Chapter Five
Dearest Grandemother, and Grand Father,
I write to tell you that I have returned from a Fashion Parayde at, the house of Ladie Selachiiii. I sawe many of the New Seeson Fashions but, I did not like themme very much. Afterwards there was a Parte, It was moste, Horrible, for I did not knowe any Body there excepte Sammy Vimes, who has become a most dredful Fopp, and even my own Gerhardtina was behaving, moste Strangely. I was well gladde to leave Early and stay there no more. Mother and Father are, well and send their beste wishes as does
your granddaughter
Del
* * *
An angry mob, distinct only from the general standard run of Ankh- Morporkian angry mobs by the fact that this one happened to be dressed in the uniform of the City Watch, swarmed up Bournemouth St towards the Selachii mansion. The mob's leader pounded with his truncheon on the elegant wrought-iron gates.
"Oy! Open up! Watch business!".
Jaimes the butler glided through the front door and pulled open the gates with an elegant flourish. What greeted him in the forecourt was not a comforting sight. Cold moonlight gleamed off scratched and dented armour. Swords and daggers were mismatched, but wickedly sharp, and pointed in a no- nonsense fashion at the general vicinity of Jaimes's neck. Bootlaces trailed, and the large angry-looking gentleman towards the front of the pack appeared to be wearing a pair of GREY WOOLLEN SOCKS with his OPEN TOED SANDALS. Jaimes winced and pressed a hand to his temple in abject horror. He turned and shouted back into the hall of the building.
"Emergency! Cartson! Kyaine! Tohm! Tehd! Come quickly, you're needed!".
The Watch stared as a number of men dressed in very expensive clothes slithered down a pole at the far end of the hall. Jaimes turned to the wearer of the offending socks. "You first, sir. Come this way as quickly as you can, please, and for Prada's sake don't *touch* anything."
* * *
"Well, thank-you very much for letting us look around anyway, Mrs. Rackthorne. And do tell Mr. Rackthorne I hope old Maisy gets over that nasty case of the scroggs before too long."
Carrot tramped down the steps; his expression unreadable.
A plain, whitewashed room, neatly mended clothes folded away in the dresser. A few thin, cheaply-printed books and magazines strewn over the bedside table. Elaine Clutterbuck had been a quiet girl who stayed in her room for most of the day. She'd earned a living sewing piecework for one of the dressmaking houses in Cunning Artificers, until she'd stopped bringing in baskets of work a few weeks ago. She'd gradually stopped leaving her room, her landlords assuming that she'd simply started keeping night hours like so many seamstresses had before her. And she'd died there, in that bright, empty little room. "Never given me any trouble, poor soul" Mrs Rackthorne had told him, "and always on time with the rent. Such a pretty girl, too, and so sweet. It's a crying shame.".
Angua stepped out of the shadows to join him, glancing at his face and refraining from asking how the enquiry had gone.
"I found this". He held it out. "On her bedside table".
Angua sniffed at the bundle of papers. It smelled like nothing else in the city, like something she hadn't come across since Uberwald. It smelled like home. There was anxiety there, overlaid with self-doubt and self-loathing exorcised through pain. Fear. Love and hate and strange chemicals mingled in the well-thumbed pages, and her eyes flickered over the headlines on the foremost page. "Lose Fifteen Pounds in Two Weeks". "New Spring Looks for Every Species". A smile pulled up the corners of her savage mouth. Well, *almost* every species.
High above them, the gargoyle perched on the guttering of the Landresses' Guild raised one heavy forelimb, then the other, in an unmistakable clacks signal. Carrot and Angua froze, then looked at one another. He spoke first, in a comforting cliche. "Trouble at Mr. Blannick's leather workshop?".
And through the dark streets wolf and man ran headlong side by side.
* * *
Sammy and Gerhardtina watched as their erstwhile cousin and friend bumbled her way towards the door, tripping over a diminutive old lady in a tiara and almost snapping in half a spectrally thin woman in pink chiffon.
"Strange girl" he remarked, flipping back a lock of midnight hair that had never really been out of place.
Gerhardtina smiled and extended her long neck, making the tiniest purring sound. "Well, she was a dear to come, in any case. I didn't really think this would be Del's sort of scene."
"What would be? Digging in the mud for miscreants, I suppose."
Both Gerhardtina and Samuel swung around to observe the braying source of this new conversation.
