Monstrous Regiment

“Probably wanted a date,” said Tonker.

“In Ankh-Morpork that means ‘jolly good’,” said Blouse. “In Klatch, I think, it means ‘I hope your donkey explodes’. I spotted the man. Looked like a guard sergeant to me.”

“Didn’t have stripes,” said Polly. “Why’d he want to say jolly good to us?”

“Or hate our donkey so much?” said Shufti. “How’s Wazzer?”

“Sleeping,” said Igorina. “I think.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I don’t think she’s dead.”

“You don’t think she is?” said Polly.

“Yes,” said Igorina. “It’s like that. I wish I could keep her warmer.”

“I thought you said she was burning up?”

“She was. Now she’s freezing cold.”

Lieutenant Blouse strode over to the door, grabbed its handle and, to the surprise of all, pulled it open. Four swords were levelled at him.

“We have a sick man here!” he snapped to the astonished guards. “We need blankets and firewood! Get them now!” He slammed the door. “It might work,” he said.

“That door doesn’t have a lock,” said Tonker. “Useful fact, Polly.”

Polly sighed. “Right now, I just want something to eat. This is a kitchen, after all. There could be food here.”

“This is a kitchen,” said Tonker. “There could be cleavers!”

But it is always upsetting to find that the enemy is as bright as you. There was a well, but a web of bars across the top allowed for the passage of nothing bigger than a bucket. And someone with no sense of the narrative of adventure had removed from the room anything with an edge and, for some reason, anything that could be eaten.

“Unless we want to dine on candles,” said Shufti, pulling a bundle of them out of a creaking cupboard. “’s tallow, after all. I bet old Scallot’d make candle scubbo.”

Polly checked the chimney, which smelled as though there had not been a fire in it for a long time. It was big and wide, but six feet up a heavy grille was hung with sooty cobwebs. It looked rusted and ancient, and could probably be shifted by twenty minutes’ work with a crowbar, but there’s never a crowbar when you want one.

There were some couple of sacks of ancient, dry and dusty flour in the storeroom. It smelled bad. There was a thing with a fu

The door opened. Armed men came in to act as protection for a couple of women, carrying blankets and firewood. They scurried in with their eyes cast down, deposited their burdens, and almost ran out. Polly strode over to the guard who seemed to be in charge, and he backed away. A huge key ring jingled on his belt.

“You knock next time, all right?” she said.

He gri

“Really?”

The jailer glanced around. “But we reckon you’re doing bloody well, for girls,” he said conspiratorially.

“So that means you won’t shoot at us when we break out?” said Polly sweetly.

The grin faded. “Don’t try it,” said the jailer.

“What a big bunch of keys you have there, sir,” said Tonker, and the man’s hand flew to his belt.

“You just stay in here,” he said. “Things are bad enough already. You stay here!”

He slammed the door. A moment later they heard something heavy being pushed up against it.

“Well, now we have a fire, at least,” said Blouse.

“Er…” This was from Lofty. She volunteered a word so seldom that the rest turned to look at her, and she stopped in embarrassment.

“Yes, Lofty?” said Polly.

“Er… I know how to get the door open,” muttered Lofty. “So it stays open, I mean.”

Had it been anyone else, someone would have laughed. But words from Lofty had obviously been turned over for some time before utterance.

“Er… good,” said Blouse. “Well done.”

“I’ve been thinking about it,” said Lofty.

“Good.”

“It will work.”

“Just what we need, then!” said Blouse, like a man trying against all the odds to keep cheerful.

Lofty looked up at the big sooty beams that ran across the room. “Yes,” she said.

“But there’ll still be guards outside,” said Polly.

“No,” said Lofty. “There won’t.”

“There won’t?”

“They’ll have gone away.” Lofty stopped, with the air of one who’d said everything that needed to be said.

Tonker walked over and took her arm. “We’ll just have a little chat, shall we?” she said, and led the girl to the other side of the room. There was some whispered conversation. Lofty spent most of it staring at the floor, and then Tonker came back.

“We will need the bags of flour from the storeroom, and the rope from the well,” she said. “And one of those… what are those big round things that cover dishes? With a knob on?”

“Dish covers?” said Shufti.

“And a candle,” Tonker went on. “And a lot of barrels. And a lot of water.”

“And what will all this do?” said Blouse.

“Make a big bang,” said Tonker. “Tilda knows a lot about fire, believe me.”

“When you say she knows a lot…” Polly began uncertainly.

“I mean every place she worked at burned down,” said Tonker.

They rolled the empty barrels to the middle of the room and filled them with water from the pump. Under Lofty’s monosyllabic direction and the rope from the well, they hauled three leaking, dusty flour sacks up as high as possible, so that they twisted gently over the space between the barrels and the door.

“Ah,” said Polly, standing back. “I think I understand. A flour mill on the other side of town blew up two years ago.”

“Yes,” said Tonker. “That was Tilda.”

“What?”

“They’d been beating her. And worse. And the thing about Tilda is, she just watches and thinks and somewhere in there it all comes together. Then it explodes.”

“But two people died!”

“The man and his wife. Yes. But I heard that other girls sent there never came back at all. Shall I tell you that Tilda was pregnant when they brought her back to the Grey House after the fire? She had it, and they took it away, and we don’t know what happened to it. And then she got beaten again because she was an Abomination Unto Nuggan. Does that make you feel better?” said Tonker, tying the rope to a table leg. “There’s just us, Polly. Just her and me. No inheritance, no nice home to go back to, no relatives that we know of. The Grey House breaks us all, somehow. Wazzer talks to the Duchess, I don’t have… middle gears, and Tilda frightens me when she gets her hands on a box of matches. You should see her face then, though. It lights up. Of course,” Tonker smiled in her dangerous way, “so do other things. Better get everyone into the storeroom while we light the candle.”

“Shouldn’t Tilda do that?”

“She will. But we’ll have to be ready to drag her away, otherwise she’ll stay and watch.”

This had started like a game. She hadn’t thought of it like a game, but it was a game called Let Polly keep The Duchess. And now… it didn’t matter. She’d made all kinds of plans, but she was beyond plans now. They’d done bloody well, for girls…

A final barrel of water had been placed, after some discussion, in front of the storeroom’s door. Polly looked over the top of it at Blouse and the rest of the squad.

10. Every long-established kitchen has one of these, and no one ever remembers why. It is generally for something that no one does any more and, even when it was done, it wasn’t done with any real enthusiasm, such as celery basting, walnut shredding or, in the worst case, edible dormouse stuffing.