Going Postal (28 page)

You probably couldn’t
kill
a vampire with pins…

And after a thought like that is when you realize that however hard you try to look behind you, there’s a behind you, behind you, where you aren’t looking. Moist flung his back to the cold stone wall and slithered along it until he ran out of wall and acquired a doorframe.

The faint blue glow of the Sorting Engine was just visible.

As Moist peered into the machine’s room, Tiddles was visible, too. He was crouched under the engine.

“That’s a very cat thing you’re doing here, Tiddles,” said Moist, staring at the shadows. “Come to Uncle Moist. Please?”

He sighed, and hung the suit on an old letter rack, and crouched down. How were you supposed to pick up a cat? He’d never done it. Cats never figured in Grandfather’s Lipwigzer kennels, except as an impromptu snack.

As his hand drew near Tiddles, the cat flattened its ears and hissed.

“Do you want to cook down here?” said Moist. “No claws, please—”

The cat began to growl, and Moist realized that it wasn’t looking directly at him.

“Good Tiddles,” he said, feeling the terror begin to rise. It was one of the prime directives of exploring in a hostile environment: Do not bother about the cat. And, suddenly, the environment was a lot more hostile.

Another important rule was: Don’t turn around too slowly to look. It’s there, all right. Not the cat. Damn the cat. It’s something else.

He stood upright and took a two-handed grip on the wooden stake.
It’s right behind me, yes
? he thought.
Bloody well bloody right bloody behind me! Of course it is! How could things be otherwise?

The feeling of fear was almost the same as the feeling he got when, say, a mark was examining a glass diamond. Time slowed a little, every sense was heightened, and there was a taste of copper in his mouth.

Don’t turn around slowly. Turn around fast.

He spun, screamed, and thrust. The stake met resistance, which yielded only slightly.

A long, pale face grinned at him in the blue light. It showed rows of pointy teeth.

“Missed
both
my hearts,” said Mr. Gryle, spitting blood.

M
OIST JUMPED BACK
as a thin, clawed hand sliced through the air, but kept the stake in front of him, jabbing with it, holding the thing back…

Banshee
, he thought.
Oh hell…

Only when he moved did Gryle’s leathery black cape swing aside briefly to show the skeletal figure beneath; it helped if you knew that the black leather was a wing. It helped if you thought of banshees as the only humanoid race that had evolved the ability to fly, in some lush jungle somewhere where they’d hunted flying squirrels. It didn’t help much if you knew why the story went that hearing the scream of the banshee meant that you were going to die.

It meant that the banshee was tracking you. No good looking behind you. It was overhead.

There weren’t many of the feral ones, even in Uberwald, but Moist knew the advice passed on by people who’d survived them. Keep away from the mouth, those teeth were vicious. Don’t attack the chest, the flight muscles there are like armor. They’re not strong but they’ve got sinews like steel cables, and the long reach on those arm bones’ll mean it can slap your silly head right off—

Tiddles yowled and backed further under the Sorting Engine. Gryle slashed at Moist again, and came after him as he backed away.

—but their necks snap easily if you can get inside their reach, and they have to shut their eyes when they scream.

Gryle came toward him, head bobbing as he strutted. There was nowhere else for Moist to go, so he tossed aside the wood and held up his hands.

“All right, I give in,” he said. “Just make it quick, okay?”

The creature kept looking at the golden suit; they had a magpie’s eye for glitter.

“I’m going somewhere afterwards,” said Moist helpfully.

Gryle hesitated. He was hurt, disoriented, and had eaten pigeons that were effluent on wings. He wanted to get out of here and up into the cool sky. Everything was too complicated here. There were too many targets, too many smells.

For a banshee, everything was in the pounce, when teeth, claws, and body weight all bore down at once. Now, bewildered, he strutted back and forth, trying to deal with the situation. There was no room to fly, nowhere else to go, the prey was standing there…instinct, emotion, and some attempt at rational thought all banged together in Gryle’s overheated head.

Instinct won. Leaping at things with your claws out had worked for a million years, so why stop now?

He threw his head back, screamed, and sprang.

