Terry Pratchett - Thud

There was hardly any sound now. Perhaps sound was unable to keep up.

`Sir?' said Willikins quietly.

`Yes?' said Vimes, his eyes streaming.

`It took us less than a minute to go that last mile. I timed us between milestones, sir.'

`Sixty miles an hour? Don't be daft, man! A coach can't go that fast!'

`Just as you say, sir.'

A milestone flashed past. Out of the corner of his ear, Willikins heard Vimes counting under his breath until, before very long, another stone fell away behind them.

`Wizards, eh?' said Vimes weakly, staring ahead again.

`Indeed, sir,' said Willikins. `May I suggest that once we are

through Quirm we head straight across the grass country?'

`The roads up there are pretty bad, you know,' said Vimes.

`So I believe, sir. However, that will not, in fact, matter,' said the

butler, not taking his eyes off the unrolling road ahead.

`Why not? If we try to go at speed over those rough-'

`I was referring obliquely, sir, to the fact that we are not precisely

touching the ground any more.'

Vimes, clinging with care to the rail, looked over the side. The wheels were turning idly. The road, just below them, was a blur. Ahead of them, the spirit of the horse galloped serenely onwards.

`There's plenty of coaching inns around Quirm,' he said. `We could, er, stop for lunch?'

`Late breakfast, sir! Mail coach ahead, sir! Hold tight!'

A tiny square block on the road ahead was getting bigger quite fast. Willikins twitched the reins, Vimes had a momentary vision of rearing horses, and the mail coach was a dwindling dot, soon hidden by the smoke of flaming brassicas.

'Dem milestones is goin' past real fast now,' Detritus observed, in a conversational tone of voice. Behind him, Brick lay flat on the roof

of the coach with his eyes tight shut, having never before been in a world where the sky went all the way to the ground; there were brass rails around the top of the coach, and he was leaving fingerprints in them.

`Could we try braking?' said Vimes. `Look out! Haycart!'

`That only stops the wheels spinning, sir!' yelled Willikins, as the cart went by with a whoom and fell back into the distance.

`Try pulling on the reins a little!'

`At this speed, sir?'

Vimes slid back the hatch behind him. Sybil had Young Sam on her knee, and was pulling a woolly jumper over his head.

`Is everything all right, dear?' he ventured.

She looked up and smiled. `Lovely smooth ride, Sam. Aren't we going rather fast, though?'

`Er, could you please sit with your back to the horses?' said Sam. `And hold on tight to Young Sam? It might be a bit ... bumpy.'

He watched her shift seats. Then he shut the hatch and yelled to Willikins: `Now!'

Nothing seemed to happen. In Vimes's mind, the milestones were already going zip ... zip as they flashed past.

Then the flying world slowed, while in the fields on either side hundreds of burning cabbages leapt towards the sky, trailing oily smoke. The horse of light and air disappeared and the real horses dropped gently towards the road, going from floating statues to beasts in full gallop without a stumble.

He heard a brief scream as the rear coach tore past and swerved into a field full of cauliflowers where, eventually, it squelched to a flatulent halt. And then there was stillness, except for the occasional thud of a falling cabbage. Detritus was comforting Brick, who'd not picked a good day to go cold turkey; it was turning out to be frozen roc.

A skylark, safely above cabbage range, sang in the blue sky. Below, except for the whimpering of Brick, all was silent.

Absent-mindedly, Vimes pulled a half-cooked leaf off his helmet and flicked it away.

`Well, that was fun,' he said, his voice a little distant. He got down carefully and opened the coach door. `Everyone all right in here?' he said.

`Yes. Why have we stopped?' said Sybil.

`We ran out of ... er, well, we just ran out,' said Vimes. `I'd better go and check that everyone else is all right. ..'

The milestone near by proclaimed that it was but two miles to Quirm. Vimes fished out the Gooseberry as a red-hot cabbage smacked into the road behind him.

`Good morning!' he said brightly to the surprised imp. `What is the time, please?'

`Er ... nine minutes to eight, Insert Name Here,' said the imp. `So that would mean a speed slightly above one mile a minute,' mused Vimes. `Very good.'

Moving like a sleepwalker, he went into the field on the other side of the road and followed the trail of stricken, steaming greens until he reached the other coach. People were climbing out of it.

`Everyone okay?' he said. `Breakfast today will be boiled cabbage, baked cabbage, fried cabbage'- he stepped smartly aside as a steaming cauliflower hit the ground and exploded - `and Cauliflower Surprise. Where's Fred?'

`Looking for somewhere to throw up,' said Angua.

`Good man. We'll take a minute or two to rest here, I think.' With that, Sam Vimes walked back to the milestone, sat down

next to it, put his arms round it, and held on tight until he felt better.

You could catch up with the dwarfs long before they're near Koom Valley. Good grief, at the speed we did earlier you'd have to watch out in case you smashed into the back of them!

Vimes's thought nagged at him as Willikins drove the coach, at a very sedate speed, out of Quirm and then, on a clear stretch of road, unleashed the hidden horsepower until they were bowling along at forty miles every hour. That seemed quite fast enough.

No one was hurt, after all. You could get to Koom Valley by nightfall!

Yes, but that was not the plan.

Okay, he thought, but what is the plan, exactly? Well, it helped that Sybil knew more or less everybody, or at least everybody who was female, of a certain age, and who had been to the Quirm College for Young Ladies at the same time as Sybil. There appeared to be hundreds of them. They all seemed to have names like Bunny or Bubbles, they kept in touch meticulously, they'd all married influential or powerful men, they all hugged one another when they met and went on about the good old days in Form 3b or whatever, and if they acted together, they could probably run the world or, it occurred to Vimes, might already be doing so.

They were Ladies Who Organize.

Vimes did his best, but he could never keep track of them. A web of correspondence held them all together, and he marvelled at Sybil's ability to be concerned over the problems of a child - which she'd never met - of a woman she hadn't seen for twenty-five years. It was a female thing.

So they would be staying in the town near the foot of the valley with a lady currently known to him only as Bunty, whose husband was the local magistrate. According to Sybil, he had his own police force. Vimes translated this, in the privacy of his head, as `he's got his own gang of thuggish, toothless, evil-smelling thief-takers, since that was what you generally got in these little towns. Still, they might be useful.

Beyond that ... there was no plan. He intended to find the dwarfs and capture and drag as many as possible back to AnkhMorpork. But that was an intention, not a plan. It was a firm intention, though. Five people had been murdered. You couldn't just turn your back on that. He'd drag 'em back and lock them up and throw everything at 'em and see what stuck. He doubted if they had many friends now. Of course, it'd get political, it always did, but at least people would know that he'd done all he could, and it was the best he could do. And with any luck it would stop anyone else getting funny ideas. And then there was the damn Secret, but it occurred to him that if he did find it, and it simply was proof that the dwarfs ambushed the trolls or the trolls ambushed the dwarfs or they both ambushed each other at the same time, well, he might as well drop it down a hole. It really wouldn't change anything. And it was unlikely to be a pot of gold; people didn't take a lot of money on to battlefields, because there wasn't very much to spend it on.