Men at Arms

something.”
    “Oh?”
    “Something bad.”
    “You won’t like it at all,” said Detritus. “Bad, bad, bad. Even worse.”
    “We thought it would be best to leave it there,” said Cuddy, “on account of it being Evidence. But you ought to see it.”
    “It’s going to upset everything,” said the troll, warming to the part.
    “What was it?”
    “If we tell you, you say, stupid ethnic people, you pulling my leg off,” said Detritus.
    “So you’d better come and see,” said Cuddy.
    Sergeant Colon looked at the rest of the Watch.
    “All of us?” he said, nervously. “Er. Shouldn’t a couple of senior officers stay up here? In case anything happens?”
    “Do you mean in case anything happens up here?” said Angua, tartly. “Or in case anything happens down there?”
    “I’ll go with Lance-Constable Cuddy and Lance-Constable Detritus,” said Carrot. “I don’t think anyone else ought to come.”
    “But it could be dangerous!” said Angua.
    “If I find who’s been shooting at Watchmen,” said Carrot, “it will be.”

    Samuel Vimes reached up with a big toe and turned on the hot tap.
    There was a respectful knock at the door, and Willikins old-retainer’d in.
    “Would sir be wanting anything?”
    Vimes thought about it.
    “Lady Ramkin said you wouldn’t be wanting any alcohol,” said Willikins, as if reading his thoughts.
    “Did she?”
    “Emphatically, sir. But I have here a very fine cigar.”
    He winced as Vimes bit the end off and spat it over the side of the bath, but produced some matches and lit it for him.
    “Thank you, Willikins. What’s your first name?”
    “First name, sir?”
    “I mean, what do people call you when they’ve got to know you better?”
    “Willikins, sir.”
    “Oh, Right, then. Well. You may go, Willikins.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    Vimes lay back in the warm water. The inner voice was still in there somewhere, but he tried not to pay any attention. About now, it was saying, you’d be proceeding along the Street of Small Gods, just by the bit of old city wall where you could stop and smoke a rollup out of the wind…
    To drown it out, he started to sing at the top of his voice.

    The cavernous sewers under the city echoed with human and near-human voices for the first time in millennia.
    “Hi-ho—”
    “—hi-ho—”
    “Oook oook oook oook ook—”
    “You all stupid !”
    “I can’t help it. It’s my nearly-dwarfish blood. We just like singing underground. It comes naturally to us.”
    “All right, but why him singing? Him ape .”
    “He’s a people person.”
    They’d brought torches. Shadows jumped among the pillars in the big cavern, and fled along the tunnels. Whatever the possible lurking dangers, Carrot was beside himself with the joy of discovery.
    “It’s amazing! The Via Cloaca is mentioned in some old book I read, but everyone thought it was a lost street! Superb workmanship. Lucky for you the river was so low. It looks as though these are normally full of water.”
    “That’s what I said,” said Cuddy. “Full of water, I said.”
    He glanced cautiously at the dancing shadows, which made weird and worrying shapes on the far wall—strange biped animals, eldritch underground things…
    Carrot sighed.
    “Stop making shadow pictures, Detritus.”
    “Oook.”
    “What him say?”
    “He said ‘Do Deformed Rabbit, it’s my favorite’,” Carrot translated.
    Rats rustled in the darkness. Cuddy peered around. He kept imagining figures, back there, sighting along some kind of pipe…
    There were a disturbing few moments when he lost sight of the tracks on the wet stone, but he picked them up again near a mold-hung wall. And then, there was the particular pipe. He’d made a scratch on the stones.
    “It’s not far along,” he said, handing Carrot the torch.
    Carrot disappeared.
    They heard his footsteps in the mud, and then a whistle of surprise, and then silence for a while.
    Carrot reappeared.
    “My word,” he said. “You two know who this is?”
    “It looks like—” Cuddy began.
    “It looks like trouble,” said Carrot.
    “You see why we didn’t bring it back up?” said Cuddy. “Carrying a human’s corpse through the streets right now would not be a good idea, I thought. Especially this one.”
    “I thought some of that, too,” Detritus volunteered.
    “Right enough,” said Carrot. “Well done, men. I think we’d better…leave it for now, and come back with a sack later on. And…don’t tell anyone