Published by Delacone Press Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. 666 Fifth Avenue New York, New York 10103 This work was originally published in Great Britain by Transworld Publishers Ltd. Copyright © 1989 by Terry and Lyn Pratchett All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. The trademark Delacorte Press¨ is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Pratchett, Terry. Diggers / Terry Pratchett. p. cm. Summary: A group of small creatures called nomes, whose families have lived for generations hidden in a department store, are forced to flee to a country quarry, where they struggle against harsh weather, destructive humans, and dissension among themselves. ISBN 0-385-30152-9 [1. Fantasy.] I. Title. PZ7.P8865Di 1990 [Fic]÷dc20 89-78123 CIP AC Manufactured in the United States of America February 1991 10 987654321 BVG In the beginning . . . . . . Arnold Bros. (est. 1905) created the Store. At least, that was the belief of thousands of nomes who for many generations* had lived under the floorboards of Arnold Bros. (est. 1905), an old and respected department store in the middle of the city. The Store had become their world. A world with a roof and walls. Wind and Rain were ancient legends. So were Day and Night. Now there were sprinkler systems and air conditioners, and the nomes' small, crowded lives ticked to the clock of Opening Time and Closing Time. The seasons of their year were January Sales, Spring into Spring Fashions, Sum- mer Bargains, and Christmas Fayre. Led by the Ab- bot and priesthood of the Stationer!, they wor- shipped÷in a polite, easygoing sort of way, so as * Nome generations, that is. Nomes live ten times faster than humans. To them, ten years is a long lifetime. TERRY PRATCHETT not to upset him÷Arnold Bros. (est. 1905), who they believed had created everything, i.e., the Store and all the contents therein. Some families of nomes had grown rich and powerful and took the names÷more or less÷of the Store departments they lived under . . . the Del Icatessen, the Ironmongri, the Haberdasheri. And into the Store, on the back of a truck, came the last nomes to live Outside. They knew what wind and rain were, all right. That's why they tried to leave them behind. Among them was Masklin, rat hunter, and Granny Morkie, and Grimma, although they were women and didn't really count. And, of course, the Thing. No one quite understood the Thing. Masklin's people had handed it down for centuries; it was very important, that was all they knew. When it came near the electricity in the Store it was able to talk. It said it was a thinking machine from a ship which, thousands of years before, had brought the nomes from a far Store, or possibly star. It also said it could hear electricity talk, and one of the things the electricity was saying was that the Store would be demolished in three weeks. It was Masklin who suggested that the nomes leave the Store on a truck. He found, oddly enough, that actually working out how you could drive a giant truck was the easiest part. The hardest part was getting people to believe that they could do it. ð 2 ' DIGGERS He wasn't the leader. He'd have liked to be a leader. A leader could stick his chin out and do brave things. What Masklin had to do was argue and persuade and, sometimes, lie very slightly. He found it was often easier to get people to do things if you let them think it was their idea. Ideas! That was the tricky bit, all right. And there were lots of ideas that they needed. They needed to learn to work together. They needed to learn to read. They needed to think that female nomes were, well, nearly as intelligent as males (al- though everyone knew that really this was ridicu- lous and that if females were encouraged to think too much their brains would overheat). Anyway, it all worked. The truck did leave just before the Store mysteriously burned down, and hardly damaging anything very much, it was driven out into the country. The nomes found an abandoned quarry tucked into a hillside, and moved into the ruined build- ings. And then they knew everything was going to be All Right. There was going to be, they'd heard, a Bright New Dawn. Whatever that was. Most nomes had never seen a dawn, bright or otherwise, and if they had they would have known that the trouble with bright new dawns is that they're usually followed by cloudy days. With scat- tered showers. Six months passed . . . ð 3 ' TERRY PRATCHETT * * This is the story of the Winter. This is the story of the Great Battle. This is the story of the awakening of the Cat, the Dragon in the Hill, with eyes like great eyes and a voice like a great voice and teeth like great teeth. But the story didn't end there. It