He followed the banks for some way. They were criss-crossed with animal tracks. Here and there the water pooled in deep hollows that smelled of rotten eggs. Around them the leafless bushes were heavy with ice, where the steam had frozen.
Food could wait. Vimes stripped off his clothes and stepped into one of the deeper pools, yelping at the heat, and then lay back.
Didn’t they do something like this up in Nothingfjord? He’d heard stories. They had hot steamy baths and then ran around in the snow hitting one another with birch logs, didn’t they? Or something. There was nothing really daft that some foreigner wouldn’t do somewhere.
Gods, it felt good. Hot water was civilization. Vimes could feel the stiffness in his muscles melting away in the warmth.
After a moment or two he splashed over to the bank and rummaged through his clothes until he found a flattened cigar packet containing a couple of things that, after the events of the past
twenty-four hours, looked like fossilized twigs.
He had two matches.
Well, the hell with it. Anyone could light a fire with one match.
He lay back in the water. That was a good decision. He could feel himself coming back together again, pulled into shape by the heat within and without
‘Ah. Your grace…’
Wolf von Uberwald was sitting on the opposite bank. He was stark naked. A little vapour rose off him, as if he’d just been exerting himself. Muscles gleamed as though they’d been oiled. They probably had been.
‘A run in the snow is such a thing, is it not?’ said Wolf pleasantly. ‘You are certainly learning the ways of Uberwald, your grace. Lady Sybil is alive and well and free to go back to your city when the passes are cleared. I know you would wish to hear that.’
Other figures were approaching through the trees, men and women, all of them as unselfconsciously naked as Wolf.
Vimes realized he was a dead man bathing. He could see it in Wolf’s eyes. ‘Nothing like a hot dip before breakfast,’ he said.
‘Ah, yes. We also have not, as yet, breakfasted,’ said Wolf. He stood up, stretched, and cleared the pool from a standing start. Vimes’s breeches were picked up and examined.
‘I threw Inigo’s damn thing away,’ said Vimes. ‘I don’t think a friend put it there.’
‘It is all a great game, your grace,’ said Wolf. ‘Do not reproach yourself! The strongest
survive, which is as it should be!’
‘Dee planned this, did he?’
Wolf laughed. ‘The dear little Dee? Oh, he had a plan. It was a good little plan, although a touch insane. Happily, it will no longer be required!’
‘You want the dwarfs to go to war?’
‘Strength is good,’ said Wolf, folding Vimes’s clothes neatly. ‘But like some other good things, it only remains good if it is not possessed by too many people.’ He tossed the clothes as far as he could.
‘What is it you want me to say, your grace?’ Wolf continued. ‘Something like “You are going to die anyway so I might as well tell you,” perhaps?’
‘Well, it’d be a help,’ said Vimes.
‘You are going to die anyway.’ Wolf smiled. ‘Why don’t you tell me?’
Talking gained time. Maybe those woodcutters and charcoal burners would be along at any minute. If they hadn’t brought their axes everyone was going to be in big trouble.
‘I’m … pretty sure why the replica Scone was stolen in AnkhMorpork,’ said Vimes. ‘I’ve just got the inkling of an idea that a copy was made of it, which was smuggled here on one of our coaches. Diplomats don’t get searched.’
‘Well done!’
‘Shame Igor came to unload when one of your boys was there, wasn’t it?’
‘Oh, it’s hard to hurt an Igor!’
‘You don’t care, do you?’ said Vimes. ‘A bunch of dwarfs want Albrecht on the thro-the Scone because they want to hang on to that old-time
certainty, and you just want dwarfs fighting. And old Albrecht wouldn’t even get the right Scone back!’
‘Let us say that just now we find our interests converge, shall we?’ said Wolf.
Out of the corner of his eye Vimes saw the other werewolves spreading out around the pool.
