Thud!

lady currently known only as Bunty, whose husband was the local magistrate. According to Sybil, he had his own police force. Vimes translated this, in the privacy of his head, as “he’s got his own gang of thuggish, toothless, evil-smelling thief-takers” since that was what you generally got in these little towns. Still, they might be useful.
    Beyond that…there was no plan. He intended to find the dwarfs and capture and drag as many as possible back to Ankh-Morpork. But that was an intention, not a plan. It was a firm intention, though. Five people had been murdered. You couldn’t just turn your back on that. He’d drag ’em back and lock them up and throw everything at ’em and see what stuck. He doubted it they had many friends now. Of course, it’d get political, it always did, but at least people would know that he’d done all he could, and it was the best he could do. With any luck, it would stop anyone else getting funny ideas.
    And then there was the damn Secret, but it occurred to him that if he did find it, and it simply was proof that the dwarfs ambushed the trolls or the trolls ambushed the dwarfs or they both ambushed each other at the same time, well, he might as well drop it down a hole. It really wouldn’t change anything. And it was unlikely to be a pot of gold; people didn’t take a lot of money onto battlefields, because there wasn’t very much to spend it on.
    Anyway, it had been a good start. They’d clawed some time, hadn’t they? They could keep up a cracking pace and change horses at every staging inn, couldn’t they? Why was he trying to persuade himself? It made sense to slow down. It was dangerous to go fast.
    “If we keep up this pace, we might get there the day after tomorrow, right?” he said to Willikins as they rattled on between stands of young maize.
    “If you say so, sir,” said Willikins. Vimes noted the hint of diplomacy.
    “You don’t think so?” he said. “Come on, you can speak your mind!”
    “Well, sir, those dwarfs want to get there fast, d’you think?” said Willikins.
    “I expect so. I don’t think they want to hang around. So?”
    “So I’m just puzzled that you think they’ll be using the road, sir. They could use broomsticks, couldn’t they?”
    “I suppose so,” Vimes conceded. “But the archchancellor would have told me if they’d done that, surely.”
    “Begging your pardon, sir, but what business would it be of his? They wouldn’t have to bother the gentlemen at the university. Everyone knows the best broomsticks are made by the dwarfs, up at Copperhead.”
    The coach rolled on.
    After a while, Vimes inquired, in the voice of one who has been thinking deeply: “They’d have to travel at night, though. They’d be spotted otherwise.”
    “Very true, sir,” said Willikins, staring ahead.
    There was more thoughtful silence.
    “Do you think this thing could jump fences?” said Vimes.
    “I’m game to give it a try, sir,” said Willikins. “I think the wizards put some thought into all this.”
    “And how fast do you think it could go, for the sake of argument?” said Vimes.
    “Dunno, sir. But I’ve got a feeling it might be pretty fast. A hundred miles in an hour, maybe?”
    “You really think so? That means we could be halfway there in a couple of hours!”
    “Well, you did say you wanted to get there fast, sir,” said Willikins.
    This time, the silence went on longer, before Vimes said: “All right, stop somewhere. I want to make sure that everyone knows what we’re going to do.”
    “Happy to do that, sir,” said Willikins. “It’ll give me a chance to tie my hat on.”

W hat Vimes remembered most of all about that journey— and there was so much of it he wanted to forget—was the silence. And the softness .
    Oh, he could feel the wind in his face, but it was only a breeze, even when the ground was a flat green blur. The air was shaping itself around them. When Vimes experimentally held up a piece of paper a foot above his head, it blew away in an instant.
    The corn exploded, too. As the coach approached, the green shoots grew out of the ground as if dragged, and then burst like fireworks.
    The corn belt was giving way to cattle country, when Willikins said: “You know, sir, this thing steers itself. Watch.”
    He lowered the reins as a patch of woodland approached. The scream had hardly formed in Vimes’s throat before the coach curved around the woodland and then swung delicately back onto its