Feet of Clay d-19

by Terry David John Pratchett

  'I heard the other day the sawmill in Dimwell Street wouldn't mind selling the one it's got,' said the foreman. 'It sawed up a mahogany trunk into matchsticks, or something. You want I should go and have a word?'

  Stronginthearm looked at the slate again.

  Dibbuk had never been very wordy. He'd carry red-hot iron, hammer sword-blanks with his fists, clean out clinkers from a smelter still too hot for a man to touch … and never say a word. Of course, he couldn't say any words, but Dibbuk had always given the impression that there were none he'd particularly wanted to say in any case. He just worked. These were the most words he'd ever written at any one time.

  They spoke to Stronginthearm of black distress, and a mind that would have been screaming if it could only have uttered a sound. Which was daft! The things couldn't commit suicide.

  'Boss?' said the foreman. 'I said, you want me to get another one?'

  Stronginthearm skimmed the slate away and, with a feeling of relief, watched it shatter against the wall. 'No,' he said. 'Just clear this thing up. And get the bloody hammer fixed.'

  Sergeant Colon, after some considerable effort, managed to get his head higher than the gutter.

  'You — you all right, Corporal Lord de Nobbes?' he mumbled.

  'Dunno, Fred. Whose face is this?'

  '’S mine, Nobby.'

  'Thank gods for that, I thought it was me …'

  Colon fell back. 'We're lyin' in the gutter, Nobby,' he moaned. 'Ooo.'

  'We're all lyin' in the gutter, Fred. But some of us're lookin' at the stars.'

  'Well, I'm lookin' at your face, Nobby. Stars'd be a lot better, believe you me. C'mon …'

  With several false starts they both managed to get upright, mainly by pulling themselves up one another.

  'Where're're're we, Nobby?'

  '’m sure we left the Drum,… 've I got a sheet over m'head?'

  'It's the fog, Nobby.'

  'What about these legs down here?'

  'I reckon them's your legs, Nobby. I've got mine.'

  'Right. Right. Ooo … I reckon I drunk a lot, Sarge.'

  'Drunk as a lord, eh?'

  Nobby reached gingerly up to his helmet. Someone had put a paper coronet around it. His questing hand found a dog-end behind his ear.

  It was that unpleasant hour of the drinking day when, after a few hours' quality gutter-time, you're beginning to feel the retribution of sobriety while still being drunk enough to make it worse.

  'How'd we get here, Sarge?'

  Colon started to scratch his head and stopped because of the noise.

  'I reckon …' he said, winnowing the frazzled shreds of his short-term memory, 'I… reckon… seems to me there was something about stormin' the palace and demandin' your birthright…'

  Nobby choked and spat out the cigarette. 'We didn't do that, did we?'

  'You was shouting we ought to do it …'

  'Oh, gods …' moaned Nobby.

  'But I reckon you threw up around that time.'

  'That's a relief, anyway.'

  'Well… it was all over Grabber Hoskins. But he tripped over someone before he could get us.'

  Colon suddenly patted his pockets. 'And I've still got the tea money,' he said. Another cloud of memory scudded across the sunshine of oblivion. 'Well… three pennies of it…'

  The urgency of this got through to Nobby. 'Thruppence?'

  'Yeah, well … after you started orderin' all them expensive drinks for the whole bar … well, you din't have no money and it was either me payin' for them or …' Colon moved his finger across his throat and went: 'Kssssh!'

  'You tellin' me we paid for Happy Hour in the Drum?'

  'Not so much Happy Hour,' said Colon miserably. 'More sort of Ecstatic One-Hundred-and-Fifty Minutes. I didn't even know you could buy gin in pints.'

  Nobby tried to focus on the fog. 'No one can drink gin by the pint, Sarge.'

  'That's what I kept sayin', and would you listen?'

  Nobby sniffed. 'We're close to the river,' he said. 'Let's try to get …’

  Something roared, very close by. It was long and low, like a foghorn in serious distress. It was the sound you might hear from a cattleyard on a nervous night, and it went on and on, and then stopped so abruptly it caught the silence unawares.

