Terry Pratchett - The Long War

The princess of the beagles had no throne; she sat easily on the ground, on what looked like a patch of natural turf growing in the middle of the room. The princess was flanked by guards, who had stone-tipped spears and space-age blasters to hand. Jansson wondered how the grass got the light to grow.

The Granddaughter’s title was not “Granddaughter’. Her name was not “Petra’. The adviser beside her, an ageing male with a glum posture, was not called “Brian’. But these were the best labels Sally and Jansson were given, courtesy of the kobold. The Granddaughter wore only a practical-looking pocket belt—that, and, Jansson saw, some kind of pendant on a loop of leather at her neck, what looked like handsome blue stones set in a ring of gold. It was an artefact that caught Jansson’s eye; it looked naggingly familiar.

And there was a dog by her side! A real dog, an authentic dog, a Datum dog, a big Alsatian if Jansson was any judge. It sat up, watching the newcomers, its tongue lolling; it looked healthy, well fed, well groomed. Somehow it looked the most natural presence in the world, here in this room full of dog-people, and yet the strangest too.

All the beagles watched stonily as Jansson and Sally, hastily instructed by Finn McCool, showed submission to the Granddaughter by getting down on the ground and lying on their backs, arms and legs up in the air.

“God, how humiliating,” Sally murmured.

“You should worry. I’m going to need help getting up again.”

The kindly nurse type Li-Li came over to assist when the gesture was finished. Then Sally and Jansson, with McCool, had to sit as best they could on the hard-packed earth of the floor, while the Granddaughter murmured to her advisers.

“That dog,” murmured Sally, “is a Datum dog. Something to do with you, McCool?”

“Not me… anoth-ther kobold seller-rr. Popular here. They lik-ke big males. Sex-ss toys.”

Sally snorted, but kept from laughing.

Jansson leaned over and whispered, “Sally. That pendant she’s wearing.”

“Yes. Shut up about it.”

“But it looks like—”

“I know what it looks like. Shut up.”

At length the Granddaughter deigned to consider them. She said, with the usual rough approximation of English, “You. What you call hhrr-uman. From worr-ld you call Datum-mm.”

“That’s correct,” Sally said. “Umm—ma’am.”

“Wh-hrr-at you want her-hhre?”

Sally and Jansson went through a halting explanation of why they had come: the problems with the trolls across the human Earths, how Sally had learned from the kobolds that many of the trolls had fled to this world, how they hoped that the trolls they had brought here, Mary and Ham, would be safe…

The Granddaughter considered this. “Trolls hrr-appy here. Trolls like beagrr-les. Beagles like trolls. Troll music fine. H-rruman music arse shit.” She perked her own ears. “Beagle ears better-hhr than human. Human music ar-hhrse shit.”

“That’s what my father kept telling me,” Sally said. “All downhill since Simon and Garfunkel broke up, he said.”

Petra stared at her. “I know noth-thing of this Simon and Garr-hrr—”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Beagles despise human music. Beagles despise h-hrr-umans.”

That blunt statement shocked Jansson. “Why?”

The Granddaughter stood upright now and walked over to her, towering over the sitting women. Jansson did her best not to flinch, and to return that wintry stare. “Why? You-hhr stink. You especially…”

But it seemed to Jansson that the Granddaughter’s own scent was odd, unnatural, overlaid by some kind of perfume perhaps. Maybe, for a species to whom scent was so important, to mask your smell was to mask your thoughts.

“And,” said Petra, “you-hhr dogs.” She pointed at the patient Alsatian. “Once wolf. Now toy, like sc-hhrap of bone in mouth. No mind-dd . Hrr-umans did this.”

Jansson supposed that was true: dogs were wolves reduced to submissive pets. She imagined seeing a small-brained humanoid in a collar, on a lead… Still, she protested. “But we love our dogs.”

Sally said, “In fact we co-evolved with them—”

“They have no rrh-ights. He-rre, walk on two legs, not four-rr. Except pups at play. And except hunt. We have cr-hrr-ime. Those who do wr-hrr-ong. We catch, we turn out of city. We hunt.”

Jansson returned her gaze. “On all fours? You hunt down criminals, on all fours?”

The adviser, Brian, spoke up for the first time. “We have many pups. Big litte-hhrs. Life cheap. Like to hunt…”

Petra seemed to smile. Jansson smelled meat on her breath. “Like to hunt. Good for wolf-ff within.”

Sally snapped, “So you despise humans for how we domesticated your cousins on our world. Fine. But we’ve done nothing to harm you, any of you. We didn’t even know you existed before Snowy there showed up on Rectangles.”

“You offen-nnd me. Stinking elves gone w-hhrong. You, no hrr-ights here. Why should I not th-hhrrow you out for the hunt?”

Sally glanced at Jansson, and said desperately, “Because we can get you more ray guns.” She pointed to the nearest guard. “Like those.”

Jansson, astonished by this claim, turned and stared at her.

Sally wouldn’t meet her eyes. “Those weapons look old to me. Run down, are they? We haven’t seen one fired… I know they’re dead. We can get you more .”

Petra looked over at the kobold, who in turn looked—angry? Alarmed? If he had been supplying the weapons, he was being cut out of the deal, Jansson reflected. But she couldn’t read his expression, if he had one.

Petra leaned forward, her great head thrust at Sally’s face. Her nose wrinkled, wet, probing. “You l-lie.”

“That’s for you to decide.”

The moment of judgement hung in the air. Jansson sat still, feeling every ache of her treacherous body. Sally did not yield before Petra’s glare.

At last Petra withdrew with a frustrated growl, and loped from the chamber, her sex-slave dog at her heels.

Sally delivered a noisy mock sigh. “We live to fight another day…”

As the guards milled around, talking among themselves in growls and yaps, Jansson leaned over to Sally. “What are you playing at?” But even as she asked she was thinking it through. She was a cop; there were clues here; connections formed in her mind. “Has this got something to do with that pendant she wore, that was the spitting image of Joshua’s Rectangles ring—”

Sally pressed a forefinger to her lips, but she smiled.

They were taken to a kind of suite at one end of the palace, with a communal area and a central hearth, and small rooms that could be shut off behind flaps of leather.

Finn McCool was put in here with the women. Sally brusquely pushed him inside one of the rooms and told him to stay put. The kobold cringingly deferred, as he tended to when close up and personal with a human. But Jansson wondered what resentment burned in that strange soul, resentment at the treatment he received from these superior creatures that evidently fascinated and repelled him at the same time.

Jansson picked a room at random. A pallet of straw had been set out on the floor, with blankets laid over it. There was no lavatory or wash basin, but a kind of well in the floor contained water that seemed clean. Jansson dumped her travel pack and fingered the blankets curiously. They seemed to be of woven bark. How were they made? She imagined beagles stripping and weaving bark with hands and teeth.

She went back out to the communal area, where beagles were laying out bowls of food on the ground around the hearth.

Sally sat on the floor, comfortably enough, studying the food. She glanced up at Jansson. “How’s your en suite?”