didn't start there, either. The sky blew a gale. The sky blew a fury. The wind became a wall sweeping across the country, a giant stamping on the land. Small trees bent, big trees broke. The last leaves of autumn whirred through the air like lost bullets. The garbage dump by the gravel pits was de- serted. The seagulls that patrolled it had found shelter somewhere, but it was still full of move- ment. The wind tore into the heaps as though it had something particular against old detergent boxes and leftover shoes. Tin cans rolled into the ruts and clanked miserably, while lighter bits of rubbish flew up and joined the riot in the sky. Still the wind burrowed. Papers rustled for a while, then got caught and blasted away. Finally one piece that had been flapping for hours tears free and flies up into the booming air. It looks like a large white bird with oblong wings. Watch it tumble. . . . It gets caught on a fence, but very briefly. Half of ð 4 ' DIGGERS it tears off, and now that much lighter, it pinwheels across the furrows of the field beyond. . . . It is just gathering speed when a hedge looms up and snaps it out of the air like a fly. 5 I. And in that time were Strange Happenings: the Air moved harshly, the Warmth of the Sky grew Less, on some mornings the tops of puddles grew Hard and Cold. II. And the nomes said unto one another, What is this Thing? ÷From the Book of Nome, Quarries I, v. I-II "Winter," said Masklin firmly. "It's called winter." Abbott Gurder frowned at him. "You never said it would be like this," he said. "It's so cold." "Call this cold?" said Granny Morkie. "Cold? This ain't cold. You think this is cold? You wait till it gets really cold!" She was enjoying this, Masklin noticed; Granny Morkie always enjoyed doom. "It'll be really cold then, when it gets cold. You get real frosts, and water comes down out of the sky in frozen bits!" She leaned back triumphantly. "What d'you think of that, then? Eh?" ð 6 ' DIGGERS "You don't have to use baby talk to us," sighed Gurder. "We can read, you know. We know what snow is." "Yes," said Dorcas. "There used to be cards with pictures on them, back in the Store. Every time Christmas Fayre came around. We know about snow. It's glittery." "You get robins," agreed Gurder. "There's, er, actually there's a bit more to it than that," Masklin began. Dorcas waved him into silence. "I don't think we need to worry," he said. "We're well dug in, the food stores are looking good, and we know where to go to get more if we need it. Unless anyone's got anything else to raise, why don't we close the meet- ing?" Everything was going well. Or, at least, not very badly. That sort of thing always worried Masklin. Oh, there was still plenty of squabbling and feuds between the various families, but that was nomish nature for you. That's why they'd set up the council, which seemed to be working. Nomes liked arguing. At least the Council of Drivers meant they could argue without hitting one another hardly ever. Funny thing, though. Back in the Store the great departmental families had run things. But now all the families were mixed up and, anyway, there were no departments in a quarry. But by instinct, almost, nomes liked hierarchies. The world had al- ð / ð TERRY PRATCHETT ways been neatly divided between those who told people what to do, and those who did it. So, in a strange way, a new set of leaders was emerging. The Drivers. It depended on where you had been during the Long Drive. If you were one of the ones who had been in the truck cab, then you were a Driver. Ev- eryone else was just a Passenger. No one talked about it much. It wasn't official or anything. It was just that the bulk of nomekind felt that anyone who could get the Truck all the way here was the sort of person who knew what they were doing. Being a Driver wasn't necessarily much fun. Last year, before they'd found the Store, Masklin had to hunt all day. Now he only hunted when he felt like it; the younger Store nomes liked hunting, and apparently it wasn't right for a Driver to do it. And they mined potatoes and there'd been a big harvest of corn from a nearby field, even after the machines had been around. Masklin would have preferred the nomes to grow their own food, but they didn't seem to have the knack of making seeds grow in the rock-hard ground of the quarry. But they were getting fed, that was the main thing. Around him he could feel thousands of nomes living their lives. Raising families. Settling down. He wandered back to his own burrow, down un- der one of the derelict quarry sheds. After a while he reached a decision and pulled the Thing out of its own hole in the wall. None of...
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