Thud!

own.
    Saturday was Koom Valley Day, and Ankh-Morpork was full of trolls and dwarfs and you know what? The further trolls and dwarfs got from the mountains, the more that bloody, bloody Koom Valley mattered. The parades were okay; the Watch had gotten good at keeping them apart, and anyway they were in the morning, when everyone was still mostly sober. But when the dwarf bars and the troll bars emptied out in the evening, hell went for a stroll with its sleeves rolled up.
    In the bad old days, the Watch would find business elsewhere, and only turned up when stewed tempers had run their course. Then they’d bring out the hurry-up wagon and arrest every troll and dwarf too drunk, dazed, or dead to move. It was simple.
    That was then. Now there were too many dwarfs and trolls—no, mental correction—the city had been enriched by vibrant, growing communities of dwarfs and trolls…and there was more…yes, call it venom in the air. Too much ancient politics, too many chips handed down from shoulder to shoulder. Too much boozing, too.
    And then, just when you thought it was as bad as it could be, up popped Grag Hamcrusher and his chums. Deep-downers, they were called, dwarfs as fundamental as the bedrock. They’d turned up a month ago, occupied some old house in Treacle Street, and had hired a bunch of local lads to open up the basements. They were “grags.” Vimes knew just enough dwarfish to know that “grag” meant “renowned master of dwarfish lore,” but Hamcrusher had mastered it in his own special way. He preached the superiority of dwarf over troll, and that the duty of every dwarf was to follow in the footsteps of their forefathers and remove trollkind from the face of the world. It was written in some holy book, apparently, so that made it okay, and probably compulsory.
    Young dwarfs listened to him, because he talked about history and destiny and all the other words that always got trotted out to put a gloss on slaughter. It was heady stuff, except that brains weren’t involved. Malign idiots like him were the reason you saw dwarfs walking around now not just with the “cultural” battle-axes but heavy mail, chains, morningstars, broadswords…all the dumb, in-your-face swaggering that was known as “clang.”
    Trolls listened, too. You saw more lichen, more clan graffiti, more body carving, and much, much bigger clubs being dragged around.
    It hadn’t always been like this. Things had loosened up a lot in the last ten years or so. Dwarfs and trolls as races would never be chums, but the city stirred them together, and it had seemed to Vimes that they had managed to get along with no more than surface abrasions.
    Now the melting pot was full of lumps again.
    Gods damn Hamcrusher. Vimes itched to arrest him. Technically, he was doing nothing wrong, but that was no barrier to a copper who knew his business. He could certainly get him under “Behavior Likely To Cause A Breach Of The Peace.” Vetinari had been against it, though. He’d said it’d only inflame the situation, but how much worse could it get?
    Vimes closed his eyes and recalled that little figure, dressed in heavy black-leather robes and hooded so that he would not commit the crime of seeing daylight. A little figure, but with big words. He remembered: “Beware of the troll. Trust him not. Turn him from your door. He is nothing, a mere accident of forces, unwritten, unclean, the mineral world’s pale, jealous echo of living, thinking creatures. In his head, a rock; in his heart, a stone. He does not build, he does not delve, he neither plants nor harvests. His nascence was a deed of theft and everywhere he drags his club he steals. When not thieving, he plans theft. The only purpose in his miserable life is its ending, relieving from the wretched rock his all-too-heavy burden of thought. I say this in sadness. To kill the troll is no murder. At its very worst, it is an act of charity.”
    It was about that time that the mob had broken into the hall.
    That was how much worse it could be. Vimes blinked at the newspaper again, this time seeking anything that dared suggest that people in Ankh-Morpork still lived in the real world—
    “Oh, damn!” He got up and hurried down the stairs, where Cheery practically cowered at his thundering approach.
    “Did we know about this?” he demanded, thumping the paper down on the Occurrences Ledger.
    “Know about what, sir?” said Cheery nervously.
    Vimes prodded a short, illustrated article