"I didn't know there was a hatch like this in the wall."
Commander Vimes was whispering, his voice getting progressively quieter when he realised how well it carried in the narrow tunnel. Still the disgruntled tome was impossible to miss. He was, Vetinari imagined, not quite pleased about the fact that there was something in his streets that even after a lifetime of patrolling them he didn't know. A secret tunnel in one of the better parts of Ankh-Morpork – not the place where anyone would suspect such a thing, which was most likely the reason for choosing this location in the first place.
"If it is any consolation, Sir Samuel," the patrician said, not bothering to lower his voice in the last, "the entrance has not been in this place for very long."
"You mean they just dug this tunnel and no one noticed?"
"If you don't try to keep something secret, no one will suspect there is a secret to be kept. You of all people should know this."
"But you noticed, of course." Now the voice sounded sour. Able to imagine the expression that went along with the words, Vetinari smiled briefly in the darkness.
"Quite the contrary, I was only shown it only a couple of weeks before. Really, Commander, there is no reason to whisper. No one will hear us."
Silence answered him. It was hard, he imagined, to overcome the urge to be as quiet as possible while sneaking down a dark, damp stairwell to where the enemy waited. The air was getting cooler with each step down, and soon the stones of the surrounding buildings were replaced by the rough material of much older tunnels.
"Who created these?" Vimes asked, his voice still subdued, though Vetinari no longer had to strain to hear him. "The dwarfs?" By now they were pretty far below the streets.
"No. They are leftovers of the first city."
"Let me rephrase it: Did the dwarfs uncover these tunnels?"
It was pitch black around them, yet Vetinari could make out the barred door to his right, the junction to his left. He walked down the alley with Vimes on his heels, no more than an few inches of air between his head and the bottom on the next higher layer of Ankh-Morpork, as abandoned as this one, long ago.
"The dwarfs don't come here," he said. He suspected death had something to do with the fact that they could see in the darkness, but if it was Death as a person, or simply their personal state of not being alive, he didn't dare to speculate on.
It was very much like the invisible dark in Death's house.
"Mind telling me…" Vimes stopped himself and rephrased the question. "Where are we going?"
Vetinari smiled to himself because Vimes, walking behind him, could not see it. "We are headed to the place where I believe the cause for our current situation is awaiting us."
"Awaiting in the sense that they are there, or in the sense that they know we're coming?" The last time Vetinari had been here, the tunnels had been lit by torchlight, and he had been in a considerable amount of pain. It was not a memory he cared about, but at the moment it was valuable. He took another turn left, down another flight of steps, when Vimes added, "And who are 'they' anyway? Death's explanation didn't make an awful lot of sense to me."
"No," Vetinari agreed in as pleasant a tone he could muster. "It wouldn't."
Vimes growled, and the patrician decided to offer an explanation before he run a risk of dying in these tunnels a second time.
"We are up against beings apparently called the Auditors of Reality, although their name doesn't matter in the least here, as it could be exchanged with any other. If I understand correctly what Death told me, along with the information found in his library, the Auditors do, for one reason or another, have an interest in extinguishing all life on the Disk. Destroying this city was a first step, and by the look of it the only one they had to take, as it greatly reduced the number of antrophomorphical personifications, whose existence is closely interwoven with that of all beings on this world."
"Hold on a second. Why do they want to erase all life?"
Here Vetinari could only speculate. "Because it doesn't follow the rules and brings chaos to a world they would prefer neatly structured."
"But they are destroying the world!"
"A price they appear more than willing to pay," Vetinari said friendly.
"And what do they have to do with the Agatheans?"
"They cannot intervene directly, just as Death could not take direct actions to stop them. The Auditors could only enable the Agathean army to invade the city without anyone noticing in time. The army that is currently on its way here, unseen."
"Ah," said Vimes. "So, these Auditors didn't, by any chance get the idea into the emperor's head that invading us would be a good idea?"
"Why, Sir Samuel, I'm impressed. There might be hope for you yet."
"None for you, if you keep this up," Vimes replied surprisingly bluntly. Vetinari's lips twitched. It had been a long time since anyone dared speak this way with him. It was most amusing. There were benefits to being dead, after all.
"Sir," Vimes added.
"Quite."
"The Auditors enabled the enemy to invade," the watchman continued this thought, "which is only an indirect interference, and Death enabled us to stop them, which is only an indirect interference on his part. So they're all just bending the rules."
