He grabbed it desperately and hung on as it struggled to bite him. A paw flailed to gain purchase on the slippery stone and then, in sudden difficulties, responding automatically... it changed...
It was as if the wolf shape became small and a man shape became bigger, in the same space, at the same time, with a moment of horrible distortion as the two forms passed through one another.
And then there was that moment he"d noticed before, a second of confusion -
It was just long enough to ram the man"s head against the rock with every ounce of strength he could scrape together. Vimes thought he heard a crack.
Then he pushed himself back out into the current and let it carry him on, while he simply struggled to stay near the surface. There was blood in the water. He"d never killed someone with his bare hands before. Truth to tell, he"d never deliberately killed at all. There had been deaths, because when people are rolling down a roof and trying to strangle one another it"s sheer luck who is on top when they hit the ground. But that was different. He went to bed every night believing that.
His teeth were chattering and the bright sun made his eyes ache, but he felt... good.
He wanted to beat his chest and scream, in fact.
They"d been trying to kill him!
Make them stay wolves, said a little inner voice. The more time they spent on four legs the less bright they"d become.
A deeper voice, red and raw, from much, much further inside, said, Kill "em all!
The rage was boiling up now, fighting against the chill.
His feet touched bottom.
The river was broadening here, into something wide enough to be called a lake. A wide ledge of ice had crept out from the bank, covered here and there with blown snow. Fog drifted across it, fog with a sulphurous smell.
There were still cliffs on the far side of the river. A solitary werewolf, companion to the one now drifting on the current, was watching him from the nearest bank. Clouds were sliding across the sun and snow was falling again, in large, raggedy flakes.
Vimes waded to the rim of ice and tried to pull himself up out of the water, but it creaked ominously under his weight and cracks zigzagged across its surface.
The wolf came closer, moving with caution. Vimes made another desperate attempt, a slab of ice came free and tipped up, and he disappeared under the water. The creature waited a few moments and then inched further out over the ice, growling as fine cracks spread out like stars under its paws.
A shadow moved in the shallow water below it. There was an explosion of water and breath as Vimes broke through the ice under the werewolf, grabbed it around the waist and fell back.
A claw ripped along Vimes"s side, but he gripped as hard as he could with arms and legs as they rolled under the ice. It was a desperate test of lung capacity, he knew. But he wasn"t the one who"d just had the air squeezed out of him. He held on, while the water clanged in his ears and the thing scrabbled and scratched at him and then, when there was nothing else left but to let go or drown, he punched his way up to the air.
Nothing lashed at him. He cracked his way through the ice to the bank, dropped on his hands and knees and threw up.
Howling started, all around the mountains.
Vimes looked up. Blood was coursing down his arms. The air stank of rotten eggs. And there, high on a hill a mile or so off, was the clacks tower...
... with its stone walls and door that could be bolted...
He stumbled forward. The snow underfoot was already giving way to coarse grass and moss. The air was hotter now, but it was the clammy heat of a fever. And he looked around and realized where he was.
There was bare dirt and rock in front of him, but here and there parts of it were moving and going "blup".
Everywhere he looked there were fat geysers. Rings of ancient, congealed yellow fat, so old and rancid that even Sam Vimes wouldn"t dip his toast in it unless he was really hungry, encircled sizzling little pools. There were even black floating bits, which on second glance turned out to be insects that were slow learners in a hot fat situation.
Vimes recalled something Igor had said. Sometimes dwarfs working the high strata, where the fat had congealed into a kind of tallow millennia ago, found strange ancient animals, perfectly preserved but fried to a crisp.
Probably... Vimes found himself laughing out of sheer exhaustion... probably battered to death.
Mwahahaa.
The snow was falling heavily now, making the fat pools spit.
He sagged to his knees. He ached all over. It wasn"t just that his brain was writing cheques that his body couldn"t cash. It had gone beyond that. Now his feet were borrowing money that his legs hadn"t got, and his back muscles were looking for loose change under the sofa cushions.