Stronginthearm hurried back down the steps.
When he was half-way down Dibbuk had laid his head on the anvil.
When Stronginthearm reached the bottom the hammer struck for the first time.
When he was half-way across the ash-crusted floor, other workers scurrying after him, the hammer struck for the second time.
As he reached Dibbuk the hammer struck for the third time.
The glow faded in the golem’s eyes. A crack appeared across the impassive face.
The hammer went back up for the fourth time
‘Duck!’ screamed Stronginthearm
and then there was nothing but pottery.
When the thunder had died away, the foundry master got to his feet and brushed himself off. Dust and wreckage were strewn across the floor. The hammer had jumped its bearings and was lying by the anvil in a heap of golem shards.
Stronginthearm gingerly picked up a piece of a foot, tossed it aside, and then reached down again and pulled a slate out of the wreckage.
He read:
THE OLD MEN HELPED US!
THOU SHALT NOT KILL!
CLAY OF MY CLAY!
SHAME.
SORROW.
His foreman looked over Stronginthearm’s shoulder. ‘What did it go and do that for?’
‘How should I know?’ snapped Stronginthearm.
‘I mean, it brought the tea round this afternoon as normal as anything. Then it went off for a coupla hours, and now this . . .’
Stronginthearm shrugged. A golem was a golem and that was all there was to it, but the recollection of that bland face positioning itself under the giant hammer had shaken him.
‘I heard the other day the sawmill in Dimwell Street wouldn’t mind selling the one it’s got,’ said the foreman. ‘It sawed up a mahogany trunk into matchsticks, or something. You want I should go and have a word?’
Stronginthearm looked at the slate again.
Dibbuk had never been very wordy. He’d carry red-hot iron, hammer sword-blanks with his fists, clean out clinkers from a smelter still too hot for a man to touch . . . and never say a word. Of course, he couldn’t say any words, but Dibbuk had always given the impression that there were none he’d particularly wanted to say in any case. He just worked. These were the most words he’d ever written at any one time.
They spoke to Stronginthearm of black distress, and a mind that would have been screaming if it could only have uttered a sound. Which was daft! The things couldn’t commit suicide.
‘Boss?’ said the foreman. ‘I said, you want me to get another one?’
Stronginthearm skimmed the slate away and, with a feeling of relief, watched it shatter against the wall. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Just clear this thing up. And get the bloody hammer fixed.’
Sergeant Colon, after some considerable effort, managed to get his head higher than the gutter.
‘You – you all right, Corporal Lord de Nobbes?’ he mumbled.
‘Dunno, Fred. Whose face is this?’
‘S mine, Nobby.’
Thank gods for that, I thought it was me . . .’
Colon fell back. ‘We’re lyin’ in the gutter, Nobby,’ he moaned. ‘Ooo.’
‘We’re all lyin’ in the gutter, Fred. But some of us’re lookin’ at the stars
‘Well, I’m lookin’ at your face, Nobby. Stars’d be a lot better, believe you me. C’mon . . .’
With several false starts they both managed to get upright, mainly by pulling themselves up one another.
‘Where’re’re’re we, Nobby?’
‘m sure we left the Drum,. . . ‘ve I got a sheet over m’head?’
‘It’s the fog, Nobby.’
‘What about these legs down here?’
‘I reckon them’s your legs, Nobby. I’ve got mine.’
‘Right. Right. Ooo … I reckon I drunk a lot, Sarge.’
‘Drunk as a lord, eh?’
Nobby reached gingerly up to his helmet. Someone had put a paper coronet around it. His questing hand found a dog-end behind his ear.
It was that unpleasant hour of the drinking day when, after a few hours’ quality gutter-time, you’re beginning to feel the retribution of sobriety while still being drunk enough to make it worse.
‘How’d we get here, Sarge?’
Colon started to scratch his head and stopped because of the noise.
‘I reckon . . .’ he said, winnowing the frazzled shreds of his short-term memory, ‘I… reckon. . . seems to me there was something about stormin’ the palace and demandin’ your birthright. . .’
