Thud!

shall we?”
    Vimes looked at Detritus, who shrugged his massive shoulders. Something was happening here, in the mind of a little man whose back he could probably break with one hand.
    “Oh, well, if you say so,” he said hopelessly. “You heard the inspector, Sergeant Detritus. Let’s do this, shall we?”
    The troll nodded, and turned to face the distant troll encampment. He cupped his hands and bellowed a string of trollish, which bounced off the buildings.
    “Something we can all understand, perhaps?” said Vimes as the echoes died away.
    A. E. Pessimal stepped forward, taking a deep breath.
    “C’mon if you think you’re hard enough!” he screamed wildly.
    Vimes coughed. “Thank you, Mr. Pessimal,” he said weakly. “I imagine that should do it.”

T he moon was somewhere beyond the clouds, but Angua didn’t need to see it. Carrot once had a special watch made for her birthday. It was a little moon that turned right around, black side and white side, every twenty-eight days. It must have cost him a lot of money, and Angua now wore it on her collar, the one item of clothing that she could wear all month around. She couldn’t bring herself to tell him she didn’t need it. You knew what was happening.
    It was hard to know much else right now, because she was thinking with her nose. That was the problem with the wolf times; the nose took charge.
    Currently, Angua was searching the alleys around Treacle Street, spiraling out from the dwarf mine. She prowled onwards in a world of color; smells overlaid one another, drifting and persisting. The nose was also the only organ that can see backwards in time.
    She’d already visited the spoil heap on the waste ground. There was the smell of troll there. It had got out that way, but there was no point in following a trail that cold. Hundreds of street trolls wore lichen and skulls these days. But the foul, oily stuff, that was a smell that was clinging to her memory. The little devils must have some other ways in, right? And you had to move the air around in a mine, right? So some trace of that oil would find its ways out along with the air. They probably wouldn’t be strong, but she didn’t need them to be. A trace of it was all she needed. It would be more than enough.
    As she padded through the alleys, and leapt walls into midnight yards, she kept clenched in her jaws the little leather bag that was a friend to any thinking werewolf, such a creature being defined as one who remembers that your clothes don’t magically follow you. The bag held a lightweight silk dress and a large bottle of mouthwash, which Angua considered to be the greatest invention of the last hundred years.
    She found what she was looking for behind Broad Way: it stood out against the familiar organic smells of the city as a tiny black ribbon of stench that left zigzags in the air as breezes and the passage of carts had dragged it this way and that.
    She began to move with more care. This wasn’t an area like Treacle Street; people with money lived here, and they often spent that money on big dogs and DISPROPORTIONATE RESPONSE signs in their driveways. As it was, she heard the rattle of chains and the occasional whine as she slunk along. She hated being attacked by large, ferocious dogs. It always left a mess and the mouthwash was afterwards never strong enough.
    The thread of stink was floating through the railings of Empirical Crescent, one of the city’s great architectural semi-precious gems. It was always hard to find people prepared to live there, however, despite the general desirable nature of the area. Tenants seldom stayed for more than a few months before moving hurriedly, sometimes leaving all their possessions behind. *
    She sailed over the railing with silence and ease and landed on all fours on what had once been gravel path. Residents in the crescent seldom did much gardening, since even if you planted bulbs you could never be sure whose garden they’d come up in.
    Angua followed her nose to a patch of rampant thistles. Some molding bricks in a circle marked what must have been an old well.
    The oily stink was heavy here, but there was a fresher, far more complex smell that raised the hairs on Angua’s neck.
    There was a vampire down there.
    Someone had pulled away the weeds and debris, including the inevitable rotting mattress and decomposing armchair. * Sally? What was she doing here?
    Angua pulled a brick out of the rotted edging and let it drop. Instead of a