  '… far away from that as we can,' said Nobby. The sound had done the work of an ice-cold shower and about two pints of black coffee.

  Colon spun around. He desperately needed something that would do the work of a laundry. 'Where did it come from?' he said.

  'It was … over there, wasn't it?'

  'I thought it was that way!'

  In the fog, all directions were the same.

  'I think …' said Colon, slowly, 'that we ort to go and make a report about this as soon as possible.'

  'Right,' said Nobby. 'Which way?'

  'Let's just run, eh?'

  Constable Downspout's huge pointy ears quivered as the noise boomed over the city. He turned his head carefully, triangulating for height, direction and distance. And then he remembered it.

  The cry was heard in the Watch House, but muffled by the fog.

  It entered the open head of the golem Dorfl and bounced around inside, echoing down, down among the small cracks in the clay until, at the very edge of perception, little grains danced together.

  The sightless sockets stared at the wall. No one heard the cry that came back from the dead skull, because there was no mouth to utter it and not even a mind to guide it, but it screamed out into the night:

  CLAY OF MY CLAY, THOU SHALT NOT KILL! THOU SHALT NOT DIE!

  Samuel Vimes dreamed about Clues.

  He had a jaundiced view of Clues. He instinctively distrusted them. They got in the way.

  And he distrusted the kind of person who'd take one look at another man and say in a lordly voice to his companion, 'Ah, my dear sir, I can tell you nothing except that he is a left-handed stonemason who has spent some years in the merchant navy and has recently fallen on hard times,' and then unroll a lot of supercilious commentary about calluses and stance and the state of a man's boots, when exactly the same comments could apply to a man who was wearing his old clothes because he'd been doing a spot of home bricklaying for a new barbecue pit, and had been tattooed once when he was drunk and seventeen[14] and in fact got seasick on a wet pavement. What arrogance! What an insult to the rich and chaotic variety of the human experience!

  It was the same with more static evidence. The footprints in the flowerbed were probably in the real world left by the window-cleaner. The scream in the night was quite likely a man getting out of bed and stepping sharply on an upturned hairbrush.

  The real world was far too real to leave neat little hints. It was full of too many things. It wasn't by eliminating the impossible that you got at the truth, however improbable; it was by the much harder process of eliminating the possibilities. You worked away, patiently asking questions and looking hard at things. You walked and talked, and in your heart you just hoped like hell that some bugger's nerve'd crack and he'd give himself up.

  The events of the day clanged together in Vimes's head. Golems tramped like sad shadows. Father Tubelcek waved at him and then his head exploded, showering Vimes in words. Mr Hopkinson lay dead in his own oven, a slice of dwarf bread in his mouth. And the golems marched on, silently. There was Dorfl, dragging its foot, its head open for the words to fly in and out of, like a swarm of bees. And in the middle of it all Arsenic danced, a spiky little green man, crackling and gibbering.

  At one point he thought one of the golems screamed.

  After that, the dream faded, a bit at a time.

  Golems. Oven. Words. Priest. Dorfl. Golems marching, the thudding of their feet making the whole dream pulsate …

  Vimes opened his eyes.

  Beside him, Lady Sybil said. 'Wsfgl,' and turned over.

  Someone was hammering at the front door. Still muzzy, head swimming, Vimes pulled himself up on his elbows and said, to the night-t
ime world in general, 'What sort of a time do you call this?'

  'Bingeley bingeley beep!' said a cheerful voice from the direction of Vimes's dressing-table.

  'Oh, please.'

  'Twenty-nine minutes and thirty-one seconds past five ay-emm. A Penny Saved is a Penny Earned. Would you like me to present your schedule for today? While I am doing this, why not take some time to fill out your registration card?'

  'What? What? What're you talking about?'

  The knocking continued.

  Vimes fell out of bed and groped in the dark for the matches. He finally got a candle alight and half-ran, half-staggered down the long stairs and into the hall.

  The knocker turned out to be Constable Visit.

  'It's Lord Vetinari, sir! It's worse this time!'

  'Has anyone sent for Doughnut Jimmy?'

  'Yessir!'