‘And now you’ve set me up,’ he said. ‘Pretty amateurishly, I’d say. But impressive, because Dee couldn’t have had much time after he thought I was getting close. It would have worked, too. People aren’t good eye-witnesses. I know. They believe what they want to see and what people told them they saw. It was a nice touch giving me that damn one-shot. He really must have hoped I’d kill to escape-‘
‘Is it not time you got out of that … pool?’ said Wolfgang.
‘You mean bath?’ said Vimes. Yes, there was a wince. Vimes registered it. Oh, you’re walking upright and talking, my lad, and you look strong as an ox – but something between a human and a wolf has a bit of dog in them, doesn’t it?
‘We have an ancient custom here,’ said Wolf, looking away. ‘And it is a good one. Anyone can challenge us. It’s a little … chase. The great game! A competition, if you like. If they outrun us they win four hundred crowns. That is a very good sum! A man may start a small business with it. Of course, as I can see you realize, if they don’t outrun us the question of money does not arise!’
‘Does anyone ever win?’ said Vimes. Come on, woodcutters, the people need wood!
‘Sometimes. If they train well and know the country! Many a successful man in Bonk owes his start in life to our little custom. In your case, we’ll give you, oh, an hour’s lead. For the sport of it!’ He pointed. ‘Bonk is five miles in that direction. The lore says that you must not enter a dwelling until you get there.’
‘And if I don’t run?’
‘Then it will be a really short event! We do not like AnkhMorpork. We do not want you here!’
‘That’s odd,’ said Vimes.
Wolf’s broad brow wrinkled. ‘Your meaning?’
‘Oh, it’s just that everywhere I go in AnkhMorpork I seem to bump into people who come from Uberwald, you see. Dwarfs, trolls, humans. All beavering away quite happily and writing letters home saying, come on, it’s great here -they don’t eat you alive for a dollar.’
Wolf’s lip curled, revealing a glint of incisor. Vimes had seen that look on Angua’s face.. It meant she was having a bad hair ,day. And a werewolf can have a bad hair day all over.
He pushed his luck. It was clearly too weak to move by itself. ‘Angua’s getting on well-‘
‘Vimes! Mister Civilized! AnkhMorpork! You
will run!’
Hoping that his legs would support him, Vimes climbed out on the snow of the bank, as slowly as he dared. There was laughter from the werewolves.
‘You go into the water wearing clothes?’
Vimes looked down at his streaming legs. ‘You’ve never seen drawers before?’ he said.
Wolf’s lip curled again. He glanced triumphantly
at the others. ‘Behold … civilization!’ he said.
Vimes, puffed life into his cigar and looked around the frozen woodland with as much hauteur as he could muster.
‘Four hundred crowns, did you say?’ he said.
‘Yes!’
Vimes sneered at the forest again. ‘What is that in AnkhMorpork dollars, do you know? About a dollar fifty?’
‘The question will not arise!’ Wolf bellowed.
‘Well, I don’t want to have to spend it all here-‘
‘Run!’
‘In the circumstances, then, I won’t ask if you have the money on you.’
Vimes walked away from the werewolves, glad that they couldn’t see his face and very much aware that the skin on his back wanted to crawl around to his front.
He kept moving calmly, his wet drawers beginning to crackle in the frosty air, until he was certain he was out of sight of the pack.
So, let’s see … they’ve got better strength than you, they know the country, and if they’re as good as Angua they could track a fart through a skunk’s breakfast, and your legs hurt already.
So what are the pluses here? Well, you’ve made Wolf really angry.
Vimes broke into a run.
Not much of a plus there, then, all things considered.
Vimes broke into a faster run.
Off in the distance, wolves began to howl.
There is a saying: it won’t get better if you picket.
Corporal Nobbs or, rather, Guild President C. W. St J. Nobbs, reflected on this. A little early snow was fizzling in the air over the metal drum which, in approved strike fashion, was glowing red-hot in front of the Watch House.
A main problem, as he saw it, was that there was something philosophically wrong with picketing a building that no one except a watchman wanted to enter in any case. It is impossible to keep people out of something that they don’t want to go into. It can’t be done.