"I loved your work tonight, 'Tina. Beautiful, beautiful stuff, you just bring the collection alive, darling. And Lord Samuel, so nice to see you looking... well. And do my eyes deceive me, or are those Manny Blannicks?".
The thing that used to be Emmelina Cosmopilite was cruising towards them, smiling like a shark*.
* The shark in question would most probably be the Rimwards Ocean Lipstick Shark, a rare and truly disturbing creature that lives in the fast-moving currents of the outer Rim, preying on smaller, less fashionable fish which it usually frightens to death by spreading rumours behind their backs.
* * *
"Oh, but Kyaine, you have to leave him the moustache! It's so cute! Very Village People."
"Which village?"
"Sto Plains, I expect. Or one of those weird little ones in Lancre, you know, where the straight people all marry their cousins and spend too much time with their sheep. Anyway, the moustache stays."
"OK, but I'm gonna make him zhjuje it with some product."
"Mousse?"
"Oh yeah!"
Fred Colon shifted uneasily. In the fifteen minutes or so he'd been separated from his fellow watchmen, he'd been surrounded and whisked upstairs by this crowd of swiftly-chattering men dressed in very expensive clothes. He now appeared to be in one of the guest bedrooms of Lady Selachii's house, where two strangely-named men were arguing over his facial hair while a small blond person named Cartson produced endless garments from a large purple closet and entreated him to try them on.
"Come on, just put it on for a little bit, OK?" Cartson shook a royal blue velvet smoking jacket in a gesture that was presumably meant to be inviting. "It's going to bring out your eyes fabulously, and then we'll just have to fix up that footwear issue before you go see Jaimes to get your hair scenario re-structured!"
"Now just wait a minute, mate. As an officer of the City Watch, I don't think that you've any call to be -".
Cartson stamped his foot. "Well, if you're going to be like that, I don't think I'll bother doing the rest of your colours!". He gazed at Colon, then softened. "No, that's cruel. Look, I know these are really big changes to your fashion story, Fred, but the end result is going to be really amazing. Fred, don't do this for me, do it for yourself! And do it for the sake of 'Slightly Odd Eye for the Perpendicular Person', OK honey?".
As he shrugged his way into the smoking jacket and sat passively while another small chattery man named something unpronounceable splattered something thick, cold and improbably chocolatey-smelling across his face, Colon couldn't help but feel that something had gone horribly awry somewhere along the line...
* * *
And now, a variation of the scene that was going on all around the city...
Mica the young troll slumped on her bed, sadly turning the pages of a magazine. If troll mattresses weren't made mostly of granite, with a basalt under layer for comfort and support, she might had buried her face in the bed and burst into tears. Her younger sister Zirconia walked into the room, took one look at Mica's face and sat down on the edge of the bed.
"Mica. You look like troll lose piece of argon, find piece of calcium precipitate. What wrong?"
Mica sniffled, a truly disturbing sound when emanating from a nose roughly the size of a loaf of bread. She held up the centrefold picture of 'Ankh- Morpork Vague', the magazine dwarfed, perhaps even gnomed, by the size of her massive, broad-knuckled troll hand.
"Look at dat, Zirc. What dat look like to you?"
Zirconia picked up the magazine and studied it. "Look like skinny human female what not got enough food or clothes."
"Exactly!"
Zirconia frowned. "You cryin' because humans not got enough food to eat?". Her sister Mica had never been known for her charitable impulses at home on Copperhead, although her personality had branched out somewhat on the family's recent trip to Ankh-Morpork. Since the character traits for which Mica had been known *did* include violent outbursts and the clobbering of siblings with random pieces of the landscape, Zirconia decided to play it low-key. "Cause dat's OK if you is, I'm sure we can find some way to make sure der poor humans gets - "
"NO! You ain't looking prop'ly! Dat lady in der picture, she ain't unhappy! Dat beauty, fashion, *glamour*. Dat how you supposed to look. You dat size, you can wear pretty clothes, top fashion designs what only come in small sizes! Not like" Mica gestured towards her own powerfully muscled form stretched out on the bed "dis! You think they ever put troll girl in magazine? No! Because troll girl ugly, lumpy, disgustin' ...".
