by MongoGutman » Thu Feb 10, 2011 9:49 pm
.......... “What about you?” Vimes asked the remaining - no, he corrected himself mentally, the other remaining dwarf - there was something about the six foot plus Carrot that just didn’t say dwarf to him. “Ceilings too high for you?” Renkovil was much less aggresive than the departed Shaftpropper and took off his helmet, turning it around and around in his hands nervously.
.......... “Begging your pardon, your worship, It’s the rats, you see...” he began, diffidently.
.......... “Mr Renkovil runs a dwarf restaurant down in Dolly Sisters.” Carrot informed, “The Grub Bucket.”
.......... “Rats? Well, this is the big city, Mr Renkovil, you’ve got to expect rats; put a few traps down...”
.......... “We do expect rats, we depend on them! It’s the rat shortage that’s the problem!”
.......... “The rat... shortage?” They were two words which Vimes had never expected to hear in conjunction.
.......... “The Grub Bucket’s Rat Risotto is considered the best in the City, while their Rat Suprise is even talked about back in the Ramtops,” said Carrot.
.......... “What’s the suprise? No,” Vimes reconsidered, “Don’t tell me, I don’t think I want to know.” Though he knew he’d be wondering in the small hours, he suspected that the wondering would be better than the certainty.
.......... “We just can’t get the rats!” Renkovil complained, “at first I thought one of my competitors was undercutting me with the suppliers, but everyone’s in the same cave-in: all over the city restaurants are having to close early, even turn away paying customers!” This last was said with a wide eyed horror.
.......... “Well, the number of dwarves in Ankh Morpork has been increasing steadily for the past few years,” Vimes ruminated, “perhaps you’re just exhausting the, ah, supply?”
.......... “No,” Renkovil shook his head in denial, “I’ve been talking to the trappers and they say something strange is going on. Places they’d expect to be teeming with them are suddenly deserted, others have reported being attacked by swarms of the little devils and barely escaping.”
.......... “Well... what do you expect me to do about it?”
.......... “It‘s got to be the giant crocodiles living in the sewers! They’re eating all the rats!” The dwarf’s helmet was turning faster and faster in his hands as he got more excited. “You have to hunt them down, clear them out!”
.......... “Oh, not that old story again, look: I can assure you that...” Vimes started, then reconsidered: long experience on the force with those known in technical police jargon as ‘nutters’ - the round-worlders, the 'abductees’ of invaders from another turtle, the tin foil helmet brigade - had taught him that no amount of reasoned explanation would dissuade them from their obsessions. Then again, he thought, maybe he could kill two birds with one stone here.
.......... “You can be assured, I’m going to put our most experienced officers on the case.” Again he gave gave Carrot the nod. Just a few scorpions, he thought, trained not to sting perhaps...
.......... “Do you think that’s wise, Sir?” Carrot asked as the door closed on Renkovil.
.......... “I wan’t to get them out of the way anyway, things could get a little hairy for a while above ground.”
.......... “Is that why you sent for me Sir?”
.......... “In part...” Vimes suddenly had a nagging feeling he was being watched. His eyes slid around the room and came to resst on the sightless stone ones of Vetinari’s bust.
.......... “Has this uh..Major... Ketchup? Turned up yet?” He asked.
.......... “Colonel Condiment, Sir." Carrot corrected. “And no, still missing.”
.......... “What’s he like?”
.......... Carrot flipped open a little notepad. “Middle aged but still fit, six foot, blond hair, muttonchop whiskers, usually wears his old regimental uniform, green, lots of braid,”
.......... “Doesn’t sound much like a grocer,” Vimes frowned.
.......... “He’s old money, Sir.” Carrot explained, “I understand he financed one of his sergeants who was leaving the regiment to open a grocery store, his sergeant had a brother who went into a similar business, the brother knew an established grocer who needed investment to expand... and so on, he became silent partner in so many shops and stalls that when the last Head of the Grocer’s Guild died they found that Condiment was the biggest grocer in the city, without ever actually handling an apple or selling a spud. By the Guild rules he had to become the new head.”
.......... “Does he understand the grocery business?”
.......... “Apparantly not. When he first took over he tried to get involved in running the guild but there were some terrible rows - not used to having people disagree with him it seems. There were a few... incidents they called them - I think violence might have been involved. After the last they came to an arrangement where the Guild was left to the running of the officials and the Colonel was paid a stipend and only made appearances for ceremonial events.”
.......... “Oh? Bit of a hothead is he?”
.......... “A fiery temper, yes Sir. It seems he spent most of his time searching for antiquites and relics. Amateur archaeologist and all that. A good one too, by all accounts - the museum staff said that half their exhibits were found by him.”
.......... “So. Prone to rages. Access to the palace museum. Went missing the morning of the murder. I think we really want to have a little talk with this Colonel. Have his description circulated to our contacts in the other cities of the plains.”
.......... “Already done Sir.”
