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built of honey-coloured stone with the occasional pillar or cherub nailed on. Inside,
the front door of No. 1 opened into the back bedroom of No.15, the ground-floor front
window of No.3 showed the view appropriate to the second floor of No.9, smoke from
the dining-room fireplace of No. 2 came out of the chimney of No.19.]
She sailed over the railing with silence and ease and landed on all fours on what had
once been a gravel path. Residents in the crescent seldom did much gardening,
since even if you planted bulbs you could never be sure whose garden they'd come
up in.
Angua followed her nose to a patch of rampant thistles. Some mouldering bricks in a
circle marked what must have been an old well.
The oily stink was heavy here, but there was a fresher, far more complex smell that
raised the hairs on Angua's neck. There was a vampire down there.
Someone had pulled away the weeds and debris, including the inevitable rotting
mattress and decomposing armchair. [1 It was okay to throw your rubbish into the
garden, because it might not be your garden you were throwing it into.] Sally? What
would she be doing here?
Angua pulled a brick out of the rotted edging and let it drop. Instead of a splash, there
was a clear wooden thump.
Oh well. She went back to human to get down; claws were fine, but some things were
better done by monkeys. The sides were of course slimy, but so many bricks had
fallen out over the years that the descent turned out to be easier than she'd
expected. And it was only about sixty feet deep, built in the days when it was widely
believed that any water that supported so many little whiskery swimming things must
be healthy.
There were fresh planks in the bottom. Someone - and surely it could only have been
the dwarfs - had broken into the well down here and laid a couple of planks across it.
They had dug this far, and stopped. Why? Because they'd reached the well?
There was dirty water, or water-like liquid, just under the planks. The tunnel was a bit
wider here, and dwarfs had been here - she sniffed - a few days ago, no more. Yes.
Dwarfs had been here, had fished around, and had then all left at once. They hadn't
even bothered to tidy up. She could smell it like a picture.
She crept forward, the tunnels mapping themselves in her nostrils. They weren't
nicely finished like the tunnels Ardent moved in. They were rougher, with lots of
zigzags and blind alleys. Rough planks and baulks of timber held back the fetid mud
of the plains, which was nevertheless oozing through everywhere. These tunnels
weren't built to last; they were there for a quick and definitely dirty job and all they
had to do was survive until it was done.
So the diggers had been looking for something, but weren't sure where it was until
they were within, what, about twenty feet of it, when they'd smelled it? Detected it?
The last stretch to the well was dead straight. By then, they knew where they were
going.
Angua crept on, almost bending double to clear the low ceiling until she gave up and
went back to wolf. The tunnel straightened out again, with the occasional side
passage that she ignored, although they smelled long. The vampire odour was still
an annoying theme in the nasal symphony, and it came close to drowning the reek of
foul water oozing from the walls. Here and there, vurms had colonized the ceiling. So
had bats. They stirred.
And then there was another scent, as she passed a tunnel opening. It was quite faint,
but it was unmistakably the whiff of corruption. A fresh death
Three fresh deaths. At the end of a short side tunnel were the bodies of two, no,
three dwarfs, half buried in mud. They glowed. Vurms had no teeth, Carrot had told
her. They waited until the prospective meal became runny of its own accord. And,
while they waited for the biggest stroke of luck ever to have come their way, they
celebrated. Down here, in a world far away from the streets, the dwarfs would
dissolve in light.
Angua sniffed.
Make that very fresh
'They found something,' said a voice behind her. 'And then it killed them.'
Angua leapt.
The leap wasn't intentional. Her hindbrain arranged it all by itself. The front brain, the
bit that knew that sergeants should not attempt to disembowel lance-constables
without provocation, tried to stop the leap in mid-air, but by then simple ballistics were
in charge. All she managed was a mid-air twist, and struck the soft wall with her
shoulder.
Wings fluttered a little way off, and there was a drawn-out organic sound, a sound
that conveyed the idea that a slaughterhouse man was having some difficulty with a
tricky bit of gristle.
'You know, sergeant,' said the voice of Sally, as if nothing had happened, 'you
werewolves have it easy. You stay one thing and you don't have any problems with
body mass. Do you know how many bats I have to become for my bodyweight? More
than a hundred and fifty, that's how many. And there's always one, isn't there, that
gets lost or flies the wrong way? You can't think straight unless you get your bats
together. And I'm not even going to touch on the subject of reassimilation. It's like the
biggest sneeze you can think of. Backwards.'
There was no point in modesty, not down here in the dark. Angua forced herself to
change back, every brain cell piling in to outvote tooth and claw. Anger helped.
'Why the hell are you here?' she said, when she had a mouth that worked.
'I'm off duty,' said Sally, stepping forward. 'I thought I'd see what I could find.' She
was totally naked.
'You couldn't have been so lucky!' Angua growled.
'Oh, I don't have your nose, sergeant,' said Sally, with a sweet smile. 'But I was using
a hundred and fifty-five pretty good flying ones, and they can cover a lot of ground.'
'I thought vampires could rematerialize their clothes,' said Angua accusingly. 'Otto
Chriek can!'
'Females can't. We don't know why. It's probably part of the whole underwired
nightdress business. That's where you score again, of course. When you're in one
hundred and fifty bat bodies it's quite hard to remember to keep two of them carrying
a pair of pants.' Sally looked up at the ceiling and sighed. 'Look, I can see where this
is going. It's going to be about Captain Carrot, isn't it?'
'I saw the way you were smiling at him!'
'I'm sorry! We can be very personable! It's a vampire thing!'
'You were so keen to impress him, eh?'
'And you aren't? He's the kind of man anyone would want to impress!'
They watched one another warily.
'He is mine, you know,' said Angua, feeling the nascent claws strain under her
fingernails.
'You're his, you mean!' said Sally. 'You know it works like that. You trail after him!'
'I'm sorry! It's a werewolf thing!' Angua yelled.
'Hold it!' Sally thrust both hands in front of her in a gesture of peace. 'There's
something we'd better sort before this goes any further!'
'Yeah?'
'Yes. We're both wearing nothing, we're standing in what, you may have noticed, is
increasingly turning into mud, and we're squaring up to fight. Okay. But there's
something missing, yes?'
'And that is ?'
'A paying audience? We could make a fortune.' Sally winked. 'Or we could do the job
we came here to do?'
Angua forced her body to relax. She should have been saying that. She was the
sergeant, wasn't she? [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]