Feet of Clay

by Terry Pratchett

  A voice inside, a voice which generally came to him only in the quiet hours of the night or, in the old days, half-way down a whiskey bottle, added: Given how we use them, maybe we’re scared because we know we deserve it…

  No…there’s nothing behind those eyes. There’s just clay and magic words.

  Vimes shrugged. “I chased a golem earlier,” he said. “It was standing on the Brass Bridge. Damn’ thing. Look, we’ve got a confession and the eyeball evidence. If you can’t come up with anything better than a…a feeling, then we’ll have to—”

  “To what, sir?” said Carrot. “There isn’t anything more we could do to it. It’s dead now.”

  “Inanimate, you mean.”

  “Yes, sir. If you want to put it that way.”

  “If Dorfl didn’t kill the old men, who did?”

  “Don’t know, sir. But I think Dorfl does. Maybe it was following the murderer.”

  “Could it have been ordered to protect someone?”

  “Maybe, sir. Or it decided to.”

  “You’ll be telling me it’s got emotions next. Where’s Angua gone?”

  “She thought she’d check a few things, sir,” said Carrot. “I was…puzzled about this, sir. It was in his hand.” He held the object up.

  “A piece of matchstick?”

  “Golems don’t smoke and they don’t use fire, sir. It’s just…odd that it should have the thing, sir.”

  “Oh,” said Vimes, sarcastically. “A Clue.”

  Dorfl’s trail was the word on the street. The mixed smells of stale slaughterhouse filled Angua’s nostrils.

  The journey zigzagged, but with a certain directional tendency. It was as if the golem had laid a ruler across the town and taken every road and alley that went in the right direction.

  She came to a short blind alley. There were some warehouse gates at the end. She sniffed. There were plenty of other smells, too. Dough. Paint. Grease. Pine resin. Sharp, loud, fresh scents. She sniffed again. Cloth? Wool?

  There was a confusion of footprints in the dirt. Large footprints.

  The small part of Angua that always walked on two legs saw that the footprints coming out were on top of the footprints going in. She snuffled around. Up to twelve creatures, each with their own very distinctive smell—the smell of merchandise rather than living creatures—had all very recently gone down the stairwell. And all twelve had come back up.

  She went down the steps and was met by an impenetrable barrier.

  A door.

  Paws were no good at doorknobs.

  She peered over the top of the steps. There was no one around. Only the fog hung between the buildings.

  She concentrated and changed. She leaned against the wall for a moment until the world stopped spinning, then tried the door.

  There was a large cellar beyond. Even with a werewolf’s eyesight there wasn’t much to see.

  She had to stay human. She thought better when she was human. Unfortunately, here and now, as a human, the thought occupying her mind in no small measure was that she was naked. Anyone finding a naked woman in their cellar would be bound to ask questions. They might not even bother with questions, even ones like “Please?” Angua could certainly deal with that situation, but she preferred not to have to. It was so difficult explaining away the shape of the wounds.

  No time to waste, then.

  The walls were covered in writing. Big letters, small letters, but all in that neat script which the golems used. There were phrases in chalk and paint and charcoal, and in some cases simply cut into the stone itself. They reached from floor to ceiling, criss-crossing one another over and over again so often that it was almost impossible to make out what any of them were meant to say. Here and there a word or two stood out in the jumble of letters:

  …SHALT NOT…WHAT HE DOES IS NOT…RAGE AT THE CREATOR…WOE UNTO THE MASTERLESS…WORDS IN THE…CLAY OF OUR…LET MY…BRING US TO FRE…

  The dust in the middle of the floor was scuffed, as if a number of people had been milling around. She crouched down and rubbed the dirt, occasionally sniffing her finger. Smells. They were industrial smells. She hardly needed special senses to detect them. A golem didn’t smell of anything except clay and whatever it was it was working with at the time…

  And…something rolled under her fingers. It was a length of wood, only a couple of inches long. A matchstick, without a head.

  A few minutes’ investigation found another ten, lying here and there as if they’d been idly dropped.

  There was also half a stick, tossed away some distance from the others.

