Feet of Clay (15 page)

He lit a match on a hippo’s toenail and cupped his hand around it to shield his cigar from the damp.

These murders, now. No one would care if the Watch didn’t care. Two old men, murdered on the same day. Nothing stolen … He corrected himself: nothing
apparently
stolen. Of course, the thing about things that were stolen was that the bloody things weren’t there. They almost certainly hadn’t been fooling around with other people’s wives. They probably couldn’t remember what fooling around was. One spent his time among old religious books; the other, for gods’ sakes, was an authority on the aggressive uses of baking.

People would probably say they had lived blameless lives.

But Vimes was a policeman.
No one
lived a completely blameless life. It might be just possible, by lying very still in a cellar somewhere, to get through a day without committing a crime. But only just. And, even then, you were probably guilty of loitering.

Anyway, Angua seemed to have taken this case personally. She always had a soft spot for the underdog.

So did Vimes. You had to. Not because they were pure or noble, because they weren’t. You had to be on the side of underdogs because they weren’t overdogs.

Everyone in this city looked after themselves. That’s what the guilds were for. People banded together against other people. The guild looked after you from the cradle to the grave or, in the case of the Assassins, to other people’s graves. They even maintained the law, or at least they had done, after a fashion. Thieving without a licence was punishable by death for the first offence.
¹¹
The Thieves’ Guild saw to that. The arrangement sounded unreal, but it worked.

It worked like a machine. That was fine except for the occasional people who got crushed in the wheels.

The damp cobbles felt reassuringly real under his soles.

Gods, he’d missed this. He’d patrolled alone in
the
old days. When there was just him, and the stones glistened around 3 am, it all seemed to make sense somehow—

He stopped.

Around him, the world became a crystal of horror, the special horror that has nothing to do with fangs or ichor or ghosts but has everything to do with the familiar becoming unfamiliar.

Something fundamental was wrong.

It took a few dreadful seconds for his mind to supply the details of what his subconscious had noticed. There had been five statues along the parapet on this side.

But there should have been four.

He turned very slowly and walked back to the last one. It was a hippo, all right.

So was the next one. There was graffiti on it. Nothing supernatural had ‘Zaz Ys A Wonker’ scrawled on it.

It seemed to him that it didn’t take quite so long to get to the next one, and when he
looked
at it …

Two red points of light flared in the fog above him.

Something big and dark leapt down, knocked him to the ground and disappeared into the gloom.

Vimes struggled to his feet, shook his head and set off after it. No thought was involved. It is the ancient instinct of terriers and policemen to chase anything that runs away.

As he ran he felt automatically for his bell, which would summon other Watchmen, but the Commander of the Watch didn’t carry a bell. Commanders of the Watch were on their own.

In Vimes’s squalid office Captain Carrot stared at a piece of paper:

Repairs to Guttering, Watch House, Pseudopolis Yard. New downpipe, 35° Micklewhite bend, four right-angled trusses, labour and making good. $16.35p.

There were more like them, including Constable Downspout’s pigeon bill. He knew Sergeant Colon objected to the idea of a policeman being paid in pigeons, but Constable Downspout was a gargoyle and gargoyles had no concept of money. But they knew a pigeon when they ate it.

Still, things were improving. When Carrot had arrived the entire Watch’s petty cash had been kept on a shelf in a tin marked ‘Stronginthearm’s Armour Polish for Gleaming Cohorts’ and, if money was needed for anything, all you had had to do was go and find Nobby and force him to give it back.

Then there was the letter from a resident in Park Lane, one of the most select addresses in the city:

Commander Vimes,

The Night Watch patrol in this street appears to be made up entirely of dwarfs. I have nothing against dwarfs amongst their own kind, at least they are not trolls, but one hears stories and I have daughters in the house. I
demand
that this situation is remedied instantly otherwise I shall have no option but to take up the matter with Lord Vetinari, who is a personal friend.

I am, sir, your obt. servant,

Joshua H. Catterail

This was police work, was it? He wondered if Mr Vimes were trying to tell him something. There were other letters. The Community Co-ordinator of Equal Heights for Dwarfs was demanding that dwarfs in the Watch be allowed to carry an axe rather than the traditional sword, and should be sent to investigate only those crimes committed by tall people. The Thieves’ Guild was complaining that Commander Vimes had said publicly that most thefts were committed by thieves.