"So it would seem, although I have reason to belief, according to my research, that these Auditors are the rules. However, their world is not all that different from ours."
"In that there are rules, or in that no one seems to follow them?"
"That, it seems to me, would fall into your field of expertise, commander."
"How do we stop them?" Vimes returned to the original topic while they slipped through a half opened door and Vetinari tried not to clench his hands into fists at the faint smell in the air and the memories it carried. He concentrated on Vimes' voice instead. "No one can see us, so I guess visiting the watch house and yell 'There's an army sneaking closer!' is out of the question."
"It's much easier than that," Vetinari told him. "Their arrival is clouded by the Auditors' power. So all we have to do is get rid of the Auditors."
-
"I had a feeling you were going to say that." In fact, the usual eighty-nine-numbers scale from one to one hundred (Obviously, since it had been invented by wizards, it was missing all numbers containing an eight, and the number eighty-eight it was missing twice.) wasn't big enough to measure how much Sam had seen this coming.
Having predicted correctly gave him some satisfaction and some dread. More dread than satisfaction, since he didn't expect all-powerful, outworldly beings to be stopped by a 'Halt, or I'll arrest you!'
"Are we going to club them to death?" It seemed to be as good a question to ask as any.
"I doubt such an opportunity will present itself. Besides, they can't exactly be considered alive." Vetinari sounded mildly amused. Vimes suspected the tone was meant to cover the fact that he had no idea what to do himself.
Well, they would just have to come up with something when the time came. They were good at that, at least.
The air had grown constantly cooler. Sam was shivering, which was kind of unfair, as he should by any rights be beyond the point where he could feel cold. He also was hungry.
The company of Albert and his cooking would not be entirely unwelcome. It would, in any case, upstage being alone with Vetinari and some spooky assassins in the dark beneath the city.
At first he didn't recognize the smell that mingled with the dampness of the tunnel. But the dampness lessened and the smell got stronger, until Sam realised where he had smelled it before: It reminded him of home. Of the very rare, peaceful evenings in front of the fireplace, but even more so of the large building in which Sybil kept her dragons, especially after one of them had exploded. In other words, it smelled burned.
Whoever was down here apparently didn't like the cold, so they had a nice warm fire somewhere. Nothing wrong with that – made it easier to find them in any case. Except that Vetinari seemed to know where to go anyway, and the not unpleasant smell of burned wood mingled with the fainter but very unpleasant smell of burned flesh.
Which should have reminded him of dinner at home, or even dinner made by Albert, or at least of Nobby roasting something unrecognizable over a burning ton. But somehow it didn't.
The fell silent. There was a lot more to ask, but somehow Vetinari projected the words DON'T TALK TO ME in glowing letters into the air around him. Sam could almost smell that, too, and like everything else here, it smelled of death.
His, to be exact. So he followed without a word and tried to figure out what to expect when they reached their destination. It had to be right around that corner. Or the next.
It wasn't around the next corner. However, behind the next corner they saw the faint shimmer of light reflected on the damp walls, and that was at least a start.
It got stronger, while the air remained chilly. Eventually Sam could make out voices. They spoke quietly though not hushed, for who would hear them in this place? Sam made out three different voices, but even as they came closer, the words remained gibberish. He didn't know this language.
"Agathean, I presume?" he was whispering again, knowing it was useless but unable to help himself.
"Obviously." Even Vetinari sounded subdued. Sam knew he understood the language, but the patrician didn't offer any further information as to the topic of the conversation, so he assumed it wasn't relevant to their situation. Eventually the smell of burned flesh mingled with the smell of cooked carrots, and Sam thought that maybe the Agatheans were simply discussing dinner.
The dank, dark corridors were memory now. The place they had entered wasn't all that different from a normal, lived in house. The walls were naked and slightly damp, true, and there were no windows, but the stones were clean and in better condition than earlier, and the wood of the doors they passed looked new. The hinges were well oiled. They didn't make a sound when the door closest to them swung open to reveal an Agathean solider in full armour.
Vimes jumped back, as quietly as possibly, his heart racing while he silently cursed his body for its instinctive reactions that were making a fool out of him. Vetinari merely stepped aside in one fluid movement, apparently unwilling to test what would happen if one of the living collided with him. Perhaps he would have passed through him as one would pass through thin air. It would have been a sight to behold, but as it was, no one passed through anything.
