‘Oh, I assumed it was going to be something like that right at the start,’ saidthe Lecturer in Recent Runes.

‘Indeed,’ said the Chair of Indefinite Studies. ‘It crossed my mind as soon asI saw it in the paper.’

‘Gentlemen,’ said Ridcully. ‘I am humbled that as soon as I have an idea aboutwhat something is, it turns out that you all knew what it was. I am amazed.’

‘Excuse me,’ said Dr Hix, ‘but I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.’

‘You are out of touch! You’ve been spending too long underground, sir!’ saidthe Lecturer in Recent Runes sternly.

‘You don’t often let me out, that’s why! And can I remind you that I have tomaintain a vital line of cosmic defence in this establishment here with a staffof exactly one? And he’s dead!’

‘You mean Charlie? I remember old Charlie, keen worker nevertheless,’ saidRidcully.

‘Yes, but I have to keep rewiring him all the time,’ sighed Hix. ‘I do try tokeep you abreast of things in my monthly reports. I hope you read them… ?’

‘Tell me, Doctor Hix,’ said Ponder, ‘did you experience anything unusual whenthat young lady was speaking so eloquently?’

‘Well, yes, I had a pleasant moment of happy recollection about my father.’

‘So did we all, I am sure,’ said Ponder. There was sombre nodding around thetable. ‘I never knew my father. I was brought up by my aunts. I had déjà vuwithout the original vu.’

‘And it wasn’t magic?’ suggested the Lecturer in Recent Runes.

‘No. Religion, I suspect,’ said Ridcully. ‘A god invoked, that sort of thing.’

‘Not invoked, Mustrum,’ said Dr Hix. ‘Summoned by bloodshed!’

‘Oh, I hope not,’ said Ridcully, getting to his feet. ‘I would like to try alittle experiment this afternoon, gentlemen. We will not talk about football,we will not speculate about football, we will not worry about football—’

‘You are going to make us play it, aren’t you?’ said the Lecturer in RecentRunes glumly.

‘Yes,’ said Ridcully, more than somewhat miffed at the spoiling of a perfectlygood peroration. ‘Just a little kick-about to help us get some hands-onexperience of the game as it is played.’

‘Er. Strictly, under the new rules, by which I mean the ancient rules we aretaking as our model, hands-on experience means no hands,’ said Ponder.

‘Well pointed out, that man. Put the word out, will you? Football practice onthe lawn after lunch!’

One thing you had to remember when dealing with dwarfs was that while theyshared the same world as you did, metaphorically they thought about it as if itwere upside down. Only the richest and most influential of dwarfs lived in thedeepest caverns. For a dwarf, a penthouse in the centre of the city would besome kind of slum. Dwarfs liked it dark and cool.

It didn’t stop there. A dwarf on the up and up was really on his uppers, andupper-class dwarfs were lower class. A dwarf who was rich, healthy and hadrespect and his own rat farm justifiably felt at rock bottom and was held inlow esteem. When you talked to dwarfs, you turned your mind upside down. Thecity, too. Of course, when you dug down in Ankh-Morpork you just found moreAnkh-Morpork. Thousands of years of it, ready to be dug out and shored up andwalled in with the shiny dwarf brick.

It was Lord Vetinari’s ‘Grand Undertaking’. The city’s walls corseted it like afetishist’s happiest dream. Gravity offered only a limited supply of up, butthe deep loam of the plain had a limitless supply of down.

Glenda was surprised, therefore, to find Shatta right at the surface in theMaul, alongside the really posh dress shops that were for human ladies. Thatmade sense, however; if you were going to make a scandalous profit sellingclothes, it made sense to camouflage yourself amongst other shops doing thesame thing. She wasn’t sure about the name, but apparently shatta meant ‘awonderful surprise’ in Dwarfish, and if you started to laugh about that sort ofthing then you would never have time to pause for breath.

She approached the door with the apprehension of one who is certain that themoment she sets foot inside she will be charged five dollars a minute forbreathing and then be held upside down and have all her wealth removed with ahook.

And it was, indeed, classy. But it was dwarf classy. That meant an awful lot ofchain mail, and enough weaponry to take over a city-but if you paid attention,you realized it was female chain mail and weaponry. That was how things werehappening, apparently. Dwarf women had got fed up with looking like dwarf menall the time and were metaphorically melting down their breastplates in orderto make something a little lighter and with adjustable straps.

Juliet had explained this on the way down, although, of course, Juliet did notuse the word ‘metaphorically’, it being several syllables beyond her range.There were battle-axes and war hammers, but all with that certain femininetouch: one war axe, apparently capable of cleaving a backbone lengthwise, wasbeautifully engraved with flowers. It was another world, and as she stood justinside the doorway looking around, Glenda felt relieved that there were otherhumans in the place. In fact, there were quite a few, and that was surprising.One of them, a young human woman with steel boots six inches high, gravitatedtowards them as if drawn by a magnet-and given the amount of ferrous metal onher body, a magnet was something she would never pass in a hurry. She washolding a tray of drinks.

‘There’s black mead, red mead and white mead,’ she said, and then lowered hervoice by a few decibels and three social classes. ‘Actually, the red mead isreally sherry and all the dwarf ladies are drinking it. They like not having toquaff.’

‘Do we have to pay for this?’ said Glenda nervously.

‘It’s free,’ said the girl. She indicated a bowl of small black things on thetray, each one pierced with a cocktail stick, and said slightly hopelessly,‘And do try the rat fruit.’

Before Glenda could stop her, Juliet had taken one and was chewingenthusiastically.

‘What part of a rat is its fruit?’ asked Glenda. The girl with the tray did notlook directly at her.

‘Well, you know shepherd’s pie?’ she said.

‘I know twelve different recipes,’ said Glenda in a moment of rare smugness.This was actually a lie. She probably knew about four recipes because there wasonly so much you could do with meat and potatoes, but the glittering metallicgrandeur of the place was getting on her nerves and she felt the need to stickup for herself. And then realization dawned. ‘Oh, you mean like traditionalshepherd’s pie,’ she said, ‘made with the—’

‘I’m afraid so,’ said the girl, ‘but they’re very popular with the ladies.’

‘Don’t have any more, Jools,’ said Glenda quickly.

‘It’s quite nice,’ said Juliet. ‘Can’t I have one more?’

‘Just one, then,’ said Glenda. ‘That should even up the rat.’ She helpedherself to a sherry and the girl, balancing carefully as she managed threedifferent things with two different hands, handed her a glossy brochure.

Glenda glanced through it and knew her original impression had been right. Thisplace was so expensive they didn’t tell you the price of anything. You couldalways be sure things were going to be expensive when they didn’t tell you theprice. No point in looking through it, it’d suck your wages out through youreyeballs. Free drinks? Oh, yes.

With nothing else to do, she scanned the rest of the crowd. Everyone, exceptthe growing and, in fact, quite large number of humans, had a beard. All dwarfshad beards. It was part of being a dwarf. Here, though, the beards were alittle finer than you usually saw around the city and there had been someexperimentation with perms and ponytails. There were mining pickaxes on view,it was true, but carried in expensively tooled bags as if the owner might spota likely-looking coal seam on the way to the shops and wouldn’t be able to helpherself.