'Acquiring information. Everyone does it, mmm, mhm.'

'Yes, but if you find a diplomat going too far you just send him home with a sharp note, don't you?'

'Around the Circle Sea, your grace, that is the case. Here they may have a different approach.'

'Something rather sharper than a note?'

'Exactly. Mmm.'

One of the guards was Captain Tantony. There was some minor difficulty, but the argument that, since he was guarding Vimes, he might as well be where Vimes was, eventually carried some weight. Tantony had the look of an agonizingly logical man.

He kept giving Vimes curious looks as the coach rattled out of the town. Beside him sat Cheery with her legs dangling. Vimes noticed, although it was not the kind of thing he generally made a habit of noticing, that the shape of her breastplate had been subtly altered, probably by the same armourer that Angua went to, to indicate that the chest underneath it was not quite the same shape of chest that you got under the armour of, say, Corporal Nobbs, although of course probably no one had a chest the same shape as that of Corporal Nobbs.

She was wearing her high-heeled iron boots, too.

'Look, you don't have to come,' he said out loud.

'Yes, I do.'

'I mean I could go and get Detritus instead. Although I suppose there'd be even more upshot if I took a troll into a dwarf mine. I mean, rather than a... a...'

'Girl,' said Cheery helpfully.

'Er, yes.' Vimes felt the coach slow to a halt, even though they hadn't left the town yet, and he looked out.

In front of them, across a small square, was a fort of sorts, but with much larger gates than you'd expect for its size. As Vimes stared at them they were swung open from within.

Inside was a slope. All the fort consisted of were four walls around a large, sloping tunnel.

'The dwarfs live underneath the town?' he said, as the light from outside was gradually replaced by the infrequent glow of torches. But they clearly showed the coach was rattling past a long, long line of stationary carts. The pools of light revealed horses, and drivers talking in groups.

'Under quite a lot of Uberwald,' said Cheery. 'This is just the nearest entrance, sir. We'll probably have to stop in a minute because the horses don't like—ah.'

The coach stopped again, and the coachman banged on the side to indicate that this was the end of the line. The queue of carts wound off down another tunnel, but the coach had stopped in a small cave with a big door. A couple of dwarfs were waiting there. They had axes slung across their backs, although by dwarf standards this counted merely as 'politely dressed' rather than 'heavily armed'. Their attitude, however, was in the international language of people guarding gates everywhere. 'Commander Sam Vimes, Ankh-Morpork Ci— Ambassador from Ankh-Morpork,' said Vimes, handing one of them his papers. At least it was not hard to assume a lofty air with dwarfs.

To his surprise, the document was read thoroughly, one dwarf looking over the other one's shoulder and pointing out interesting sub

clauses. The official seal was carefully examined.

One guard pointed to Cheery. 'Kra'k?'

'My official guard,' said Vimes. 'Included in "associated members of staff" on page two,' he added helpfully.

'Mhust searhch thy coash,' said the guard.

'No. Diplomatic immunity,' said Vimes. 'Tell 'em, Cheery.'

They listened to Cheery's urgent dwarfish. Then the other guard, whose face had indicated that there was something on his mind and it was jumping up and down, nudged his companion and pulled him aside.

There was a torrent of whispers. Vimes couldn't understand, but he caught the word 'Wilinus'. And, shortly afterwards, the word 'hr grag', dwarfish for 'thirty'.

'Oh gods,' he said. 'And a dog?'

'Good guess, sir,' said Cheery.

The document was handed back hurriedly. Vimes could read the body language, even written smaller than usual: there was probably an expensive problem here, so the guards were inclined to leave it to someone who earned more money than them.

One of them pulled a bellrope by the door. After some time the door slid open, revealing a small room.

'We have to go in, sir,' said Cheery.

'But there's no other doors!'

'It's all right, sir.'

Vimes stepped inside. The dwarfs slid the door back, leaving them in the room, which was lit by a single candle.

'Some kind of waiting room?' said Vimes.

Somewhere far off something went clonk. The floor trembled for a moment and then Vimes had an uneasy sensation of movement.

'The room moves?' he said.

'Yes, sir. Several hundred feet down, probably. I think it's all done by counterweights.'

They stood silently, unsure of what to say, as walls around them creaked and groaned. Then there was a rattle, a passing sensation of weight, and the room stopped moving.

'Wherever we're headed, keep your ears open,' said Vimes. 'Something's going on, I can feel it.'

The door slid back. Vimes looked out on to the night sky, underground. The stars were all around him... below him...

'I think we went down too far,' he said. And then his brain made sense of what his eyes had seen. The moving room had brought them out somewhere on the side of a huge cave. He was looking at a thousand points of candlelight, spread out on the cavern floor and in other galleries. Now that he could grasp the scale of things, he realized that many of them were moving.

The air was full of one huge sound made up of thousands of voices, echoed and re-echoed. Occasionally a shout or a laugh would stand out, but mostly it was just an endless sea of sound, beating on the shores of the eardrum.

'I thought you people lived in little mines,' said Vimes.

'Well, I thought humans lived in little cottages, sir,' said Cheery, taking a candle from a large rack beside the door and lighting it. 'And then I saw Ankh-Morpork.'

There was something recognizable about the way the lights were moving. A whole constellation of them was heading in towards one invisible wall, where reflected light now indicated, very faintly, the mouth of a large tunnel. In front of it was a row of lights.

Think of it as a lot of people heading for something that one row of people was... guarding.

'People down there aren't happy,' said Vimes. 'That looks like a mob to me. Look, you can tell by the way they move.'

'Commander Vimes?'

He turned. In the gloom he could make out several dwarfs, each with a candle fixed to his helmet. In front of them was, presumably, another dwarf.

He'd seen dwarfs like this in Ankh-Morpork, but always scurrying away. This was a deep-down dwarf.

The robe it was wearing was made of overlapping leather plates. Instead of the small round iron helmet which Vimes had always thought dwarfs were born with, it had a pointed leather hat with more leather flaps all round it. The one at the front had been tied up, to allow the wearer to look out at the world, or at least that part of it that was underground. The general effect was of a mobile cone.

'Er, yes, that's me,' said Vimes.

'Welcome to Schmaltzberg, your excellency. I am the King's jar'ahk'haga, which in your language you would call—'

But Vimes's lips had been moving fast as he tried to translate.

'Ideas... taster?' he said.

'Hah! That would be a way of putting it, yes. My name is Dee. Would you care to follow me? This should not take long.'

The figure swept away. One of the other dwarfs prodded Vimes very gently, indicating that he should follow.

The sound from far below redoubled. Someone was yelling.

'Is there a problem?' said Vimes, catching up with the fast-moving Dee.

'We have no problems.'

Ah, he's already lied to me, thought Vimes. We're being diplomatic.