To his surprise, the document was read thoroughly, one dwarf looking over the other one"s shoulder and pointing out interesting sub
clauses. The official seal was carefully examined.
One guard pointed to Cheery. "Kra"k?"
"My official guard," said Vimes. "Included in "associated members of staff" on page two," he added helpfully.
"Mhust searhch thy coash," said the guard.
"No. Diplomatic immunity," said Vimes. "Tell "em, Cheery."
They listened to Cheery"s urgent dwarfish. Then the other guard, whose face had indicated that there was something on his mind and it was jumping up and down, nudged his companion and pulled him aside.
There was a torrent of whispers. Vimes couldn"t understand, but he caught the word "Wilinus". And, shortly afterwards, the word "hr grag", dwarfish for "thirty".
"Oh gods," he said. "And a dog?"
"Good guess, sir," said Cheery.
The document was handed back hurriedly. Vimes could read the body language, even written smaller than usual: there was probably an expensive problem here, so the guards were inclined to leave it to someone who earned more money than them.
One of them pulled a bellrope by the door. After some time the door slid open, revealing a small room.
"We have to go in, sir," said Cheery.
"But there"s no other doors!"
"It"s all right, sir."
Vimes stepped inside. The dwarfs slid the door back, leaving them in the room, which was lit by a single candle.
"Some kind of waiting room?" said Vimes.
Somewhere far off something went clonk. The floor trembled for a moment and then Vimes had an uneasy sensation of movement.
"The room moves?" he said.
"Yes, sir. Several hundred feet down, probably. I think it"s all done by counterweights."
They stood silently, unsure of what to say, as walls around them creaked and groaned. Then there was a rattle, a passing sensation of weight, and the room stopped moving.
"Wherever we"re headed, keep your ears open," said Vimes. "Something"s going on, I can feel it."
The door slid back. Vimes looked out on to the night sky, underground. The stars were all around him... below him...
"I think we went down too far," he said. And then his brain made sense of what his eyes had seen. The moving room had brought them out somewhere on the side of a huge cave. He was looking at a thousand points of candlelight, spread out on the cavern floor and in other galleries. Now that he could grasp the scale of things, he realized that many of them were moving.
The air was full of one huge sound made up of thousands of voices, echoed and re-echoed. Occasionally a shout or a laugh would stand out, but mostly it was just an endless sea of sound, beating on the shores of the eardrum.
"I thought you people lived in little mines," said Vimes.
"Well, I thought humans lived in little cottages, sir," said Cheery, taking a candle from a large rack beside the door and lighting it. "And then I saw Ankh-Morpork."
There was something recognizable about the way the lights were moving. A whole constellation of them was heading in towards one invisible wall, where reflected light now indicated, very faintly, the mouth of a large tunnel. In front of it was a row of lights.
Think of it as a lot of people heading for something that one row of people was... guarding.
"People down there aren"t happy," said Vimes. "That looks like a mob to me. Look, you can tell by the way they move."