There was pandemonium in the servants’ hall.
‘Winkles’ Old Peculiar?’ said the butler.
‘Another one hundred and four pints!’ said the footman.
The butler shrugged. ‘Harry, Sid, Rob and Jeffrey . . . two trays apiece and double down to the King’s Head again right now! What else is he doing?’
‘Well, they’re supposed to be having a poetry reading but he’s telling ’em jokes . . .’
‘Anecdotes?’
‘Not exactly.’
It was amazing how it could drizzle and fog at the same time. Wind was blowing both through the open window, and Vimes was forced to shut it. He lit the candles by his desk and opened his notebook. Probably he should use the demonic organizer, but he liked to see things written down fair and square. He could think better when he wrote things down.
He wrote ‘Arsenic’, and drew a big circle round it. Around the circle he wrote: ‘Fr. Tubelcek’s fingernails’ and ‘Rats and ‘Vetinari’ and ‘Mrs Easy’. Lower down the page he wrote: ‘Golems’, and drew a second circle. Around that one he wrote: ‘Fr. Tubelcek?’ and ‘Mr Hopkinson?’. After some thought he wrote down: ‘Stolen clay’ and ‘Grog’.
And then: ‘Why would a golem admit to something it didn’t do?’
He stared at the candlelight for a while and then wrote: ‘Rats eat stuff.’ More time passed.
‘What has the priest got that anyone wants?’ From downstairs came the sound of armour as a patrol came in. A corporal shouted.
‘Words,’ wrote Vimes. ‘What had Mr Hopkinson got? Dwarf bread? ť Not stolen. What else had he got?’
Vimes looked at this, too, and then he wrote ‘Bakery’, stared at the word for a while, and rubbed it out and replaced it with ‘Oven?’. He drew a ring around ‘Oven?’ and a ring around ‘Stolen clay’, and linked the two.
There’d been arsenic under the old priest’s fingernails. Perhaps he’d put down rat poison? There were plenty of uses for arsenic. It wasn’t as if you couldn’t buy it by the pound from any alchemist.
He wrote down ‘Arsenic Monster’ and looked at it. You found dirt under fingernails. If people had put up a fight you might find blood or skin. You didn’t find grease and arsenic.
He looked at the page again and, after still more thought, wrote: ‘Golems aren’t alive. But they think they are alive. What do things that are alive do? ť Ans: Breathe, eat, crap.’ He paused, staring out at the fog, and then wrote very carefully: ‘And make more things.’
Something tingled at the back of his neck.
He circled the late Hopkinson’s name and drew a line down the page to another circle, in which he wrote: ‘He’d got a big oven.’
Hmm. Cheery had said you couldn’t bake clay properly in a bread oven. But maybe you could bake it improperly.
He looked up at the candlelight again.
They couldn’t do that, could they? Oh, gods . . . No, surely not …
But, after all, all you needed was clay. And a holy man who knew how to write the words. And someone to actually sculpt the figure, Vimes supposed, but golems had had hundreds and hundreds of years to learn to be good with their hands . . .
Those great big hands. The ones that looked so very fist-like.
And then the first thing they’d want to do would be to destroy the evidence, wouldn’t they? They probably didn’t think of it as killing, but more like a sort of switching-off. . .
He drew another rather misshapen circle on his notes.
Grog. Old baked clay, ground up small.
They’d added some of their own clay. Dorfl had a new foot, didn’t he – it? It hadn’t made it quite right. They’d put part of their own selves into a new golem.
That all sounded – well, Nobby would call it mucky. Vimes didn’t know what to call it. It sounded like some sort of secret-society thing. ‘Clay of my clay.’ My own flesh and blood . . .
Damn hulking things. Aping their betters!
Vimes yawned. Sleep. He’d be better for some sleep. Or something.
He stared at the page. Automatically his hand trailed down to the bottom drawer of his desk, as it always did when he was worried and trying to think. It wasn’t as though there was ever a bottle there these days – but old habits died ha …
There was a soft glassy ching and a faint, seductive slosh.
