Feet of Clay (32 page)

‘Oh, no, sir. His lordship’s particular about that!
We
just use Number Threes.’

‘And you take your, er, perks home?’

‘Yessir. Gran said they gave a lovely light, sir …’

‘I expect she sat up with your little brother, did she? Because I expect he got took sick first, so she sat up with him all night long, night after night and, hah, if I know old Mrs Easy, she did her sewing …’

‘Yessir.’

There was a pause.

‘Use my handkerchief,’ said Vimes, after a while.

‘Am I going to lose my position, sir?’

‘No. That’s definite. No one involved deserves to lose their jobs,’ said Vimes. He looked at the candle. ‘Except possibly me,’ he added.

He stopped at the doorway, and turned. ‘And if you ever want candle-ends, we’ve always got lots at the Watch House. Nobby’ll have to start buying cooking fat like everyone else.’

‘What’s it doing now?’ said Sergeant Colon.

Wee Mad Arthur peered over the edge of the roof again. ‘It’s havin’ problems with its elbows,’ he said conversationally. ‘It keeps lookin’ at one of ’em and tryin’ it all ways up and it’s not workin’.’

‘I had that trouble when I put up them kitchen units for Mrs Colon,’ said the sergeant. ‘The instructions on how to open the box were inside the box—’

‘Oh-oh, it’s worked it out,’ said the rat-catcher. ‘Looks like it had it mixed up with its knees after all.’

Colon heard a clank below him.

‘And now it’s gone round the corner’ – there was
a
crash of splintering wood – ‘and now it’s got into the building. I expect it’ll come up the stairs, but it looks like yer’ll be okay.’

‘Why?’

‘’Cos all you gotta do is let go of the roof, see?’

‘I’ll drop to my death!’

‘Right! Nice clean way to go. None of that “arms-and-legs-bein’-ripped-off” stuff first.’

‘I wanted to buy a farm!’ moaned Colon.

‘Could be,’ said Arthur. He looked over the roof again. ‘Or,’ he said, as if this were hardly a better option, ‘yez could try to grab the drainpipe.’

Colon looked sideways. There
was
a pipe a few feet away. If he swung his body and really made an effort, he might
just
miss it by inches and plunge to his death.

‘Does it look safe?’ he said.

‘Compared with what, mister?’

Colon tried to swing his legs like a pendulum. Every muscle in his arm screamed at him. He knew he was overweight. He’d always meant to take exercise one day. He just hadn’t been aware that it was going to be today.

‘I reckon I can hear it walking up the stairs,’ said Wee Mad Arthur.

Colon tried to swing faster. ‘What’re
you
going to do?’ he said.

‘Oh, don’t yez worry about me,’ said Wee Mad Arthur. ‘I’ll be fine. I’ll jump.’

‘
Jump
?’

‘Sure. I’ll be safe ’cos of being normal-sized, see.’

‘You think you’re normal-sized?’

Wee Mad Arthur looked at Colon’s hands. ‘Are these yer fingers right here by my boots?’ he said.

‘Right, right, you’re normal-sized. ’S not your fault you’ve moved into a city full of giants,’ said Colon.

‘Right. The smaller yez are the lighter yez fall. Well known fact. A spider’ll not even notice a drop like this, a mouse’d walk away, a horse’d break every bone in its body and a helephant would spla—’

‘Oh, gods,’ muttered Colon. He could feel the drainpipe with his boot now. But getting a grip would mean there would have to be one long, bottomless moment when he was not exactly holding on to the roof and not exactly holding on to the drainpipe and in very serious peril of holding on to the ground.

There was another crash from somewhere on the roof.

‘Right,’ said Wee Mad Arthur. ‘See you at the bottom.’

‘Oh, gods …’

The gnome stepped off the roof.

‘All okay so far,’ he shouted, as he went past Colon.

‘Oh, gods …’

Sergeant Colon looked up into two red glows.

‘Doing fine up to now,’ said a dopplering voice from below.

‘Oh,
gods
…’

Colon heaved his legs around, stood on fresh air for a moment, grabbed the top of the pipe, ducked his head as a pottery fist swung at him, heard the
nasty
little noise as the pipe’s rusty bolts said goodbye to the wall and, still clinging to a tilting length of cast-iron pipe as if it were going to help, disappeared backwards into the fog.