.......... “Good. Good.” Vimes drummed his fingers on the desk. “What was it Cheery called it? Narrative corsetry...?”
.......... “Narrative causality principle.”
.......... “I don’t like it.”
.......... “No, Sir.”
.......... “Hmm. Find him. Find him quick.”
.......... “Yes, Sir.”
.......... Vimes slapped his hand down on the desk dismissing the matter. “But that wasn’t really why I asked you to come.”
.......... “No, Sir?” Carrot asked, radiating polite inquiry and eagerness - and a faint whiff of soap.
.......... “No.” Vimes gave Carrot a calculating look. “Do you remember what you did on your first day on the force?”
.......... “Um, yes, Sir.” Carrot blushed a litle in embaressment.
.......... “Well...”
......................................................................*....................*....................*
.......... Hubert H. Hibbert III - H3 to his friends - crept down the secret passage in his grandfathers, no, he corrected himself, his house. That H1 had left it to him in his will along with a substantial trust fund had come as a suprise to both him and his father, and a matter of some consternation to the later, who had had plans to tear the house down and redevelop the site, fitting it into the huge commercial empire he controlled. Why he crept, he didn’t know, since it was, he reasoned, his secret passage now, it just seemed that creeping was the correct form of progress for secret passages.
.......... He’d been led to it by cryptic notes in the strange codified journal, bound in red leather, that he’d found by his grandfather’s bed. He hadn’t really known his grandfather that well, being more the sort of rugged outdoorsy type growing up, not one to sit by an old man’s bed and listen to his ailments. Still, he’d thought the old man had liked him, or at least approved of him - more than he had his own son, H3‘s father.
.......... Not that H2 was disliked, by either his father or son, just they hadn’t had much in common. H1‘s accident had thrust his thin, bespectacled son into the world of business at a much younger age than expected as he was forced to take control of the family holdings during his father’s convalescence. Much to everyone’s suprise - especially their competitors - when he was thrown into the sea of commerce rather than sinking it was found that he swam like a shark. Hibbert Enterprises was now the biggest import/export company in Ankh Morpork, accounting for nearly 40% of ocean bound trade.
.......... Now that H3 had seen some of H1‘s keepsakes - etchings, sporting trophies, faded iconographs - he had some inkling of why he’d been favoured: it seemed that they shared an outlook and a physique - before H1‘s accident - that must have skipped a generation. Looking at some of the iconographs it could have been him standing there in old fashioned clothing beaming at the camera. He found himself wishing he’d got to know the old man better - which was why he’d spent so much of the last week trying to decipher the journal. He’d had little success until a line had seemed to mention the portrait of Tacticus in the study. Looking at it he’d noticed a corner of the frame was smoother than the rest. Running his hand along it he must have tripped some hidden switch as a section of wall swivelled out revealing a dark, dank, dusty and dirty corridor.
.......... At least it wasn’t eldricht - he knew that because there was no glowing fungus on the walls and he had to light his way by a simple lantern he found by the entrance and re-filled - just an ordinary everyday secret passage built into the walls of an old mansion in the docklands. Though by the number of staircases he’d descended - some of which had creaked alarmingly, rotten with age or damp - he was far below the mansion and it’s regular cellars by now. He guessed that at the bottom he’d find some sort of storage facility left over from the earlier pirating or smuggling days of his forbears, so was completely suprised when he entered the room at the bottom of the final flight of stairs.
.......... There were benches. There were weights and dumbbells. There were punching bags and vaulting horses and various bars and rings and pulleys and such. It was, without doubt, a gymnasium. Smugglers with a keep-fit fetish? Yo ho ho and a thirty minute workout? Something didn’t add up. At the far end was a door on which could still be seen, discoloured and faded, the coat of arms of Ankh Morpork, though something didn’t look right about it.
.......... Beyond the door was what looked like an artificer’s workroom, there were workbenches with vices and saws and files and things and scattered pieces of strange equipment. He spent some time trying to make sense of the stuff. An odd bellows arrangement seemed to be used to squash air into a number of metal pod like things of various sizes and when he slotted a pod into a contraption that looked as though it should be hand held and pulled a little lever a nasty hook trailing a metal cable shot out of it and buried itself into the ceiling, narrowly missing going up his nose in its progress.
.......... Jumping back in suprise he knocked into another workbench accidently scattering some more devices and parts and spilling a small pile of what he took to be pamphlets to the floor. On closer inspection, however, they proved to be old exercise books such as a schoolchild might use. He flicked through the yellowed pages curiously and though at first glance the faded writing seemed to be in some foreign language he found that there were many doodles and sketches, some in margins, others filling whole pages. One of them appeared to be a diagram of the hook throwing device in his hand, another of what he had assumed was some sort of wall decoration: a large metal plate with a wheel jutting out of it’s center. Closer inspection revealed hinges on one side... another door? There was a little window set in it at about eye height but even tough he held the lantern up he couldn’t see through it. Thinking maybe if he wiped some of the grime off he might get a better view he pulled a dustsheet off of a big wardrobe sized shape set against the back wall, meaning to use the corner as a cleaning rag.
