The moon was somewhere beyond the clouds, but Angua didn’t need to see it. Carrot once had a special watch made for her birthday. It was a little moon that turned right around, black side and white side, every twenty-eight days. It must have cost him a lot of money, and Angua now wore it on her collar, the one item of clothing that she could wear all month around. She couldn’t bring herself to tell him she didn’t need it. You knew what was happening.

It was hard to know much else right now, because she was thinking with her nose. That was the problem with the wolf times; the nose took charge.

Currently, Angua was searching the alleys around Treacle Street, spiraling out from the dwarf mine. She prowled onwards in a world of color; smells overlaid one another, drifting and persisting. The nose was also the only organ that can see backwards in time.

She’d already visited the spoil heap on the waste ground. There was the smell of troll there. It had got out that way, but there was no point in following a trail that cold. Hundreds of street trolls wore lichen and skulls these days. But the foul, oily stuff, that was a smell that was clinging to her memory. The little devils must have some other ways in, right? And you had to move the air around in a mine, right? So some trace of that oil would find its ways out along with the air. They probably wouldn’t be strong, but she didn’t need them to be. A trace of it was all she needed. It would be more than enough.

As she padded through the alleys, and leapt walls into midnight yards, she kept clenched in her jaws the little leather bag that was a friend to any thinking werewolf, such a creature being defined as one who remembers that your clothes don’t magically follow you. The bag held a lightweight silk dress and a large bottle of mouthwash, which Angua considered to be the greatest invention of the last hundred years.

She found what she was looking for behind Broad Way: it stood out against the familiar organic smells of the city as a tiny black ribbon of stench that left zigzags in the air as breezes and the passage of carts had dragged it this way and that.

She began to move with more care. This wasn’t an area like Treacle Street; people with money lived here, and they often spent that money on big dogs and DISPROPORTIONATE RESPONSE signs in their driveways. As it was, she heard the rattle of chains and the occasional whine as she slunk along. She hated being attacked by large, ferocious dogs. It always left a mess and the mouthwash was afterwards never strong enough.

The thread of stink was floating through the railings of Empirical Crescent, one of the city’s great architectural semi-precious gems. It was always hard to find people prepared to live there, however, despite the general desirable nature of the area. Tenants seldom stayed for more than a few months before moving hurriedly, sometimes leaving all their possessions behind.*

She sailed over the railing with silence and ease and landed on all fours on what had once been gravel path. Residents in the crescent seldom did much gardening, since even if you planted bulbs you could never be sure whose garden they’d come up in.

Angua followed her nose to a patch of rampant thistles. Some molding bricks in a circle marked what must have been an old well.

The oily stink was heavy here, but there was a fresher, far more complex smell that raised the hairs on Angua’s neck.

There was a vampire down there.

Someone had pulled away the weeds and debris, including the inevitable rotting mattress and decomposing armchair.* Sally? What was she doing here?

Angua pulled a brick out of the rotted edging and let it drop. Instead of a splash, there was a clear, wooden thump.

Oh well. She went back to human to get down; claws were fine, but some things were better done by monkeys. The sides were, of course, slimy, but so many bricks had fallen out over the years that the descent turned out to be easier than she’d expected. And it was only about sixty feet deep, built in the days when it was widely believed that any water that supported so many little whiskery swimming things must be healthy.

There were fresh planks in the bottom. Someone—and surely it could only have been the dwarfs—had broken into the well down here, and laid a couple of planks across it. They had dug this far, and stopped. Why? Because they’d reached the well?

There was dirty water, or water-like liquid, just under the planks. The tunnel was a bit wider here, and dwarfs had been here—she sniffed—a day ago, no more. Yes. Dwarfs had been here, had fished around, and had then all left at once. They hadn’t even bothered to tidy up. She could smell it like a picture.

She crept forward, the tunnels mapping themselves in her nostrils. They weren’t nicely finished, like the tunnels Ardent moved in. They were rougher, with lots of zigzags and blind alleys. Rough planks and balks of timber held back the fetid mud of the plains, which was nevertheless oozing through everywhere. These tunnels weren’t built to last; they were there for a quick and definitely dirty job, and all they had to do was survive until it was done.

So…the diggers had been looking for something, but weren’t sure where it was until they were within, what, about twenty feet of it, when they’d…smelled it? Detected it? The last stretch to the well was dead straight. By then, they knew where they were going.

Angua crept on, almost bending double to clear the low ceiling until she gave up and went back to wolf. The tunnel straightened out, with the occasional side passage that she ignored, although they smelled long. The vampire smell was still an annoying theme in the nasal symphony, and it came close to drowning the reek of foul water oozing from the walls. Here and there, vurms had colonized the ceiling. So had bats. They stirred.

And then there was another scent as she passed a tunnel opening. It was quite faint, but it was unmistakably the whiff of corruption. A fresh death…

Three fresh deaths. At the end of a short side tunnel were the bodies of two, no, three dwarfs, half-buried in mud. They glowed. Vurms had no teeth, Carrot had told her. They waited until the prospective meal became runny of its own accord. And, while they waited for the biggest stroke of luck ever to have come their way, they celebrated. Down here, in a world far away from the streets, the dwarfs would dissolve in light.

Angua sniffed.

Make that very fresh—

“They found something,” said a voice behind her. “And then it killed them.”

Angua leapt.