Men at Arms (40 page)

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Wrong. Vimes didn’t travel much except on foot, and knew little of the Lancre Suicide Thrush, for example, or the Shadowing Lemma, which exists in only two dimensions and eats mathematicians, or the quantum weather butterfly. But it is possible that the strangest, and possibly saddest, species on Discworld is the hermit elephant. This creature, lacking the thick hide of its near relatives, lives in huts, moving up and building extensions as its size increases. It’s not unknown for a traveller on the plains of Howondaland to wake up in the morning in the middle of a village that wasn’t there the night before.

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The axiom “Honest men have nothing to fear from the police” is currently under review by the Axioms Appeal Board.

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Probably no other world in the multiverse has warehouses for things which only exist
in potentia,
but the pork futures warehouse in Ankh-Morpork is a product of the Patrician’s rules about baseless metaphors, the literal-mindedness of citizens who assume that everything must exist somewhere, and the general thinness of the fabric of reality around Ankh, which is so thin that it’s as thin as a very thin thing. The net result is that trading in pork futures—in pork
that doesn’t exist yet
—led to the building of the warehouse to store it in until it does. The extremely low temperatures are caused by the imbalance in the temporal energy flow. At least, that’s what the wizards in the High Energy Magic building say. And they’ve got proper pointy hats and letters after their name, so they know what they’re talking about.

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It has probably been gathered that although Leonard da Quirm was absolutely the greatest technological genius of all time, he was a bit of a Detritus when it came to thinking up names.

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It didn’t need to. Cuddy, belonging to a race that worked underground for preference, and Detritus, a member of a race notoriously nocturnal, had excellent vision in the dark. But mysterious caves and tunnels always have luminous fungi, strangely bright crystals or at a pinch merely an eldritch glow in the air, just in case a human hero comes in and needs to see in the dark. Strange but true.

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Rather like British Rail

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Which can mean…well…meanings include: “Pardon me, you’re hanging from my rubber ring, thank you so very much”, “It may be just vital biomass oxygenating the planet to
you
, but it’s home to me” and “I’m sure there was a rain forest around here a moment ago.”

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Who stoked the boiler.

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Five more embraced it as a holy weapon and instructed that it be used on all infidels, heretics, gnostics and people who fidgeted during the sermon.

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It runs: “He who chains down a troll, especially taking advantage of the situation to put the boot in a few times, had better not be the one who unchains it again.”

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And was the origin, long after the events chronicled here were over, of an Ankh-Morpork folk song scored for tin whistle and nasal passage:
“As I was a-walking along Lower Broadway,
The recruiting party came picking up people by their ankles and saying they were going to volunteer to join the Watch unless they wanted their goohuloog heads kicked in,
So I went via Peach Pie Street and Holofernes instead,
Singing: Too-ra-li, etc.”
It never really caught on.

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To trolls, heaven is below.