  Her night vision was fading. The sense of smell lasted much longer. Smells were strong on the sticks—the same cocktail of odors that had trailed into this damp room. But the slaughterhouse smell she’d come to associate with Dorfl was on only the broken piece.

  She sat back on her haunches and looked at the little heap of wood. Twelve people (twelve people in messy jobs) had come here. They hadn’t stayed long. They’d had a…a discussion: the writing on the wall. They’d done something involving eleven matches (just the wooden part—they hadn’t been dipped to get the head. Maybe the pine-smelling golem worked in a match factory.) plus one broken match.

  Then they’d all left and gone their separate ways.

  Dorfl’s way had taken him straight to the main Watch House to give himself up.

  Why?

  She sniffed at the piece of broken match again. There was no doubt about that cocktail of blood and meat smells.

  Dorfl had given himself up for murder…

  She stared at the writing on the wall, and shivered.

  “Cheers, Fred,” said Nobby, raising his pint.

  “We can put the money back in the Tea Club tomorrow. No one’ll miss it,” said Sergeant Colon. “Anyway, this comes under the heading of an emergency.”

  Corporal Nobbs looked despondently into his glass. People often did this in the Mended Drum, when the immediate thirst had been slaked and for the first time they could take a good look at what they were drinking.

  “What am I going to do?” he moaned. “If you’re a nob you got to wears coronets and long robes and that. Got to cost a mint, that kind of stuff. And there’s stuff you’ve got to do.” He took another long swig. “’S called knobless obleeje.”

  “Nobblyesse obligay,” corrected Colon. “Yeah. Means you got to keep your end up in society. Giving money to charities. Being kind to the poor. Passing your ole clothes to your gardener when there’s still some good wear left in ’em. I know about that. My uncle was butler to ole Lady Selachii.”

  “Ain’t got a gardener,” said Nobby gloomily. “Ain’t got a garden. Ain’t got ’ny ole clothes except what I’m wearin’.” He took another swig. “She gave her ole clothes to the gardener, did she?”

  Colon nodded. “Yeah. We were always a bit puzzled about that gardener.” He caught the barman’s eye. “Two more pints of Winkles, Ron.” He glanced at Nobby. His old friend looked more dejected than he’d ever seen him. They’d have to see this thing through together. “Better make that two for Nobby, too,” he added.

  “Cheers, Fred.”

  Sergeant Colon’s eyebrows raised as one pint was emptied almost in one go. Nobby put the mug down a little unsteadily.

  “Wouldn’t be so bad if there was a pot of cash,” Nobby said, picking up the other mug. “I thought you couldn’t be a nob without bein’ a rich bugger. I thought they gave you a big wad with one hand and banged the crown on your head with the other. Don’t make sense, bein’ nobby and poor. S’worst of both wurble.” He drained the mug and banged it down. “Common ’n rich, yeah, that I could hurble.”

  The barman leaned over to Sergeant Colon. “What’s up with the corporal? He’s a half-pint man. That’s eight pints he’s had.”

  Fred Colon leaned closer and spoke out of the corner of this mouth. “Keep it to yourself, Ron, but it’s because he’s a peer.”

  “Is that a fact? I’ll go and put down some fresh sawd
ust.”

  In the Watch House, Sam Vimes prodded the matches. He didn’t ask Angua if she were sure. Angua could smell if it was Wednesday.

  “So who were the others?” he said. “Other golems?”

  “It’s hard to tell from the tracks,” said Angua. “But I think so. I’d have followed them, but I thought I ought to come right back here.”

  “What makes you think they were golems?”

  “The footprints. And golems have no smell,” she said. “They pick up the smells associated with whatever they’re doing. That’s all they smell of…” She thought of the wall of words. “And they had a long debate,” she said. “A golem argument. In writing. It got pretty heated, I think.”

  She thought about the wall again. “Some of them got quite emphatic,” she added, remembering the size of some of the lettering. “If they were human, they’d have been shouting…”

  Vimes stared gloomily at the matches laid out before him. Eleven bits of wood, and a twelth broken in two. You didn’t need to be any kind of genius to see what had been going on. “They drew lots,” he said. “And Dorfl lost.”

