Men at Arms (34 page)

He pushed and squirmed through the tangle of legs.

Angua was at bay in a ring of teeth.

The barking stopped. A couple of large dogs moved aside, and Big Fido stepped delicately forward.

“So,” he said, “what we have here is not a dog at all. A spy, perhaps? There’s always an enemy. Everywhere. They look like dogs but, inside, they’re not dogs. What were you doing?”

Angua growled.

Oh lor’, thought Gaspode. She could probably take down a few of ’em, but these are
street
dogs.

He wriggled under a couple of bodies and emerged in the circle. Big Fido turned his red-eyed gaze on him.

“And Gaspode, too,” said the poodle. “I might have known.”

“You leave her alone,” said Gaspode.

“Oh? You’ll fight us all for her, will you?” said Big Fido.

“I got the Power,” said Gaspode. “You know that. I’ll do it. I’ll use it.”

“There’s no time for this!” snarled Angua.

“You won’t do it,” said Big Fido.

“I’ll do it.”

“Every dog’s paw’ll be turned against you—”

“I got the Power, me. You back off, all of you.”

“What power?” said Butch. He was drooling.

“Big Fido knows,” said Gaspode. “He’s
studied
. Now, me an’ her are going to walk out of here, right? Nice and slow.”

The dogs looked at Big Fido.

“Get them,” he said.

Angua bared her teeth.

The dogs hesitated.

“A wolf’s got a jaw four times stronger’n any dog,” said Gaspode. “And that’s just a
ordinary
wolf—”

“What are you all?” snapped Big Fido. “You’re the pack! No mercy!
Get them
!”

But a pack doesn’t act like that, Angua had said. A pack is an association of free individuals. A pack doesn’t leap because it’s told—a pack leaps because every individual, all at once, decides to leap.

A couple of the bigger dogs crouched…

Angua moved her head from side to side, waiting for the first assault…

A dog scraped the ground with its paw…

Gaspode took a deep breath and adjusted his jaw.

Dogs leapt.

“SIT!” said Gaspode, in passable Human.

The command bounced back and forth around the alley, and fifty percent of the animals obeyed. In most cases, it was the hind fifty percent. Dogs in mid-spring found their treacherous legs coiling under them—

“BAD DOG!”

—and this was followed by an overpowering sense of racial shame that made them cringe automatically, a bad move in mid-air.

Gaspode glanced up at Angua as bewildered dogs rained around them.

“I said I got the Power, didn’t I?” he said. “
Now
run!”

Dogs are not like cats, who amusingly tolerate humans only until someone comes up with a tin opener that can be operated with a paw. Men made dogs, they took wolves and gave them human things—unnecessary intelligence, names, a desire to belong, and a twitching inferiority complex. All dogs dream wolf dreams, and know they’re dreaming of biting their Maker. Every dog knows, deep in his heart, that he is a Bad Dog…

But Big Fido’s furious yapping broke the spell.

“Get them!”

Angua galloped over the cobbles. There was a cart at the other end of the alley. And, beyond the cart, a wall.

“Not that way!” whined Gaspode.

Dogs were piling along behind them. Angua leapt on to the cart.

“I can’t get up there!” said Gaspode. “Not with my leg!”

She jumped down, picked him up by the scruff of his neck, and leapt back. There was a shed roof behind the cart, a ledge above that and—a few tiles slid under her paws and tumbled into the alley—a house.

“I feel sick!”

“Futupf!”

Angua ran along the ridge of the roof and jumped the alley on the other side, landing heavily in some ancient thatch.

“Aargh!”

“Futupf!”

But the dogs were following them. It wasn’t as though the alleys of the Shades were very wide.

Another narrow alley passed below.

Gaspode swung perilously from the werewolf’s jaws.

“They’re still behind us!”

Gaspode shut his eyes as Angua bunched her muscles.

“Oh, no! Not Treacle Mine Road!”

There was a burst of acceleration followed by a moment of calmness. Gaspode shut his eyes…

…Angua landed. Her paws scrabbled on the wet roof for a moment. Slates cascaded off into the street, and then she was bounding up to the ridge.

“You can put me down right now,” said Gaspode. “Right now this minute! Here they come!”

The leading dogs arrived on the opposite roof, saw the gap, and tried to turn. Claws slid on the tiles.

Angua turned, fighting for breath. She’d tried to avoid breathing, during that first mad dash. She’d have breathed Gaspode.

