Thud

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-'

`We could solve this! Come on! You can't be afraid of dying!' Angua plunged away.

`And you think spending a few thousand years buried in sludge is likely to be fun?' shouted Sally, but she was talking only to dripping mud and fetid air. She hesitated a moment, groaned and followed Angua.