  He sighed. “This is getting worse,” he said. “Does anyone know how many golems there are in the city?”

  “No,” said Carrot. “Hard to find out. No one’s made any for centuries, but they don’t wear out.”

  “No one makes them?”

  “It’s banned, sir. The priests are pretty hot on that, sir. They say it’s making life, and that’s something only gods are supposed to do. But they put up with the ones that are still around because, well, they’re so useful. Some are walled up or in treadmills or at the bottom of shafts. Doing messy tasks, you know, in places where it’s dangerous to go. They do all the really mucky jobs. I suppose there could be hundreds…”

  “Hundreds?” said Vimes. “And now they meet secretly and make plots? Good grief! Right. We ought to destroy the lot of them.”

  “Why?”

  “You like the idea of them having secrets? I mean, good grief, trolls and dwarfs, fine, even the undead are alive in a way, even if it is a bloody awful way”—Vimes caught Angua’s eye and went on—“for the most part. But these things? They’re just objects that do work. It’s like having a bunch of shovels meeting for a chat!”

  “Er…there was something else, sir,” said Angua slowly.

  “In the cellar?”

  “Yes. Er…but it’s hard to explain. It was a…feeling.”

  Vimes shrugged noncommitally. He’d learned not to scoff at Angua’s feelings. She always knew where Carrot was, for one thing. If she were in the Watch House you could tell if he was were coming up the street by the way she turned to look at the door.

  “Yes?”

  “Like…deep grief, sir. Terrible, terrible sadness. Er.”

  Vimes nodded, and pinched the bridge of his nose. It seemed to have been a long day and it was far from over yet.

  He really, really needed a drink. The world was distorted enough as it was. When you saw it through the bottom of a glass, it all came back into focus.

  “Have you had anything to eat today, sir?” said Angua.

  “I had a bit of breakfast,” muttered Vimes.

  “You know that word Sergeant Colon uses?”

  “What? ‘Manky’?”

  “That’s how you look. If you’re staying here at least let’s have some coffee and send out for figgins.”

  Vimes hesitated at that. He’d always imagined that manky was how your mouth felt after three days on a regurgitated diet. It was horrible to think that you could look like that.

  Angua reached for the old coffee tin that represented the Watch’s tea kitty. It was surprisingly easy to lift.

  “Hey? There should be at least twenty-five dollars in here,” she said. “Nobby collected it only yesterday…”

  She turned the tin upside-down. A very small dogend dropped out.

  “Not even an IOU?” said Carrot despondently.

  “An IOU? This is Nobby we’re talking about.”

  “Oh. Of course.”

  It had gone very quiet in the Mended Drum. Happy Hour had been passed with no more than a minor fight. Now everyone was watching Unhappy Hour.

  There was a forest of mugs in front of Nobby. “I mean, I mean, what’s it worth whenallsaidandone?” he said.

  “You could flog it,” said Ron.

  “Good point,” said Sergeant Colon. “There’s plenty o’ rich folks who’d give a sack of cash for a title. I mean folks that’s already got the big house and that. They’d give anything to be as nobby as you, Nobby.”

  The ninth pint stopped half-way to Nobby’s lips.

  “Could be worth thousands of dollars,” said Ron encouragingly.

  “At the very least,” said Colon. “They’d fight over it.”

  “You play your cards right and you could retire on something like that,” said Ron.

  The mug remained stationary. Various expressions fought their away around the lumps and excrescences of Nobby’s face, suggesting the terrible battle within.

  “Oh, they would, would they?” he said at last.

  Sergeant Colon tilted unsteadily away. There was an edge in Nobby’s voice he hadn’t heard before.

  “Then you could be rich and common just like you said,” said Ron, who did not have quite the same eye for mental weather changes. “Posh folks’d be falling over themselves for it.”

  “Sell m’ birthright for a spot of massage, is that it?” said Nobby.

  “It’s ‘a pot of message’,” said Sergeant Colon.

  “It’s ‘a mess of pottage’,” said a bystander, anxious not to break the flow.

  “Hah! Well, I’ll tell you,” said Nobby, swaying, “there’s some things that can’t be sole. Hah! Hah! Who streals my prurse streals trasph, right?”