You’d need the wisdom of King Isiahdanu to tackle them, and these were only
today’s
letters.

He picked up the next one and read: ‘Translation of text found in Fr. Tubelcek’s mouth. Why? SV.’

Carrot dutifully read the translation.

‘In his mouth? Someone tried to put
words
in his mouth?’ said Carrot, to the silent room.

He shivered, but not because of the cold that came from fear. Vimes’s office was always cold. Vimes was an outdoors person. Fog was dancing in the open window, little fingers of it drifting in the light.

The next paper down the heap was a copy of Cheery’s iconograph. Carrot stared at the two blurred red eyes.

‘Captain Carrot?’

He half-turned his head, but kept looking at the picture.

‘Yes, Fred?’

‘We’ve got the murderer! We’ve got ’im!’

‘Is he a golem?’

‘How did you know that?’

The tincture of night began to suffuse the soup of the afternoon
.

Lord Vetinari considered the sentence, and found it good. He liked ‘tincture’ particularly. Tincture.
Tinc
ture. It was a distinguished word, and pleasantly countered by the flatness of ‘soup’. The soup of the afternoon. Yes. In which may well be found the croutons of teatime.

He was aware that he was a little light-headed. He’d never have thought a sentence like that in a normal frame of mind.

In the fog outside the window, just visible by the candlelight, he saw the crouching shape of Constable Downspout.

A gargoyle, eh? He’d wondered why the Watch was indented for five pigeons a week on its wages bill. A gargoyle in the Watch, whose job it was to watch. That would be Captain Carrot’s idea.

Lord Vetinari got up carefully from the bed and closed the shutters. He walked slowly to his writing table, pulled his journal out of its drawer, then tugged out a wad of manuscript and unstoppered the ink bottle.

Now then, where had he got to?

Chapter Eight
, he read unsteadily,
The Rites of Man
.

Ah, yes …

‘Concerning Truth,’ he wrote, ‘that which May be Spoken as Events Dictate, but should be Heard on Every Ocasfion …’

He wondered how he could work ‘soup of the afternoon’ into the treatise, or at least ‘tincture of night’.

The pen scratched across the paper.

Unheeded on the floor lay the tray that had contained a bowl of nourishing gruel, concerning which he had resolved to have strong words with the cook when he felt better. It had been tasted by three tasters, including Sergeant Detritus, who was unlikely to be poisoned by anything that worked on humans or even by most things that worked on trolls … but probably by most things that worked on trolls.

The door was locked. Occasionally he could hear the reassuring creak of Detritus on his rounds. Outside the window, the fog condensed on Constable Downspout.

Vetinari dipped the pen in the ink and started a new page. Every so often he consulted the leather-bound journal, licking his fingers delicately to turn the thin pages.

Tendrils of fog slipped in around the shutters and brushed against the wall until they were frightened away by the candlelight.

Vimes pounded through the fog after the fleeing figure. It wasn’t quite so fast as him, despite the twinges in his legs and one or two warning stabs from his left knee, but whenever he came close to it some muffled pedestrian got in the way, or a cart pulled out of a cross-street.
¹²

His soles told him that they’d gone right down Broad Way and had turned left into Nonesuch Street (small square paving stones). The fog was even thicker here, trapped between the trees of the park.

But Vimes was triumphant. You’ve missed your turning if you’re heading for the Shades, my lad! There’s only the Ankh Bridge now and there’ll be a guard on that—

His feet told him something else. They said: ‘Wet leaves, that’s Nonesuch Street in the autumn. Small square paving stones with occasional treacherous drifts of wet leaves.’

They said it too late.

Vimes landed on his chin in the gutter, staggered upright, fell over again as the rest of the universe spun past, got up, tottered a few steps in the wrong direction, fell over again and decided to accept the majority vote for a while.

Dorfl was standing quietly in the station office, heavy arms folded across its chest. In front of the golem was the crossbow belonging to Sergeant Detritus, which had been converted from an ancient siege weapon. It fired a six-foot long iron arrow. Nobby sat behind it, his finger on the trigger.

