"I"m afraid I"m not much help here, sir," said Angua. "I can smell dwarf, but that"s about it. There"s just too much damn water everywhere!"
"Maybe we won"t need your nose," said Vimes. He unslung the tube that contained Sybil"s sketch, unrolled the drawing and pinned the ends together.
"Give me a hand with this, will you, Cheery?" he said. "Everyone else, get some rest. And don"t laugh."
He lowered the circlet of mountains over his head. There was a cough from Angua, which he pretended to ignore.
"Okay," said Vimes, turning the stiff paper to get the mountains lined up just above their pencilled outlines. "That"s Copperhead over there and Cori Celesti over there ... and they line up pretty well against the drawing. We"re practically on top of it already!"
"Not really, commander," said Bashfullsson, behind him. "They"re both almost four hundred miles away. They"d look pretty much the same from anywhere in this part of the valley. You need to look at the nearer peaks."
Vimes turned. "Okay. What"s that one that looks really sheer on the left-hand side?"
"That is The King, sir," said Cheery. "He"s about ten miles away."
"Really? He looks closer.
Vimes found the mountain on the drawing. "And that small one over there?" he said. "The one with two peaks?"
"I don"t know the name, sir, but I can see the one you mean."
"They"re too small and too close together. .: Vimes muttered.
"Then walk towards them, sir. Mind where you"re putting your feet. Only tread on bare rock. Keep off any pile of debris. The grag is right. It could be over an old sinkhole and you might drop right through."
"O-kay. About halfway between them is that funny-shaped little outcrop. I"ll head directly for it. You watch where I"m putting my feet too, will you?"
Trying to keep the paper level, stumbling on rocks and splashing through icy rivulets, Vimes walked the lonesome valley....Damn and blast!"
"Sir?"
Vimes peered over the top of his ring of paper. "I"ve lost The King. That damn great ridge of boulders is in the way. Hold on ... I can see that mountain with the chunk taken out of it. .
It looked so simple. It would have been simple if Koom Valley had been flat and not littered with rubbish like the ten-pin bowling alley of the gods. In some places they had to backtrack because a rampart of tangled, stinking, gnat-infested timber blocked the way. Or the barrier was a wall of rocks the length of a street. Or a wide, mist-filled, thundering cauldron of white water that elsewhere would have a name like The Devil"s Cauldron but here was nameless because this was Koom Valley and for Koom Valley there just weren"t enough devils and they didn"t have enough cauldrons.
And the flies stung and the sun shone and the rotting wood and damp air and lack of wind created a sticky, swamp-like miasma that seemed to weaken the muscles. No wonder they fought at the other end of the valley, Vimes thought. There was air and wind up there. At least you"d be comfortable.
Sometimes they"d come out into a clear stretch that looked like the scene that Methodia Rascal had painted, but the nearby mountains didn"t quite match up, and it was off again into the maze. You had to detour, and then detour around the detour.
At last Vimes sat down on a bleached, crumbling log and put the paper aside.
"We must"ve missed it," he said, panting. "Or Rascal didn"t get the mountains quite right. Or maybe even a slice of mountain fell off in the last hundred years. It could have happened. We could be twenty feet away from whatever it is we"re looking for and still miss it." He slapped a gnat off his wrist.
"Cheer up, sir, I think we"re fairly close," said Cheery.
"Why? What makes you think that?" said Vimes, wiping his brow.
"Because I think you may be sitting on the painting, sir. It"s very dirty, but that looks like rolled-up canvas to me."
Vimes stood up quickly and inspected the log. One corner of what he"d taken to be yellow-grey bark peeled back to reveal paint on the other side.
"And those timbers over there-" Cheery began, but stopped because Vimes had raised a finger to his lips.
There were indeed some long thin pine saplings lying near by, stripped of all branches. They would have gone unnoticed if it weren"t for the presence of the rolled-up painting.
They did just what we did, Vimes thought. It was probably easier, if they had enough dwarfs to hold up the painting; the mountains would be properly coloured, not just pencil lines, and it would be more accurate on the bigger canvas. They could take their time, too. They thought they were well ahead of me. All they were worried about was some bloody mystic symbol.
He drew his sword and beckoned Cheery to follow him.