Snuff

hideous strength. If you cut their leg off they wouldn’t notice until they fell over. Tricks didn’t work, and the floor was slippery with the debris of half a forest. As they kicked and punched their way back and forth across the wheelhouse deck, Stratford was winning. When had Vimes last eaten, or had a decent drink of water, or slept properly?
    And then from below was the cry “Barges away!” And the Wonderful Fanny bucked like a thoroughbred, throwing both of the fighters to the floor, where Vimes barely had room to kick and fend off blows. Water poured over them, filling the cabin to waist level, reducing Vimes’s stamina to almost nothing. Stratford had his hands around his throat, and Vimes’s world turned dark blue and full of chuckling water, banging against his ears. He tried to think of Young Sam and Sybil, but the water kept washing them away…except that the pressure was suddenly gone, and his body, deciding that his brain had at last gone on holiday, flailed upward.
    And there was Stratford, kneeling in water that was falling away very fast, a matter probably of no concern to him now since he was holding his head and screaming, owing to the fact that suddenly there was Stinky, spreadeagled on Stratford’s head, reaching down and kicking and scratching anything that could be kicked off, scratched or, to one lengthy scream, pulled.
    His Grace the Duke of Ankh, assisted by Sir Samuel Vimes, with the help of Commander Vimes, got to his feet, with the last-minute assistance of Blackboard Monitor Vimes, and all of them coalesced into one man as he leapt across the shaking deck just too late to stop Stratford pulling Stinky—and a certain amount of hair—off his head, and throwing him to the streaming deck and stamping on him heavily. There was no mistaking it. He’d heard the crack of bones even while airborne, and so what hit Stratford was the full force of the law, and its rage.
    The street is old and cunning; but the street is always willing to learn and that is why Vimes, in mid air, felt his legs unfold and the full majesty of the law hit Stratford with the traditionally unstoppable One Man He Up Down Very Sorry. Even Vimes was surprised and wondered if he would be able to do it again.
    â€œWe’re on the wave!” Gastric shouted. “We’re on it, not under it! We’re surfing all the way to Quirm, commander! There’s light ahead! Glory be!”
    Vimes grunted as he wrapped the last of the rope from his pocket around the stunned Stratford, tying him tightly to a stanchion. “Sink or swim, you’re going to pay, Mr. Stratford, from heaven, hell or high water, I don’t care which.”
    And then there was a creaking and a bellowing as the frantic oxen redoubled their attempts to escape the stench of the goblins immediately behind them, a surge skyward and while it would be most poetic to say that the waters were on the face of the earth, in truth they were mostly on the face of Samuel Vimes.

V imes woke in damp and utter darkness with sand under his cheek. Some parts of his body reported for duty, others protested that they had a note from their mother. After a while little insistent clues evolved: there was the sound of surf, the chatter of people and, for some reason, what sounded like the trumpeting of an elephant.
    At this point something stuck a finger in one of his nostrils and pulled hard. “Upsee-daisy, Mr. Po-leess-maan, otherwise you biggest pancake I ever seen! Upsee-daisy! Save Goblins! Big hero! Hurrah! Everybody get clap!”
    It was a familiar voice, but it couldn’t have been Stinky, because Vimes had seen the little goblin completely crushed. But Vimes tried to pull himself up anyway and this was almost impossible because of the stinking fishy-smelling debris that covered him like a shroud. He couldn’t bring his arm around to swat whatever blasted thing it was that was still tugging at his nostril, but he did manage to at least raise himself enough to realize that there was a lot of debris on top of him.
    He could make out what seemed like the thump of an elephant’s footfall, and in his state of comfortable hallucination wondered idly what an elephant was doing at the seaside, and how much care said elephant would take to avoid just another load of flotsam. This thought crystallized just as the tugging at his nose stopped and the cracked voice shouted, “Rise and shine, Mr. Vimes,