The ghost of old Mrs. Easy rose up in his inner vision. He couldn’t remember much about her. He’d been just another snotty kid in a crowd of snotty kids, and she’d been just another worried face somewhere on top of a pinny. One of Cockbill Street’s people. She’d taken in needlework to make ends meet and kept up appearances and, like everyone else in the street, had crept through life never asking for anything and getting even less.
What else could he have done? They’d practically scraped the damn wallpaper off the wall…
He stopped.
There was the same wallpaper in both rooms. In every room on that floor. That horrible green wallpaper.
But…no, that couldn’t be it. Vetinari had slept in that room for years, if he slept at all. You can’t sneak in and redecorate without someone noticing.
In front of him, the fog rolled aside. He caught a glimpse of a candlelit room in a nearby building before the cloud flowed back.
The fog. Yes. Dampness. Creeping in, brushing against the wallpaper. The old, dusty, musty wallpaper…
Would Cheery have tested the wallpaper? After all, in a way you didn’t actually see it. It wasn’t in the room because it was defining what the room was. Could you actually be poisoned by the walls?
He hardly dared think the thought. If he let his mind settle on the suspicion it’d twist and fly away, like all the others.
But…this was it, said his secret soul. All the messing around with suspects and Clues…that was just something to keep the body amused while the back of the brain toiled away. Every real copper knew you didn’t go around looking for Clues so that you could find out Who Done It. No, you started out with a pretty good idea of Who Done It. That way, you knew what Clues to look for.
He wasn’t going to have another day of bafflement interspersed with desperately bright ideas, was he? It was bad enough looking at Corporal Littlebottom’s expression, which seemed to be getting a little more colorful every time he saw it.
He’d said, “Ah, arsenic’s a metal, right, so maybe the cutlery has been made of it?” He wouldn’t forget the look on the dwarf’s face as Cheery tried to explain that, yes, it might be possible to do that, provided you were sure that no one would notice the way it dissolved in the soup almost instantly.
This time he was going to think first.
“The Earl of Ankh, Corporal the Rt. Hon. Lord C. W. St. J. Nobbs!”
The buzz of conversation stopped. Heads turned. Somewhere in the crowd someone started to laugh and was hurriedly shushed into silence by their neighbors.
Lady Selachii came forward. She was a tall, angular woman, with the sharp features and aquiline nose that were the hallmarks of the family. The impression was that an axe was being thrown at you.
Then she curtsied.
There were gasps of surprise around her, but she glared at the assembled guests and there was a smattering of bows and curtsies. Somewhere at the back of the room someone started to say, “But the man’s an absolute oik—” and was cut off.
“Has someone dropped something?” said Nobby nervously. “I’ll help you look, if you like.”
The footman appeared at his elbow, bearing a tray. “A drink, m’lord?” he said.
“Yeah, OK, a pint of Winkles,” said Nobby.
Jaws fell. But Lady Selachii rose to the occasion. “Winkles?” she said.
“A type of beer, your ladyship,” said the footman.
Her ladyship hesitated only a moment. “I believe the butler drinks beer,” she said. “See to it, man. And I’ll have a pint of Winkles, too. What a novel idea.”
This caused a certain effect among those guests who knew on which side of the biscuit their pâté was spread.
“Indeed! Capital suggestion! A pint of Winkles here, too!”
“Hawhaw! Great! Winkles for me!”
“Winkles all round!”
“But the man’s an absolute ti—”
“Shut up!”
Vimes crossed the Brass Bridge with care, counting the hippos. There was a ninth shape, but it was leaning against the parapet and muttering to itself in a familiar and, to Vimes at least, an unmenacing way. Faint air movements wafted towards him a smell that out-smelled even the river. It proclaimed that ahead of Vimes was a ding-a-ling so big he’d been upgraded to a clang-a-lang.
“…Buggrit buggrit I told ’em, stand it up and pull the end orf? Millennium hand and shrimp! I told ’em, sez I, and would they poke…”
“Evening, Ron,” said Vimes, without even bothering to look at the figure.