Nobby choked and spat out the cigarette. ‘We didn’t do that, did we?’
‘You was shouting we ought to do it . . .’
‘Oh, gods . . .’ moaned Nobby.
‘But I reckon you threw up around that time.’
‘That’s a relief, anyway.’
‘Well… it was all over Grabber Hoskins. But he tripped over someone before he could get us.’
Colon suddenly patted his pockets. ‘And I’ve still got the tea money,’ he said. Another cloud of memory scudded across the sunshine of oblivion. ‘Well. . . three pennies of it. . .’
The urgency of this got through to Nobby. Thruppence?’
‘Yeah, well . . . after you started orderin’ all them expensive drinks for the whole bar . . . well, you din’t have no money and it was either me payin’ for them or . . .’ Colon moved his finger across his throat and went: ‘Kssssh!’
‘You tellin’ me we paid for Happy Hour in the Drum?’
‘Not so much Happy Hour,’ said Colon miserably. ‘More sort of Ecstatic One-Hundred-and-Fifty Minutes. I didn’t even know you could buy gin in pints.’
Nobby tried to focus on the fog. ‘No one can drink gin by the pint, Sarge.’
‘That’s what I kept sayin’, and would you listen?’
Nobby sniffed. ‘We’re close to the river,’ he said. ‘Let’s try to get . . .
Something roared, very close by. It was long and low, like a foghorn in serious distress. It was the sound you might hear from a cattleyard on a nervous night, and it went on and on, and then stopped so abruptly it caught the silence unawares.
‘. . . far away from that as we can,’ said Nobby. The sound had done the work of an ice-cold shower and about two pints of black coffee.
Colon spun around. He desperately needed something that would do the work of a laundry. ‘Where did it come from?’ he said.
‘It was . . . over there, wasn’t it?’
‘I thought it was that way!’
In the fog, all directions were the same.
‘I think . . .’ said Colon, slowly, ‘that we ort to go and make a report about this as soon as possible.’
‘Right,’ said Nobby. ‘Which way?’
‘Let’s just run, eh?’
Constable Downspout’s huge pointy ears quivered as the noise boomed over the city. He turned his head carefully, triangulating for height, direction and distance. And then he remembered it.
The cry was heard in the Watch House, but muffled by the fog.
It entered the open head of the golem Dorfl and bounced around inside, echoing down, down among the small cracks in the clay until, at the very edge of perception, little grains danced together.
The sightless sockets stared at the wall. No one heard the cry that came back from the dead skull, because there was no mouth to utter it and not even a mind to guide it, but it screamed out into the night:
CLAY OF MY CLAY, THOU SHALT NOT KILL! THOU SHALT NOT DIE!
Samuel Vimes dreamed about Clues.
He had a jaundiced view of Clues. He instinctively distrusted them. They got in the way.
And he distrusted the kind of person who’d take one look at another man and say in a lordly voice to his companion, ‘Ah, my dear sir, I can tell you nothing except that he is a left-handed stonemason who has spent some years in the merchant navy and has recently fallen on hard times,’ and then unroll a lot of supercilious commentary about calluses and stance and the state of a man’s boots, when exactly the same comments could apply to a man who was wearing his old clothes because he’d been doing a spot of home bricklaying for a new barbecue pit, and had been tattooed once when he was drunk and seventeen[14] and in fact got seasick on a wet pavement. What arrogance! What an insult to the rich and chaotic variety of the human experience!
It was the same with more static evidence. The footprints in the flowerbed were probably in the real world left by the window-cleaner. The scream in the night was quite likely a man getting out of bed and stepping sharply on an upturned hairbrush.
The real world was far too real to leave neat little hints. It was full of too many things. It wasn’t by eliminating the impossible that you got at the truth, however improbable; it was by the much harder process of eliminating the possibilities. You worked away, patiently asking questions and looking hard at things. You walked and talked, and in your heart you just hoped like hell that some bugger’s nerve’d crack and he’d give himself up.