They heard Big Fido’s irate yapping.

“Cowards! That’s not twenty feet across! That’s nothing to a wolf!”

The dogs measured the distance doubtfully. Sometimes a dog has to get right down and ask himself: what species am I?

“It’s easy! I’ll show you! Look!”

Big Fido ran back a little way, paused, turned, ran…and leapt.

There was hardly a curve to the trajectory. The little poodle accelerated out into space, powered less by muscles than by whatever it was that burned in his soul.

His forepaws touched the slates, clawed for a moment on the slick surface, and found no hold. In silence he skidded backward down the roof, over the edge—

—and hung.

He turned his eyes upward, to the dog that was gripping him.

“Gaspode? Is that you?”

“Yeff,” said Gaspode, his mouth full.

There was hardly any weight to the poodle but, then, there was hardly any weight to Gaspode. He’d darted forward and braced his legs to take the strain, but there was nothing much to brace them against. He slid down inexorably until his front legs were in the gutter, which began to creak.

Gaspode had an amazingly clear view of the street, three stories down.

“Oh,
hell
!” said Gaspode.

Jaws gripped his tail.

“Let him go,” said Angua indistinctly.

Gaspode tried to shake his head.

“Stop ftruggling!” he said, out of the corner of his mouth. “Brave Dog Faves the Day! Valiant Hound in Wooftop Wefcue! No!”

The gutter creaked again.

It’s going to go, he thought. Story of my life…

Big Fido struggled around.

“What are you holding me up by?”

“Yer collar,” said Gaspode, through his teeth.

“What? To hell with
that
!”

The poodle tried to twist, flailing viciously at the air.

“Ftop it, you daft fbugger! You’ll haf uff all off!” Gaspode growled. On the opposite roof, the dog pack watched in horror. The gutter creaked again.

Angua’s claws scored white lines on the slates.

Big Fido wrenched and spun, fighting the grip of the collar.

Which, finally, snapped.

The dog turned in the air, hanging for a moment before gravity took hold.

“Free!”

And then he fell.

Gaspode shot backward as Angua’s paws slipped from under her, and landed further up the roof, legs spinning. Both of them made it to the crest and hung there, panting.

Then Angua bounded away, clearing the next alley before Gaspode had stopped seeing a red mist in front of his eyes.

He spat out Big Fido’s collar, which slid down the roof and vanished over the edge.

“Oh, thank you!” he shouted. “Thank you very much! Yes! Leave me here, that’s right! Me with only three good legs! Don’t you worry about me! If I’m lucky I’ll fall off before I starve! Oh yes! Story of my life! You and me, kid! Together! We could have made it!”

He turned and looked at the dogs lining the roofs on the other side of the street.

“You lot! Go home! BAD DOG!” he barked.

He slithered down the other side of the roof. There was an alley there, but it was a sheer drop. He crept along the roof to the adjoining building, but there was no way down. There was a balcony a story below, though.

“Lat’ral thinking,” he muttered. “That’s the stuff. Now, a wolf, your basic wolf, he’d jump, and if he couldn’t jump, he’d be stuck. Whereas me, on account of superior intelligence, can assess the whole wossname and arrive at a solution through application of mental processes.”

He nudged the gargoyle squatting on the angle of the gutter.

“Ot oo oo ont?”

“If you don’t help me down to that balcony, I’ll widdle in your ear.”

BIG FIDO?

“Yes?”

HEEL.

There were, eventually, two theories about the end of Big Fido.

The one put forward by the dog Gaspode, based on observational evidence, was that his remains were picked up by Foul Ole Ron and sold within five minutes to a furrier, and that Big Fido eventually saw the light of day again as a set of ear muffs and a pair of fleecy gloves.

The one believed by every other dog, based on what might tentatively be called the truth of the heart, was that he survived his fall, fled the city, and eventually led a huge pack of mountain wolves who nightly struck terror into isolated farmsteads. It made digging in the middens and hanging around back doors for scraps seem…well, more bearable. They were, after all, only doing it until Big Fido came back.

His collar was kept in a secret place and visited regularly by dogs until they forgot about it.

Sergeant Colon pushed open the door with the end of his pike.

The Tower had floors, a long time ago. Now it was hollow all the way up, criss-crossed by golden shafts of light from ancient window embrasures.