Zirconia reached out and gently took the magazine from her sister's hands. She flicked through the pages, searching. "Don't be silly, Mica. Look. Here's a picture. They do put troll in magazine, see?" Mica started up eagerly, then slumped back. "Yeah. Next to heading dat say 'Don't Worry About Being Beautiful, Just Be Happy With Yourself The Way You Are'."
Zirconia, a somewhat slower reader, squinted at the lines of text next to the picture of a smiling female troll, her frown deepening from puzzlement to hostility. "'Even der ugliest and stupiddest troll can achieve a fac-sim- il-e of happiness if she t'inks positive an' maintains a happy per-son-al- it-y'? Mica, what is dis coprolite you readin'?"
Beside her, regardless of the hardness of the bed, Mica buried her face in the mattress and began to wail.
* * *
"He's been like this for a couple of hours, now."
The inner door to the workshop opened and Angua stepped in, human-formed and hurriedly re-adjusting the neckline of her shirt. Carrot turned towards her from the workbench, where he and Coralie Nailsande were bent over the frozen body of Immanuel Blannick.
"He'd been working all day. The shop just went crazy, I've never seen anything like it. I had to send Tommy and Ben home, they were exhausted."
"And was Mr. Blannick sick, or behaving oddly, anything like that?"
"Well, he was acting strange this morning before we opened. Kept going on about finding the perfect sole, and shoe-making being his Art Form. Not like Manny at all, he used to say "just bang in the nails and it'll be right, it's all just clodhoppers for a bunch of stupid cop... erm, sorry, no offence meant."
Carrot smiled tiredly. "None taken. I'm afraid we've got no leads to go on for the moment, Mistress Nailsande. There are a lot of unusual things going on around the city at the moment, as I'm sure you don't need to be told."
Angua patted the exhausted woman on the shoulder. "We can arrange for him to be taken down to the Yard if you like. Someone can at least keep an eye on him and make sure he's warm, and we'll knock up a doctor to take a look at him in the morning."
"Thank-you, Captain. I'd appreciate that."
They looked at one another, three confused, worried faces in the candle- light.
* * *
Champagne corks popped. Laughter, shrill and husky, ran and poured and trickled through the room. She took them by the arms and moved them through the crowd, her beautiful creatures, her own, making for the stage door, a strange triumvirate of shetland pony, tiger and gazelle... ... and blue sparks flashed and flickered between them.
* * *
It was half past two, and C.M.O.T. Dibbler was starting to get worried. His usually brisk trade in dodgy snack food had suddenly fallen right off, for no discernable reason. It was a beautiful spring night, and in accordance with the best traditions of Ankh-Morporkian nightlife the streets should have been awash with young lovers needing to be sold wilted cellophane- wrapped roses, children requiring brightly-coloured and dubiously-flavoured ice-lollies and drunks seeking midnight sausages in buns. His best customers were suddenly nowhere to be found, and his cries advertising his wares had gone unheeded all night long.
He tried again. "RAT ONNA STI-ICK! SAUSAGE INNA BUN!!"
He picked out two figures advancing down the street, and identified them as Sargent Anthracite and Corporal Dwarrows of the City Watch. "Evening officers! Fancy a nice hot snack on this chilly night? Got some lovely rat juice and hot shale on the boil, twopence a cup and that's cutting-"
"- your own throat" chorussed Anthra and Dwarrows wearily. The shorter Watchwoman eyed Dibbler suspiciously. He was well used to this; in fact he tended to worry about customers who *didn't* eye him suspiciously; all too often nowadays they turned out to be Undercover Food Inspectors sent out by Commander Vimes. But Dibbler had become, over the years, a connoisseur of different kinds of suspicious gaze, ranging from the basic "Are-you-really- sure-this-pie-is-chicken?" to the more complex "What's-this-wobbly-green- bit-over-here-and-I-don't-remember-asking-for...well,-bloody-hell-that-had- better-be-gravy!". The particular combination of squinty, piercing eyes and pursed mouth currently before him was one he had never seen before. It was as though the dwarf was concerned, not about the (traditionally non- existent) quality of the food, but as though she somehow distrusted the presence of food itself. In a city were comestibles were usually prized for cheapness, availability and largeness of portions, it was unheard-of for anyone, particularly a dwarf, to reject or refuse any food that didn't actually attempt to slither off the plate.
"Excuse me? Mr. Dibbler? How many grams of fat are there in one of your rats on a stick?"