Foul Ole Ron fell into step behind him. “Buggrit they done me out of it so they did…”
“Yes, Ron,” said Vimes.
“…And shrimp…buggrit, say I, bread it on the butter side…Queen Molly says to watch your back, mister.”
“What was that?”
“…Sowter fry it!” said Foul Ole Ron innocently. “Trouser the lot of ’em, they did me out of it, them and their big weasel!”
The beggar lurched around and, filthy coat dragging its hems along the ground, limped away into the fog. His little dog trotted along in front of him.
There was pandemonium in the servants’ hall.
“Winkles’ Old Peculiar?” said the butler.
“Another one hundred and four pints!” said the footman.
The butler shrugged. “Harry, Sid, Rob, and Jeffrey…two trays apiece and double down to the King’s Head again right now! What else is he doing?”
“Well, they’re supposed to be having a poetry reading but he’s telling ’em jokes…”
“Anecdotes?”
“Not exactly.”
It was amazing how it could drizzle and fog at the same time. Rain was blowing both through the open window, and Vimes was forced to shut it. He lit the candles by his desk and opened his notebook.
Probably he should use the demonic organizer, but he liked to see things written down fair and square. He could think better when he wrote things down.
He wrote “Arsenic,” and drew a big circle round it. Around the circle he wrote: “Fr. Tubelcek’s fingernails” and “Rats” and “Vetinari” and “Mrs. Easy.” Lower down the page he wrote: “Golems,” and drew a second circle. Around that one he wrote: “Fr. Tubelcek?” and “Mr. Hopkinson?” After some thought he wrote down: “Stolen clay” and “Grog.”
And then: “Why would a golem admit to something it didn’t do?”
He stared at the candlelight for a while and then wrote: “Rats eat stuff.”
More time passed.
“What has the priest got that anyone wants?”
From downstairs came the sound of armor as a patrol came in. A corporal shouted.
“Words,” wrote Vimes. “What had Mr. Hopkinson got? Dwarf bread? ? Not stolen. What else had he got?”
Vimes looked at this, too, and then he wrote “Bakery,” stared at the word for a while, and rubbed it out and replaced it with “Oven?” He drew a ring around “Oven?” and a ring around “Stolen clay,” and linked the two.
There’d been arsenic under the old priest’s fingernails. Perhaps he’d put down rat poison? There were plenty of uses for arsenic. It wasn’t as if you couldn’t buy it by the pound from any alchemist.
He wrote down “Arsenic Monster” and looked at it. You found dirt under fingernails. If people had put up a fight you might find blood or skin. You didn’t find grease and arsenic.
He looked at the page again and, after still more thought, wrote: “Golems aren’t alive. But they think they are alive. What do things that are alive do? ? Ans: Breathe, eat, crap.” He paused, staring out at the fog, and then wrote very carefully: “And make more things.”
Something tingled at the back of his neck.
He circled the late Hopkinson’s name and drew a line down the page to another circle, in which he wrote: “He’d got a big oven.”
Hmm. Cheery had said you couldn’t bake clay properly in a bread oven. But maybe you could bake it improperly.
He looke
d up at the candlelight again.
They couldn’t do that, could they? Oh, gods…No, surely not…
But, after all, all you needed was clay. And a holy man who knew how to write the words. And someone to actually sculpt the figure, Vimes supposed, but golems had had hundreds and hundreds of years to learn to be good with their hands…
Those great big hands. The ones that looked so very fist-like.
And then the first thing they’d want to do would be to destroy the evidence, wouldn’t they? They probably didn’t think of it as killing, but more like a sort of switching-off…
He drew another rather misshapen circle on his notes.
Grog. Old baked clay, ground up small.
They’d added some of their own clay. Dorfl had a new foot, didn’t he—it? It hadn’t made it quite right. They’d put part of their own selves into a new golem.
