‘All the wood’s greasy, sir!’
‘Corporal Littlebottom, I order you not to fall off!’
‘Very good, sir!’
Vimes pulled off his jacket. ‘Hang on to this. I’ll see if I can climb up . . .’he muttered.
‘It won’t work!’ said Angua. The thing’s shaky enough as it is!’
‘I can feel my hands slipping, sir.’
‘Good grief, why didn’t you call out earlier?’
‘Everyone seemed to be busy, sir.’
‘Turn around, sir,’ said Angua, undoing the buckles of her breastplate. ‘Right now, please! And shut your eyes!’
‘Why, what . . . ?’
‘Rrright nowwww, sirrrrr!’
‘Oh. . .yes. . .’
Vimes heard Angua back away from the candle machine, her footsteps punctuated by the clang of falling armour. Then she started running and the footsteps changed while she was running and then . . .
He opened his eyes.
The wolf sailed upwards in slow motion, caught the dwarfs shoulder in its jaws as Cheri’s grip gave way, and then arced its body so that wolf and dwarf hit the floor on the far side of the vat.
Angua rolled, whimpering.
Cheri scrambled to her feet. ‘It’s a werewolf!’
Angua rolled back and forth, pawing at her mouth.
‘What’s happened to it?’ said Cheri, her panic receding a little. ‘It looks . . . hurt. Where’s Angua? Oh. . .’
Vimes glanced at the dwarfs torn leather shirt. ‘You wear chain mail under your clothes?’ he said.
‘Oh . . . it’s my silver vest . . . but she knew about it. I told her . . .’
Vimes grabbed Angua’s collar. She moved to bite him, and then caught his eye and turned her head away.
‘She only bit the silver,’ said Cheri, distractedly.
Angua pulled herself on to her feet, glared at them, and slunk off behind some crates. They heard her whimpering which, by degrees, became a voice.
‘Blasted blasted dwarfs and their blasted vests . . .’
‘You all right, Constable?’ said Vimes.
‘Damn silver underwear . . . Can you throw me my clothes, please?’
Vimes bundled up Angua’s uniform and, eyes closed for decency’s sake, handed it around the crates.
‘No one told me she was a were’ Cheri moaned.
‘Look at it like this, Corporal,’ said Vimes, as patiently as he could. ‘If she hadn’t been a werewolf you would by now be the world’s largest novelty candle, all right?’
Angua walked from behind the crates, rubbing her mouth. The skin around it looked too pink . . .
‘It burned you?’ said Cheri.
‘It’ll heal,’ said Angua.
‘You never said you were a werewolf!’
‘How would you’ve liked me to have put it?’
‘Right,’ said Vimes, ‘if that’s all sorted out, ladies, I want this place searched. Understand?’
‘I’ve got some ointment,’ said Cheri meekly.
‘Thank you.’
They found a bag in a cellar. There were several boxes of candles. And a lot of dead rats.
Igneous the troll opened the door of his pottery a fraction. He’d intended the fraction to be no more than about one-sixteenth, but someone immediately pushed hard and turned it into rather more than one and three-quarters.
‘Here, what’s dis?’ he said, as Detritus and Carrot came in with the shell of Dorfl between them. ‘You can’t jus’ break in here’
‘We ain’t just breakin’ in,’ said Detritus.
‘Dis is an outrage,’ said Igneous. ‘You got no right comin’ in here. You got no reason’
Detritus let go of the golem and spun around. His hand shot out and caught Igneous around the throat. ‘You see dose statchoos of Monolith over dere? You see dem?’ he growled, twisting the other troll’s head to face a row of troll religious statues on the other side of the warehouse. ‘You want I should smash one open, see what dey’re fill wit’, maybe find a reason?’
Igneous’s slitted eyes darted this way and that. He might have been hard of thinking, but he could feel a killing mood when it was in the air. ‘No call for dat, I always help der Watch,’ he muttered. ‘What dis all about?’
Carrot laid out the golem on a table. ‘Start, then,’ he said. ‘Rebuild him. Use as much of the old clay as you can, understand?’
‘How can it work when its lights’re out?’ said Detritus, still puzzled by this mission of mercy.
‘He said the clay remembers!’
The sergeant shrugged.