* * *
"All things just keep getting better - " Cartson and Kyaine were humming cheerfully as they led the way down a long corridor. In the distance, Colon could make out the sounds of music, voices and shuffling feet as he was led into a small ante-chamber, where a truly disturbing sight met his eyes.
"Nobby?"
"I've had my colours done, sarge!" Nobby beamed proudly.
* * *
"OK, so that's one skinny rat with low-killer-jewel-ketchup, a jumbo-sized mug of weak fat-free-soy half-decaf-rat-juice extra-hot with less whisker, and a half-serving of ninety-nine-point-nine-percent sediment-free shale."
"Hold on! I don't want powdered granite onna shale!"
"And I ORDERED a mug-a-weak fat-free-soy-half-decaf-rat-juice extra-hot with MORE whisker! You stupid or something?"
"An' no powdered granite onna shale!"
* * *
The girl in the mirror looked back at her, face collapsed into an expression of lumpen, square-jawed misery. Blood swept across her features as she recalled her stumbling, stuttering performance at the party, making a fool of herself.
"What am I good for?" the girl silently asked her reflection. She answered her own question, "Scrubbing stone with bleach, and getting shouted at by everyone who comes along." She had always been dimly aware that everyone who'd known her parents had wondered; what the child of a werewolf and the lost heir to the throne would be like, who she would grow up to be. A perfect princess, with her father's easy grace and kingliness shining out of her mother's beautiful face? A powerful bimorph stalking the city in wolf form, armed with knowledge, ferocity and strength? In either case, they'd undoubtedly expected the greatest Watchwoman the city had ever seen. And instead they'd gotten *her*. Couldn't even make a decent copper, not with every single advantage she had going for her. Big stupid lump, ugly, clumsy, no good for anything except screwing up and getting into trouble, disappointing her parents (assuming they were even around to be disappointed) and embarrassing her friends and relatives so badly they didn't even want to be seen in public with her any more.
Del gazed into the flat, unfriendly glass surface, hating it, that heavy, sorry face. Big bony shoulders, scrappy, sweaty hair, drooping mouth and sad blue eyes.
And dancing in the ocean depths were tiny electric-blue sparks...
Dearest Grandemother, and Grand Father,
I write to tell you that I have returned from a Fashion Parayde at, the house of Ladie Selachiiii. I sawe many of the New Seeson Fashions but, I did not like themme very much. Afterwards there was a Parte, It was moste, Horrible, for I did not knowe any Body there excepte Sammy Vimes, who has become a most dredful Fopp, and even my own Gerhardtina was behaving, moste Strangely. I was well gladde to leave Early and stay there no more. Mother and Father are, well and send their beste wishes as does
your granddaughter
Del
* * *
An angry mob, distinct only from the general standard run of Ankh- Morporkian angry mobs by the fact that this one happened to be dressed in the uniform of the City Watch, swarmed up Bournemouth St towards the Selachii mansion. The mob's leader pounded with his truncheon on the elegant wrought-iron gates.
"Oy! Open up! Watch business!".
Jaimes the butler glided through the front door and pulled open the gates with an elegant flourish. What greeted him in the forecourt was not a comforting sight. Cold moonlight gleamed off scratched and dented armour. Swords and daggers were mismatched, but wickedly sharp, and pointed in a no- nonsense fashion at the general vicinity of Jaimes's neck. Bootlaces trailed, and the large angry-looking gentleman towards the front of the pack appeared to be wearing a pair of GREY WOOLLEN SOCKS with his OPEN TOED SANDALS. Jaimes winced and pressed a hand to his temple in abject horror. He turned and shouted back into the hall of the building.
"Emergency! Cartson! Kyaine! Tohm! Tehd! Come quickly, you're needed!".
The Watch stared as a number of men dressed in very expensive clothes slithered down a pole at the far end of the hall. Jaimes turned to the wearer of the offending socks. "You first, sir. Come this way as quickly as you can, please, and for Prada's sake don't *touch* anything."
* * *
"Well, thank-you very much for letting us look around anyway, Mrs. Rackthorne. And do tell Mr. Rackthorne I hope old Maisy gets over that nasty case of the scroggs before too long."
Carrot tramped down the steps; his expression unreadable.
