Feet of Clay

‘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 halfway 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.^{64} 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.