  At this time of day the fog was fighting a rearguard action against the dawn, and made the whole world look as though it were inside a ping-pong ball.

  'I poked my head in as soon as I came on shift and he was out like a light, sir!'

  'How did you know he wasn't asleep?'

  'On the floor, sir, with all his clothes on?'

  A couple of Watchmen had put the Patrician on his bed by the time Vimes arrived, slightly out of breath and with his knees aching. Gods, he thought as he struggled up the stairs, it's not like the old truncheon-and-bell days. You wouldn't think twice about running half-way across the city, coppers and criminals locked in hot pursuit.

  With a mixture of pride and shame he added: And none of the buggers ever caught me, either.

  The Patrician was still breathing, but his face was waxy and he looked as though death might be an improvement.

  Vimes's gaze roamed the room. There was a familiar haze in the air.

  'Who opened the window?' he demanded.

  'I did, sir,' said Visit. 'Just before I went to get you. He looked as though he needed some fresh air.'

  'It'd be fresher if you left the window shut,' said Vimes. 'Okay, I want everyone, I mean everyone, who was in this place overnight rounded up and down in the hall in two minutes. And someone fetch Corporal Littlebottom. And tell Captain Carrot.'

  I'm worried and confused, he thought. So the first rule in the book is to spread it around.

  He prowled about the room. It didn't take much intelligence to see that Vetinari had got up and moved over to his writing-desk, where by the look of it he had worked for some time. The candle had burned right down. An inkwell had been overturned, presumably when he'd slipped off the chair. Vimes dipped a finger in the ink and sniffed it. Then he reached for the quill pen beside it, hesitated, took out his dagger, and lifted the long feather gingerly. There seemed to be no cunning little barbs on it, but he put it carefully on one side for Littlebottom to examine later.

  He glanced down at the paper Vetinari had been working on.

  To his surprise it wasn't writing at all, but a careful drawing. It showed a striding figure, except that the figure was not one person at all but made up of thousands of smaller figures. The effect was like one of the wicker men built by some of the more outlandish tribes near the Hub, when they annually celebrated the great cycle of Nature and their reverence for life by piling as much of it as possible in a great heap and setting fire to it. The composite man was wearing a crown. Vimes pushed the sheet of paper aside and returned his attention to the desk. He brushed the surface carefully for any suspicious splinters. He crouched down and examined the underside.

  The light was growing outside. Vimes went into both the rooms alongside and made sure their drapes were open, then went back into Vetinari's room, closed the curtains and the doors, and sidled along the walls looking for any tell-tale speck of light that might indicate a small hole.

  Where could you stop? Splinters in the floor? Blowpipes through the keyhole?

  He opened the curtains again.

  Vetinari had been on the mend yesterday. And now he looked worse. Someone had got to him in the night. How? Slow poison was the devil of a thing. You had to find a way of giving it to the victim every day.

  No, you didn't … What was elegant was finding a way of getting him to administer it to himself every day.

  Vimes rummaged through the paperwork. Vetinari had obviously felt well enough to get up and walk over here, but here was where he had collapsed.

  You couldn't poison a splinter or a nail because he wouldn't keep on nicking himself…

  There was a book half-buried in the papers, but it had a lot of bookmarks in it, mostly torn bits of old letters.

  What did he do every day?

  Vimes opened the book. Every page was covered with handwritten symbols.

  You have to get a poison like arsenic into the body. It isn't enough to touch it. Or is it? Is there a kind of arsenic you can pick up through the skin?

  No one was getting in. Vimes was almost certain of that.

  The food and drink were probably all right, but he'd get Detritus to go and have another one of his little talks with the cooks in any case.

  Something he breathed? How could you keep that up day after day without arousing suspicion somewhere? Anyway, you'd have to get your poison into the room.

  Something already in the room? Cheery had a different carpet put down and replaced the bed, What else could you do? Strip the paint from the ceiling?

  What had Vetinari told Cheery about poisoning? "You put it where no one will look at all …"

  Vimes realized he was still staring at the book. There wasn't anything there that he could recognize. It must be a code of some sort. Knowing Vetinari, it wouldn't be crackable by anyone in a normal frame of mind.

