Feet of Clay (6 page)

‘Really,’ said Vimes.

‘Ah-ha.’ In the dark, Dragon made a movement that might have been a conspiratorial tap on the side of the nose. ‘We know these things!’

‘Captain Carrot is doing well,’ said Vimes, as icily as he could manage. ‘Captain Carrot always does well.’

He slammed the door when he went out. The candle flames wavered.

Constable Angua walked out of an alleyway, doing up her belt.

‘That went very well, I thought,’ said Carrot, ‘and will go some way to earning us the respect of the community.’

‘Pff! That man’s sleeve! I doubt if he even knows
the
meaning of the word “laundry”,’ said Angua, wiping her mouth.

Automatically, they fell into step – the energy-saving policeman’s walk, where the pendulum weight of the leg is used to propel the walker along with the minimum of effort. Walking was important, Vimes had always said, and because Vimes had said it Carrot believed it. Walking and talking. Walk far enough and talk to enough people and sooner or later you had an answer.

The respect of the community
, thought Angua. That was a Carrot phrase. Well, in fact it was a Vimes phrase, although Sir Samuel usually spat after he said it. But Carrot
believed
it. It was Carrot who’d suggested to the Patrician that hardened criminals should be given the chance to ‘serve the community’ by redecorating the homes of the elderly, lending a new terror to old age and, given Ankh-Morpork’s crime rate, leading to at least one old lady having her front room wallpapered so many times in six months that now she could only get into it sideways.
⁶

‘I’ve found something very interesting that you will be very interested to see,’ said Carrot, after a while.

‘That’s interesting,’ said Angua.

‘But I’m not going to tell you what it is because I want it to be a surprise,’ said Carrot.

‘Oh. Good.’

Angua walked in thought for a while and then said: ‘I wonder if it will be as surprising as the collection of rock samples you showed me last week?’

‘That
was
good, wasn’t it?’ said Carrot enthusiastically. ‘I’ve been along that street dozens of times and never suspected there was a mineral museum there! All those silicates!’

‘Amazing! You’d imagine people would be flocking to it, wouldn’t you?’

‘Yes, I can’t think why they don’t!’

Angua reminded herself that Carrot appeared to have in his soul not even a trace element of irony. She told herself that it wasn’t his fault he’d been brought up by dwarfs in some mine, and really did think that bits of rock were interesting. The week before they’d visited an iron foundry. That had been interesting, too.

And yet … and yet … you couldn’t help
liking
Carrot. Even people he was arresting liked Carrot. Even old ladies living in a permanent smell of fresh paint liked Carrot.
She
liked Carrot. A lot. Which was going to make leaving him all the harder.

She was a werewolf. That’s all there was to it. You either spent your time trying to make sure people didn’t find out or you let them find out and spent your time watching them keep their distance and whisper behind your back, although of course you’d have to turn round to watch that.

Carrot didn’t mind. But he minded that other people minded. He minded that even quite friendly colleagues tended to carry a bit of silver somewhere
on
their person. She could see it upsetting him. She could see the tensions building up, and he didn’t know how to deal with them.

It was just as her father had said. Get involved with humans other than at mealtimes and you might as well jump down a silver mine.

‘Apparently there’s going to be a huge firework display after the celebrations next year,’ said Carrot. ‘I like fireworks.’

‘It beats me why Ankh-Morpork wants to celebrate the fact it had a civil war three hundred years ago,’ said Angua, coming back to the here-and-now.

‘Why not? We won,’ said Carrot.

‘Yes, but you lost, too.’

‘Always look on the positive side, that’s what I say. Ah, here we are.’

Angua looked up at the sign. She’d learned to read dwarf runes now.

‘“Dwarf Bread Museum”,’ she said. ‘Gosh. I can’t wait.’

Carrot nodded happily and pushed open the door. There was a smell of ancient crusts.

‘Coo-ee, Mr Hopkinson?’ he called. There was no reply. ‘He does go out sometimes,’ he said.

‘Probably when the excitement gets too much for him,’ said Angua. ‘Hopkinson? That’s not a dwarf name, is it?’

‘Oh, he’s a human,’ said Carrot, stepping inside. ‘But an amazing authority. Bread’s his life. He wrote the definitive work on offensive baking. Well … since he’s not here I’ll just take two tickets and leave tuppence on the desk.’

