Thud!

sir?”
    Vimes slid back the hatch behind him. Sybil had Young Sam on her knee, and was pulling a wooly jumper over his head.
    “Is everything all right, dear?” he ventured.
    She looked up and smiled. “Lovely, smooth ride, Sam. Aren’t we going rather fast, though?”
    “Er…could you please sit with your back to the horses?” said Sam. “And hold on tight to Young Sam? It might be a bit…bumpy.”
    He watched her shift seats. Then he shut the hatch, and yelled to Willikins.
    “Now!”
    Nothing seemed to happen. In Vimes’s mind, the milestones were already going zip…zip as they flashed past.
    Then the flying world slowed, while in the fields on either side hundreds of burning cabbages leapt toward the sky, trailing oily smoke. The horse of light and air disappeared, and the real horses dropped gently to the road, going from floating statues to beasts in full gallop without a stumble.
    He heard a brief scream as the rear coach tore past and swerved into a field full of cauliflowers, where, eventually, it squelched to a flatulent halt. And then there was stillness, except for the occasional thud of a falling cabbage. Detritus was comforting Brick, who’d not picked a good day to go cold turkey; it was turning out to be frozen roc.
    A skylark, safely above cabbage range, sang in the blue sky. Below, except for the whimpering of Brick, all was silent.
    Absentmindedly, Vimes pulled a half-cooked leaf off his helmet and flicked it away.
    “Well, that was fun,” he said, his voice a little distant.
    He got down carefully and opened the coach door.
    “Everyone all right in here?” he said.
    “Yes. Why have we stopped?” said Sybil.
    “We ran out of…er, well, we just ran out,” said Vimes. “I’d better go and check that everyone else is all right…”
    The milestone nearby proclaimed that it was but two miles to Quirm. Vimes fished out the Gooseberry as a red-hot cabbage smacked into the road behind him.
    “Good morning!” he said brightly to the surprised imp. “What is the time, please?”
    “Er…nine minutes to eight, Insert Name Here,” said the imp.
    “So that would mean a speed slightly above one mile a minute,” mused Vimes. “Very good.”
    Moving like a sleepwalker, he walked into the field on the other side of the road and followed the trail of stricken, steaming greens until he reached the other coach. People were climbing out of it.
    “Everyone okay?” he said. “Breakfast today will be boiled cabbage, baked cabbage, fried cabbage—” he stepped smartly aside as a steaming cauliflower hit the ground and exploded “—and Cauliflower Surprise. Where’s Fred?”
    “Looking for somewhere to throw up,” said Angua.
    “Good man. We’ll take a minute or two to rest here, I think.”
    With that, Sam Vimes walked back to the milestone, sat down next to it, put his arms around it, and held on tight until he felt better.

Y ou could catch up with the dwarfs long before they’re near Koom Valley. Good grief, at the speed we did earlier you’d have to watch out in case you smash into the back of them!
    Vimes’s thoughts nagged at him as Willikins drove the coach, at a very sedate speed, out of Quirue and then, on a clear stretch of road, unleashed the hidden horsepower until they were bowling along at forty miles every hour. That seemed quite fast enough.
    No one was hurt, after all. You could get to Koom Valley by nightfall!
    Yes, but that was not the plan.
    Okay, he thought, but what was the plan, exactly? Well, it helped that Sybil knew more or less everybody, or at least everybody who was female, of a certain age, and who had been to the Quirm College for Young Ladies at the same time as Sybil. There appeared to be hundreds of them. They all seemed to have names like Bunny or Bubbles, they kept in touch meticulously, they’d all married influential or powerful men, they all hugged one another when they met, and went on about the good old days in Form 3b or whatever, and if they acted together, they could probably run the world or, it occurred to Vimes, might already be doing so.
    They were Ladies Who Organize.
    Vimes did his best, but he could never keep track of them. A web of correspondence held them all together, and he marveled at Sybil’s ability to be concerned over the problems of a child, whom she’d never met, of a woman she hadn’t seen in twenty-five years. It was a female thing.
    So they would be staying in the town near the foot of the valley, with a