Kirkus Reviews
“Pratchett demonstrates just how great the distance is between one-or-two-joke writers and the comic masters whose work will be read into the next century.”
Locus
“If Terry Pratchett is not yet an institution, he should be.”
Fantasy & Science Fiction
BOOKS BY TERRY PRATCHETT
The Carpet People
The Dark Side of the Sun
Strata • Truckers
Diggers • Wings
Only You Can Save Mankind
Johnny and the Dead • Johnny and the Bomb
The Unadulterated Cat (with Gray Jollife)
Good Omens (with Neil Gaiman)
THE DISCWORLD® SERIES:
Going Postal • Monstrous Regiment • Night Watch
The Last Hero • The Truth • Thief of Time
The Fifth Elephant • Carpe Jugulum
The Last Continent • Jingo
Hogfather • Feet of Clay • Maskerade
Interesting Times • Soul Music • Men at Arms
Lords and Ladies • Small Gods
Witches Abroad • Reaper Man
Moving Pictures • Eric (with Josh Kirby)
Guards! Guards! • Pyramids
Wyrd Sisters • Sourcery • Mort • Equal Rites
The Light Fantastic • The Color of Magic
The Art of Discworld (with Paul Kidby)
Mort: A Discworld Big Comic (with Graham Higgins)
The Streets of Ankh-Morpork (with Stephen Briggs)
The Discworld Companion (with Stephen Briggs)
The Discworld Mapp (with Stephen Briggs)
The Pratchett Portfolio (with Paul Kidby)
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
FEET OF CLAY. Copyright © 1996 by Terry Pratchett. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Mobipocket Reader June 2007 ISBN 978-0-06-146415-7
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
About the Publisher
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.
25 Ryde Road (PO Box 321)
Pymble, NSW 2073, Australia
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com.au
Canada
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
55 Avenue Road, Suite 2900
Toronto, ON, M5R, 3L2, Canada
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.ca
New Zealand
HarperCollinsPublishers (New Zealand) Limited
P.O. Box 1
Auckland, New Zealand
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.nz
United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
77-85 Fulham Palace Road
London, W6 8JB, UK
http://www.uk.harpercollinsebooks.com
United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
10 East 53rd Street
New York, NY 10022
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com
*He subsequently got dead-drunk and was shanghaied aboard a merchantman bound for strange and foreign parts, where he met lots of young ladies who didn’t wear many clothes. He eventually died from stepping on a tiger. A good deed goes around the world.
†That is to say, the sort you can use to give something three extra legs and then blow it up.
*Town hall
**Because Ankh-Morpork doesn’t have a town hall.
†Yeast bowl
*Commander Vimes, on the other hand, was all for giving criminals a short, sharp shock. It really depended on how tightly they could be tied to the lightning rod.
*Constable Visit was an Omnian, whose country’s traditional approach to evangelism was to put unbelievers to torture and the sword. Things had become a lot more civilized these days but Omnians still had a strenuous and indefatigable approach to spreading the Word, and had merely changed the nature of the weapons. Constable Visit spent his days off in company with his co-religionist Smite-The-Unbeliever-With-Cunning-Arguments, ringing doorbells and causing people to hide behind the furniture everywhere in the city.
*Detritus was particularly good when it came to asking questions. He had three basic ones. They were the direct (“Did you do it?”), the persistent (“Are you sure it wasn’t you that done it?”) and the subtle (“It was you what done it, wasn’t it?). Although they were not the most cunning questions ever devised, Detritus’s talent was to go on patiently asking them for hours on end, until he got the right answer, which was generally something like: “Yes! Yes! I did it! I did it! Now please tell me what it was I did!”
*It is a pervasive and beguiling myth that the people who design instruments of death end up being killed by them. There is almost no foundation in fact. Colonel Shrapnel wasn’t blown up, M. Guillotin died with his head on, Colonel Gatling wasn’t shot. If it hadn’t been for the murder of cosh and blackjack maker Sir William Blunt-Instrument in an alleyway, the rumor would never have got started.
*Welcome, Corporal Smallbottom! This is Constable Angua…Angua, show Smallbottom how well you’re learning dwarfish…”
*The Ankh-Morpork view of crime and punishment was that the penalty for the first offense should prevent the possibility of a second offense.
*This always happens in any police chase anywhere. A heavily laden lorry will always pull out of a side alley in front of the pursuit. If vehicles aren’t involved, then it’ll be a man with a rack of garments. Or two men with a large sheet of glass. There’s probably some kind of secret society behind all this.
*And for the most part were unconcerned about matters of height. There’s a dwarfish saying: “All trees are felled at ground-level”—although this is said to be an excessively bowdlerized translation for a saw which more literally means, “When his hands are higher than your head, his groin is level with your teeth.”
*These terms are often synonymous.
*As they were euphemistically named. People said, “They call themselves seamstresses—hem, hem!”
*Because of the huge obtrusive mass of his forehead, Rogers the bulls’ view of the universe was from two eyes each with their own non-overlapping hemispherical view of the world. Since there were two separate visions, Rogers had reasoned, that meant there must be two bulls (bulls not having been bred for much deductive reasoning). Most bulls believe this, which is why they always keep turning their head this way and that when they look at you. They do this because both of them want to see.
Feet of Clay Page 32