Thud!

faces of her host and hostess as she crossed their hall. She glared at the grandfather clock. The minute hand was nearly on the 12, and trembling.
    She threw open the front door. There was no Sam there, and no one galloping down the road.
    The clock struck the hour. She heard someone step quietly beside her.
    “Would you like me to read to the young man, madam?” said Willikins. “Perhaps a man’s voice would—”
    “No, I’ll go up,” said Sybil quietly. “You wait here for my husband. He won’t be long,” she added firmly.
    “Yes, madam.”
    “He’ll probably be quite rushed.”
    “I shall usher him up without delay, madam.”
    “He will be here, you know!”
    “Yes, madam.”
    “He will walk through walls!”
    Sybil climbed the stairs as the chimes ended. The clock was a wrong clock. Of course it was!
    Young Sam had been installed in the old nursery of the house, a rather somber place full of grays and browns. There was a truly frightening rocking horse, all teeth and mad glass eyes.
    The boy was standing up in his cot. He was smiling, but the smile faded into puzzlement as Sybil pulled up a chair and sat down next to him.
    “Daddy has asked Mummy to read to you tonight, Sam,” she announced brightly. “Won’t that be fun!”
    Her heart did not sink. It could not. It was already as low as any heart could go. But it curled up and whimpered as she watched the little boy stare at her, at the door, at her again, and then throw back his head and scream.

V imes, half limping and half running, tripped and fell into a shallow pool.
    He found he’d stumbled over a dwarf. A dead one. Very dead. So dead, in fact, that the dripping water had built a small stalagmite on him, and with a film of milky stone had cemented him to the rock against which he sat.
    “…got to read to Young Sam,” Vimes told the shadowy helmet, earnestly.
    A little way away, on the sand, was a dwarf’s battle-axe. What was going on in Vimes’s mind was not exactly coherent thought, but he could hear faint noises up ahead and an instinct older than thought decided there was no such thing as too much cutting power.
    He picked it up. It was covered with no more than a thin coat of rust. There were other humps and mounds on the cavern floor, which, now that he came to look at them, might all be—
    No time! Read book!
    At the end of the cavern, the ground sloped up, and had been made treacherous by the dripping water. It fought back, but the axe helped. One problem at a time. Climb hill! Read book!
    And then the screaming started. His son, screaming.
    It filled his mind.
    They will burn…
    A staircase floated in his vision, reaching endlessly upwards into darkness. The screaming came from up there.
    Feet slithered. The axe bit into the milky stone. Weeping and cursing, sliding at every step, Vimes struggled to the top of the slope.
    A new, huge cave spread out below. It was busy with dwarfs. It looked like a mine.
    There were four of them, only a few feet away from Vimes, whose vision was full of rocking lambs. They stared at this sudden, bloody, swaying apparition, which was dreamily waving a sword in one hand and an axe in the other.
    They had axes, too. But the thing glared at them and asked:
    “Where’s…My…Cow?”
    They backed away.
    “Is that my cow?” the creature demanded, stepping forward unsteadily. It shook its head sadly.
    “It goes Baaaa!” it wept. “It is…a sheep…”
    Then it fell to its knees, clenched its teeth, turned its face upwards, like a man tortured beyond his wits, beseeching the gods of fortune and the tempest, and screamed:

    “No! That! Is!! Not!!! My!!! Cow!!!!!”

    The words echoed around the cavern and broke through mere rock, so great was the force behind them, melted mere mountains, screamed across the miles…
    And in the somber nursery, Young Sam stopped crying and looked around, suddenly happy but puzzled, and said, to his despairing mother’s surprise: “Co!”
    The dwarfs backed way down the slope. Overhead, the vurms were still pouring in, outlining the invader against their green-white glow.
    “Where’s my cow? Is that my cow?” it demanded, following them.
    In every part of the cavern, dwarfs had stopped work. There was hesitancy in the air. This was only one man, after all, and the thought in many minds was: What is someone else going to do about this? It had not yet progressed to: What am I going to do about this? Besides, where was the cow? There were cows down