Mr Sock looked up at the sound of the door opening, and then cowered back against the sausage machine.

‘
You
?’ he whispered. ‘Here, you can’t come back! I
sold
you!’

Dorfl regarded him steadily for a few seconds, and then walked past him and took the largest cleaver from the blood-stained rack on the wall.

Sock began to shake.

‘I-I-I was always g-g-good to you,’ he said. ‘A-a-always let you h-have your h-holy d-d-days off—’

Dorfl stared at him again.
It’s only red light
, Sock gibbered to himself …

But it seemed more focused. He felt it entering his head through his own eyes and examining his soul.

The golem pushed him aside and stepped out of the slaughterhouse and towards the cattle pens.

Sock unfroze. They never fought back, did they? They
couldn’t
. It was how the damn things were
made
.

He stared around at the other workers, humans and trolls alike. ‘Don’t just stand there! Get it!’

One or two hesitated. It was a
big
cleaver in the golem’s hand. And when Dorfl stopped to look
around
at them there was something different about the golem’s stance, too. It didn’t
look
like something that wouldn’t fight back.

But Sock didn’t employ people for the muscles in their heads. Besides, no one had really liked a golem around the place.

A troll aimed a pole-axe at him. Dorfl caught it one-handed without turning his head and snapped the hickory handle with his fingers. A man with a hammer had it plucked from his hand and thrown so hard at the wall that it left a hole.

After that they followed at a cautious distance. Dorfl took no further notice of them.

The steam over the cattle pens mingled with the fog. Hundreds of dark eyes watched Dorfl curiously as he walked between the fences. They were always quiet when the golem was around.

He stopped by one of the largest pens. There were voices from behind.

‘Don’t tell me it’s going to slaughter the lot of ’em! We’ll never get that lot jointed this shift!’

‘I heard where there was one at a carpenter’s that went odd and made five thousand tables in one night. Lost count or something.’

‘It’s just staring at them …’

‘I mean, five thousand tables? One of them had twenty-seven legs. It got stuck on legs …’

Dorfl brought the cleaver down hard and sliced the lock off the gate. The cattle watched the golem, with that guarded expression which cattle have that means they’re waiting for the next thought to turn up.

He walked on to the sheep pens and opened them, too. The pigs were next, and then the poultry.

‘
All
of them?’ said Mr Sock.

The golem walked calmly back down the line of pens, ignoring the watchers, and re-entered the slaughterhouse. He came out very shortly afterwards leading the ancient and hairy billygoat on a piece of string. He went past the waiting animals until he reached the wide gates that led on to the main road, which he opened. Then he let the goat loose.

The animal sniffed the air and rolled its slotted eyes. Then, apparently deciding that the distant odour of the cabbage fields beyond the city wall was much preferable to the smells immediately around it, it trotted away up the road.

The animals followed it in a rush, but with hardly any other noise than the rustle of movement and the sounds of their hooves. They streamed around the stationary figure of Dorfl, who stood and watched them go.

A chicken, bewildered by the stampede, landed on the golem’s head and started to cluck.

Anger finally overcame Sock’s terror. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ he shouted, trying to field a few stray sheep as they bolted out of the pens. ‘That’s
money
walking out of the gate, you—’

Dorfl’s hand was suddenly around his throat. The golem picked him up and held the struggling man at arm’s-length, turning his head this way and that as if considering his next course of action.

Finally he tossed away the cleaver, reached up under the chicken that had taken up residence, and
produced
a small brown egg. With apparent ceremony the golem smashed it carefully on Sock’s scalp and dropped him.

The golem’s former co-workers jumped back out of the way as Dorfl walked back through the slaughterhouse.

There was a tally board by the entrance. Dorfl looked at it for a while, then picked up the chalk and wrote:

NO MASTER …

The chalk crumbled in his fingers. Dorfl walked out into the fog.

Cheri looked up from her workbench.

‘The wick’s
full
of arsenous acid,’ she said. ‘Well done, sir! This candle even weighs slightly more than other candles!’

‘What an evil way to kill anyone,’ said Angua.

‘Certainly very clever,’ said Vimes. ‘Vetinari sits up half the night writing, and in the morning the candle’s burned down. Poisoned by the light. The light’s something you don’t see. Who looks at the light? Not some plodding old copper.’

