Thud!

as some kind of squire. So far, his excuses for avoiding the interminable sittings had been reasonable, but it was a close-run thing…
    More time passed. Some of the dwarfs in the crowd wandered off. Vimes didn’t move, not even when he heard the hatch in the door open for a moment and then slide back. They were trying to wait him out.
    “Tcha-tcha-rumptiddle-tiddle-tiddle-tiddle-tchum-chum!”
    Without looking down, maintaining the stolid thousand-mile stare of a guard, Vimes pulled the Dis-Organizer out of his pocket and raised it to his lips.
    “I know you were turned off,” he grunted.
    “Pop up for alarms, remember?” said the imp.
    “How do I stop you doing that?”
    “The correct form of words is in the manual, Insert Name Here,” said the imp primly.
    “Where is the manual?”
    “You threw it away,” said the imp, full of reproach. “You always do. That’s why you never use the right commands, and that is why I did not ‘go away and stick my head up a duck’s bottom’ yesterday. You have an appointment to see Lord Vetinari in half an hour.”
    “I will be busy,” muttered Vimes.
    “Would you like me to remind you again in ten minutes?”
    “Tell me, what part of ‘stick your head up a duck’s bottom’ didn’t you understand?” Vimes replied, and plunged the thing back into his pocket.
    So…it had been half an hour. Half an hour was enough. This was going to be drastic, but he’d seen the looks the dwarfs were giving Detritus. Rumor was an evil poison.
    As he stepped forward, ready to go and summon Dorfl and all the problems that invading this place would entail, the door opened behind him.
    “Commander Vimes? You may come in.”
    There was a dwarf in the doorway. Vimes could just make out his shape in the gloom. And for the first time he noticed the symbol chalked on the wall over the door: a circle with a horizontal line through it.
    “Sergeant Angua will accompany me,” he said. The sign struck Vimes as vaguely unsettling; it seemed to be a stamp of ownership that was rather more emphatic than, for example, a little plaque saying MON REPOS .
    “The troll will stay outside,” said the figure flatly.
    “Sergeant Detritus will stand guard, along with Corporal Ringfounder,” said Vimes.
    This restatement of fact seemed to pass muster, suggesting that the dwarf probably knew a lot about iron but nothing about irony. The door opened further, and Vimes stepped inside.
    The hall was bare, except for a few stacked boxes, and the air smelled of—what? Stale food. Old, empty houses. Sealed-up rooms. Attics.
    The whole house is an attic, Vimes thought. The thud, thud from below was really noticeable here. It was like a heartbeat.
    “This way, if you please,” said the dwarf, and ushered Vimes and Angua into a side room. Again, the only furnishings were more wooden boxes and, here and there, some well-worn shovels.
    “We do not often entertain. Please be patient,” said the dwarf, and backed out. The key clicked on the lock.
    Vimes sat down on a box.
    “Polite,” said Angua. Vimes put one hand to his ear and jerked a thumb toward the damp, stained plaster. She nodded, but mouthed the word “corpse” and pointed downwards.
    “Sure?” said Vimes.
    Angua tapped her nose. You couldn’t argue with a werewolf’s nose.
    Vimes leaned back against a bigger box. It was comfort itself to a man who’d learned to sleep leaning against any available wall.
    The plaster on the opposite wall was crumbling, green with damp and hung with dusty old spiderwebs. Someone, though, had scratched a symbol in it so deeply that bits of the plaster had fallen out. It was another circle, this time with two diagonal lines slashed through it. Some passion there; not what you’d expect around dwarfs.
    “You are taking this very well, sir,” said Angua. “You must know this is deliberate discourtesy.”
    “Being rude isn’t against the law, Sergeant.” Vimes pulled his helmet over his eyes and settled down.
    The little devils! Play silly buggers with me, will they? Try to wind me up, will they? Don’t tell the Watch, eh? There are no no-go areas in this city. I’ll see to it they find that out. Oh yes.
    There were more and more of deep-downers in the city these days, although you very seldom saw them outside the dwarf areas. Even there, you didn’t see deep-downers themselves, you just saw their dusty black sedan chairs being muscled through the crowds by four other dwarfs. There were no