That all sounded—well, Nobby would call it mucky. Vimes didn’t know what to call it. It sounded like some sort of secret-society thing. “Clay of my clay.” My own flesh and blood…
Damn hulking things. Aping their betters!
Vimes yawned. Sleep. He’d be better for some sleep. Or something.
He stared at the page. Automatically his hand trailed down to the bottom drawer of his desk, as it always did when he was worried and trying to think. It wasn’t as though there was ever a bottle there these days—but old habits died ha…
There was a soft glassy ching and a faint, seductive slosh.
Vimes’s hand came up with a fat bottle. The label said: Bearhugger’s Distilleries: The MacAbre, Finest Malt.
The liquid inside almost crawled up the sides of the glass in anticipation.
He stared at it. He’d reached down into the drawer for the whiskey bottle and there it was.
But it shouldn’t have been. He knew Carrot and Fred Colon kept an eye on him, but he’d never bought a bottle since he’d got married, because he’d promised Sybil, hadn’t he…?
But this wasn’t any old rotgut. This was The MacAbre…
He’d tried it once. He couldn’t quite remember why now, since in those days the only spirits he generally drank had the subtlety of a mallet to the inner ear. He must have found the money somehow. Just a sniff of it had been like Hogswatchnight. Just a sniff…
“And she said, ‘That’s funny—it didn’t do that last night’!” said Corporal Nobbs.
He beamed at the company.
There was silence. Then someone in the crowd started to laugh, one of those little uncertain laughs a man laughs who is unsure that he’s not going to be silenced by those around him. Another man laughed. Two more picked it up. Then laughter exploded in the group as a whole.
Nobby basked.
“Then there’s the one about the Klatchian who walked into a pub with a tiny piano—” he began.
“I think,” said Lady Selachii firmly, “that the buffet is ready.”
“Got any pig knuckles?” said Nobby cheerfully. “Goes down a treat with Winkles, a plate of pig knuckles.”
“I don’t normally eat extremities,” said Lady Selachii.
“A pig-knuckle sandwich…Never tried a pig knuckle? You just can’t beat it,” said Nobby.
“It is…perhaps…not the most delicate food?” said Lady Selachii.
“Oh, you can cut the crusts off,” said Nobby. “Even the toenails. If you’re feeling posh.”
Sergeant Colon opened his eyes, and groaned. His head ached. They’d hit him with something. It might have been a wall.
They’d tied him up, too. He was trussed hand and foot.
He appeared to be lying in darkness on a wooden floor. There was a greasy smell in the air, which seemed familiar yet annoyingly unrecognizable.
As his eyes grew accustomed to the dark he could make out very faint lines of light, such as might surround a door. He could also hear voices.
He tried to get up to his knees, and groaned as more pain crackled in his head.
When people tied you up it was bad news. Of course, it was much better news than when they killed you, but it could mean they were just putting you on one side for killing later.
This never used to happen, he told himself. In the old days, if you caught someone thieving, you practically held the door open for him to escape. That way, you got home in one piece.
By using the angle between a wall and a heavy crate he managed to get upright. This was not much of an improvement on his former position, but after the thunder in his head had died away he hopped awkwardly towards the door.
There were still voices on the other side of it.
Someone apart from Sergeant Colon was in trouble.
“—clown! You got me here for this? There’s a werewolf in the Watch! Ah-ha. Not one of your freaks. She’s a proper bimorphic! If you tossed a coin, she could smell what side it came down!”
“How about if we kill him and drag his body away?”
“You think she couldn’t smell the difference between a corpse and a living body?”
Sergeant Colon moaned softly.
“Er, how about we could march him out in the fog—?”
“And they can smell fear, idiot. Ah-ha. Why couldn’t you have let him look around? What could he have seen? I know that copper. A fat old coward with all the brains of, ah-ha, a pig. He stinks of fear all the time.”
Sergeant Colon hoped he wasn’t about to stink of anything else.
“Send Meshugah after him, ah-ha.”
“Are you sure? It’s getting odd. It wanders off and screams in the night, and they’re not supposed to do that. And it’s cracking up. Trust dumb golems not to do something prop—”
“Everyone knows you can’t trust golems. Ah-ha. See to it!”
