was that dwarfs believed that they had no religion and no priests. Being a dwarf was a religion. People went into the dark for the good of the clan, and heard things, and were changed, and came back to tell…
And then, fifty years ago, a dwarf tinkering in AnkhMorpork had found that if you put a simple .fine mesh over your lantern flame it’d burn blue in the presence of the gas but wouldn’t explode. It was a discovery of immense value to the good of dwarfkind and, as so often happens with such discoveries, almost immediately led to a war.
‘And afterwards there were two kinds of dwarf,’ said Cheery sadly. ‘There’s the Copperheads, who all use the lamp and the patent gas exploder, and the Schmaltzbergers, who stick to the old ways. Of course we’re all dwarfs,’ she said, ‘but relations are rather … strained.’
‘I bet they are.’
‘Oh, no, all dwarfs recognize the need for the Low King, it’s just that …’
‘ . . they don’t quite see why knockermen are still so powerful?’
‘It’s all very sad,’ said Cheery. ‘Did I tell you my brother Snorey went off to be a knockerman?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘He died in an explosion somewhere under Borogravia. But he was doing what he wanted to do.’ After a moment she added, conscientiously, ‘Well, up to the moment when the blast hit him. After that, I don’t think so.’
Now the coach was rumbling up the mountain on one side of the town. Vimes looked down at the little round helmet beside him. Funny how you think you know about people, he thought.
The wheels clattered over the wood of a drawbridge.
As castles went, this one looked as though it could be taken by a small squad of not very efficient soldiers. Its builder had not been thinking about fortifications. He’d been influenced by fairytales and possibly by some of the more ornamental sorts of cake. It was a castle for looking at. For defence, putting a blanket over your head might be marginally safer.
The coach stopped in the courtyard. To Vimes’s amazement, a familiar figure in a shabby black coat came shuffling up to open the door.