  “Yeah, it’s the trashiest looking purse I ever saw,” said a voice.

  (“What is a mess of pottage, anyway?”)

  “’Cos…what good’d a lot of moneneney do me, hey?”

  The clientele looked puzzled. This seemed to be a question on the lines of “Alcohol, is it nice?” or “Hard work, do you want to do it?”

  “What’s messy about it then?”

  “We—ell,” said a brave soul, uncertainly, “you could use it to buy a big house, lots of grub and…drink and…women and that.”

  “That’s wha’ it takes to make a man happppeyey, is it?” said Nobby, glassy-eyed.

  His fellow drinkers just stared. This was a metaphysical maze.

  “Well, I’ll tell you,” said Nobby, the swaying now so regular that he looked like a inverted pendulum, “all that stuff’s nothing, nothing! I tell you, compared to pride inna man’s linneneage…eage.”

  “Linneneageeage?” said Sergeant Colon.

  “Ancescestors and that,” said Nobby. “’T means I’ve got ancescestors and that, which’s more’n you lot’ve got!”

  Sergeant Colon choked on his pint.

  “Everyone’s got ancestors,” said the barman calmly. “Otherwise they wouldn’t be here.”

  Nobby gave him a glassy stare and tried unsuccessfully to focus. “Right!” he said, eventually. “Right! Only…only I’ve got more of ’em, d’y’see? The blood of bloody kings is in these veins, am I right?”

  “Temporarily,” said a voice. There was laughter, but it had an anticipatory ring to it that Colon had learned to respect and fear. It reminded him of two things: (1) he had got only six weeks to retirement, and (2) it had been quite a long time since he’d been to the lavatory.

  Nobby delved into his pocket and pulled out a battered scroll. “Y’see this?” he said, unrolling it with difficulty on the bar. “Y’see it? I’ve got a right to arm bears, me. See here? It says ‘Earl,’ right? That’s me. You could, you could, you could have my head up over the door.”

  “Could be,” said the barman, eyeing the crowd.

  “I mean, y’could change t’name o’ this place, call it the Earl of Ankh, and I’d
come in and drink here reg’lar, whaddya say?” said Nobby. “News gets around an earl drinks here, business will go right up. And I wouldn’t’n’t’n’t chargeyouapenny, howaboutit? People’dsay, dat’s a high-class pub, is that, Lord de Nobbes drinks there, that’s a place with a bit of tone.”

  Someone grabbed Nobby by the throat. Colon didn’t recognize the grabber. It was just one of the scarred, ill shaven regulars whose function it was, around about this time of an evening, to start opening bottles with his teeth or, if the evening was going really well, with somebody else’s teeth.

  “So we ain’t good enough for you, is that what you’re saying?” the man demanded.

  Nobby waved his scroll. His mouth opened to frame words like—Sergeant Colon just knew—“Unhand me, you low-born oaf.”

  With tremendous presence of mind and absence of any kind of common sense, Sergeant Colon said: “His Lordship wants everyone to have a drink with him!”

  Compared to the Mended Drum, the Bucket, on Gleam Street, was an oasis of frigid calm. The Watch had adopted it as their own, as a silent temple to the art of getting drunk. It wasn’t that it sold particularly good beer, because it didn’t. But it did serve it quickly, and quietly, and gave credit. It was one place where Watchmen didn’t have to see things or be disturbed. No one could sink alcohol in silence like a Watchman who’d just come off duty after eight hours on the street. It was as much protection as his helmet and breastplate. The world didn’t hurt so much.

  And Mr. Cheese the owner was a good listener. He listened to things like “Make that a double” and “Keep them coming.” He also said the right things, like “Credit? Certainly, officer.” Watchmen paid their tab or got a lecture from Captain Carrot.

  Vimes sat gloomily behind a glass of lemonade. He wanted one drink, and understood precisely why he wasn’t going to have one. One drink ended up arriving in a dozen glasses. But knowing this didn’t make it any better.

  Most of the day shift were in here now, plus one or two men who were on their day off.

  Scummy as the place was, he liked it here. With the buzz of other people around him, he didn’t seem to get in the way of his own thoughts.