A plain, whitewashed room, neatly mended clothes folded away in the dresser. A few thin, cheaply-printed books and magazines strewn over the bedside table. Elaine Clutterbuck had been a quiet girl who stayed in her room for most of the day. She'd earned a living sewing piecework for one of the dressmaking houses in Cunning Artificers, until she'd stopped bringing in baskets of work a few weeks ago. She'd gradually stopped leaving her room, her landlords assuming that she'd simply started keeping night hours like so many seamstresses had before her. And she'd died there, in that bright, empty little room. "Never given me any trouble, poor soul" Mrs Rackthorne had told him, "and always on time with the rent. Such a pretty girl, too, and so sweet. It's a crying shame.".
Angua stepped out of the shadows to join him, glancing at his face and refraining from asking how the enquiry had gone.
"I found this". He held it out. "On her bedside table".
Angua sniffed at the bundle of papers. It smelled like nothing else in the city, like something she hadn't come across since Uberwald. It smelled like home. There was anxiety there, overlaid with self-doubt and self-loathing exorcised through pain. Fear. Love and hate and strange chemicals mingled in the well-thumbed pages, and her eyes flickered over the headlines on the foremost page. "Lose Fifteen Pounds in Two Weeks". "New Spring Looks for Every Species". A smile pulled up the corners of her savage mouth. Well, *almost* every species.
High above them, the gargoyle perched on the guttering of the Landresses' Guild raised one heavy forelimb, then the other, in an unmistakable clacks signal. Carrot and Angua froze, then looked at one another. He spoke first, in a comforting cliche. "Trouble at Mr. Blannick's leather workshop?".
And through the dark streets wolf and man ran headlong side by side.
* * *
Sammy and Gerhardtina watched as their erstwhile cousin and friend bumbled her way towards the door, tripping over a diminutive old lady in a tiara and almost snapping in half a spectrally thin woman in pink chiffon.
"Strange girl" he remarked, flipping back a lock of midnight hair that had never really been out of place.
Gerhardtina smiled and extended her long neck, making the tiniest purring sound. "Well, she was a dear to come, in any case. I didn't really think this would be Del's sort of scene."
"What would be? Digging in the mud for miscreants, I suppose."
Both Gerhardtina and Samuel swung around to observe the braying source of this new conversation.
"I loved your work tonight, 'Tina. Beautiful, beautiful stuff, you just bring the collection alive, darling. And Lord Samuel, so nice to see you looking... well. And do my eyes deceive me, or are those Manny Blannicks?".
The thing that used to be Emmelina Cosmopilite was cruising towards them, smiling like a shark*.
* The shark in question would most probably be the Rimwards Ocean Lipstick Shark, a rare and truly disturbing creature that lives in the fast-moving currents of the outer Rim, preying on smaller, less fashionable fish which it usually frightens to death by spreading rumours behind their backs.
* * *
"Oh, but Kyaine, you have to leave him the moustache! It's so cute! Very Village People."
"Which village?"
"Sto Plains, I expect. Or one of those weird little ones in Lancre, you know, where the straight people all marry their cousins and spend too much time with their sheep. Anyway, the moustache stays."
"OK, but I'm gonna make him zhjuje it with some product."
"Mousse?"
"Oh yeah!"
Fred Colon shifted uneasily. In the fifteen minutes or so he'd been separated from his fellow watchmen, he'd been surrounded and whisked upstairs by this crowd of swiftly-chattering men dressed in very expensive clothes. He now appeared to be in one of the guest bedrooms of Lady Selachii's house, where two strangely-named men were arguing over his facial hair while a small blond person named Cartson produced endless garments from a large purple closet and entreated him to try them on.
"Come on, just put it on for a little bit, OK?" Cartson shook a royal blue velvet smoking jacket in a gesture that was presumably meant to be inviting. "It's going to bring out your eyes fabulously, and then we'll just have to fix up that footwear issue before you go see Jaimes to get your hair scenario re-structured!"
"Now just wait a minute, mate. As an officer of the City Watch, I don't think that you've any call to be -".
Cartson stamped his foot. "Well, if you're going to be like that, I don't think I'll bother doing the rest of your colours!". He gazed at Colon, then softened. "No, that's cruel. Look, I know these are really big changes to your fashion story, Fred, but the end result is going to be really amazing. Fred, don't do this for me, do it for yourself! And do it for the sake of 'Slightly Odd Eye for the Perpendicular Person', OK honey?".
