'Oook oook oook oook ook—'
'You all stupid!'
'I can't help it. It's my nearly-dwarfish blood. We just like singing underground. It comes naturally to us.'
'All right, but why him singing? Him ape.'
'He's a people person.'
They'd brought torches. Shadows jumped among the pillars in the big cavern, and fled along the tunnels. Whatever the possible lurking dangers, Carrot was beside himself with the joy of discovery.
'It's amazing! The Via Cloaca is mentioned in some old book I read, but everyone thought it was a lost street! Superb workmanship. Lucky for you the river was so low. It looks as though these are normally full of water.'
'That's what I said,' said Cuddy. 'Full of water, I said.'
He glanced cautiously at the dancing shadows, which made weird and worrying shapes on the far wall -strange biped animals, eldritch underground things . . .
Carrot sighed.
'Stop making shadow pictures, Detritus.'
'Oook.'
'What him say?'-
'He said “Do Deformed Rabbit, it's my favourite”,' Carrot translated.
Rats rustled in the darkness. Cuddy peered around. He kept imagining figures, back there, sighting along some kind of pipe . . .
There were a disturbing few moments when he lost sight of the tracks on the wet stone, but he picked them up again near a mould-hung wall. And then, there was the particular pipe. He'd made a scratch on the stones.
'It's not far along,' he said, handing Carrot the torch.
Carrot disappeared.
They heard his footsteps in the mud, and then a whistle of surprise, and then silence for a while.
Carrot reappeared.
'My word,' he said. 'You two know who this is?'
'It looks like—' Cuddy began.
'It looks like trouble,' said Carrot.
'You see why we didn't bring it back up?' said Cuddy. 'Carrying a human's corpse through the streets right now would not be a good idea, I thought. Especially this one.'
'I thought some of that, too,' Detritus volunteered.
'Right enough,' said Carrot. 'Well done, men. I think we'd better . . . leave it for now, and come back with a sack later on. And . . . don't tell anyone else.'
'Except the sergeant and everyone,' said Cuddy.
'No . . . not even them. If d make everyone very . . . jumpy.'
'Just as you say, Corporal Carrot.'
'We're dealing with a sick mind here, men.'