“And the worst thing is, most of the time they walk around looking just like real people.”
Angua blinked, glad of the twin disguises of the fog and Cheery’s unquestioning confidence. “Come on. We’re nearly there.”
“Where?”
“We’re going to see someone who’s either our murderer or who knows who the murderer is.”
Cheery stopped. “But you’ve got only a sword and I haven’t even got that!”
“Don’t worry, we won’t need weapons.”
“Oh, good.”
“They wouldn’t be any use.”
“Oh.”
Vimes opened his door to see what all the shouting was about down in the office. The corporal manning—or in this case dwarfing—the desk was having trouble.
“Again? How many times have you been killed this week?”
“I was minding my own business!” said the unseen complainer.
“Stacking garlic? You’re a vampire, aren’t you? I mean, let’s see what jobs you have been doing…Post sharpener for a fencing firm, sunglasses tester for Argus Opticians…Is it me, or is there some underlying trend here?”
“Excuse me, Commander Vimes?”
Vimes looked round into a smiling face that sought only to do good in the world, even if the world had other things it wanted done.
“Ah…Constable Visit, yes,” he said hurriedly. “At the moment I’m afraid I’m rather busy, and I’m not even sure that I have got an immortal soul, ha-ha, and perhaps you could call again when…”
“It’s about those words you asked me to check,” said Visit reproachfully.
“What words?”
“The ones Father Tubelcek wrote in his own blood? You said to try and find out what they meant?”
“Oh. Yes. Come on into my office.” Vimes relaxed. This wasn’t going to be another one of those painful conversations about the state of his soul and the necessity of giving it a wash and brush-up before eternal damnation set in. This was going to be about something important.
“It’s ancient Cenotine, sir. It’s out of one of their holy books, although of course when I say ‘holy’ it is a fact that they were basically misguided in a…”
“Yes, yes, I’m sure,” said Vimes, sitting down. “Does it by any chance say ‘Mr. X did it, aargh, aargh, aargh’?”
“No, sir. That phrase does not appear anywhere in any known holy book, sir.”
“Ah,” said Vimes.
“Besides, I looked at other documents in the room and the paper does not appear to be in the deceased’s handwriting, sir.”
Vimes brightened up. “Ah-ha! Someone else’s? Does it say something like ‘Take that, you bastard, we’ve been waiting ages to get you for what you did all those years ago’?”
“No, sir. That phrase also does not appear in any holy book anywhere,” said Constable Visit, and hesitated. “Except in the Apocrypha to The Vengeful Testament of Offler,” he added conscientiously. “These words are from the Cenotine Book of Truth,” he sniffed, “as they called it. It’s what their false god…”
“Could I just perhaps have the words and leave out the comparative religion?” said Vimes.
“Very well, sir.” Visit looked hurt, but unfolded a piece of paper and sniffed disparagingly. “These are some of the rules that their god allegedly gave to the first people after he’d baked them out of clay, sir. Rules like ‘Thou shalt labor fruitfully all the days of your life,’ sir, and ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ and ‘Thou shalt be humble.’ That sort of thing.”
“Is that all?” said Vimes.
“Yes, sir,” said Visit.
“They’re just religious quotations?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Any idea why it was in his mouth? Poor devil looked like he was having a last cigarette.”
“No, sir.”
“I could understand if it was one of the ‘smite your enemies’ ones,” said Vimes. “But that’s just saying ‘get on with your work and don’t make trouble’.”
“Ceno was a rather liberal god, sir. Not big on commandments.”
“Sounds almost decent, as gods go.”
Visit looked disapproving. “The Cenotines died through five hundred years of waging some of the bloodiest wars on the continent, sir.”
“Spare the thunderbolts and spoil the congregation, eh?” said Vimes.
“Pardon, sir?”
“Oh, nothing. Well, thank you, Constable. I’ll, er, see that Captain Carrot is informed and, thank you once again, don’t let me keep you from—”
Vimes’s desperately accelerating voice was too late to prevent Visit pulling a roll of paper out of his breastplate.