“I heard that Vimes is—”
“I’ve seen to Vimes!”
Colon eased himself away from the door as quietly as possible. He hadn’t the faintest idea what this thing called Meshugah the golems had made was, except that it sounded like a fine idea to be wherever it wasn’t.
Now, if he were a resourceful type, like Sam Vimes or Captain Carrot, he’d…find a nail or something to snap these ropes, wouldn’t he? They were really tight, and cut into his wrists because the cord was so thin, little more than string wound and knotted many times. If he could find something to rub it on…
But, unfortunately, and against all common sense, sometimes people inconsiderately throw their bound enemies into rooms entirely bereft of nails, handy bits of sharp stone, sharp-edged shards of glass or even, in extreme cases, enough pieces of old junk and tools to make a fully functional armored car.
He managed to get on to his knees again and shuffled across the planks. Even a splinter would do. A lump of metal. A wide-open doorway marked FREEDOM. He’d settle for anything.
What he got was a tiny circle of light on the floor. A knothole in the wood had long ago fallen out, and light—dim orange light—was shining through.
Colon got down and applied his eye to the hole. Unfortunately this also brought his nose into a similar proximity.
The stench was appalling.
There was a suggestion of wateriness, or at least of liquidity. He must be over one of the numerous streams that flowed through the city, although they had of course been built-over centuries before and were now used—if their existence was even re-membered—for those purposes to which humanity had always put clean fresh water; i.e., making it as turbid and undrinkable as possible. And this one was flowing under the cattle markets. The smell of ammonia bored into Colon’s sinuses like a drill.
And yet there was light down there.
He held his breath and took another look.
A couple of feet below him was a very small raft. Half a dozen rats were laid neatly on it, and a minute scrap of candle was burning.
A tiny rowing boat entered his vision. A rat was in the bottom of it and, sitting amidships and rowing, was—
“Wee Mad Arthur?”
The gnome looked up. “Who’s tha
t there, then?”
“It’s me, your good old mate Fred Colon! Can you give me a hand?”
“Wha’re yez doing up there?”
“I’m all tied up and they’re going to kill me! Why does it smell so bad?”
“’S the old Cockbill stream. All the cattle pens drain into it.” Wee Mad Arthur grinned. “Yez can feel it doing yer tubes a power of good, eh? Just call me King of the Golden River, eh?”
“They’re going to kill me, Arthur! Don’t piss about!”
“Aha, good one!”
Desperate cells flared in Colon’s mind. “I’ve been on the trail of those blokes who’re poisoning your rats,” he said.
“The Ratcatchers’ Guild!” snarled Arthur, almost dropping an oar. “I knew it was them, right? This is where I got them rats! There’s more of ’em down here, dead as doornails!”
“Right! And I’ve got to give the names to Commander Vimes! In person! With all my arms and legs on! He’s very particular about that sort of thing!”
“Did yez know yez on a trapdoor?” said Arthur. “Wait right there.”
Arthur rowed out of sight. Colon rolled over. After a while there was a scratching noise in the walls and then someone kicked him in the ear.
“Ow!”
“Would there be any money in this?” said Wee Mad Arthur, holding up his stub of candle. It was a small one, such as might be put on a child’s birthday cake.
“What about your public duty?”
“Aye, so there’s no money in this?”
“Lots! I promise! Now untie me!”
“This is string they’ve used,” said Arthur, somewhere around Colon’s hands. “Not proper rope at all.”
Colon felt his hands free, although there was still pressure around his wrists.
“Where’s the trapdoor?” he said.
“Yer on it. Handy for dumping stuff. Dunt look as if it been used for years, from underneath. Hey, I been finding dead rats everywhere down there now! Fat as yer head and twice as dead! I thought the ones I caught for Gimlet were a wee bit sluggish!”
There was a twang and Colon’s legs were free. He sat up cautiously and tried to massage some life back into them.
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