Thud! by Terry Pratchett

wincing as his sore hand protested.
    Fresh air, that was the stuff. He’d felt quite dizzy down there, and the tiny cut on his hand itched like mad. He’d better get Igor to take a look at it. You could probably catch anything in the muck down there.
    Ah, that was better. He could feel himself cooling down. The air down there had made him feel really strange.
    The crowd was a lot more like a mob now, but he saw at the second glance that it was what he thought of as a plum-cake mob. It doesn’t take many people to turn a worried, anxious crowd into a mob. A shout here, a shove there, something thrown here …and with care, every hesitant, nervous individual is being drawn into a majority that does not, in fact, exist.
    Detritus was still standing like a statue, apparently oblivious to the growing din. But Ringfounder…damn. He was arguing hotly with people at the front of the crowd. You never argued! You never got drawn in!
    “Corporal Ringfounder!” he bellowed. “To me!”
    The dwarf turned as a halfbrick sailed over the heads of the mob and clanged off his helmet. He went over like a tree.
    Detritus moved so fast that he was halfway through the crowd before the dwarf hit the cobbles. His arm dipped into the press of bodies and hauled up a struggling figure. He spun around, thudded back through the gap that hadn’t had time to close yet, and was beside Vimes before Ringfounder’s helmet had stopped rolling.
    “Well done, Sergeant,” said Vimes out of the corner of his mouth. “Did you have a plan for the next bit?”
    “I’m more der tactical kind, sir,” said Detritus.
    Oh, well. At time like this you didn’t argue, and you didn’t step back. Vimes pulled out his badge and held it up.
    “This dwarf is under arrest for assaulting a Watch officer!” he shouted. “Let us through, in the name of the law!”
    And, to his amazement, the crowd went quiet, like a lot of children when they sense that this time the teacher is really, really angry. Perhaps it was the words on the badge, he thought. You couldn’t rub them out.
    In the silence, another halfbrick dropped out of the free hand of the dwarf in Detritus’s very solid custody. Years later, Vimes would shut his eyes and still be able to recall the crunch it made when it hit the ground.
    Angua stood up, with the unconscious Ringfounder in her arms.
    “He’s concussed,” she said. “And I suggest, sir, that you turn around, just for a moment?”
    Vimes risked a glance. Ardent—or, at least, a leather-shrouded dwarf that could have been him—was standing in the shadows of the doorway. He had the attention of the crowd.
    “We’re being allowed to go?” he said to Angua, nodding to the figure.
    “I think the going is the thing, sir, don’t you?”
    “You’ve got that right, Sergeant. Detritus, keep a grip on that little bugger. Back to the nick, all of us.”
    The crowd parted to let them through, with barely a murmur. The silence followed them all the way back to the Watch house…
    …where Otto Chriek of the Times was waiting in the street, iconograph at the ready.
    “Oh no, you don’t, Otto,” said Vimes, as his squad approached.
    “I’m standing on the public highway, Mr. Vimes,” said Otto meekly. “Smile, please—”
    And he took a picture of a troll officer holding a dwarf up in the air.
    Oh well, said Vimes to himself, that’s page one sorted out. And probably the bloody cartoon, too.

 
    O ne dwarf in the cells, one in the tender, loving care of Igor, Vimes thought, as he trudged up the stairs to his office. And it’s only going to get worse. Those dwarfs were obeying Ardent, weren’t they? What would they have done if the dwarf had shaken his head?
    He landed in his chair so hard that it rolled back a foot.
    He’d met deep-down dwarfs before. They’d been weird, but he’d been able to deal with them. The Low King was a deep-downer, and Vimes had got on with him well enough, once you accepted that the fairy-tale dwarf in