‘Oh, you’re not that old, sir,’ said Carrot, cheerfully.

‘What about plodding?’

‘Or that plodding, either,’ Carrot added quickly. ‘I’ve always pointed out to people that you walk in a very purposeful and meaningful manner.’

Vimes gave him a sharp look and saw nothing more than a keen and innocently helpful expression.

‘We don’t look at the light because the light is what we look
with
,’ said Vimes. ‘Okay. And now I think we should go and have a look at the candle factory, shouldn’t we? You come, Littlebottom, and bring your … have you got taller, Littlebottom?’

‘High-heeled boots, sir,’ said Cheri.

‘I thought dwarfs always wore iron boots …’

‘Yes, sir. But I’ve got high heels on mine, sir. I welded them on.’

‘Oh. Fine. Right.’ Vimes pulled himself together. ‘Well, if you can still totter, bring your alchemy stuff with you. Detritus should’ve come off-duty from the palace. When it comes to locked doors you can’t beat Detritus. He’s a walking crowbar. We’ll pick him up on the way.’

He loaded his crossbow and lit a match.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘We’ve done it the modern way, now let’s try policing like grandfather used to do it. It’s time to—’

‘Prod buttock, sir?’ said Carrot, hurriedly.

‘Close,’ said Vimes, taking a deep drag and blowing out a smoke ring, ‘but no cigar.’

Sergeant Colon’s view of the world was certainly changing. Just when something was about to fix itself firmly in his mind as the worst moment of his entire life, it was hurriedly replaced by something even nastier.

Firstly, the drainpipe he was riding hit the wall of the building opposite. In a well-organized world he
might
have landed on a fire escape, but fire escapes were unknown in Ankh-Morpork and the flames generally had to leave via the roof.

With the pipe thus leaning against the wall, he found himself sliding down the diagonal. Even this might have been a happy outcome were it not for the fact that Colon was a heavy man and, as his weight slid nearer to the middle of the unsupported pipe, the pipe sagged, and cast iron has only a very limited amount of sag before it snaps, which it now did.

Colon dropped, and landed on something soft – at least, softer than the street – and the something went ‘mur-r-r-r-r-m!’. He bounced off it and landed on something lower and softer which went ‘baaaaarp!’, and rolled from this on to something even lower and apparently made of feathers, which went insane. And pecked him.

The street was full of animals, milling around uncertainly. When animals are in a state of uncertainty they get nervous, and the street was already, as it were, paved with anxiety. The only benefit to Sergeant Colon was that this made it slightly softer than would otherwise have been the case.

Hooves trod on his hands. Very large dribbly noses sneezed at him.

Sergeant Colon had not hitherto had a great deal of experience of animals, except in portion sizes. When he’d been little he’d had a pink stuffed pig called Mr Dreadful, and he’d got up to Chapter Six in
Animal Husbandry
. It had woodcuts in it. There
was
no mention of hot smelly breath and great clomping feet like soup plates on a stick. Cows, in Sergeant Colon’s book, should go ‘moo’. Every child knew that. They shouldn’t go ‘mur-r-r-r-r-m!’ like some kind of undersea monster and spray you with spit.

He tried to get up, skidded on some cow’s moment of crisis, and sat down on a sheep. It went ‘blaaaart!’ What kind of noise was that for a sheep to make?

He got up again and tried to make his way to the kerb. ‘Shoo! Get out of the damn way, you sheep! Garn!’

A goose hissed at him and stuck out altogether too much neck.

Colon backed off, and stopped when something nudged him in the back. It was a pig.

It was no Mr Dreadful. This wasn’t the little piggy that went to market, or the little piggy that stayed at home. It would be quite hard to imagine what kind of foot would have a piggy like this, but it would probably be the kind that also had hair and scales and toenails like cashew nuts.

This piggy was the size of a pony. This piggy had tusks. And it wasn’t pink. It was a blue-black colour and covered with sharp hair but it did have –
let’s be fair
, thought Colon – little red piggy eyes.

This little piggy looked like the little piggy that killed the boarhounds, disembowelled the horse and ate the huntsman.

Colon turned around, and came face-to-face with a bull like a beef cube on legs. It turned its huge head
from
side to side so that each rolling eye could get a sight of the sergeant, but it was clear that neither of them liked him very much.