As he shrugged his way into the smoking jacket and sat passively while another small chattery man named something unpronounceable splattered something thick, cold and improbably chocolatey-smelling across his face, Colon couldn't help but feel that something had gone horribly awry somewhere along the line...
* * *
And now, a variation of the scene that was going on all around the city...
Mica the young troll slumped on her bed, sadly turning the pages of a magazine. If troll mattresses weren't made mostly of granite, with a basalt under layer for comfort and support, she might had buried her face in the bed and burst into tears. Her younger sister Zirconia walked into the room, took one look at Mica's face and sat down on the edge of the bed.
"Mica. You look like troll lose piece of argon, find piece of calcium precipitate. What wrong?"
Mica sniffled, a truly disturbing sound when emanating from a nose roughly the size of a loaf of bread. She held up the centrefold picture of 'Ankh- Morpork Vague', the magazine dwarfed, perhaps even gnomed, by the size of her massive, broad-knuckled troll hand.
"Look at dat, Zirc. What dat look like to you?"
Zirconia picked up the magazine and studied it. "Look like skinny human female what not got enough food or clothes."
"Exactly!"
Zirconia frowned. "You cryin' because humans not got enough food to eat?". Her sister Mica had never been known for her charitable impulses at home on Copperhead, although her personality had branched out somewhat on the family's recent trip to Ankh-Morpork. Since the character traits for which Mica had been known *did* include violent outbursts and the clobbering of siblings with random pieces of the landscape, Zirconia decided to play it low-key. "Cause dat's OK if you is, I'm sure we can find some way to make sure der poor humans gets - "
"NO! You ain't looking prop'ly! Dat lady in der picture, she ain't unhappy! Dat beauty, fashion, *glamour*. Dat how you supposed to look. You dat size, you can wear pretty clothes, top fashion designs what only come in small sizes! Not like" Mica gestured towards her own powerfully muscled form stretched out on the bed "dis! You think they ever put troll girl in magazine? No! Because troll girl ugly, lumpy, disgustin' ...".
Zirconia reached out and gently took the magazine from her sister's hands. She flicked through the pages, searching. "Don't be silly, Mica. Look. Here's a picture. They do put troll in magazine, see?" Mica started up eagerly, then slumped back. "Yeah. Next to heading dat say 'Don't Worry About Being Beautiful, Just Be Happy With Yourself The Way You Are'."
Zirconia, a somewhat slower reader, squinted at the lines of text next to the picture of a smiling female troll, her frown deepening from puzzlement to hostility. "'Even der ugliest and stupiddest troll can achieve a fac-sim- il-e of happiness if she t'inks positive an' maintains a happy per-son-al- it-y'? Mica, what is dis coprolite you readin'?"
Beside her, regardless of the hardness of the bed, Mica buried her face in the mattress and began to wail.
* * *
"He's been like this for a couple of hours, now."
The inner door to the workshop opened and Angua stepped in, human-formed and hurriedly re-adjusting the neckline of her shirt. Carrot turned towards her from the workbench, where he and Coralie Nailsande were bent over the frozen body of Immanuel Blannick.
"He'd been working all day. The shop just went crazy, I've never seen anything like it. I had to send Tommy and Ben home, they were exhausted."
"And was Mr. Blannick sick, or behaving oddly, anything like that?"
"Well, he was acting strange this morning before we opened. Kept going on about finding the perfect sole, and shoe-making being his Art Form. Not like Manny at all, he used to say "just bang in the nails and it'll be right, it's all just clodhoppers for a bunch of stupid cop... erm, sorry, no offence meant."
Carrot smiled tiredly. "None taken. I'm afraid we've got no leads to go on for the moment, Mistress Nailsande. There are a lot of unusual things going on around the city at the moment, as I'm sure you don't need to be told."
Angua patted the exhausted woman on the shoulder. "We can arrange for him to be taken down to the Yard if you like. Someone can at least keep an eye on him and make sure he's warm, and we'll knock up a doctor to take a look at him in the morning."
"Thank-you, Captain. I'd appreciate that."
They looked at one another, three confused, worried faces in the candle- light.
* * *
Champagne corks popped. Laughter, shrill and husky, ran and poured and trickled through the room. She took them by the arms and moved them through the crowd, her beautiful creatures, her own, making for the stage door, a strange triumvirate of shetland pony, tiger and gazelle... ... and blue sparks flashed and flickered between them.