.......... Hubert H. Hibbert III - H3 to his friends - crept down the secret passage in his grandfathers, no, he corrected himself, his house. That H1 had left it to him in his will along with a substantial trust fund had come as a suprise to both him and his father, and a matter of some consternation to the later, who had had plans to tear the house down and redevelop the site, fitting it into the huge commercial empire he controlled. Why he crept, he didn’t know, since it was, he reasoned, his secret passage now, it just seemed that creeping was the correct form of progress for secret passages.
.......... He’d been led to it by cryptic notes in the strange codified journal, bound in red leather, that he’d found by his grandfather’s bed. He hadn’t really known his grandfather that well, being more the sort of rugged outdoorsy type growing up, not one to sit by an old man’s bed and listen to his ailments. Still, he’d thought the old man had liked him, or at least approved of him - more than he had his own son, H3‘s father.
.......... Not that H2 was disliked, by either his father or son, just they hadn’t had much in common. H1‘s accident had thrust his thin, bespectacled son into the world of business at a much younger age than expected as he was forced to take control of the family holdings during his father’s convalescence. Much to everyone’s suprise - especially their competitors - when he was thrown into the sea of commerce rather than sinking it was found that he swam like a shark. Hibbert Enterprises was now the biggest import/export company in Ankh Morpork, accounting for nearly 40% of ocean bound trade.
.......... Now that H3 had seen some of H1‘s keepsakes - etchings, sporting trophies, faded iconographs - he had some inkling of why he’d been favoured: it seemed that they shared an outlook and a physique - before H1‘s accident - that must have skipped a generation. Looking at some of the iconographs it could have been him standing there in old fashioned clothing beaming at the camera. He found himself wishing he’d got to know the old man better - which was why he’d spent so much of the last week trying to decipher the journal. He’d had little success until a line had seemed to mention the portrait of Tacticus in the study. Looking at it he’d noticed a corner of the frame was smoother than the rest. Running his hand along it he must have tripped some hidden switch as a section of wall swivelled out revealing a dark, dank, dusty and dirty corridor.
.......... At least it wasn’t eldricht - he knew that because there was no glowing fungus on the walls and he had to light his way by a simple lantern he found by the entrance and re-filled - just an ordinary everyday secret passage built into the walls of an old mansion in the docklands. Though by the number of staircases he’d descended - some of which had creaked alarmingly, rotten with age or damp - he was far below the mansion and it’s regular cellars by now. He guessed that at the bottom he’d find some sort of storage facility left over from the earlier pirating or smuggling days of his forbears, so was completely suprised when he entered the room at the bottom of the final flight of stairs.
.......... There were benches. There were weights and dumbbells. There were punching bags and vaulting horses and various bars and rings and pulleys and such. It was, without doubt, a gymnasium. Smugglers with a keep-fit fetish? Yo ho ho and a thirty minute workout? Something didn’t add up. At the far end was a door on which could still be seen, discoloured and faded, the coat of arms of Ankh Morpork, though something didn’t look right about it.
.......... Beyond the door was what looked like an artificer’s workroom, there were workbenches with vices and saws and files and things and scattered pieces of strange equipment. He spent some time trying to make sense of the stuff. An odd bellows arrangement seemed to be used to squash air into a number of metal pod like things of various sizes and when he slotted a pod into a contraption that looked as though it should be hand held and pulled a little lever a nasty hook trailing a metal cable shot out of it and buried itself into the ceiling, narrowly missing going up his nose in its progress.
.......... Jumping back in suprise he knocked into another workbench accidently scattering some more devices and parts and spilling a small pile of what he took to be pamphlets to the floor. On closer inspection, however, they proved to be old exercise books such as a schoolchild might use. He flicked through the yellowed pages curiously and though at first glance the faded writing seemed to be in some foreign language he found that there were many doodles and sketches, some in margins, others filling whole pages. One of them appeared to be a diagram of the hook throwing device in his hand, another of what he had assumed was some sort of wall decoration: a large metal plate with a wheel jutting out of it’s center. Closer inspection revealed hinges on one side... another door? There was a little window set in it at about eye height but even tough he held the lantern up he couldn’t see through it. Thinking maybe if he wiped some of the grime off he might get a better view he pulled a dustsheet off of a big wardrobe sized shape set against the back wall, meaning to use the corner as a cleaning rag.
.......... What was revealed, though, completely banished the little window from H3's mind. It was big. It was red. It was... magnificent.
......................................................................*....................*....................*
...to be continued
-Mongo
Why don't you knock it off with them negative waves? Why don't you dig how beautiful it is out here? Why don't you say something righteous and hopeful for a change? ~~ Oddball
and get quite shirty about people commenting (dont you pooh) 
! honestly!
