Up on the swaying roof of the armoured carriage, Vimes quickly started to take his toll on the enemy, who were swinging down from the canyon walls on to the moving train. Unhappily for the attacking dwarfs, the problem with swinging down was that the defender on the train could easily judge where you were going to land, which was precisely the place you then got hit mightily with a jim crow. While Moist and Vimes, well accustomed to the motion of the train, could keep their feet, the dwarfs, even with their low centre of gravity, simply couldn’t fight on the rocking and rolling carriages, and the two men were able to knock them down like skittles. Moist couldn’t help feeling sorry for them. Idiots with a cause and it had been such a stupid cause to begin with.

And as he was watching Vimes fend off an attack from two of the buggers, there came a blow out of the darkness that knocked Moist on to his back, taking the wind out of him. He looked up into the face of madness. That special kind of madness warped by idealism. The madness that gloats – which, in these circumstances, was a bad idea. The grag swung his axe, but with reactions born out of terror Moist managed to roll as the mighty blade struck the roof beside him, splintering the wood where his head had just been. The grag lifted the axe once again and Moist thought, well, this is it, then … a life without danger is a life not worth living … Maybe the next one’ll be even better …

And then he saw it and grinned: the entrance to the tunnel. And so he winked, as only Moist von Lipwig could wink, and said, ‘Goodbye.’

Sparks rained down and it took him a moment to realize what had happened. Or, indeed, what unfortunately had not happened. The tunnel was just too capacious – the grag had not been shortened as expected and his axe was scraping along the roof, making a rather impressive fountain of sparks in its wake, illuminating the scene just enough for Moist to kick up and find his target, hoping against hope that this dwarf wasn’t a female. And fortunately luck was with him and therefore regrettably not with the grag, who dropped his axe, clutched at his groin and unceremoniously fell from the carriage on to the tracks below.

As the train emerged from the tunnel, it came to a grinding stop. Moist scrambled to his feet and clambered back down across the flatbed to find out what had happened to the rest of the gang. He was relieved to discover the crew of the guard’s van all more or less unharmed, including Of the Twilight the Darkness and his group of goblins, Fred Colon, Nobby Nobbs, Cheery Littlebottom, Detritus and Bluejohn, who was still hanging on to the last carriage, keeping the train together. There were also a few rather bewildered engineers and train drivers, some of whom had been trying to catch up with their sleep when the attack came but had apparently done their best.