“I’ve brought you the latest Unadorned Facts magazine, sir, and also this month’s Battle Call, which contains many articles that I’m sure will be of interest to you, including Pastor Nasal Pedlers’ exhortation to the congregation to rise up and speak to people sincerely through their letterboxes, sir.”
“Er, thank you.”
“I can’t help noticing that the pamphlets and magazines I gave you last week are still on your desk where I left them, sir.”
“Oh, yes, well, sorry, you know how it is, the amount of work these days, makes it so hard to find the time to—”
“It’s never too soon to contemplate eternal damnation, sir.”
“I think about it all the time, Constable. Thank you.”
Unfair, thought Vimes, when Visit had gone. A note is left at the scene of a crime in my town and does it have the decency to be a death-threat? No. The last dying scrawl of a man determined to name his murderer? No. It’s a bit of religious doggerel. What’s the good of Clues that are more mysterious than the mystery?
He scribbled a note on Visit’s translation and chucked it into his In Tray.
Too late, Angua remembered why she avoided the slaughterhouse district at this time of the month.
She could change at will at any time. That’s what people forgot about werewolves. But they remembered the important thing. Full moonlight was the irresistible trigger: the lunar rays reached down into the center of her morphic memory and flipped all the switches, whether she wanted them switched or not. Full moon was only a couple of days away. And the delicious smell of the penned animals and the blood from the slaughterhouses was chiming against her strict vegetarianism. The clash was bringing on her PLT.
She glared at the shadowy building in front of her. “I think we’ll go round the back,” she said. “And you can knock.”
“Me? They won’t take any notice of me!” said Cheery.
“You show them your badge and tell them you’re the Watch.”
“They’ll ignore me! They’ll laugh at me!”
“You’re going to have to do it sooner or later. Go on.”
The door was opened by a stout man in a bloody apron. He was shocked to have his belt grabbed by one dwarf hand, while another dwarf hand was thrust in front of his face, holding a badge, and a dwarf voice in the region of his navel said, “We’re the Watch, right? Oh, yes! And if you don’t let us in we’ll have your guts for starters!”
“Good try,” murmured Angua. She lifted Cheery out of the way and smiled brightly at the butcher.
“Mr. Sock? We’d like to speak to an employee of yours. Mr. Dorfl.”
The man hadn’t quite got over Cheery, but he managed to rally. “Mr. Dorfl? What’s he done now?”
“We’d just like to talk to him. May we come in?”
Mr. Sock looked at Cheery, who was trembling with nerves and excitement. “I have a choice?” he said.
“Let’s say—you have a kind of choice,” said Angua.
She tried to close her nostrils against the beguiling miasma of blood. There was even a sausage factory on the premises. It used all the bits of animals no one would ever otherwise eat, or even recognize. The odors of the abattoir turned her human stomach but, deep inside, part of her sat up and drooled and begged at the mingling smells of pork and beef and lamb and mutton
and…
“Rat?” she said, sniffing. “I didn’t know you supplied the dwarf market, Mr. Sock.”
Mr. Sock was suddenly a man who wished to be seen to be cooperative.
“Dorfl! Come here right now!”
There was the sound of footsteps and a figure emerged from behind a rack of beef carcasses.
Some people had a thing about the undead. Angua knew Commander Vimes was uneasy in their presence, although he was getting better these days. People always needed someone to feel superior to. The living hated the undead, and the undead loathed—she felt her fists clench—the unalive.
The golem called Dorfl lurched a little because one leg was slightly shorter than the other. It didn’t wear any clothes because there was nothing whatsoever to conceal, and so she could see the mottling on it where fresh clay had been added over the years. There was so much patching that she wondered how old it could be. Originally, some attempt had been made to depict human musculature, but the repairs had nearly obscured these. The thing looked like the kind of pots Igneous despised, the ones made by people who thought that because it was hand-made it was supposed to look as if was hand-made, and that thumbprints baked in the clay were a sign of integrity.
That was it. The thing looked hand-made. Of course, over the years it had mostly made itself, one repair at a time. Its triangular eyes glowed faintly. There were no pupils, just the dark red glow of a banked fire.
