‘And light?’
‘Of course. Excuse our lack of consideration. Stand back from the door, please. The guards with me are armed and they are … uncomplicated people.’
The grille on the door was swung back. A glowing cage was put on the ledge.
‘What’s this? A sick glow-worm?’
‘It is a kind of beetle, yes. You’ll find that it will very soon seem quite bright. We are very accustomed to darkness.’
‘Look,’ said Vimes, as the grille was shut again, ‘you know this is ridiculous! I don’t know what the position is with Mister Skimmer, but I damn well intend to find out! And there’s the Scone theft, I’m pretty certain I’m close to working that out, too. If you let me return to the embassy where else could I go?’
‘We would not wish to find out. You may just feel that life would be more pleasant in AnkhMorpork.’
‘Really? And how would we get there?’
‘You may have friends in unexpected places.’
Vimes thought of the evil little weapon in the pillow.
‘You will not be badly treated. This is our way’ said Dee. ‘I will return when I have news.’
‘Hey-‘
But Dee was a retreating shape in the crepuscular, almost-not-there light.
In Vimes’s cell the glow beetle was doing its best. All it managed to achieve, though, was to turn the darkness into a variety of green shadows. You could find your way around without walking into walls, but that was about the extent of it.
One shot, which they didn’t know you had.
That’d probably get him out of the door. Into a corridor. Underground. Full of dwarfs.
On the other hand, it was amazing how the evidence could stack up against you when people wanted it to.
Anyway, Vimes was an ambassador! What had happened to diplomatic immunity? But that was hard to argue when you were faced with uncomplicated people with weaponry; there was a risk that they’d experiment to see if it was true.
One shot they didn’t expect …
Some time later there was a rattling of keys and the door was pulled open. Vimes could make out the shape of two dwarfs. One was holding an axe, the other was bearing a tray.
The dwarf with the axe motioned Vimes to step back.
An axe wasn’t a good idea, Vimes considered. It was always the weapon of choice amongst dwarfs, but it wasn’t sensible in a confined space.
He raised his hands and, as the other dwarf walked cautiously over to the stone slab, let them move towards the back of his neck.
These dwarfs were nervous of him. Perhaps they didn’t see humans very often. They’d remember this one.
‘Want to see a trick?’ said Vimes.
‘Grz’dak?’
‘Watch this,’ said Vimes, and brought his hands around and shut his eyes just before the match flared.
He heard the axe drop as its owner tried to cover his face. That was an unexpected bonus, but there wasn’t time to thank the god of desperate men. Vimes plunged forward, kicked as hard as he could, and heard an ‘oof’ of expelled breath. Then he leapt into the patch of darkness that contained the other dwarf, found a head, spun around and rammed it into an unseen wall.
The first dwarf was trying to get to his feet. Vimes fumbled for him in the gloom, pulled him up by his jerkin and rasped: ‘Someone left me a
weapon. They wanted me to kill you. Remember that. I could have killed you.’
He punched the dwarf in the stomach. This was no time to play by the Marquis of Fantailler rules.*
Then he turned, snatched the little cage containing the light beetle and headed for the door.
There was a feeling of passageway, stretching off in both directions. Vimes paused for just long enough to sense the draught on his face and headed that way.
Another glow beetle was hanging in a cage a little distance off. It illuminated, if such a bright word could be used for a light that merely made the darkness less black, a huge circular opening in which a fan turned lazily.
The blades were so slow that Vimes was able to step between them, into the velvet cavern beyond.
Someone really wants me dead, he thought, as he inched his way along the nearest invisible wall with his face to the draught. One shot they weren’t expecting … but someone was expecting it, weren’t they?
*The Marquis of Fantailler got into many fights in his youth, most of them as a result of being known as the Marquis of Fantailler, and wrote a set of rules for what he termed ‘the noble art of fisticuffs’, which mostly consisted of a list of places where people weren’t allowed to hit him. Many people were impressed with his work and later stood with noble chest out-thrust and fists balled in a spirit of manly aggression against people who hadn’t read the Marquis’s book but did know how to knock people senseless with a chair. The last words of a surprisingly large number of people were ‘Stuff the bloody Marquis of Fantailler-‘
If you want to get a prisoner out of the clink, then you give him a key, or a file. You don’t give him a weapon. A key might get him out; a weapon would get him killed.
He stopped, one foot over emptiness. The glow beetle revealed a hole in the floor. It had the huge suckingness of depth.
Then he gripped the beetle’s cage between his teeth, took a few steps back and completely misjudged the distance. He hit the other side of the hole with every rib, both arms flat on the floor beyond.
A bit of AnkhMorpork sense of humour hissed between his teeth.
He scrabbled his way on to the cave floor and got his breath back. Then he took the one-shot out of his pocket, fired it into the floor, tossed it into the hole – it clattered and echoed for some time – and moved on, keeping his face towards the cold air.
This wasn’t a tunnel any more. It was the bottom of a shaft. But the green glow lit up something heaped in the middle.
Vimes picked up a handful of snow and, when he looked up, a flake melted on his face. He grinned in the dark. The beetle light just caught the edge of the spiral stairs fixed to the rock.
‘Stairs’ turned out to be a generous description. When the shaft had been cut, the dwarfs had made holes in the stone and hammered thick baulks of timber into them. He tried one or two. They seemed sturdy enough. With
care, he’d be able to scramble …
He was a long way up before one log snapped. He flung out his hands and caught the next one, his grip slipping on the wet wood. The glow beetle disappeared downwards and Vimes, swinging back and forth from his precarious handhold, watched the circle of dim green light dwindle to a dot and vanish.
Then the realization crept over him that there was no way he would be able to pull himself up. His fingers were numb, but the rest of his entire life consisted of the amount of time they could maintain a grip on the clammy step above him.
Call it a minute, perhaps.
There were a lot of things that could profitably be done in a minute, but most of them couldn’t be done with no hands while hanging in darkness over a long drop.
He lost his grip. A moment later he smacked into the spiral of logs one turn below, which parted company with the wall.
Man and timber fell one more turn. Vimes landed with a rib-bending thump across one step, while those around it gave way. Rocking gently on the one tough log, he listened to the thuds and booms as the fallen timber continued to the bottom of the shaft.
‘ !’ Vimes had intended to swear, but the fall had knocked the breath out of him. He hung like a folded pair of old trousers.
It had been a long time since he’d slept. Whatever he’d been doing on the slab it hadn’t been sleep. Normal sleep didn’t leave your mouth feeling as though glue had been poured into it.
And only this morning the new ambassador for AnkhMorpork had strolled out to present his credentials. Only this evening AnkhMorpork’s commander of police had set out to solve a simple little theft. And now he was dangling halfway up a freezing shaft, with a few inches of old and unreliable wood between him and a brief trip to the next world.
All he could hope for was that his whole life wasn’t going to pass before his eyes. There were some bits of it he didn’t want to remember.
‘Ah … Sir Samuel. Bad luck. You vere doing so vell.’