Terry Pratchett - Monstrous Regiment

The door opened. Armed men came in to act as protection for a couple of women, carrying blankets and firewood. They scurried in with their eyes cast down, deposited their burdens, and almost ran out. Polly strode over to the guard who seemed to be in charge, and he backed away. A huge key ring jingled on his belt.

“You knock next time, all right?” she said.

He grinned nervously. “Yeah, right,” he said. “They said we weren’t to talk to you…”

“Really?”

The jailer glanced around. “But we reckon you’re doing bloody well, for girls,” he said conspiratorially.

“So that means you won’t shoot at us when we break out?” said Polly sweetly.

The grin faded. “Don’t try it,” said the jailer.

“What a big bunch of keys you have there, sir,” said Tonker, and the man’s hand flew to his belt.

“You just stay in here,” he said. “Things are bad enough already. You stay here!”

He slammed the door. A moment later they heard something heavy being pushed up against it.

“Well, now we have a fire, at least,” said Blouse.

“Er…” This was from Lofty. She volunteered a word so seldom that the rest turned to look at her, and she stopped in embarrassment.

“Yes, Lofty?” said Polly.

“Er… I know how to get the door open,” muttered Lofty. “So it stays open, I mean.”

Had it been anyone else, someone would have laughed. But words from Lofty had obviously been turned over for some time before utterance.

“Er… good,” said Blouse. “Well done.”

“I’ve been thinking about it,” said Lofty.

“Good.”

“It will work.”

“Just what we need, then!” said Blouse, like a man trying against all the odds to keep cheerful.

Lofty looked up at the big sooty beams that ran across the room. “Yes,” she said.

“But there’ll still be guards outside,” said Polly.

“No,” said Lofty. “There won’t.”

“There won’t?”

“They’ll have gone away.” Lofty stopped, with the air of one who’d said everything that needed to be said.

Tonker walked over and took her arm. “We’ll just have a little chat, shall we?” she said, and led the girl to the other side of the room. There was some whispered conversation. Lofty spent most of it staring at the floor, and then Tonker came back.

“We will need the bags of flour from the storeroom, and the rope from the well,” she said. “And one of those… what are those big round things that cover dishes? With a knob on?”

“Dish covers?” said Shufti.

“And a candle,” Tonker went on. “And a lot of barrels. And a lot of water.”

“And what will all this do?” said Blouse.

“Make a big bang,” said Tonker. “Tilda knows a lot about fire, believe me.”

“When you say she knows a lot…” Polly began uncertainly.

“I mean every place she worked at burned down,” said Tonker.

They rolled the empty barrels to the middle of the room and filled them with water from the pump. Under Lofty’s monosyllabic direction and the rope from the well, they hauled three leaking, dusty flour sacks up as high as possible, so that they twisted gently over the space between the barrels and the door.

“Ah,” said Polly, standing back. “I think I understand. A flour mill on the other side of town blew up two years ago.”

“Yes,” said Tonker. “That was Tilda.”

“What?”

“They’d been beating her. And worse. And the thing about Tilda is, she just watches and thinks and somewhere in there it all comes together. Then it explodes.”

“But two people died!”

“The man and his wife. Yes. But I heard that other girls sent there never came back at all. Shall I tell you that Tilda was pregnant when they brought her back to the Grey House after the fire? She had it, and they took it away, and we don’t know what happened to it. And then she got beaten again because she was an Abomination Unto Nuggan. Does that make you feel better?” said Tonker, tying the rope to a table leg. “There’s just us, Polly. Just her and me. No inheritance, no nice home to go back to, no relatives that we know of. The Grey House breaks us all, somehow. Wazzer talks to the Duchess, I don’t have… middle gears, and Tilda frightens me when she gets her hands on a box of matches. You should see her face then, though. It lights up. Of course,” Tonker smiled in her dangerous way, “so do other things. Better get everyone into the storeroom while we light the candle.”

“Shouldn’t Tilda do that?”

“She will. But we’ll have to be ready to drag her away, otherwise she’ll stay and watch.”

This had started like a game. She hadn’t thought of it like a game, but it was a game called Let Polly keep The Duchess. And now… it didn’t matter. She’d made all kinds of plans, but she was beyond plans now. They’d done bloody well, for girls…

A final barrel of water had been placed, after some discussion, in front of the storeroom’s door. Polly looked over the top of it at Blouse and the rest of the squad.

“Okay, everybody, we’re… er… about to do it,” she said. “Are we sure about this, Tonker?”

“Yep.”

“And we won’t get hurt?”

Tonker sighed. “The dusty flour will explode. That’s simple. The blast coming this way will hit the barrels full of water which’ll probably last just long enough to see it rebound. The worst that should happen to us is that we get wet. That’s what Tilda thinks. Would you argue? And in the other direction, there’s only the door.”

“How does she work this out?”

“She doesn’t. She just sees how it should go.” Tonker handed Polly the end of a rope. “This goes over the beam and down to the dish lid. Can you hold it, lieutenant? But don’t pull it until we say. I really mean that. C’mon, Polly.”

In the space between the barrels and the door, Lofty was lighting a candle. She did it slowly, as if it was a sacrament or some ancient ceremony every part of which held enormous and complex meaning.

She lit a match, and held it carefully until the flame caught. She waved it back and forth on the base of the candle, which she thrust firmly onto the flagstones so that the hot wax stuck it into position. Then she applied the match to the candlewick.

Polly and Tonker watched her kneel there, staring at the dancing flame

“Okay,” said Tonker. “I’m just going to pick her up, and you just carefully lower the lid over the candle, right? C’mon, Tilda.”

She raised the girl carefully to her feet, whispering to her all the time, and then nodded to Polly, who lowered the lid with a carefulness that amounted to reverence.

Lofty walked as though asleep.

Tonker stopped by the leg of the heavy kitchen table, to which she’d attached the other end of the rope holding the flour bags.

“Okay so far,” she said. “Now, when I pull the knot we each grab an arm and we run, Polly, understand? We run . Ready? Got her?” She hauled on the rope. “ Run! ”

The flour sacks dropped, streaming white dust as they fell, and exploded in front of the door. Flour rose like a fog.

They raced for the storeroom and fell in a heap past the barrel as Tonker screamed, “Okay, lieutenant!”

Blouse pulled the rope that raised the lid and let the candle flame reach—

The word was not whoomph . The experience was whoomph. It had a quality that overwhelmed every sense. It shook the world like a sheet, painted it white and then, surprisingly, filled it with the smell of toast. And then it was over, in a second, leaving nothing but distant screams and the rumble of collapsing masonry.

Polly uncurled, and looked up into Blouse’s face.