It was holding a long, heavy cleaver. Cheery’s stare gravitated to this and remained fixed on it in terrified fascination. The other hand grasped a piece of string, on the end of which was a large, hairy and very smelly goat.
“What are you doing, Dorfl?”
The golem nodded towards the goat.
“Feeding the yudasgoat?”
Dorfl nodded again.
“Have you got something to do, Mr. Sock?” said Angua.
“No, I’ve…”
“You have got something to do, Mr. Sock,” said Angua emphatically.
“Ah. Er? Yes. Er? Yes. OK. I’ll just go and see to the offal boilers…”
As the butcher walked away he stopped to wave a finger under the place where Dorfl’s nose would be if the golem had had a nose.
“If you’ve been causing trouble…” he began.
“I expect those boilers could really do with attention,” said Angua sharply.
He hurried off.
There was silence in the yard, although the sounds of the city drifted in over the walls. From the other side of the slaughterhouse there was the occasional bleat of a worried sheep. Dorfl stood stock-still, holding his cleaver and looking down at the ground.
“Is it a troll made to look like a human?” whispered Cheery. “Look at those eyes!”
“It’s not a troll,” said Angua. “It’s a golem. A man of clay. It’s a machine.’
“It looks like a human!”
“That’s because it’s a machine made for looking like a human.”
She walked around behind the thing. “I’m going to read your chem, Dorfl,” she said.
The golem let go of the goat and raised the cleaver and brought it down sharply on to a chopping block beside Cheery, making the dwarf leap sideways. Then it pulled around a slate that was slung over its shoulder on a piece of string, unhooked the pencil, and wrote:
YES.
When Angua put her hand up, Cheery realized that there was a thin line across the golem’s forehead. To her horror, the entire top of the head flipped up. Angua, quite unperturbed, reached inside. Her hand came out holding a yellowing scroll.
The golem froze. The eyes faded.
Angua unrolled the paper. “Some kind of holy writing,” she said. “It always is. Some old dead religion.”
“You’ve killed it?”
“No. You can’t take away what isn’t there.” She put the scroll back and closed the head with a click.
The golem came “alive” again, the glow returning to its eyes.
Cheery had been holding her breath. It came out in a rush. “What did you do?” she managed.
“Tell her, Dorfl,” said Angua.
The golem’s thick fingers were a blur as the pencil scratched across the slate.
I AM A GOLEM. I WAS MADE OF CLAY. MY LIFE IS THE WORDS. BY MEANS OF WORDS OF PURPOSE IN MY HEAD I ACQUIRE LIFE. MY LIFE IS TO WORK. I OBEY ALL COMMANDS. I TAKE NO REST.
“What words of purpose?”
RELEVANT TEXT THAT ARE THE FOCUS OF BELIEF. GOLEM MUST WORK. GOLEM MUST HAVE A MASTER.
The goat lay down beside the golem and started to chew cud.
“There have been two murders,” said Angua. “I’m pretty certain a golem did one and probably both. Can you tell us anything, Dorfl?”
“Sorry, look,” said Cheery. “Are you telling me this…thing is powered by words? I mean…is it telling me it’s powered by words?”
“Why not? Words do have power. Everyone knows that,” said Angua. “There are more golems around than you might think. They’re out of fashion now, but they last. They can work underwater, or in total darkness, or knee-deep in poison. For years. They don’t need rest or feeding. They…”
“But that’s slavery!” said Cheery.
“Of course it isn’t. You might as well enslave a doorknob. Have you got anything to tell me, Dorfl?”
Cheery kept looking at the cleaver in the block. Words like length and heavy and sharp were filling her head more snugly than any words could have filled the clay skull of the golem.
Dorfl said nothing.
“How long have you been working here, Dorfl?”
NOW THREE HUNDRED DAYS ALREADY.
“And you have time off?”
TO MAKE A HOLLOW LAUGHING. WHAT WOULD I DO WITH TIME OFF?
“I mean, you’re not always in the slaughterhouse?”
SOMETIMES I MAKE DELIVERIES.