One of them, filled with glittering motes of dust, lanced down on what, not long before, had been Acting-Constable Cuddy.

Colon gave the body a cautious prod. It didn’t move. Nothing looking like that should move. A twisted axe lay beside it.

“Oh, no,” he breathed.

There was a thin rope, the sort the Assassins used, hanging down from the heights. It was twitching. Colon looked up at the haze, and drew his sword.

He could see all the way to the top, and there was no one on the rope. Which meant—

He didn’t even look around, which saved his life.

His dive for the floor and the explosion of the gonne behind him happened at exactly the same time. He swore afterwards that he felt the wind of the slug as it passed over his head.

Then a figure stepped through the smoke and hit him very hard before escaping through the open door, into the rain.

ACTING-CONSTABLE CUDDY?

Cuddy brushed
himself off
.

“Oh,” he said. “I see. I didn’t think I was going to survive that. Not after the first hundred feet.”

YOU WERE CORRECT.

The unreal world of the living was already fading, but Cuddy glared at the twisted remains of his axe. It seemed to worry him far more than the twisted remains of Cuddy.

“And will you look at that?” he said. “My dad made that axe for me! A fine weapon to take into the afterlife, I don’t think!”

IS THAT SOME KIND OF BURIAL CUSTOM?

“Don’t you know? You
are
Death, aren’t you?”

THAT DOESN’T MEAN I HAVE TO KNOW ABOUT BURIAL CUSTOMS. GENERALLY, I MEET PEOPLE
BEFORE
THEY’RE BURIED. THE ONES I MEET AFTER THEY’VE BEEN BURIED TEND TO BE A BIT OVER-EXCITED AND DISINCLINED TO DISCUSS THINGS.

Cuddy folded his arms.

“If I’m not going to be properly buried,” he said, “I ain’t going. My tortured soul will walk the world in torment.”

IT DOESN’T HAVE TO.

“It can if it
wants
to,” snapped the ghost of Cuddy.

“Detritus! You haven’t got
time
to ooze! Get over to the Tower! Take some people with you!”

Vimes reached the doorway of the Great Hall with the Patrician over his shoulder and Carrot stumbling along behind him. The wizards were clustered around the door. Big heavy drops of rain were beginning to fall, hissing on the hot stones.

Ridcully rolled up his sleeves.

“Hell’s bells! What did that to his leg?”

“That’s the gonne for you! Sort him out! And Corporal Carrot too!”

“There’s no need,” said Vetinari, trying to smile and stand up. “It’s just a flesh—”

The leg collapsed under him.

Vimes blinked. He’d never expected this. The Patrician was the man who always had the answers, who was never surprised. Vimes had a sense that history was flapping loose…

“We can handle it, sir,” said Carrot. “I’ve got men on the roofs, and—”

“Shut up! Stay here! That’s an order!” Vimes fumbled in his pouch and hung his badge on his torn jacket. “Hey, you…Pyjama! I need a sword!”

Pyjama looked sullen.

“I only take orders from Corporal Carrot—”

“Give me a sword right now, you horrible little man! Right! Thank you! Now let’s get to the Tow—”

A shadow appeared in the doorway.

Detritus walked in.

They looked at the limp shape in his hands.

He laid it carefully on a bench, without saying a word, and went and sat in a corner. While the others gathered round the mortal remains of Acting-Constable Cuddy, the troll removed his homemade cooling helmet and sat staring at it, turning it over and over in his hands.

“He was on the floor,” said Sergeant Colon, leaning against the doorframe. “He must have been pushed off the stairs right at the top. Someone else was in there, too. Must’ve shinnied down a rope and caught me a right bang on the side of the head.”

“Being pushed down the Tower’s not worth it for a shilling,” said Carrot, vaguely.

It was better when the dragon came, thought Vimes. After it’d killed someone it was at least still a dragon. It went somewhere else but you could say: that’s a dragon, that is. It couldn’t nip over a wall and become just another person. You always knew what you were fighting. You didn’t have to—

“What’s that in Cuddy’s hand?” he said. He realized he’d been staring at it without seeing it for some time.

He tugged at it. It was a strip of black cloth.

“Assassins wear that,” said Colon blankly.

“So do lots of other people,” said Ridcully. “Black’s black.”

“You’re right,” said Vimes. “Taking any action on the basis of this would be premature. You know, it’d probably get me fired.”