Feet of Clay

Repairs to Guttering, Watch House, Pseudopolis Yard. New downpipe, 35° Micklewhite bend, four right-angled trusses, labour and making good. $16.35p.

There were more like them, including Constable Downspout’s pigeon bill. He knew Sergeant Colon objected to the idea of a policeman being paid in pigeons, but Constable Downspout was a gargoyle and gargoyles had no concept of money. But they knew a pigeon when they ate it.

Still, things were improving. When Carrot had arrived the entire Watch’s petty cash had been kept on a shelf in a tin marked ‘Stronginthearm’s Armour Polish for Gleaming Cohorts’ and, if money was needed for anything, all you had had to do was go and find Nobby and force him to give it back.

Then there was the letter from a resident in Park Lane, one of the most select addresses in the city:

Commander Vimes,

The Night Watch patrol in this street appears to be made up entirely of dwarfs. I have nothing against dwarfs amongst their own kind, at least they are not trolls, but one hears stories and I have daughters in the house. I demand that this situation is remedied instantly otherwise I shall have no option but to take up the matter with Lord Vetinari, who is a personal friend.

I am, sir, your obt. servant,

Joshua H. Catterail

This was police work, was it? He wondered if Mr Vimes were trying to tell him something. There were other letters. The Community Co-ordinator of Equal Heights for Dwarfs was demanding that dwarfs in the Watch be allowed to carry an axe rather than the traditional sword, and should be sent to investigate only those crimes committed by tall people. The Thieves’ Guild was complaining that Commander Vimes had said publicly that most thefts were committed by thieves.

You’d need the wisdom of King Isiahdanu to tackle them, and these were only today’s letters.

He picked up the next one and read: ‘Translation of text found in Fr Tubelcek’s mouth. Why? SV.’

Carrot dutifully read the translation.

‘In his mouth? Someone tried to put words in his mouth?’ said Carrot, to the silent room.

He shivered, but not because of the cold that came from fear. Vimes’s office was always cold. Vimes was an outdoors person. Fog was dancing in the open window, little fingers of it drifting in the light.

The next paper down the heap was a copy of Cheery’s iconograph. Carrot stared at the two blurred red eyes.

‘Captain Carrot?’

He half-turned his head, but kept looking at the picture.

‘Yes, Fred?’

‘We’ve got the murderer! We’ve got ’im!’

‘Is he a golem?’

‘How did you know that?’

The tincture of night began to suffuse the soup of the afternoon.

Lord Vetinari considered the sentence, and found it good. He liked ‘tincture’ particularly. Tincture. Tincture. It was a distinguished word, and pleasantly countered by the flatness of ‘soup’. The soup of the afternoon. Yes. In which may well be found the croutons of teatime.

He was aware that he was a little light-headed. He’d never have thought a sentence like that in a normal frame of mind.

In the fog outside the window, just visible by the candlelight, he saw the crouching shape of Constable Downspout.

A gargoyle, eh? He’d wondered why the Watch was indented for five pigeons a week on its wages bill. A gargoyle in the Watch, whose job it was to watch. That would be Captain Carrot’s idea.

Lord Vetinari got up carefully from the bed and closed the shutters. He walked slowly to his writing table, pulled his journal out of its drawer, then tugged out a wad of manuscript and unstoppered the ink bottle.

Now then, where had he got to?

Chapter Eight, he read unsteadily, The Rites of Man.^{48}

Ah, yes …

‘Concerning Truth,’ he wrote, ‘that which May be Spoken as Events Dictate, but should be Heard on Every Ocasfion …’

He wondered how he could work ‘soup of the afternoon’ into the treatise, or at least ‘tincture of night’.

The pen scratched across the paper.

Unheeded on the floor lay the tray that had contained a bowl of nourishing gruel, concerning which he had resolved to have strong words with the cook when he felt better. It had been tasted by three tasters, including Sergeant Detritus, who was unlikely to be poisoned by anything that worked on humans or even by most things that worked on trolls … but probably by most things that worked on trolls.