‘And other people would notice if you had a great lump of rock up your jumper,’ said Vimes, more or less to himself. ‘So, this was a stupid crime. But it doesn’t feel stupid. I mean, why go to all this trouble? The lock on that door is a joke. You could kick it right out of the woodwork. If I was going to pinch this thing, I could be in here and out again before the glass had stopped tinkling. What would be the point of being quiet at this time of night?’
The dwarf had been rummaging under a nearby display cabinet. She drew her hand out. Drying blood glistened on the blade of a screwdriver.
‘See?’ said Vimes. ‘Something slipped, and someone cut their hand. What’s the point of all this, Carrot? Cat’s piss and sulphur and screwdrivers … I hate it when you get too many clues. It makes it so damn hard to solve anything.’
He threw the screwdriver down. By sheer luck it hit the floorboards tip first and stood there shuddering.
‘I’m going home,’ he said. ‘We’ll find out what this is all about when it starts to smell.’
Vimes spent the following morning trying to learn about two foreign countries. One of them turned out to be called AnkhMorpork.
Uberwald was easy. It was five or six times bigger than the whole of the Sto Plains, and stretched all the way up to the Hub. It was so thickly forested, so creased by little mountain ranges and beset by rivers, that it was largely unmapped. It was mostly unexplored, too.* The
*At least by proper explorers. Just living there doesn’t count.
people who lived there had other things on their minds, and the people from outside who came to explore went into the forests and never came out again. And for centuries no one had bothered about the place. You couldn’t sell things to people hidden by too many trees.
It was probably the coach road that had changed everything, a few years back, when they drove it all the way through to Genua. A road is built to follow. Mountain people had always gravitated to the plains, and in recent years Uberwald folk had joined them. The news got back home: there’s money to be made in AnkhMorpork, bring the kids. You don’t need to bring the garlic, though, because all the vampires work down at the kosher butchers’. And if you’re pushed in AnkhMorpork, you’re allowed to push back. No one cares enough about you to want to kill you.
Vimes could just about tell the difference between the Uberwald dwarfs and the ones from Copperhead, who were shorter, noisier and rather more at home among humans. The Uberwald dwarfs were quiet, tended to scuttle around corners, and often didn’t speak Morporkian. In some of the alleys off Treacle Mine Road you could believe you were in another country. But they were what every copper desires in a citizen. They were no trouble. They mostly had jobs working for one another, they paid their taxes rather more readily than humans did, although to be honest there were small piles of mouse droppings that yielded more money than most AnkhMorpork citizens, and generally any problems they had they sorted out amongst themselves. If such people ever come to the attention of the police, it’s usually only as a chalk outline.
It turned out, though, that within the community, behind the grubby facades of all those tenements and workshops in Cable Street and Whalebone Lane, there were vendettas and feuds that, had their origins in two adjoining mine shafts five hundred miles away and a thousand years ago. There were pubs you only drank in if you were from a particular mountain. There were streets you didn’t walk down if your clan mined a particular lode. The way you wore your helmet, the way you parted your beard spoke complicated volumes to other dwarfs. They didn’t even hand a piece of paper to Vimes.
‘Then there’s the way you krazak your G’ardrgh,’ said Corporal Littlebottom.
‘I won’t even ask,’ said Vimes.
‘I’m afraid I can’t explain in any case,’ said Cheery.
‘Have I got a Gaadrerghuh?’ said Vimes.
Cheery winced at the mispronunciation. ‘Yes, sir. Everyone has. But only a dwarf can krazak his properly,’ she said. ‘Or hers,’ she added.
Vimes sighed and looked down at the pages of scrawl in his notebook under the heading ‘Uberwald’. He wasn’t-strictly aware of it, but he treated even geography as if he was investigating a crime (‘Did you see who carved out the valley? Would you recognize that glacier if you saw it again?’).
‘I’m going to make a lot of mistakes, Cheery,’ he said.