* * *
It was half past two, and C.M.O.T. Dibbler was starting to get worried. His usually brisk trade in dodgy snack food had suddenly fallen right off, for no discernable reason. It was a beautiful spring night, and in accordance with the best traditions of Ankh-Morporkian nightlife the streets should have been awash with young lovers needing to be sold wilted cellophane- wrapped roses, children requiring brightly-coloured and dubiously-flavoured ice-lollies and drunks seeking midnight sausages in buns. His best customers were suddenly nowhere to be found, and his cries advertising his wares had gone unheeded all night long.
He tried again. "RAT ONNA STI-ICK! SAUSAGE INNA BUN!!"
He picked out two figures advancing down the street, and identified them as Sargent Anthracite and Corporal Dwarrows of the City Watch. "Evening officers! Fancy a nice hot snack on this chilly night? Got some lovely rat juice and hot shale on the boil, twopence a cup and that's cutting-"
"- your own throat" chorussed Anthra and Dwarrows wearily. The shorter Watchwoman eyed Dibbler suspiciously. He was well used to this; in fact he tended to worry about customers who *didn't* eye him suspiciously; all too often nowadays they turned out to be Undercover Food Inspectors sent out by Commander Vimes. But Dibbler had become, over the years, a connoisseur of different kinds of suspicious gaze, ranging from the basic "Are-you-really- sure-this-pie-is-chicken?" to the more complex "What's-this-wobbly-green- bit-over-here-and-I-don't-remember-asking-for...well,-bloody-hell-that-had- better-be-gravy!". The particular combination of squinty, piercing eyes and pursed mouth currently before him was one he had never seen before. It was as though the dwarf was concerned, not about the (traditionally non- existent) quality of the food, but as though she somehow distrusted the presence of food itself. In a city were comestibles were usually prized for cheapness, availability and largeness of portions, it was unheard-of for anyone, particularly a dwarf, to reject or refuse any food that didn't actually attempt to slither off the plate.
"Excuse me? Mr. Dibbler? How many grams of fat are there in one of your rats on a stick?"
* * *
"All things just keep getting better - " Cartson and Kyaine were humming cheerfully as they led the way down a long corridor. In the distance, Colon could make out the sounds of music, voices and shuffling feet as he was led into a small ante-chamber, where a truly disturbing sight met his eyes.
"Nobby?"
"I've had my colours done, sarge!" Nobby beamed proudly.
* * *
"OK, so that's one skinny rat with low-killer-jewel-ketchup, a jumbo-sized mug of weak fat-free-soy half-decaf-rat-juice extra-hot with less whisker, and a half-serving of ninety-nine-point-nine-percent sediment-free shale."
"Hold on! I don't want powdered granite onna shale!"
"And I ORDERED a mug-a-weak fat-free-soy-half-decaf-rat-juice extra-hot with MORE whisker! You stupid or something?"
"An' no powdered granite onna shale!"
* * *
The girl in the mirror looked back at her, face collapsed into an expression of lumpen, square-jawed misery. Blood swept across her features as she recalled her stumbling, stuttering performance at the party, making a fool of herself.
"What am I good for?" the girl silently asked her reflection. She answered her own question, "Scrubbing stone with bleach, and getting shouted at by everyone who comes along." She had always been dimly aware that everyone who'd known her parents had wondered; what the child of a werewolf and the lost heir to the throne would be like, who she would grow up to be. A perfect princess, with her father's easy grace and kingliness shining out of her mother's beautiful face? A powerful bimorph stalking the city in wolf form, armed with knowledge, ferocity and strength? In either case, they'd undoubtedly expected the greatest Watchwoman the city had ever seen. And instead they'd gotten *her*. Couldn't even make a decent copper, not with every single advantage she had going for her. Big stupid lump, ugly, clumsy, no good for anything except screwing up and getting into trouble, disappointing her parents (assuming they were even around to be disappointed) and embarrassing her friends and relatives so badly they didn't even want to be seen in public with her any more.
Del gazed into the flat, unfriendly glass surface, hating it, that heavy, sorry face. Big bony shoulders, scrappy, sweaty hair, drooping mouth and sad blue eyes.
And dancing in the ocean depths were tiny electric-blue sparks...