‘And give him a tongue,’ said Carrot.
Igneous looked shocked. ‘I won’t do dat,’ he said. ‘Everybody know it blasphemy if golems speak.’
‘Oh, yeah?’ said Detritus. He strode across the warehouse to the group of statues and glared at them. Then he said, ‘Whoops, here’s me accident’ly trippin’ up, ooo, dis is me grabbin’ a statchoo for support, oh, der arm have come right off, where can I put my face . . . and what is dis white powder what I sees here with my eyes accident’ly spillin’ on der floor?’
He licked a finger and gingerly tasted the stuff.
‘Slab,’ he growled, walking back to the trembling Igneous. ‘You tellin’ me about blasphemy, you sedimentr’y coprolith? You doin’ what Captain Carrot say right now or you goin’ out of here in a sack!’
‘Dis is police brutality . . .’ Igneous muttered.
‘No, dis is just police shoutin’!’ yelled Detritus. ‘You want to try for brutality it okay wit’ me!’
Igneous tried to appeal to Carrot. ‘It not right, he got a badge, he puttin’ me in fear, he can’t do dis,’ he said.
Carrot nodded. There was a glint in his eye that Igneous should have noticed. ‘That’s correct,’ he said. ‘Sergeant Detritus?’
‘Sir?’
‘It’s been a long day for all of us. You can go off duty.’
‘Yessir!’ said Detritus, with considerable enthusiasm. He removed his badge and laid it down carefully. Then he started to struggle out of his armour.
‘Look at it like this,’ said Carrot. ‘It’s not that we’re making life, we’re simply giving life a place to live.’
Igneous finally gave up. ‘Okay, okay,’ he muttered. ‘I doin’ it. I doin’ it.’
He looked at the various lumps and shards that were all that remained of Dorfl, and rubbed the lichen on his chin.
‘You got most of the bits,’ he said, professionalism edging resentment aside for a moment. ‘I could glue him together wit’ kiln cement. Dat’d do the trick if we bakes him overnight. Lessee… I reckon I got some over dere . . .’
Detritus blinked at his finger, which was still white with the dust, and sidled over to Carrot. ‘Did I just lick dis?’ he said.
‘Er, yes,’ said Carrot.
‘T’ank goodness for dat,’ said Detritus, blinking furiously, “d hate to believe dis room was really full of giant hairy spide . . . weeble weeble sclup …”
He hit the floor, but happily.
‘Even if I do it you can’t make it come alive again,’ muttered Igneous, returning to his bench. ‘You won’t find a priest who’s goin’ to write der words for in der head, not again.’
‘He’ll make up his own words,’ said Carrot.
‘And who’s going to watch the oven?’ said Igneous. ‘It’s gonna take ’til breakfast at least . . /
‘I wasn’t planning on doing anything for the rest of tonight,’ said Carrot, taking off his helmet.
Vimes awoke around four o’clock. He’d gone to sleep at his desk. He hadn’t meant to, but his body had just shut down.
It wasn’t the first time he’d opened bleary eyes there. But at least he wasn’t lying in anything sticky.
He focused on the report he’d half-written. His notebook was beside it, page after page of laborious scrawl to remind him that he was trying to understand a complex world by means of his simple mind.
He yawned, and looked out at the shank of the night.
He didn’t have any evidence. No real evidence at all. He’d had an interview with an almost incoherent Corporal Nobbs, who hadn’t really seen anything. He had nothing that wouldn’t burn away like the fog in the morning. All he’d got were a few suspicions and a lot of coincidences, leaning against one another like a house of cards with no card on the bottom.
He peered at his notebook.
Someone seemed to have been working hard. Oh, yes. It had been him.
The events of last night jangled in his head. Why’d he written all this stuff about a coat of arms?
Oh, yes . . .
Yes!
Ten minutes later he was pushing open the door of the pottery. Warmth spilled out into the clammy air.
He found Carrot and Detritus asleep on the floor on either side of the kiln. Damn. He needed someone he could trust, but he hadn’t the heart to wake them. He’d pushed everyone very hard the last few days …
Something tapped on the door of the kiln.
Then the handle started to turn by itself.
The door opened as far as it could go and something half-slid and half-fell on to the floor.