‘I shouldn’t worry about that, sir. Humans always do. But most dwarfs can spot if you’re trying not to make them.’
‘Are you sure you don’t mind coming?’
‘Got to face it sooner or later, sir.’
Vimes shook his head sadly. ‘I don’t get it, Cheery. There’s all this fuss about a female dwarf trying to act like, like-‘
‘A lady, sir?’
‘Right, and yet no one says anything about Carrot being called a dwarf, but he’s a human-‘
‘No, sir. Like he says, he’s a dwarf. He was adopted by dwarfs, he’s performed the Y grad, he observes the j’kargra insofar as that’s possible in a city. He’s a dwarf.’
‘He’s six foot high!’
‘He’s a tall dwarf, sir. We don’t mind if he wants to be a human as well. Not even the drudak’ak would have a problem with that.’
‘I’m running out of throat sweets here, Cheery. What was that?’
‘Look, sir, most of the dwarfs here are … well, I suppose you’d call them liberal, sir. They’re mainly from the mountains behind Copperhead, you know? They get along with humans. Some of them even acknowledge that … they’ve got daughters, sir. But some of the more … oldfashioned … Uberwald dwarfs haven’t got out so much. They act as if B’hrian Bloodaxe was still alive. That’s why we call them drudak’ak.’
Vimes had a go, but he knew that to really speak dwarfish you needed a lifetime’s study and,
if at all possible, a serious throat infection.
‘“above ground” … “they negatively” …’ he faltered.
“‘They do not get out in the fresh air enough,”’ Cheery supplied.
‘Ah, right. And everyone thought the new king was going to be one of these?’
‘They say Albrecht’s never seen sunlight in his life. His clan never goes above ground in daylight. Everyone was certain it’d be him.’
And as it turned out it wasn’t, thought Vimes. Some of the Uberwald dwarfs hadn’t supported him. And the world had moved on. There were plenty of dwarfs around now who had been born in AnkhMorpork. Their kids went around with their helmets on back to front and spoke dwarfish only at home. Many of them wouldn’t know a pick-axe if you hit them with it.* They weren’t about to be told how to run their lives by an old dwarf sitting on a stale bun under some distant mountain.
He tapped his pencil on his notebook thoughtfully. And because of this, he thought, dwarfs are punching one another on my streets.
‘I’ve seen more of those dwarf sedan chair things around lately,’ he said. ‘You know, the ones carried by a couple of trolls. They have thick leather curtains …’
‘Drudak’ak,’ said Cheery. ‘Very … traditional dwarfs. If they have to go out in daylight, they don’t look at it.’
‘I don’t recall them a year ago.’
*At least, if you hit them hard enough.
Cheery shrugged. ‘There’s lots of dwarfs here now, sir. The drudak’ak feel they’re among dwarfs now. They don’t have to deal with humans for anything.’
‘They don’t like us?’
‘They won’t even talk to a human. They’re fairly choosy about talking to most dwarfs, to tell you the truth.’
‘That’s daft!’ said Vimes. ‘How do they get food? You can’t live on fungi! How do they trade ore, dam streams, get wood for shoring up their shafts?’
‘Well, either other dwarfs are paid to do it or humans are employed,’ said Cheery. ‘They can afford it. They’re very good miners. Well, they own very good mines, in any case.’
‘Sounds to me they’re a bunch of-‘ Vimes stopped himself. He was aware that a wise man should always respect the folkways of others, to use Carrot’s happy phrase, but Vimes often had difficulty with this idea. For one thing, there were people in the world whose folkways consisted of gutting other people like clams and this was not a’procedure that commanded, in Vimes, any kind of respect at all.
‘I’m not thinking diplomatically, am I?’ he said. Cheery watched him with a carefully blank expression.
‘Oh, I don’t know about that, sir,’ she said. ‘You didn’t actually finish the sentence. And, well, a lot of dwarfs respect them. You know … feel better for seeing them.’