‘Put it away, Nobby! You can’t fire that in here!’ said Carrot. ‘You
know
we never find where the arrows stop!’

‘We wrestled a confession out of it,’ said Sergeant Colon, hopping up and down. ‘It kept on admitting it but we got it to confess in the end! And we’ve got these other crimes we’d like taken into consideration.’

Dorfl held up its slate.

I AM GUILTY.

Something fell out of its hand.

It was short, and white. A piece of matchstick, by the look of it. Carrot picked it up and stared at it. Then he looked at the list Colon had drawn up. It was quite long, and consisted of every unsolved crime in the city for the past couple of months.

‘It’s confessed to all these?’

‘Not yet,’ said Nobby.

‘We haven’t read ’em all out yet,’ said Colon.

Dorfl wrote:

I DID EVERYTHING.

‘Hey!’ said Colon. ‘Mr Vimes is going to be really pleased with us!’

Carrot walked up to the golem. There was a faint orange glow in its eyes.

‘Did you kill Father Tubelcek?’ he said.

YES.

‘See?’ said Sergeant Colon. ‘You can’t argue with that.’

‘Why did you do it?’ said Carrot.

No reply.

‘And Mr Hopkinson at the Bread Museum?’

YES.

‘You beat him to death with an iron bar?’ said Carrot.

YES.

‘Hang on,’ said Colon, ‘I thought you said he was …?’

‘Leave it, Fred,’ said Carrot. ‘
Why
did you kill the old man, Dorfl?’

No reply.

‘Does there have to be a reason? You can’t trust golems, my dad always used to say,’ said Colon. ‘Turn on you soon as look at you, he said.’

‘Have they ever killed anyone?’ said Carrot.

‘Not for want of thinking about it,’ said Colon darkly. ‘My dad said he had to work with one once and it used to look at him all the time. He’d turn around and there it would be … looking at him.’

Dorfl sat staring straight in front.

‘Shine a candle in its eyes!’ said Nobby.

Carrot pulled a chair across the floor and straddled it, facing Dorfl. He absent-mindedly twirled the broken match between his fingers.

‘I know you didn’t kill Mr Hopkinson and I don’t think you killed Father Tubelcek,’ he said. ‘I think he was dying when you found him. I think you tried to save him, Dorfl. In fact, I’m pretty sure I can prove it if I can see your chem—’

The light from the golem’s flaring eyes filled the room. He stepped forward, fists upraised.

Nobby fired the crossbow.

Dorfl snatched the long bolt out of the air. There was the sound of screaming metal and the bolt became a thin bar of red-hot iron with a bulge piled up around the golem’s grip.

But Carrot was behind the golem, flipping open its head. As the golem turned, raising the iron bar like a club, the fire died in its eyes.

‘Got it,’ said Carrot, holding up a yellowed scroll.

At the end of Nonesuch Street was a gibbet, where wrongdoers – or, at least, people found guilty of wrongdoing – had been hung to twist gently in the wind as examples of just retribution and, as the elements took their toll, basic anatomy as well.

Once, parties of children were brought there by their parents to learn by dreadful example of the snares and perils that await the criminal, the outlaw and those who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and they would see the terrible wreckage creaking on its chain and listen to the stern imprecations and then usually (this being Ankh-Morpork) would say ‘Wow!
Brilliant
!’ and use the corpse as a swing.

These days the city had more private and efficient ways of dealing with those it found surplus to requirements, but for the sake of tradition the gibbet’s incumbent was a quite realistic wooden
body
. The occasional stupid raven would have a peck at the eyeballs even now, and end up with a much shorter beak.

Vimes tottered up to it, fighting for breath.

The quarry could have gone anywhere by now. Such daylight as had been filtering through the fog had given up.

Vimes stood beside the gibbet, which creaked.

It had been built to creak. What’s the good of a public display of retribution, it had been argued, if it didn’t creak ominously? In richer times an elderly man had been employed to operate the creak by means of a length of string, but now there was a clockwork mechanism that needed to be wound up only once a month.