So did Moist, ducking under the long arms. That wasn’t programmed into the banshee’s responses: the prey should be huddled, or running away. But Moist’s shoulder caught him in the chest.

The creature was as light as a child.

Moist felt a claw slash into his arm as he hurled the thing onto the Sorting Engine, and flung himself to the floor. For one horrible moment he thought it was going to get up, that he’d missed the wheel, but as the enraged Mr. Gryle shifted, there was a sound like

…gloop…

…followed by silence.

Moist lay on the cool flagstones until his heart slowed down to the point where he could make out individual beats. He was aware, as he lay there, that something sticky was dripping down the side of the machine.

He arose slowly, on unsteady legs, and stared at what had become of the creature. If he’d been a hero, he would have taken the opportunity to say, “That’s what
I
call sorted!” Since he wasn’t a hero, he threw up. A body doesn’t work properly when significant bits are not sharing the same space-time frame as the rest of it, but it does look more colorful. The trade-off is not to its advantage.

Then, clutching at his bleeding arm, he knelt down and looked under the engine for Tiddles.

He had to come back with the cat, he thought muzzily. It was just something that had to happen. A man who rushes into a burning building to rescue a stupid cat
and
comes out carrying the cat is seen as a hero, even if he is a rather dumb one. If he comes out
sans
cat he’s a twit.

A muffled thunder above them suggested that part of the building had fallen down. The air was roasting.

Tiddles backed away from Moist’s hand.

“Listen,” Moist growled. “The hero has to come out with the cat. The cat doesn’t have to be alive—”

He lunged, grabbed Tiddles, and dragged the cat out.

“Right,” he said, and picked up the suit hanger in his other hand. There were a few blobs of banshee on it, but, he thought light-headedly, he could probably find something to remove it.

He lurched out into the corridor. There was a wall of fire at both ends, and Tiddles chose this moment to sink all four claws into his arm.

“Ah,” said Moist. “Up until now it was going so well—”

“
Mr. Lipvig! Are You All Right, Mr. Lipvig?
”

W
HAT GOLEMS
removed from a fire was, in fact, the fire. They took out of a burning property everything that was burning. It was curiously surgical. They assembled at the edge of the fire and deprived it of anything to burn, herded it, cornered it, stamped it to death.

Golems could wade through lava and pour molten iron. Even if they knew what fear was, they wouldn’t find it in a mere burning building.

Glowing rubble was hauled away from the steps by red-hot hands. Moist stared up into a landscape of flame but also, in front of it, Mr. Pump. He was glowing orange. Specks of dust and dirt on his clay flashed and sparkled.

“Good To See You, Mr. Lipvig!” he boomed cheerfully, tossing a crackling beam aside. “We Have Cleared A Path To The Door! Move With Speed!”

“Er…thank you!” Moist shouted above the roar of the flames. There
was
a path, dragged clear of debris, with the open door beckoning calmly and cooly at the end of it. Away, toward the far end of the hall, other golems, red-hot in the pillars of flame, were calmly throwing burning floorboards out through a hole in the wall.

The heat was intense. Moist lowered his head, clutched the terrified cat to his chest, felt the back of his neck begin to roast, and scampered forward.

From then on, it became all one memory. The crashing noise high above. The metallic boom. The golem Anghammarad looking up, with his message glowing yellow on his cherry-red arm. Ten thousand tons of rainwater pouring down in deceptive slow motion. The cold hitting the glowing golem…

…the explosion…

F
LAMES DIED
. Sound died. Light died.

A
NGHAMMARAD
.

Anghammarad looked at his hands. There was nothing there except heat, furnace heat, blasting heat that nevertheless made the shapes of fingers.

A
NGHAMMARAD
, a hollow voice repeated.

“I Have Lost My Clay,” said the golem.

Y
ES
, said Death,
THAT IS STANDARD
. Y
OU ARE DEAD
. S
MASHED
. E
XPLODED INTO A MILLION PIECES
.

“Then Who Is This Doing The Listening?”

E
VERYTHING THERE WAS ABOUT YOU THAT ISN’T CLAY
.

