There were fresh planks in the bottom. Someone - and surely it could only have been the dwarfs - had broken into the well down here and laid a couple of planks across it. They had dug this far, and stopped. Why? Because they'd reached the well?

There was dirty water, or water-like liquid, just under the planks. The tunnel was a bit wider here, and dwarfs had been here - she sniffed - a few days ago, no more. Yes. Dwarfs had been here, had fished around, and had then all left at once. They hadn't even bothered to tidy up. She could smell it like a picture.

[1] It was okay to throw your rubbish into the garden, because it might not be your garden you were throwing it into.

She crept forward, the tunnels mapping themselves in her nostrils. They weren't nicely finished like the tunnels Ardent moved in. They were rougher, with lots of zigzags and blind alleys. Rough planks and baulks of timber held back the fetid mud of the plains, which was nevertheless oozing through everywhere. These tunnels weren't built to last; they were there for a quick and definitely dirty job and all they had to do was survive until it was done.

So ... the diggers had been looking for something, but weren't sure where it was until they were within, what, about twenty feet of it, when they'd ... smelled it? Detected it? The last stretch to the well was dead straight. By then, they knew where they were going.

Angua crept on, almost bending double to clear the low ceiling until she gave up and went back to wolf. The tunnel straightened out again, with the occasional side passage that she ignored, although they smelled long. The vampire odour was still an annoying theme in the nasal symphony, and it came close to drowning the reek of foul water oozing from the walls. Here and there, vurms had colonized the ceiling. So had bats. They stirred.

And then there was another scent, as she passed a tunnel opening. It was quite faint, but it was unmistakably the whiff of corruption. A fresh death ...

Three fresh deaths. At the end of a short side tunnel were the bodies of two, no, three dwarfs, half buried in mud. They glowed. Vurms had no teeth, Carrot had told her. They waited until the prospective meal became runny of its own accord. And, while they waited for the biggest stroke of luck ever to have come their way, they celebrated. Down here, in a world far away from the streets, the dwarfs would dissolve in light.

Angua sniffed.

Make that very fresh

'They found something,' said a voice behind her. `And then it killed them.'

Angua leapt.

The leap wasn't intentional. Her hindbrain arranged it all by itself. The front brain, the bit that knew that sergeants should not attempt to disembowel lance-constables without provocation, tried to stop the leap in mid-air, but by then simple ballistics were in charge. All she managed was a mid-air twist, and struck the soft wall with her shoulder.

Wings fluttered a little way off, and there was a drawn-out organic sound, a sound that conveyed the idea that a slaughterhouse man was having some difficulty with a tricky bit of gristle.

`You know, sergeant,' said the voice of Sally, as if nothing had happened, `you werewolves have it easy. You stay one thing and you don't have any problems with body mass. Do you know how many bats I have to become for my bodyweight? More than a hundred and fifty, that's how many. And there's always one, isn't there, that gets lost or flies the wrong way? You can't think straight unless you get your bats together. And I'm not even going to touch on the subject of reassimilation. It's like the biggest sneeze you can think of. Backwards.'

There was no point in modesty, not down here in the dark. Angua forced herself to change back, every brain cell piling in to outvote tooth and claw. Anger helped.

`Why the hell are you here?' she said, when she had a mouth that worked.

`I'm off duty,' said Sally, stepping forward. `I thought I'd see what I could find.' She was totally naked.

`You couldn't have been so lucky!' Angua growled.

`Oh, I don't have your nose, sergeant,' said Sally, with a sweet smile. `But I was using a hundred and fifty-five pretty good flying ones, and they can cover a lot of ground.'

`I thought vampires could rematerialize their clothes,' said Angua accusingly. `Otto Chriek can!'

`Females can't. We don't know why. It's probably part of the whole underwired nightdress business. That's where you score again, of course. When you're in one hundred and fifty bat bodies it's quite hard to remember to keep two of them carrying a pair of pants.' Sally looked up at the ceiling and sighed. `Look, I can see where this is going. It's going to be about Captain Carrot, isn't it ...?,

'I saw the way you were smiling at him!'

`I'm sorry! We can be very personable! It's a vampire thing!'

`You were so keen to impress him, eh?'

`And you aren't? He's the kind of man anyone would want to impress!'

They watched one another warily.

`He is mine, you know,' said Angua, feeling the nascent claws strain under her fingernails.

`You're his, you mean!' said Sally. `You know it works like that. You trail after him!'

`I'm sorry! It's a werewolf thing!' Angua yelled.

`Hold it!' Sally thrust both hands in front of her in a gesture of peace. `There's something we'd better sort before this goes any further!'

`Yeah?'

`Yes. We're both wearing nothing, we're standing in what, you may have noticed, is increasingly turning into mud, and we're squaring up to fight. Okay. But there's something missing, yes?'

`And that is ... ?'

`A paying audience? We could make a fortune.' Sally winked. `Or we could do the job we came here to do?'

Angua forced her body to relax. She should have been saying that. She was the sergeant, wasn't she?

`All right, all right,' she said. `We're both here, okay? Let's leave it at that. Were you saying that these dwarfs were killed by some ... thing from the well?'

`Possibly. But if they were, it used an axe,' said Sally. `Take a look. Scrape some of the mud away. It's been oozing over them since I arrived. That's probably why you missed it,' she added generously.

Angua hauled one dwarf out of the shining slime.

`I see,' she said, letting the body fall back. `This one hasn't been dead two days. Not much effort made to hide them, I notice.'

`Why bother? They've stopped pumping out these tunnels; the props look pretty temporary; the mud's coming back. Besides, who'd be stupid enough to come down here?'

A piece of wall slithered down, with a sticky, organic, cow-pat sort of noise. Little plops and trickles filled the tunnel. Ankh-Morpork's underworld was stealthily reclaiming its own.

Angua closed her eyes and concentrated. The slime reek, the vampire's smell and the water that was now ankle deep all jostled for attention, but this was competition time. She couldn't let a vampire take the lead. That would be so ... traditional.

`There were other dwarfs,' she murmured. `Two - no, three ... er ... four more. I'm getting ... the black oil. Distant blood. Down the tunnel.' She stood up so sharply that she nearly hit her head on the tunnel roof. `C'mon!'

`It's getting a bit unsafe-'