  Could you poison a book? But … so what? There were other books. You'd have to know he'd look at this one, continuously. And even then you'd have to get the poison into him. A man might prick his finger once and after that he'd take care.

  It sometimes worried Vimes, the way he suspected everything. If you started wondering whether a man could be poisoned by words, you might as well accuse the wallpaper of driving him mad. Mind you, that horrible green colour would drive anyone insane …

  'Bingely beepy bleep!'

  'Oh, no …'

  'This is your six ay-emm wake-up call! Good morning!! Here are your appointments for today, Insert Name Here!! Ten ay-emm …'

  'Shut up! Listen, whatever's in my diary for today is definitely not—'

  Vimes stopped. He lowered the box.

  He went back to the desk. If you assumed one page per day …

  Lord Vetinari had a very good memory. But everyone wrote things down, didn't they? You couldn't remember every little thing. Wednesday: 3pm, reign of terror; 3.15pm, clean out scorpion pit …

  He held the organizer up to his lips. 'Take a memo,' he said.

  'Hooray! Go right ahead. Don't forget to say "memo" first!!'

  'Speak to … blast … Memo: What about Vetinari's journal?'

  'Is that it?'

  'Yes.'

  Someone knocked politely at the door. Vimes opened it carefully. 'Oh, it's you, Littlebottom.'

  Vimes blinked. Something wasn't right about the dwarf.

  ‘I’ll mix up some of Mr Doughnut's jollop right away, sir.' The dwarf looked past Vimes to the bed. 'Ooo … he doesn't look good, does he …?'

  'Get someone to move him into a different bedroom,' said Vimes. 'Get the servants to prepare a new room, right?'

  'Yes, sir.'

  'And, after they've done it, pick a different room at random and move him into it. And change everything, understand? Every stick of furniture, every vase, every rug—'

  'Er… yes, sir.'

  Vimes hesitated. Now he could put his finger on what had been bothering him for the last twenty seconds.

  'Littlebottom.'

  'Sir?'

  'You … er … you … on your ears?'

  'Earrings, sir,' said Cheery nervously. 'Constable Angua gave them to me.'

  'Really?
Er … right … I didn't think dwarfs wore jewellery, that's all.'

  'We're known for rings, sir.'

  'Yes, of course.' Rings, yes. No one quite like a dwarf for forging a magical ring. But… magical earrings? Oh, well. There were some waters too deep to wade.

  Sergeant Detritus's approach to these matters was almost instinctively correct. He had the palace staff lined up in front of him and was shouting at them at the top of his voice.

  Look at old Detritus, Vimes thought as he went down the stairs. Just your basic thick troll a few years ago, now a valuable member of the Watch provided you get him to repeat his orders back to you to make sure he understands you. His armour gleams even brighter than Carrot's because he doesn't get bored with polishing. And he's mastered policing as it is practised by the majority of forces in the universe, which is, basically, screaming angrily at people until they give in. The only reason that he's not a one-troll reign of terror is the ease with which his thought processes can be derailed by anyone who tries something fiendishly cunning, like an outright denial.

  'I know you all done it!' he was shouting. 'If the person wot done it does not own up der whole staff, an' I means this, der whole staff will be locked up in der Tanty also we throws der key away!' He pointed a finger at a stout scullerymaid. 'It was you wot done it, own up!'

  'No.'

  Detritus paused. Then: 'Where was you last night? Own up!'

  'In bed, of course!'

  'Aha, dat a likely story, own up, dat where you always is at night?'

  'Of course.'

  'Aha, own up, you got witnesses?'

  'Sauce!'

  'Ah, so you got no witnesses, you done it then, own up!'

  'No!'

  'Oh …'

  'All right, all right. Thank you, Sergeant. That will be all for now,' said Vimes, patting him on the shoulder. 'Are all the staff here?'

  He glared at the line-up: 'Well? Are you all here?'

  There was a certain amount of reluctant shuffling among the ranks, and then someone cautiously put up a hand.

  'Mildred Easy hasn't been seen since yesterday,' said its owner. 'She's the upstairs maid. A boy come with a message. She had to go off to see her family.'