“Do You Have A Command For Me?” said the remains of Anghammarad, standing up.

N
OT NOW
. Y
OU HAVE REACHED THE PLACE WHERE THERE ARE NO MORE ORDERS
.

“What Shall I Do?”

I
BELIEVE YOU HAVE FAILED TO UNDERSTAND MY LAST COMMENT
.

Anghammarad sat down again. Apart from the fact that there was sand rather than ooze underfoot, this place reminded him of the abyssal plain.

G
ENERALLY PEOPLE LIKE TO MOVE ON
, Death hinted. T
HEY LOOK FORWARD TO AN AFTERLIFE
.

“I Will Stay Here, Please.”

H
ERE
? T
HERE’S NOTHING TO DO HERE
, said Death.

“Yes, I Know,” said the ghost of the golem. “It Is Perfect. I Am Free.”

A
T TWO
in the morning it began to rain.

Things could have been worse. It could have rained snakes. It could have rained acid.

There was still some roof, and some walls. That meant there was still some building.

Moist and Miss Dearheart sat on some warm rubble outside the locker room, which was more or less the only room that could still be properly described as one. The golems had stamped out the last of the fire, shored things up, and then, without a word, had gone back to not being a hammer until sunset.

Miss Dearheart held a half-melted bronze band in her hand, and turned it over and over again.

“Eighteen thousand years,” she whispered.

“It was the rainwater tank,” mumbled Moist, staring at nothing.

“Fire and water,” muttered Miss Dearheart. “But not both!”

“Can’t you…rebake him, or something?” It sounded hopeless even as Moist said it. He’d seen the other golems scrabbling in the rubble.

“Not enough left. Just dust, mixed up with everything else,” said Miss Dearheart. “All he wanted to do was be useful.”

Moist looked at the remains of the letters. The flood had washed the black slurry of their ashes into every corner.

All
they
wanted to do was be delivered
, he thought. At a time like this, sitting on the sea bed for nine thousand years seemed quite attractive.

“He was going to wait until the universe came around again. Did you know that?”

“You told me, yes,” said Moist.

There’s no stink more sorrowful than the stink of wet, burned paper
, Moist thought.
It means: The end
.

“Vetinari won’t rebuild this place, you know,” Miss Dearheart went on. “Gilt will get people to make a fuss if he tries it. Waste of city funds. He’s got friends. People who owe him money and favors. He’s good at that sort of people.”

“It was Gilt who had this place torched,” said Moist. “He was shocked to see me back in the restaurant. He thought I’d be here.”

“You’ll never be able to prove it.”

Probably not
, Moist agreed, in the sour, smoke-addled hollow of his head. The Watch had turned up with more speed than Moist had found usual among city policemen. They had a werewolf with them. Oh, probably most people would have thought it was just a handsome dog, but grow up in Uberwald with a grandfather who bred dogs and you learned to spot the signs. This one had a collar, and snuffled around while the embers were still smoking, and found something extra to scent in the pall of steaming ashes.

They’d dug down, and there had been an awkward interview. Moist had handled it as well as he could manage, under the circumstances. The key point was never to tell the truth. Coppers never believed what people told them in any case, so there was no point in giving them extra work.

“A winged skeleton?” Moist had said, with what surely sounded like genuine surprise
.

“
Yes, sir. About the size of a man, but very…damaged. I could even say mangled. I wonder if you know anything about it?” This watchman was a captain. Moist hadn’t been able to make him out. His face gave nothing away that he didn’t want to let go of. Something about him suggested that he already knew the answers but was asking the questions for the look of the thing
.

“
Perhaps it was an extra-large pigeon? They’re real pests in this building,” he’d said
.

“
I doubt it, sir. We believe it to have been a banshee, Mr. Lipwig,” said the captain patiently. “They’re very rare
.”

“I thought they just screamed on the rooftops of people who are going to die,” said Moist
.

“The civilized ones do, sir. The wild ones cut out the middleman. Your young man said he hit something?
”

“Stanley did say something about, oh, something flying around,” said Moist. “But I thought it was simply—”