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Moist turned and saw, to his horror, Iron Girder pulling away at speed from the now stranded guard’s van. He looked down at
Bluejohn who was holding a grag in each hand and there was screaming as he banged their heads together and tossed them into the darkness between the tracks.
‘We’re going backwards, Bluejohn!’ yelled Moist. ‘Take us forward, could you!’
There was a jerk as Bluejohn stopped the guard’s van dead, quite possibly with his feet, and Moist jumped down on to the shuddering flatbed.
‘Nice work, Mister Bluejohn. Now get out that thing Mister Simnel’s lads made for you, please.’
In his curiously childish voice, Bluejohn said, ‘Oh yes, Mister Lipwig, I can do dat and I can tow der guard’s van as well.’
Vimes dropped down from the roof where he had been making life difficult for the grags on top – who were now essentially on the bottom – shouting ‘What the hell’s going on! Why’ve we stopped and where’s the rest of the train?!’
‘Those buggers have uncoupled us!’ yelled Moist. ‘But it’s no problem … there’s a handcar on Bluejohn’s flatbed … for emergencies!’ And, indeed, when the pedals of the handcar started to turn, the guard’s van accelerated and shot like an arrow towards the disappearing Iron Girder.
Bluejohn’s big face was aglow as he pedalled like, well, Bluejohn, because nobody else could have made that flatbed fly along the rails. It rattled and screeched and complained, but the troll’s huge feet oscillated up and down in a blur and the inner demon of Moist von Lipwig whispered to himself, ‘A little treadle machine to help somebody travel fast? Might be an idea to remember that.’
The whistle of Iron Girder echoed around the canyons, and Vimes shouted, ‘Get me up close to that train, officer!’
Trolls don’t sweat as such. A kind of blooming takes place instead. Bluejohn grunted, ‘Gettin’ a bit outta puff now, commander … but I’ll do my best.’
Bluejohn’s handcar, still dragging the guard’s van, including the recumbent grags, slammed into the last carriage, and before it bounced away again he reached forward and grabbed a buffer in each hand. Immediately Vimes flew like a demon, running across Bluejohn’s ample back and into the besieged carriage. Moist followed as best he could. Grags and delvers were everywhere, still trying to get into the armoured carriage ahead, and then it was just a matter of who was friend and who was foe, and there were far fewer friends, making it very easy to spot the foes.
‘Come on, lads! No speeches, you sons of mothers!’ Vimes shouted back to the others in the guard’s van. ‘You know who the enemy is and you know what to do … Get them before they get you and don’t let them get anywhere near the King! I’m heading up on the roof!’
Up on the swaying roof of the armoured carriage, Vimes quickly started to take his toll on the enemy, who were swinging down from the canyon walls on to the moving train. Unhappily for the attacking dwarfs, the problem with swinging down was that the defender on the train could easily judge where you were going to land, which was precisely the place you then got hit mightily with a jim crow. While Moist and Vimes, well accustomed to the motion of the train, could keep their feet, the dwarfs, even with their low centre of gravity, simply couldn’t fight on the rocking and rolling carriages, and the two men were able to knock them down like skittles. Moist couldn’t help feeling sorry for them. Idiots with a cause and it had been such a stupid cause to begin with.
And as he was watching Vimes fend off an attack from two of the buggers, there came a blow out of the darkness that knocked Moist on to his back, taking the wind out of him. He looked up into the face of madness. That special kind of madness warped by idealism. The madness that gloats – which, in these circumstances, was a bad idea. The grag swung his axe, but with reactions born out of terror Moist managed to roll as the mighty blade struck the roof beside him, splintering the wood where his head had just been. The grag lifted the axe once again and Moist thought, well, this is it, then … a life without danger is a life not worth living … Maybe the next one’ll be even better …
And then he saw it and grinned: the entrance to the tunnel. And so he winked, as only Moist von Lipwig could wink, and said, ‘Goodbye.’
Sparks rained down and it took him a moment to realize what had happened. Or, indeed, what unfortunately had not happened. The tunnel was just too capacious – the grag had not been shortened as expected and his axe was scraping along the roof, making a rather impressive fountain of sparks in its wake, illuminating the scene just enough for Moist to kick up and find his target, hoping against hope that this dwarf wasn’t a female. And fortunately luck was with him and therefore regrettably not with the grag, who dropped his axe, clutched at his groin and unceremoniously fell from the carriage on to the tracks below.