“And meet other golems? Now listen, Dorfl, I know you things keep in touch somehow. And, if a golem is killing real people, I wouldn’t give a busted teacup for your chances. Folk will be along here straight away with flaming torches. And sledgehammers. You get my drift?”
The golem shrugged.
THEY CANNOT TAKE AWAY WHAT DOES NOT EXIST, it wrote.
Angua threw up her hands. “I’m trying to be civilized,” she said. ’I could confiscate you right now. The charge would be Being Obstructive When It’s Been a Long Day and I’ve Had Enough. Do you know Father Tubelcek?
THE OLD PRIEST WHO LIVES ON THE BRIDGE.
“How come you know him?”
I HAVE MADE DELIVERIES THERE.
“He’s been murdered. Where were you when he was killed?”
IN THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE.
“How do you know?”
Dorfl hesitated a moment. Then the next words were written very slowly, as if they had come from a long way away after a great deal of thought.
BECAUSE IT IS SOMETHING THAT MUST HAVE HAPPENED NOT LONG AGO, BECAUSE YOU ARE EXCITED. FOR THE LAST THREE DAYS I HAVE BEEN WORKING HERE.
“All the time?”
YES.
“Twenty-four hours a day?”
YES. MEN AND TROLLS HERE ON EVERY SHIFT, THEY WILL TELL YOU. DURING THE DAY I MUST SLAUGHTER, DRESS, QUARTER, JOINT AND BONE, AND AT NIGHT WITHOUT REST I MUST MAKE SAUSAGES AND BOIL UP THE LIVERS, HEARTS, TRIPES, KIDNEYS AND CHITTERLING.
“That’s awful,” said Cheery.
The pencil blurred briefly.
CLOSE.
Dorfl turned his head slowly to look at Angua and wrote:
DO YOU NEED ME FURTHER?
“If we do, we know where to find you.”
I AM SORRY ABOUT THE OLD MAN.
“Good. Come on, Cheery.”
They felt the golem’s eyes on them as they left the yard.
“It was lying,” said Cheery.
“Why do you say that?”
“It looked as if it was lying.”
“You’re probably right,” said Angua. “But you can see the size of the place. I bet
we wouldn’t be able to prove it’d stepped out for half an hour. I think I’ll suggest that we put it under what Commander Vimes calls special surveillance.”
“What, like…plain clothes?”
“Something like that,” said Angua carefully.
“Funny to see a pet goat in a slaughterhouse, I thought,” said Cheery, as they walked on through the fog.
“What? Oh, you mean the yudasgoat,” said Angua. “Most slaughterhouses have one. It’s not a pet. I suppose you could call it an employee.”
“Employee? What kind of job could it possibly do?”
“Hah. Walk into the slaughterhouse every day. That’s its job. Look, you’ve got a pen full of frightened animals, right? And they’re milling around and leaderless…and there’s this ramp into this building, looks very scary…and, hey, there’s this goat, it’s not scared, and so the flock follows it and—” Angua made a throat-slitting noise—“only the goat walks out.”
“That’s horrible!”
“I suppose it makes sense from the goat’s point of view. At least it does walk out,” said Angua.
“How did you know about this?”
“Oh, you pick up all sorts of odds and ends of stuff in the Watch.”
“I’ve got a lot to learn, I can see,” said Cheery. “I never thought you had to carry bits of blanket, for a start!”
“It’s special equipment if you’re dealing with the undead.”
“Well, I knew about garlic and vampires. Anything holy works on vampires. What else works on werewolves?”
“Sorry?” said Angua, who was still thinking about the golem.
“I’ve got a silver mail vest which I promised my family I’d wear, but is anything else good for werewolves?”
“A gin and tonic’s always welcome,” said Angua distantly.
“Angua?”
“Hmm? Yes? What?”
“Someone told me there was a werewolf in the Watch! I can’t believe that!”
Angua stopped and stared down at her.
“I mean, sooner or later the wolf comes through,” said Cheery. “I’m surprised Commander Vimes allows it.”
“There is a werewolf in the Watch, yes,” said Angua.
“I knew there was something odd about Constable Visit.”
Angua’s jaw dropped.
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