It didn’t look as though Mr Hopkinson got many visitors. There was dust on the floor, and dust on the display cases, and a lot of dust on the exhibits. Most of them were the classic cowpat-like shape, an echo of their taste, but there were also buns, close-combat crumpets, deadly throwing toast and a huge dusty array of other shapes devised by a race that went in for food-fighting in a big and above all terminal way.

‘What are we looking for?’ Angua said. She sniffed. There was a nastily familiar tang in the air.

‘It’s … are you ready for this? … it’s … the Battle Bread of B’hrian Bloodaxe!’ said Carrot, rummaging in a desk by the entrance.

‘A loaf of bread? You brought me here to see a loaf of bread?’

She sniffed again. Yes. Blood.
Fresh
blood.

‘That’s right,’ said Carrot. ‘It’s only going to be here a couple of weeks on loan. It’s the actual bread he personally wielded at the Battle of Koom Valley, killing fifty-seven trolls although’ – and here Carrot’s tone changed down from enthusiasm to civic respectability – ‘that was a long time ago and we shouldn’t let ancient history blind us to the realities of a multi-ethnic society in the Century of the Fruitbat.’

There was a creak of a door.

Then: ‘This battle bread,’ said Angua, indistinctly. ‘Black, isn’t it? Quite a lot bigger than normal bread?’

‘Yes, that’s right,’ said Carrot.

‘And Mr Hopkinson … A short man? Little white pointy beard?’

‘That’s him.’

‘And his head all smashed in?’

‘What?’

‘I think you’d better come and look,’ said Angua, backing away.

Dragon King of Arms sat alone among his candles.

So that was Commander Sir Samuel Vimes
, he mused.
Stupid man. Clearly can’t see beyond the chip on his shoulder. And people like that rise to high office these days. Still, such people have their uses, which presumably is why Vetinari has elevated him. Stupid men are often capable of things the clever would not dare to contemplate
…

He sighed, and pulled another tome towards him. It was not much bigger than many others which lined his study, a fact which might have surprised anyone who knew its contents.

He was rather proud of it. It was quite an unusual piece of work, but he had been surprised – or would have been surprised, had Dragon been really surprised at anything at all for the last hundred years or so – at how easy some of it had been. He didn’t even need to read it now. He knew it by heart. The family trees were properly planted, the words were down there on the page, and all he had to do was sing along.

The first page was headed: ‘The Descent of King Carrot I, by the Grace of the Gods King of Ankh-Morpork’. A long and complex family tree occupied the next dozen pages until it reached:
Married
… The words there were merely pencilled in.

‘Delphine Angua von Uberwald,’ read the Dragon aloud. ‘Father - and, ah-ha,
sire
– Baron Guye von Uberwald, also known as Silvertail; mother, Mme Serafine Soxe-Bloonberg, also known as Yellowfang, of Genua …’

It had been quite an achievement, that part. He had expected his agents to have had some difficulty with the more lupine areas of Angua’s ancestry, but it turned out that mountain wolves took quite a lot of interest in that sort of thing as well. Angua’s ancestors had definitely been among the leaders of the pack.

Dragon King of Arms grinned. As far as he was concerned, species was a secondary consideration. What really mattered in an individual was a good pedigree.

Ah, well. That was the future as it
might
have been.

He pushed the book aside. One of the advantages of a life much longer than average was that you saw how fragile the future was. Men said things like ‘peace in our time’ or ‘an empire that will last a thousand years’, and less than half a lifetime later no one even remembered who they were, let alone what they had said or where the mob had buried their ashes. What changed history were smaller things. Often a few strokes of the pen would do the trick.

He pulled another tome towards him. The frontispiece bore the words: ‘The Descent of
King
…’ Now, what would the man call himself? That at least was not calculable. Oh, well …

Dragon picked up his pencil and wrote: ‘Nobbs’.

He smiled in the candlelit room.

People kept on talking about the true king of Ankh-Morpork, but history taught a cruel lesson. It said – often in words of blood – that the true king was the one who got crowned.

Books filled this room, too. That was the first impression – one of dank, oppressive bookishness.

The late Father Tubelcek was sprawled across a drift of fallen books. He was certainly dead. No one could have bled that much and still been alive. Or survived for long with a head like a deflated football. Someone must have hit him with a lump hammer.

‘This old lady came running out screaming,’ said Constable Visit, saluting. ‘So I went in and it was just like this, sir.’

