Feet of Clay

The door was locked. Occasionally he could hear the reassuring creak of Detritus on his rounds. Outside the window, the fog condensed on Constable Downspout.

Vetinari dipped the pen in the ink and started a new page. Every so often he consulted the leather-bound journal, licking his fingers delicately to turn the thin pages.^{49}

Tendrils of fog slipped in around the shutters and brushed against the wall until they were frightened away by the candlelight.

***

Vimes pounded through the fog after the fleeing figure. It wasn’t quite so fast as him, despite the twinges in his legs and one or two warning stabs from his left knee, but whenever he came close to it some muffled pedestrian got in the way, or a cart pulled out of a cross-street.[12]

His soles told him that they’d gone right down Broad Way and had turned left into Nonesuch Street (small square paving stones). The fog was even thicker here, trapped between the trees of the park.

But Vimes was triumphant. You’ve missed your turning if you’re heading for the Shades, my lad! There’s only the Ankh Bridge now and there’ll be a guard on that— His feet told him something else. They said: ‘Wet leaves, that’s Nonesuch Street in the autumn. Small square paving stones with occasional treacherous drifts of wet leaves.’

They said it too late.

Vimes landed on his chin in the gutter, staggered upright, fell over again as the rest of the universe spun past, got up, tottered a few steps in the wrong direction, fell over again and decided to accept the majority vote for a while.

***

Dorfl was standing quietly in the station office, heavy arms folded across its chest. In front of the golem was the crossbow belonging to Sergeant Detritus, which had been converted from an ancient siege weapon. It fired a six-foot-long iron arrow. Nobby sat behind it, his finger on the trigger.

‘Put it away, Nobby! You can’t fire that in here!’ said Carrot. ‘You know we never find where the arrows stop!’

‘We wrestled a confession out of it,’ said Sergeant Colon, hopping up and down. ‘It kept on admitting it but we got it to confess in the end! And we’ve got these other crimes we’d like taken into consideration.’

Dorfl held up its slate.

I AM GUILTY.

Something fell out of its hand.

It was short, and white. A piece of matchstick, by the look of it. Carrot picked it up and stared at it. Then he looked at the list Colon had drawn up. It was quite long, and consisted of every unsolved crime in the city for the past couple of months.

‘It’s confessed to all these?’

‘Not yet,’ said Nobby.

‘We haven’t read ’em all out yet,’ said Colon.

Dorfl wrote:

I DID EVERYTHING.

‘Hey!’ said Colon. ‘Mr Vimes is going to be really pleased with us!’

Carrot walked up to the golem. There was a faint orange glow in its eyes.

‘Did you kill Father Tubelcek?’ he said.

YES.

‘See?’ said Sergeant Colon. ‘You can’t argue with that.’

‘Why did you do it?’ said Carrot.

No reply.

‘And Mr Hopkinson at the Bread Museum?’

YES.

‘You beat him to death with an iron bar?’ said Carrot.

YES.

‘Hang on,’ said Colon, ‘I thought you said he was …?’

‘Leave it, Fred,’ said Carrot. ‘Why did you kill the old man, Dorfl?’

No reply.

‘Does there have to be a reason? You can’t trust golems, my dad always used to say,’ said Colon. ‘Turn on you soon as look at you, he said.’

‘Have they ever killed anyone?’ said Carrot.

‘Not for want of thinking about it,’ said Colon darkly. ‘My dad said he had to work with one once and it used to look at him all the time. He’d turn around and there it would be … looking at him.’

Dorfl sat staring straight in front.

‘Shine a candle in its eyes!’ said Nobby.

Carrot pulled a chair across the floor and straddled it, facing Dorfl. He absent-mindedly twirled the broken match between his fingers.

‘I know you didn’t kill Mr Hopkinson and I don’t think you killed Father Tubelcek,’ he said. ‘I think he was dying when you found him. I think you tried to save him, Dorfl. In fact, I’m pretty sure I can prove it if I can see your chem—’

The light from the golem’s flaring eyes filled the room. He stepped forward, fists upraised.

Nobby fired the crossbow.

Dorfl snatched the long bolt out of the air. There was the sound of screaming metal and the bolt became a thin bar of red-hot iron with a bulge piled up around the golem’s grip.

But Carrot was behind the golem, flipping open its head. As the golem turned, raising the iron bar like a club, the fire died in its eyes.

‘Got it,’ said Carrot, holding up a yellowed scroll.

At the end of Nonesuch Street was a gibbet, where wrongdoers — or, at least, people found guilty of wrongdoing — had been hung to twist gently in the wind as examples of just retribution and, as the elements took their toll, basic anatomy as well.