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Published:
2017-10-09
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The Guarding Dark

Summary:

Mine sign isn't created. Mine sign is born.

Work Text:

Dwarves don’t believe that mine sign is created.

After all, dwarves as far-flung as Uberwald, and Llamedos, and Copperhead, and Lancre – dwarves who can’t even understand the same dialects of dwarvish – can understand the same mine sign. Without being taught it.

Mine sign can be found in the most ancient of caves, from the time when Tak still walked the darkness.

Mine sign can be found in secluded caves, and deserted caves, and even in goblin caves; in caves where no hand could have written it.

Dwarves believe that mine sign is born.

It was Commander Carrot who first scrawled the new sign, in the grease on his breakfast plate, when he heard that Sam Vimes was dead. It was a good death, as far as they go – he’d died peacefully in his sleep, with his wife beside him. The kind of death old coppers pray for.

Angua watched him do it, but saw the look in his eye as he buckled on his sword, and decided not to comment.

***

Cheery did it next, when her son came into the station crying after school one day. She sat him on her knee in the canteen, and listened to him hiccough his way through his story – how he’d only gone to give Jeremiah a kiss on the cheek, like Mindy always did, and how the kids had laughed at him and the teacher had made him stand at the front of the room, humiliating him.

She wondered whether the teacher had taken issue with the fact that a dwarf had kissed the cheek of a human or whether a boy had kissed the cheek of a boy. She had been working on a report, and she found herself doodling something idly as her son spoke. She, too, knew what it was like to be labelled as dangerously different.

***

Soon the new sign was appearing in mines up and down the Ramtops, all the way to the Outer Sea.

When a shaft came down, killing your friends instantly, and you knew you couldn’t, mustn’t excavate for their bodies for fear of collapsing the shaft above you, it appeared.

When a good dwarf did a bad thing, and you had to see him punished, it appeared.

When dwarves feared justice would not be done, it appeared.

***

They saw a lot of the sign in the Watch. Mostly, Angua tried to ignore it. It was a dwarf thing, and none of her business, and anyways, none of the dwarves even seemed to know they were doing it.

When they were finally able to prove that Munchkin Dave was behind those rapes and murders in Tenth Egg Street, and then had to hold the line against the mob at the Watch House there to protect their prisoner, she saw a lot of it.

When Constable Pickles, who had always seemed a trustworthy, likeable lad, was found to be behind the spate of robberies that had left an old woman lying in a coma for days, they found it carved into his locker so deep that it had pierced the wood in places.

When Jackie Midnight killed a watchman and left her body in Sator Square, she saw it.

***

This morning, Carrot traced it in spilled coffee – spilled when he’d seen the front page of the Times and learned that Jackie was walking free.

“Carrot,” she said gently. She’d learned gentleness over the years.

“Mm?” he said.

Angua looked again at the squiggly shape, like an eye with a tail, with the three lines across it. The lines could have been the Trollish numeral for “many.”

“What’s the sign you just drew?”

Carrot looked down at his hand, surprised.

“It’s the Guarding Dark,” he said.

Angua looked at the symbol again. The lines could also be bars, she thought, and she remembered a time, long ago, in a mine beneath the city.

“It’s to keep the darkness out?” she hazarded.

“No,” Carrot said grimly. He turned the page of his paper. “It’s to keep the darkness in.”