The guard – for Sam was sure that was what the man was – moved on without paying them notice.
There was more light down the hall the guard had emerged from, and more guards. Sam saw two of them standing in front of a closed door at the end of the hall. Other than most doors they had encountered so far, this one was made of steel, and heavily locked. Like all good policemen, Sam Vimes was unable to look at a locked door without wondering what kind of criminal activity might be hidden behind.
He slipped into the hall just before the door fell closed, not sure what would happen if he stopped its movement and the Agateans saw. They had already discovered that the movement of objects was no problem for them as long as the action remained without consequences, but so far no one had witnessed their activity that could only be described as 'haunting the city'.
The door fell shut louder than it had any right to, in Sam's opinion. The sound echoed.
The hall was well lit, and it took all the common sense Sam could come up with (while keeping another, older and more primal kind of common sense firmly locked away) not to jump from shadow to shadow but walk towards the locked door right in front of the guards.
And since he was marvelling about shadows already: for the first time since re-entering the world of the living through the backdoor he found himself in a place providing enough light to see that he still had one. It was disconcerting, somehow. If the light didn't ignore them, then how could they be certain that everyone else did?
But the armoured men paid no attention to him. Sam walked up to them like the ghost he was, right under their noses, feeling almost childish glee for a second or two – until he heard the voices just barely audible through the heavy door. A man, shouting in Agathean, sounding angry and frustrated, and then another voice, producing a half suppressed scream of pain.
Sam froze, his heart suddenly racing. He knew that voice. Of course. Of course.
"Our destination is that way," the very same voice said, and a hand grabbed Sam's arm, almost gently dragging him back to the corridor. After a second, he tried to pull away, driven by the instinct to protect, to prevent injustice that was a part of his being. But the grip on his arm was surprisingly firm.
"Let me go!" Sam hissed with anger covering a hint of desperation. "I can…"
"No, you can't," Vetinari said in the same calm, measured voice. "This is a memory, Sir Samuel."
For a second, Sam stared at him, while the meaning and the truth of the words sank into his mind. Vetinari continued to walk towards the end of the hall, his eyes firmly set on the wooden door that led away from this place.
I'll be back here, Sam silently promised. I know where to look now. As soon as this is over and we're back alive, someone else can save the city. I'm going to save you.
So they'd better hurry up now. The sooner they got this over with, the less time was wasted in the lives of their past selves.
More time was wasted on the door: as they tried to open it, Vimes and Vetinari made the discovery that they were unable to. Stuck in the hall, just out of reach of their goal, Sam tried to disintegrate the wood with the power of his glare, and without doubt he would have succeeded eventually. However, a considerable time would have passed before the solid wood eventually gave up, and in that time Vetinari, who most likely had an even greater desire to leave this place, figured out why it wouldn't move: like proper ghosts, they were able to move objects only if no living person was looking at it. So all they had to do was wait for both guards to look somewhere else.
It was a long time before that happened – an hour at least, though Vetinari claimed it was about a minute. The hall didn't offer the two guards a lot to look at except for the door straight ahead. Eventually Vimes went over to a torch on the wall that was not being directly stared at by any of them and let it drop to the stone floor. It distracted the two men enough for them to escape.
Back in the corridor there would have been a good moment for the patrician to comment on Vimes' cleverness in regard to distracting the guards. He did instead comment on Vimes tendency to stray off the path and show up where he wasn't needed. Sam considered reconsidering his vow to come back here once he was alive.
The voices they had heard earlier still drifted through the corridor. But now another voice had joined the foreign conversation, and Sam needed almost a minute before he realised that he didn't really hear it. It spoke right in his head, a little bit like Death's voice, but with less substance, merely the memory of having heard the words without them ever consulting his ears.
The most wonderful thing about it, though, was that he understood every none-existent word. It was one of the few advantages of avoiding language while talking.
The time is at hand, the person… the being said. Another voice answered, right there behind that half closed door Vetinari was stopping in front of. Unfortunately this one was very real and very Agathean. Sam was about to ask the patrician what it had said, but something told him it would be unwise to make any noise with this inhuman creature anywhere near them.
No, the being that could only be an Auditor replied to whatever had been said. There is no risk. Your army shall approach undetected. Nothing can stop you. In few days this city will be yours.
- tbc
August 26, 2009