Vimes’s hand came up with a fat bottle. The label said: Bearhugger’s Distilleries: The MacAbre, Finest Malt.
The liquid inside almost crawled up the sides of the glass in anticipation.
He stared at it. He’d reached down into the drawer for the whisky bottle and there it was.
But it shouldn’t have been. He knew Carrot and Fred Colon kept an eye on him, but he’d never bought a bottle since he’d got married, because he’d promised Sybil, hadn’t he . . . ?
But this wasn’t any old rotgut. This was The MacAbre . . .
He’d tried it once. He couldn’t quite remember why now, since in those days the only spirits he generally drank had the subtlety of a mallet to the inner ear. He must have found the money somehow. Just a sniff of it had been like Hogswatchnight. Just a sniff. . .
‘And she said, “That’s funny – it didn’t do that last night”!’ said Corporal Nobbs.
He beamed at the company.
There was silence. Then someone in the crowd started to laugh, one of those little uncertain laughs a man laughs who is unsure that he’s not going to be silenced by those around him. Another man laughed. Two more picked it up. Then laughter exploded in the group as a whole.
Nobby basked.
‘Then there’s the one about the Klatchian who walked into a pub with a tiny piano’ he began.
‘I think,’ said Lady Selachii firmly, ‘that the buffet is ready.’
‘Got any pig knuckles?’ said Nobby cheerfully. ‘Goes down a treat with Winkles, a plate of pig knuckles.’
‘I don’t normally eat extremities,’ said Lady Selachii.
‘A pig-knuckle sandwich . . . Never tried a pig knuckle? You just can’t beat it,’ said Nobby.
‘It is … perhaps. . . not the most delicate food?’ said Lady Selachii.
‘Oh, you can cut the crusts off,’ said Nobby. ‘Even the toenails. If you’re feeling posh.’
Sergeant Colon opened his eyes, and groaned. His head ached. They’d hit him with something. It might have been a wall.
They’d tied him up, too. He was trussed hand and foot.
He appeared to be lying in darkness on a wooden floor. There was a greasy smell in the air, which seemed familiar yet annoyingly unrecognizable.
As his eyes grew accustomed to the dark he could make out very faint lines of light, such as might surround a door. He could also hear voices.
He tried to get up to his knees, and groaned as more pain crackled in his head.
When people tied you up it was bad news. Of course, it was much better news than when they killed you, but it could mean they were just putting you on one side for killing later.
This never used to happen, he told himself. In the old days, if you caught someone thieving, you practically held the door open for him to escape. That way, you got home in one piece.
By using the angle between a wall and a heavy crate he managed to get upright. This was not much of an improvement on his former position, but after the thunder in his head had died away he hopped awkwardly towards the door.
There were still voices on the other side of it.
Someone apart from Sergeant Colon was in trouble.
‘down! You got me here for this’? There’s a werewolf in the Watch! Ah-ha. Not one of your freaks. She’s a proper bimorphic! If you tossed a coin, she could smell what side it came down!’
‘How about if we kill him and drag his body away?’
‘You think she couldn’t smell the difference between a corpse and a living body?’
Sergeant Colon moaned softly.
‘Er, how about we could march him out in the fog-?’
‘And they can smell fear, idiot. Ah-ha. Why couldn’t you have let him look around? What could he have seen? I know that copper. A fat old coward with all the brains of, ah-ha, a pig. He stinks of fear all the time.’
Sergeant Colon hoped he wasn’t about to stink of anything else.
‘Send Meshugah after him, ah-ha.’
‘Are you sure? It’s getting odd. It wanders off and screams in the night, and they’re not supposed to do that. And it’s cracking up. Trust dumb golems not to do something prop’
‘Everyone knows you can’t trust golems. Ah-ha. See to it!’
I heard that Vimes is’
‘I’ve seen to Vimes!’
Colon eased himself away from the door as quietly as possible. He hadn’t the faintest idea what this thing called Meshugah the golems had made was, except that it sounded like a fine idea to be wherever it wasn’t.