‘
Just
like this, Constable Visit?’

‘Yes, sir. And the name’s Visit-The-Infidel-With-Explanatory-Pamphlets, sir.’

‘Who was the old lady?’

‘She says she’s Mrs Kanacki, sir. She says she always brings him his meals. She says she does for him.’

‘
Does
for him?’

‘You know, sir. Cleaning and sweeping.’

There was, indeed, a tray on the floor, along with a broken bowl and some spilled porridge. The lady
who
did for the old man had been shocked to find that someone else had done for him first.

‘Did she touch him?’ he said.

‘She says not, sir.’

Which meant the old priest had somehow achieved the
neatest
death Vimes had ever seen. His hands were crossed on his chest. His eyes had been closed.

And something had been put in his mouth. It looked like a rolled-up piece of paper. It gave the corpse a disconcertingly jaunty look, as though he’d decided to have a last cigarette after dying.

Vimes gingerly picked out the little scroll and unrolled it. It was covered with meticulously written but unfamiliar symbols. What made them particularly noteworthy was the fact that their author had apparently made use of the only liquid lying around in huge quantities.

‘Yuk,’ said Vimes. ‘Written in
blood
. Does this mean anything to anyone?’

‘Yes, sir!’

Vimes rolled his eyes. ‘Yes, Constable Visit?’

‘Visit-The-Infidel-With-Explanatory-Pamphlets, sir,’ said Constable Visit, looking hurt.

‘“The-Infidel-With-Explanatory-Pamphlets”
⁷
I
was just about to say it, Constable,’ said Vimes. ‘Well?’

‘It’s an ancient Klatchian script,’ said Constable Visit. ‘One of the desert tribes called the Cenotines, sir. They had a sophisticated but fundamentally flawed …’

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ said Vimes, who could recognize the verbal foot getting ready to stick itself in the aural door. ‘But do you know what it means?’

‘I could find out, sir.’

‘Good.’

‘Incidentally, were you able by any chance to find time to have a look at those leaflets I gave you the other day, sir?’

‘Been very busy!’ said Vimes automatically.

‘Not to worry, sir,’ said Visit, and smiled the wan smile of those doing good against great odds. ‘When you’ve got a moment will be fine.’

The old books that had been knocked from the shelves had spilled their pages everywhere. There were splashes of blood on many of them.

‘Some of these look religious,’ Vimes said. ‘You might find something.’ He turned. ‘Detritus, have a look round, will you?’

Detritus paused in the act of laboriously drawing a chalk outline around the body. ‘Yessir. What for, sir?’

‘Anything you find.’

‘Right, sir.’

With a grunt, Vimes hunkered down and prodded at a grey smear on the floor. ‘Dirt,’ he said.

‘You get dat on floors, sir,’ said Detritus, helpfully.

‘Except this is off-white. We’re on black loam,’ said Vimes.

‘Ah,’ said Sergeant Detritus. ‘A Clue.’

‘Could be just dirt, of course.’

There was something else. Someone had made an attempt to tidy up the books. They’d stacked several dozen of them in one neat towering pile, one book wide, largest books on the bottom, all the edges squared up with geometrical precision.

‘Now that I
don’t
understand,’ said Vimes. ‘There’s a fight. The old man is viciously attacked. Then someone – maybe it was him, dying, maybe it was the murderer – writes something down using the poor man’s own blood. And rolls it up neatly and pops it into his mouth like a sweetie. Then he does die and someone shuts his eyes and makes him tidy and piles these books up neatly and … does what? Walks out into the seething hurly-burly that is Ankh-Morpork?’

Sergeant Detritus’s honest brow furrowed with the effort of thought. ‘Could be a … could be dere’s a footprint outside der window,’ he said. ‘Dat’s always a Clue wort’ lookin’ for.’

Vimes sighed. Detritus, despite a room-temperature IQ, made a good copper and a damn good sergeant. He had that special type of stupidity that was hard to fool. But the only thing more difficult than getting him to grasp an idea was getting him to let go of it.
⁸

‘Detritus,’ he said, as kindly as possible. ‘There’s a thirty-foot drop into the river outside the window. There won’t be—’ He paused. This was the river Ankh, after all. ‘Any footprints’d be bound to have oozed back by now,’ he corrected himself. ‘Almost certainly.’