Thud!

cooing.
    “Well, it was very interesting, all the same,” said Sybil.
    “Yes, dear. Werewolves tried to eat me.”
    Vimes sat back. The coach was comfortably upholstered and well sprung. At the moment, while it threaded through the traffic, the magical loss of weight was hardly noticeable. Would it mean anything? How fast could a bunch of old dwarfs travel? If they really had taken a big wagon, the coaches would catch them tomorrow, when the mountains were still a distant prospect. In the meantime, at least he could get some rest.
    He pulled out a battered volume titled Walking in the Koom Valley , by Eric Wheelbrace, a man who apparently had walked on just about everything bigger than a sheep track in the Near Ramtops. *
    It had a sketch map, the only actual map of the valley Vimes had seen. Eric wasn’t a half-bad sketch artist.
    Koom Valley was…well, Koom Valley was basically a drain, that’s what it was; nearly thirty miles of soft limestone rock edged by mountains of harder rock, so what you had would have been a canyon if it wasn’t so wide. One end was almost on the snowline, the other merged into the plains.
    It was said that even clouds kept away from the desolation that was Koom Valley. Maybe they did, but that didn’t matter. The valley got the water anyway, from meltwater and the hundreds of waterfalls that poured over its walls from the mountains that cupped it. One of those falls, the Tears of the King, was half a mile high.
    The Koom River didn’t just rise in this valley. It leapt and danced in this valley. By the time it was halfway down this valley, it was a crisscrossing of thundering waters, forever merging and parting. They carried and hurled great rocks, and played with whole fallen trees from the dripping forests colonizing the scree that had built up against the walls. They gurgled into holes and rose again, miles away, as fountains. They had no mapable course—a good storm higher up in the mountains could bring house-sized rocks and half a stricken woodland down in the flood, blocking the sinkholes and piling up dams. Some of these could survive for years, becoming little islands in the leaping waters, growing little forests and little meadows and colonies of big birds. Then some key rock would be shifted by a random river, and within an hour, it would all be gone.
    Nothing that couldn’t fly lived in the valley, at least for long. The dwarfs had tried to tame it, back before the first battle. It hadn’t worked. Hundreds of trolls and dwarfs had been swept up in the famous flood, and many had ever been found again. Koom Valley had taken them all into its sinkholes and chambers and caverns, and had kept them.
    There were places in the valley where a man could drop a colored cork into a swirling sinkhole and wait for more than twenty minutes before it bobbed up on a fountain less than a dozen yards away.
    Eric himself had seen this trick done by a guide, Vimes read, who’d demanded half a dollar for the demonstration. Oh yes, people visited the valley, human sightseers, poets and artists looking for inspiration in the ragged, uncompromising wildness. And there were human guides who’d take them up there, for a hefty price. For a few extra dollars, they’d tell the history of the place. They’d tell you how the wind in the rocks, and the roaring of the waters, carried the sounds of ancient battle, continuing in death. They’d say, maybe all those trolls and dwarfs the valley took are still fighting, down there in the dark maze of caves and thundering torrents.
    One admitted to Eric that when he was a boy, during a cool summer when the meltwaters were pretty low, he’d roped down into one of the sinkholes (because, like all such stories, the history of Koom Valley wouldn’t have been complete without rumors of vast treasures swept down into the dark) and had himself heard, above the sound of the water, battle noises and the shouting of dwarfs, no sir, honestly sir, it chilled my blood so it did, sir, why, thank you very much, sir…
    Vimes sat up in his seat.
    Was that true? If that man had gone a little further, would he have found the little talking cube that Methodia Rascal had been unlucky enough to take home? Eric had dismissed it as an attempt to scrounge another dollar, and probably it was, but—no, the cube would surely have been long gone by then. Even so. It was an intriguing thought.
    The driver’s hatch slid back.
    “Outside the city, sir, clear road ahead,”