‘The guards on the gates were pretty keen, sir.’
‘Well, yes. Guards always are, just after a theft. Smart as foxes and sharp as knives, just in case anyone wonders if it was them who dropped off to sleep at the wrong time. I’m a copper, Cheery. I know how dull guarding can be. Especially when you know that no one is ever going to steal what you’re guarding.’ He scuffed the sand with his boot.
‘They were looking hard at every cart that went in or out this morning. But that was because the Scone had been stolen. It’s at times like this you get very official, very efficient and very pointless activity. Don’t try to tell me that last week they opened every barrel and prodded every load of hay. Even the stuff coming in? Can you see Dee? Is he looking at me?’
Cheery peered around Vimes.
‘No, sir.’
‘Good.’
Vimes walked over to the tunnel, pressed his back against a wall, took a deep breath and walked his legs up the opposite wall. Then he eased his way out over the plates of the weighbridge, inched along with feet and
shoulderblades and, wincing at every protest from his knees, eventually dropped down. He walked across to Dee, who was talking to the guards.
‘How did-‘
‘Never. mind,’ said Vimes. ‘Let’s just say I’m longer than a dwarf, shall we?’
‘Have you solved it?’
‘No. But I have an idea.’
‘Really? Already?’ said Dee. ‘And what is that?’
‘I’m still working it out,’ said Vimes. ‘But it’s lucky the King told you to ask me, Dee. One thing I have found out is that no dwarf will give you the right answer.’
The opera was near the end as Vimes slipped into the seat beside Sybil. ‘Have I missed anything?’ he said.
‘It’s very good. Where have you been?’
‘You wouldn’t believe me.’
He stared, unseeing, at the stage. A couple of dwarfs were engaged in a very careful mock battle.
All right, then. If it was politics it was … well, politics. There was nothing he could do about politics. So, think about it as a crime …
What was the simple solution? Best to start with the first rule of policing: suspect the victim. Vimes wasn’t quite sure who the victim was here, though. So suspect the witness. That was another good rule. That meant the late Dozy. He could have walked out with the Scone days before he ‘discovered’ the loss. He could have done just about anything. The way the thing was guarded was a joke. Nobby and Colon could have done it better. Much better, he corrected himself, because they had devious little minds and that was what made them coppers. The guards of the Scone were honourable dwarfs, the last people you wanted to entrust with anything. You wanted sneaky people for a job like this.
But it made no sense. He’d be the prime suspect. Vimes wasn’t well up on dwarf law, but he figured there was not a huge friendly future in store for a prime suspect, especially if no other solution was forthcoming.
Maybe he’d snapped after sixty years of changing candles? That didn’t sound right. Anyone who could put up with a job like that for ten years would probably run in their groove for the rest of eternity. Anyway, Dozy had now gone to the great big goldmine in the sky or deep underground or whatever it was dwarfs believed in. He wasn’t going to be answering any questions.
He could solve this, Vimes told himself. Everything he needed was there, if only he asked the right questions and thought the right way.
But his Vimish instincts were trying to tell him something else.
This was a crime – if holding a piece of property to ransom was technically a crime – but it wasn’t the crime.
There was another crime here. He knew it in the same way that a fisherman spots the shoal by the ripple on the water.
The fight on stage continued. It was slowed by
the need to stop after every gingerly exchanged axe blow for a song, probably about gold.
‘Er, what’s this all about?’ he said.
‘It’s nearly over,’ whispered Sybil. ‘They’ve only performed the bit concerning the baking of the Scone, really, but at least they’ve included the Ransom Aria. Ironhammer escapes from prison with the help of Skalt, steals the truth that Agi has hidden, conceals it by baking it into the Scone, and persuades the guards around Bloodaxe’s camp to let him pass. The dwarfs believe that truth was once a, a thing … a sort of ultimate rare metal, really, and the last bit of it is inside the Scone. And the .guards can’t resist, because of the sheer power of it. The song is about how love, like truth, will always reveal itself, just as the grain of truth inside the Scone makes the whole thing true. It’s actually one of the finest pieces of music in the world. Gold is hardly mentioned at all.’
Vimes stared. He got lost in any song more complex than the sort with titles like ‘Where Has All The Custard Gone (Jelly’s Just Not The Same)?’
‘Bloodaxe and Ironhammer,’ he muttered, aware that dwarfs around them were giving him annoyed looks. ‘Which one was-‘
‘Cheery told you. They were both dwarfs,’ said Sybil sharply.
‘Ah,’ said Vimes glumly.
He was always a little out of his depth in these matters. There were men, and there were women. He was clear on that. Sam Vimes was an uncomplicated man when it came to what poets called ‘the lists of love’.* In some parts of the Shades, he knew, people adopted a more pickand-mix approach. Vimes looked upon this as he looked upon a distant country; he’d never been there, and it wasn’t his problem. It amazed him what people got up to when they had time on their hands.
He just found it hard to imagine a world without a map. It wasn’t that the dwarfs ignored sex, it really didn’t seem important to them. If humans thought the same way, his job would be a lot simpler.
There seemed to be a deathbed scene now. It was a little hard for Vimes, with his shaky command of , AnkhMorpork street dwarfish, to follow what was going on. Someone was dying, and someone else was very sorry about it. Both the main singers had beards you could hide a chicken in. They weren’t bothering to act, apart from infrequently waving an arm in the direction of the other singer.
But there were sobs all around him, and occasionally the trumpeting of a blown nose. Even Sybil’s lower lip was trembling.
It’s just a song, he wanted to say. It’s not real. Crime and streets and chases … they’re real. A song won’t get you out of a tight corner. Try *He’d noticed that sex bore some resemblance to cookery: it fascinated people, they sometimes bought books full of complicated recipes and interesting pictures, and sometimes when they were really hungry they created vast banquets in their imagination – but at the end of the day they’d settle quite happily for egg and chips. If it was well done and maybe had a slice of tomato.
waving a large bun at an armed guard in AnkhMorpork and see how far it gets you …
He shouldered his way through the throng after the performance, which from the humans present had received the usual warm reception that such things always got from people who hadn’t really understood what was going on but rather felt that they should have done.
Dee was talking to a black-clad, heavily built young man who looked vaguely familiar to Vimes. Vimes must have looked familiar to him as well because he gave him a nod just short of offensiveness.
‘Ah, your grace Vimes,’ he said. ‘And did you enjoy the opera?’
‘Especially the bit about the gold,’ said Vimes. ‘And you are-?’
The man clicked his heels. ‘Wolf von Uberwald!’
Something went ‘bing’ in Vimes’s head. And his eyes picked up details – the slight lengthening of the incisors, the way the blond hair was so thick around the collar
‘Angua’s brother?’ he said.
‘Yes, your grace.’
‘Wolf the wolf, eh?’
‘Thank you, your grace,’ said Wolf solemnly. ‘That is very funny. Indeed, yes! It is quite some time since I heard that one! Your AnkhMorpork sense of humour!’
‘But you’re wearing silver on your … uniform. Those … insignias. Wolf heads biting the lightning …’
Wolf shrugged. ‘Ah, the kind of thing a policeman would notice. But they are nickel!’
‘I don’t recognize the regiment.’
‘We are more of a … movement,’ said Wolf.
The stance was Angua’s, too. It was the poised, fight-or-flight look, as if the whole body was a spring eager to unwind and ‘flight’ wasn’t an option. People in the presence of Angua when she was in a bad mood tended to turn up their collars without quite knowing why. But the eyes were different. They weren’t like Angua’s. They weren’t even like the eyes of a wolf.