Thud!

since it had been filled by the more modern Ankh-Morpork mortar of sand, horse dung, and vegetable peelings, several bricks had already fallen out. Sally removed most of the rest with one punch.
    “Sorry about that,” she said. “It’s a vampire thing.”
    The cellar behind the demolished wall had some barrels in it, and looked as though it was regularly used. There was a proper door, too. Rather dull, repetitive music filtered down from between the boards. There was a trapdoor in them.
    “O-kay,” said Angua. “There’s people up there, I can smell them—”
    “I count fifty-seven hearts beating,” said Sally. Angua gave her a Look.
    “You know, that’s one particular talent I’d keep to myself, if I was you,” she said.
    “Sorry, Sergeant.”
    “It’s not the sort of thing people want to hear,” Angua went on. “I mean, I personally am quite capable of crushing a man’s skull in my jaws, but I don’t go around telling everyone.”
    “I shall make a note of it, Sergeant,” said Sally, with a meekness that was quite possibly feigned.
    “Good. Now…what do we look like? Swamp monsters?”
    “Yes, Sergeant. Your hair looks dreadful. Just like a great lump of green slime.”
    “Green?”
    “I’m afraid so.”
    “And my emergency dress is back down there somewhere,” said Angua. “It’s past dawn, too. Can you, er, go bats now?”
    “In daylight? One hundred and fifty disoriented bits of me? No! But you could get out as a wolf, couldn’t you?”
    “I’d kind of prefer not to be a slime monster coming through the floor, if it’s all the same to you,” said Angua.
    “Yes, I can see that. It does not pay to advertise.” Sally flicked away a lump of nameless ooze. “Ugh, this stuff is foul .”
    “So, the best we can hope for is that when we make a run for it, no one will recognize us,” said Angua, pulling a lump of wobbly green stuff from her hair. “At least we—oh, no…”
    “What’s wrong?” said Sally.
    “Nobby Nobbs! He’s up there! I can smell him!” She pointed urgently at the boards overhead.
    “You mean Corporal Nobbs? The little…man with the spots?” said Sally.
    “We’re not under a Watch house, are we?” said Angua, looking around in panic.
    “I don’t think so. Someone’s dancing, by the sound of it. But look, how can you smell one human in the middle of all…this?”
    “It never leaves you, believe me.” The smell of old cabbage, acne ointment, and nonmalignant skin disease became transmuted, in Corporal Nobbs, into a strange odor that lay across the nose like a saw blade on a harp. It wasn’t bad, as such, but it was like its host: strange, ubiquitous, and hellishly difficult to forget.
    “Well, he’s a fellow officer, isn’t he? Won’t he help us?” said Sally.
    “We are naked , Lance Constable!”
    “Only technically. This mud really sticks.”
    “I mean underneath the mud!” said Angua.
    “Yes, but if we had clothes on we’re be naked underneath them, too!” Sally pointed out.
    “This is not the time for logic! This is the time for not seeing Nobby grinning at me!”
    “But he’s seen you when you’re wolf-shaped, hasn’t he?” said Sally.
    “So?” snapped Angua.
    “Well, technically you’re naked then, aren’t you?”
    “Never tell him that!”

N obby Nobbs, a shadow in the warm red gloom, nudged Sergeant Colon.
    “You don’t have to keep your eyes shut, Sarge,” he said. “It’s all legit. It’s an artistic celebration of the female body, Tawneee says. Anyway, she’s got clothes on.”
    “Two tassels and a folded hanky is not clothes, Nobby,” said Fred, sinking down in his seat. The Pink PussyCat Club! Now, fair’s fair, he’d been in the army and Watch, and you couldn’t spend all that time in uniform without seeing a thing or two—or three, now he came to recollect—and it was true, as Nobby had pointed out, that the ballerinas down at the opera house didn’t leave a lot to the imagination, at least not to Nobby’s, but when all was said and done, ballet had to be Art, even though it was a bit short on plinths and urns, on account of being expensive to look at, and moreover, ballerinas didn’t whizz around upside down. And the worst of it was, he’d already spotted two people he knew in the audience. Fortunately they hadn’t seen him, which was to say that whenever he’d sneaked a glance their way, they were looking in completely the opposite direction.
    “Now this bit is really hard,”