Men at Arms (Discworld #15)(55)

Now his brain was nearing its ideal temperature of operation. Unfortunately, this was pretty close to a troll's optimum point of death.

Part of his brain gave some thought to this. There was a high probability of rescue. That meant he'd have to leave. That meant he'd become stupid again, as sure as

10-3(Me/Mp)a6aG – N = 10N.

Better make the most of it, then.

He went back to the world of numbers so complex that they had no meaning, only a transitional point of view. And got on with freezing to death, as well.

Dibbler reached the Butchers' Guild very shortly after Cuddy. The big red doors had been kicked open and a small butcher was sitting just inside them rubbing his nose.

'Which way did he go?'

'Dat way.'

And in the Guild's main hall the master butcher Gerhardt Sock was staggering around in circles. This was because Cuddy's boots were planted on his chest. The dwarf was hanging on to the man's vest like a yachtsman tacking into a gale, and whirling his axe round and round in front of Sock's face.

'You give it to me right now or I'll make you eat your own nose!'

A crowd of apprentice butchers was trying to keep out of the way.

'But—'

'Don't you argue with me! I'm an officer of the Watch, I am!'

'But you—'

'You've got one last chance, mister. Give it to me right now!'

Sock shut his eyes.

'What is it you want?'

The crowd waited.

'Ah,' said Cuddy. 'Ahaha. Didn't I say?'

'No!'

'I'm pretty sure I did, you know.'

'You didn't!'

'Oh. Well. It's the key to the pork futures warehouse, if you must know.' Cuddy jumped down.

'Why?'

The axe hovered in front of his nose again.

'I was just asking,' said Sock, in a desperate and distant voice.

'There's a man of the Watch in there freezing to death,' said Cuddy.

There was quite a crowd around them when they finally got the main door open. Lumps of ice clinked on the stones, and there was a rush of supercold air.

Frost covered the floor and the rows of hanging carcasses on their backwards journey through time. It also covered a Detritus-shaped lump squatting in the middle of the floor.

They carried it out into the sunlight.

'Should his eyes be flashing on and off like that?' said Dibbler.

'Can you hear me?' shouted Cuddy. 'Detritus?'

Detritus blinked. Ice slid off him in the day's heat.

He could feel the cracking up of the marvellous universe of numbers. The rising temperature hit his thoughts like a flamethrower caressing a snowflake.

'Say something!' said Cuddy.

Towers of intellect collapsed as the fire roared through Detritus' brain.

'Hey, look at this,' said one of the apprentices.

The inner walls of the warehouse were covered with numbers. Equations as complex as a neural network had been scraped in the frost. At some point in the calculation the mathematician had changed from using numbers to using letters, and then letters themselves hadn't been sufficient; brackets like cages enclosed expressions which were to normal mathematics what a city is to a map.

They got simpler as the goal neared – simpler, yet containing in the flowing lines of their simplicity a spartan and wonderful complexity.

Cuddy stared at them. He knew he'd never be able to understand them in a hundred years.

The frost crumbled in the warmer air.

The equations narrowed as they were carried on down the wall and across the floor to where the troll had been sitting, until they became just a few expressions that appeared to move and sparkle with a life of their own. This was maths without numbers, pure as lightning.

They narrowed to a point, and at the point was just the very simple symbol: '='.

'Equals what?' said Cuddy. 'Equals what?'

The frost collapsed.

Cuddy went outside. Detritus was now sitting in a puddle of water, surrounded by a crowd of human onlookers.


'Can't one of you get him a blanket or something?' he said.

A very fat man said, 'Huh? Who'd use a blanket after it had been on a troll?'

'Hah, yes, good point,' said Cuddy. He glanced at the five holes in Detritus' breastplate. They were at about head height, for a dwarf. 'Could you come over here for a moment, please?'

The man grinned at his friends, and sauntered over.

'I expect you can see the holes in his armour, right?' said Cuddy.

C. M. O. T. Dibbler was a survivor. In the same way that rodents and insects can sense an earthquake ahead of the first tremors, so he could tell if something big was about to go down on the street. Cuddy was being too nice. When a dwarf was nice like that, it meant he was saving up to be nasty later on.

'I'll just, er, go about my business, then,' he said, and backed away.

'I've got nothing against dwarfs, mind you,' said the fat man. 'I mean, dwarfs is practically people, in my book. Just shorter humans, almost. But trolls . . . weeeelll . . . they're not the same as us, right?'

' 'scuse me, 'scuse me, gangway, gangway,' said Dibbler, achieving with his cart the kind of getaway customarily associated with vehicles that have fluffy dice on the windscreen.