Jingo

on a charge of being Naughtily Drunk last night…we’re going to have to charge him with impersonation as well, then? I don’t know, more blasted paperwork, the stuff just piles up…”
    Mr. Jenkins tried to look away but Vimes’s stare kept pulling him back. The occasional tremble of a lip suggested that he was preparing a riposte, but he was bright enough to spot that Vimes’s grin was as funny as the one that moves very fast toward drowning men. And has a fin on top.
    Mr. Jenkins made a wise decision, and got down. “I’ll…er…I’ll go and sort…I’d better go and…er…” he said, and pushed his way through the mob, which waited a little while to see if anything interesting was going to happen and then, disappointed, sought out other entertainment.
    “You want I should go an’ have a look at his boat?” said Detritus.
    “No, sergeant. There won’t be any silk, and there won’t be any paperwork. There won’t be anything except a lingering aroma of fish guts.”
    “Wow, dem damn Klatchians steals everything that ain’t nailed down, right?”
    Vimes shook his head and strolled on. “They don’t have trolls in Klatch, do they?” he said.
    “Nossir. It’s der heat. Troll brains don’t work in der heat. If I was to go to Klatch,” said Detritus, his knuckles making little bink-bink noises as he dragged them over the cobbles, “I’d be really stoopid .”
    “Detritus?”
    “Yessir?”
    “Never go to Klatch.”
    “Nossir.”
    Another speaker was attracting a much larger crowd. He stood in front of a large banner that proclaimed: GREASY FORANE HANDS OFF LESHP.
    “Leshp,” said Detritus. “Now dere’s a name that ain’t got its teef in.”
    “It’s the land that came back up from under the sea last week,” said Vimes despondently.
    They listened while the speaker proclaimed that Ankh-Morpork had a duty to protect its kith and kin on the new land. Detritus looked puzzled.
    “How come dere’s dese kiff and kin on dere when it only just come up from under der water?” he said.
    “Good question,” said Vimes.
    “Dey been holding dere breath?”
    “I doubt it.”
    There was more in the air than the salt of the sea, Vimes thought. There was some other current. He could sense it. Suddenly, the problem was Klatch.
    Ankh-Morpork had been at peace with Klatch, or at least in a state of non-war, for almost a century. It was, after all, the neighboring country.
    Neighbors…hah! But what did that mean? The Watch could tell you a thing or two about neighbors. So could lawyers, especially the real rich ones to whom “neighbor” meant a man who’d sue for twenty years over a strip of garden two inches wide. People’d live for ages side by side, nodding at one another amicably on their way to work every day, and then some trivial thing would happen and someone would be having a garden fork removed from their ear.
    And now some damn rock had risen up out of the sea and everyone was acting as if Klatch had let its dog bark all night.
    “ Aagragaah ,” said Detritus, mournfully.
    “Don’t mind me, just don’t spit it on my boot,” said Vimes.
    “It mean—” Detritus waved a huge hand, “like…dem things, what only comes in…” he paused and looked at his fingers, while his lips moved “…fours. Aagragaah. It mean lit’rally der time when you see dem little pebbles and you jus’ know dere’s gonna be a great big landslide on toppa you and it already too late to run. Dat moment, dat’s aagragaah.”
    Vimes’s own lips moved. “ Forebodings ?”
    “Dat’s der bunny.”
    “Where does the word come from?”
    Detritus shrugged. “Maybe it named after der soun’ you make just as a t’ousand ton of rock hit you.”
    “Forebodings…” Vimes rubbed his chin. “Yeah. Well, I’ve got plenty of them…”
    Landslides and avalanches, he thought. All the little snowflakes land, light as a feather—and suddenly the whole side of a mountain is moving…
    Detritus looked at him slyly. “I know everyone say ‘Dem two short planks, dey’re as fick as Detritus’,” he said, “but I know which way der wind is blowin’.”
    Vimes looked at his sergeant with a new respect.
    “You can spot it, can you?”
    The troll’s finger tapped his helmet twice, knowingly.
    “It pretty obvious,” he said. “You see up on der roofs dem little chickies and dragons and stuff? And dat poor bugger on der Fieves’ Guild? You just has to watch ’em. Dey know. Beats me how dey always