Men at Arms

were at about head height, for a dwarf. “Could you come over here for moment, please?”
    The man grinned at his friends, and sauntered over.
    “I expect you can see the holes in his armor, right?” said Cuddy.
    C. M. O. T. Dibbler was a survivor. In the same way that rodents and insects can sense an earthquake ahead of the first tremors, so he could tell if something big was about to go down on the street. Cuddy was being too nice. When a dwarf was nice like that, it meant he was saving up to be nasty later on.
    “I’ll just, er, go about my business, then,” he said, and backed away.
    “I’ve got nothing against dwarfs , mind you,” said the fat man. “I mean, dwarfs is practically people, in my book. Just shorter humans, almost. But trolls…weeeelll…they’re not the same as us, right?”
    “’scuse me, ’scuse me, gangway, gangway,” said Dibbler, achieving with his cart the kind of getaway customarily associated with vehicles that have fluffy dice on the windscreen.
    “That’s a nice coat you’ve got there,” said Cuddy.
    Dibbler’s cart went around the corner on one wheel.
    “It’s a nice coat,” said Cuddy. “You know what you should do with a coat like that?”
    The man’s forehead wrinkled.
    “Take it off right now,” said Cuddy, “and give it to the troll.”
    “Why, you little—”
    The man grabbed Cuddy by his shirt and wrenched him upward.
    The dwarf’s hand moved very quickly. There was a scrape of metal.
    Man and dwarf made an interesting and absolute stationary tableau for a few seconds.
    Cuddy had been brought up almost level with the man’s face, and watched with interest as the eyes began to water.
    “Let me down,” said Cuddy. “Gently. I make involuntary muscle movements if I’m startled.”
    The man did so.
    “Now take off your coat…good…just pass it over…thank you…”
    “Your axe…” the man murmured.
    “Axe? Axe? My axe?” Cuddy looked down. “Well, well, well. Hardly knew I was holding it there. My axe. Well, there’s a thing.”
    The man was trying to stand on tiptoe. His eyes were watering.
    “The thing about this axe,” said Cuddy, “the interesting thing, is that it’s a throwing axe. I was champion three years running up at Copperhead. I could draw it and split a twig thirty yards away in one second. Behind me . And I was ill that day. A bilious attack.”
    He backed away. The man sank gratefully on to his heels.
    Cuddy draped the coat over the troll’s shoulders.
    “Come on, on your feet,” he said. “Let’s get you home.”
    The troll lumbered upright.
    “How many fingers am I holding up?” said Cuddy.
    Detritus peered.
    “Two and one?” he suggested.
    “It’ll do,” said Cuddy. “For a start.”

    Mr. Cheese looked over the bar at Captain Vimes, who hadn’t moved for an hour. The Bucket was used to serious drinkers, who drank without pleasure but with a sort of determination never to see sobriety again. But this was something new. This was worrying. He didn’t want a death on his hands.
    There was no one else in the bar. He hung his apron on a nail and hurried out toward the Watch House, almost colliding with Carrot and Angua in the doorway.
    “Oh, I’m glad that’s you, Corporal Carrot,” he said. “You’d better come. It’s Captain Vimes.”
    “What’s happened to him?”
    “I don’t know. He’s drunk an awful lot.”
    “I thought he was off the stuff!”
    “I think,” said Mr. Cheese cautiously, “that this is not the case any more.”

    A scene, somewhere near Quarry Lane:
    “Where we going?”
    “I’m going to get someone to have a look at you.”
    “Not dwarf doctor!”
    “There must be someone up here who knows how to slap some quick-drying cement on you, or whatever you do. Should you be oozing like that?”
    “Dunno. Never oozed before. Where we?”
    “Dunno. Never been down here before.”
    The area was on the windward side of the cattle yards and the slaughterhouse district. That meant it was shunned as living space by everyone except trolls, to whom the organic odors were about as relevant and noticeable as the smell of granite would be to humans. The old joke went: the trolls live next to the cattle-yard? What about the stench? Oh, the cattle don’t mind…
    Which was daft. Trolls didn’t smell, except to other trolls.
    There was a slabby look about the buildings here. They had been built for humans but adapted by trolls, which broadly had meant kicking the doorways wider