As the train emerged from the tunnel, it came to a grinding stop. Moist scrambled to his feet and clambered back down across the flatbed to find out what had happened to the rest of the gang. He was relieved to discover the crew of the guard’s van all more or less unharmed, including Of the Twilight the Darkness and his group of goblins, Fred Colon, Nobby Nobbs, Cheery Littlebottom, Detritus and Bluejohn, who was still hanging on to the last carriage, keeping the train together. There were also a few rather bewildered engineers and train drivers, some of whom had been trying to catch up with their sleep when the attack came but had apparently done their best.
Moist hadn’t noticed Nobby and Colon in the mêlée but decided that he would not be surprised to hear that they had acquitted themselves with great derring-do and, of course, it was such a pity that it would turn out everyone else had been too busy to see them doing it. Even so, looking around the few groaning grags still on the train, Moist acknowledged that Nobby and Colon, if given no alternative, could fight like tigers, especially tigers with the nasty weaponry of the streets where anything went and wherever it went it could be very, very painful. Colon, in particular, was master of the underhand, and some of the groaning was familiar to Moist as the famous Ankh-Morpork lullaby.
Moist never thought of himself as a leader of men, so he delegated in circumstances such as these. The chore of marshalling went to Fred Colon, known to all for his excellent shouty voice that turned his face an unusual shade of puce and was expelled at a volume that even Iron Girder would have envied.
Such grags as were alive or weren’t definitely dead were trussed up before being taken to the guard’s van, where, Moist suspected, Commander Vimes would have a little talk with them about this and that and names and places and who and when and what dreadful manners they had. Lovely.
And now a figure leaned out of the armoured carriage. It was Aeron.
‘The King is safe! Thank you all! Iron Girder came in for a hammering but the grags that managed to get on to the footplate were shown the furnace by Stoker Blake.’ Moist winced at that. He had been close to the furnace a great many times when it had been opened by the stoker and it was instant suntan time, but if you were standing in the wrong place at the critical moment it was instant fiery death.
The journey onward, with the couplings once more in place, was altogether a sombre ride, for the victors as well as for the surviving dwarfs awaiting their dreaded conversation with the Blackboard Monitor who, it was believed, could cause you and your family never to have existed. Rubbed away, as it were, in the chalk dust of the blackboard.
A little later Iron Girder gently kissed the buffers at the Bonk rail-head, and the first person to step down on to the hastily erected platform was Rhys Rhysson. He was greeted by a very large and extremely agitated rotund man, who had the word ‘burgomaster’ stamped firmly into his demeanour. He was sweating cobs and a fat man can sweat just as much as an engine. He genuflected to the King, an achievement considering his shape which was, not to put too fine a point on it, a globe.
‘Welcome back, sire,’ he said, panting. ‘The humans of Bonk have always had a good relationship with your countrymen and I sincerely hope that this amicable arrangement is going to continue.’
This invitation was uttered at a very high speed and Moist saw it for what it was: a plea saying, please don’t hurt us, we are fairly decent people and have always accepted your highness’s claim to the Scone of Stone. The unsaid codicil being, please don’t hurt us and above all, don’t interfere with the running of our mercantile activities. Please. Please?
Rhys gripped the proffered and rather sweaty hand and said, ‘I’m so sorry if you have been inconvenienced by the recent unpleasantness, Humphrey.’ A gesture which left the burgomaster all smiles.
‘Oh, it wasn’t too bad, Your Majesty. It was a bit of a nuisance when you … I mean the others started knocking down the clacks and all that. But you know how it is, it’s like a family squabble in the house next door where you know it’s not your business so you’re ready with tea, sympathy and possibly bandages and medicaments. And next time you meet the couple next door you don’t look too hard and mind your business and are still friends on the morrow.
‘And anyway, her ladyship got involved, and once she’d made a couple of examples … Well, thank goodness, we had our clacks back. She’s firm but fair is Lady Margolotta, and remarkably swift.’
