Thud!

“Detritus?”
    “Sir?” said the sergeant, a guilty look spreading across his face.
    “What do you know about Mr. Shine?” said Vimes.
    “Er…he a bit like a troll god…” Detritus muttered.
    “Don’t get many gods in here, as a rule,” said Vimes. “Someone’s pinched the secret of fire, have you seen my golden apple? It’s amazing how often we don’t get that sort of thing in the crime book. He’s a troll, is he?”
    “Kinda like a…a king,” said Detritus, as if every word was being dragged from him.
    “I thought trolls didn’t have kings these days,” said Vimes. “I thought every clan ruled itself.”
    “Right, right,” said Detritus. “Look, Mister Vimes, he Mr. Shine, okay? We don’t talk about him much.” The troll’s expression was a mixture of misery and defiance. Vimes decided to go for a weaker target.
    “Where did you find him, Brick? I just want to—”
    “He came callin’ to help you!” snarled Detritus. “What you doin,’ Mister Vimes? Why you go on askin’ questions? Wi’ the dwarfs you have pussy feet, must not upset ’em, oh no, but what you do if dey was trolls, eh? Kick down der door, no problem! Mr. Shine bring you Brick, give you good advice, an’ you talk like he bein’ a bad troll! I’m hearin’ now where Captain Carrot, he tellin’ the dwarfs he the Two Brothers. You fink that make me happy? We know dat lyin’ ol’ dwarf lie, yes! We groan at it lyin,’ yes! You want to see Mr. Shine, you show humble, you show respec,’ yes!”
    This is Koom Valley again, thought Vimes. He’s never seen Detritus this angry, at least at him. The troll was just there , reliable and dependable. At Koom Valley, two tribes had met, and no one blinked.
    “I apologize,” he said, blinking. “I didn’t know. No offense was meant.”
    “Right!” said Detritus, his huge hand thumping on the table.
    The spoon jumped out of Brick’s empty soup bowl. The mysterious rock ball rolled across the table, with an inevitable little trundling noise, and cracked open on the floor.
    Vimes looked down at two neat halves.
    “It’s full of crystals,” he said. Then he looked closer. There was a piece of paper in one broken, glittering hemisphere.
    He picked it up and read: Pointer & Pickles, Crystals, Minerals & Tumbling Supplies, No. 3 Tenth Egg Street, Ankh-Morpork.
    Vimes put this down carefully, and picked up the two pieces of the stone. He pushed them together, and they fitted with the merest hairline crack. There was no sign that any glue had ever been used.
    He looked up at Detritus.
    “Did you know that was going to happen?” he said.
    “No,” said the troll. “But I fink Mr. Shine did.”
    “He’s given me his address, Sergeant.”
    “Yeah. So maybe he want you to visit,” Detritus conceded. “Dat is a honor, all right. You don’t find Mr. Shine, Mr. Shine find you.”
    “How did he find you , Mr. Brick?” said Vimes.
    Brick gave Detritus a panicky look. The sergeant shrugged.
    “He pick me up one day. Gimme food,” Brick mumbled. “He show me where to come for more. He tole me t’keep off’f the stuff, too. But…”
    “Yes…?” Vimes prompted.
    Brick waved a pair of scarred, knobbly arms in a gesture that said, far more coherently than he could, that there was the whole universe on one side and Brick on the other, and what could anyone do against odds like that?
    And so, he’d been handed over to Detritus, Vimes thought. That evened the odds somewhat.
    He stood up, and nodded to Detritus.
    “Should I take anything, Sergeant?”
    The troll thought about this. “No,” he said, “but maybe dere’s some finkin’ you could leave behind.”

C aptain Carrot had been busy. The city dwarfs liked him. So he’d done what Vimes could not have done, or at least have done well, which was take a muddy dwarf necklace to a dwarf home down in New Cobblers and explain to two dwarf parents how it had been found. Things had happened quite fast after that, and one other reason for the speed was that the mine was shut. Guards and workers and dwarfs seeking guidance on the path of dwarfdom had turned up, to be met with locked doors. Money was owing, and dwarfs got very definite about things like that. A lot of the huge body of dwarf lore was about contracts. You were supposed to get paid .
    No more politics, Vimes told himself. Someone killed four of our dwarfs, not some crazy rabble-rouser, and left them down there in the dark. I don’t care who they are,