Feet of Clay Read online

  “What are we looking for?” Angua said. She sniffed. There was a nastily familiar tang in the air.

  “It’s…are you ready for this?…the Battle Bread of B’hrian Bloodaxe!” said Carrot, rummaging in a desk by the entrance.

  “A loaf of bread? You brought me here to see a loaf of bread?”

  She sniffed again. Yes. Blood. Fresh blood.

  “That’s right,” said Carrot. “It’s only going to be here a couple of weeks on loan. It’s the actual bread he personally wielded at the Battle of Koom Valley, killing fifty-seven trolls although”—and here Carrot’s tone changed down from enthusiasm to civic respectability—“that was a long time ago and we shouldn’t let ancient history blind us to the realities of a multi-ethnic society in the Century of the Fruitbat.”

  There was a creak of a door.

  Then: “This battle bread,” said Angua, indistinctly. “Black, isn’t it? Quite a lot bigger than normal bread?”

  “Yes, that’s right,” said Carrot.

  “And Mr. Hopkinson…A short man? Little white pointy beard?”

  “That’s him.”

  “And his head all smashed in?”

  “What?”

  “I think you’d better come and look,” said Angua, backing away.

  Dragon King of Arms sat alone among his candles.

  So that was Commander Sir Samuel Vimes, he mused. Stupid man. Clearly can’t see beyond the chip on his shoulder. And people like that rise to high office these days. Still, such people have their uses, which presumably is why Vetinari has elevated him. Stupid men are often capable of things the clever would not dare to contemplate…

  He sighed, and pulled another tome towards him. It was not much bigger than many others which lined his study, a fact which might have surprised anyone who knew its contents.

  He was rather proud of it. It was quite an unusual piece of work, but he had been surprised—or would have been surprised, had Dragon been really surprised at anything at all for the last hundred years or so—at how easy some of it had been. He didn’t even need to read it now. He knew it by heart. The family trees were properly planted, the words were down there on the page, and all he had to do was sing along.

  The first page was headed: “The Descent of King Carrot I, by the Grace of the Gods King of Ankh-Morpork.” A long and complex family tree occupied the next dozen pages until it reached: Married ( )…The words there were merely pencilled in.

  “Delphine Angua von Uberwald,” said Dragon aloud. “Father—and, ah-ha, sire—Baron Guye von Uberwald, also known as Silvertail; mother, Mme. Serafine Soxe-Bloonberg, also known as Yellowfang, of Genua…”

  It had been quite an achievement, that part. He had expected his agents to have had some difficulty with the more lupine areas of Angua’s ancestry, but it turned out that mountain wolves took quite a lot of interest in that sort of thing as well. Angua’s ancestors had definitely been among the leaders of the pack.

  Dragon King of Arms grinned. As far as he was concerned, species was a secondary consideration. What really mattered in an individual was a good pedigree.

  Ah, well. That was the future as it might have been.

  He pushed the book aside. One of the advantages of a life much longer than average was that you saw how fragile the future was. Men said things like “peace in our time” or “an empire that will last a thousand years,” and less than half a lifetime later no one even remembered who they were, let alone what they had said or where the mob had buried their ashes. What changed history were smaller things. Often a few strokes of the pen would do the trick.

  He pulled another tome towards him. The frontispiece bore the words. “The Descent of King…” Now, what would the man call himself? That at least was not calculable. Oh, well…

  Dragon picked up his pencil and wrote: “Nobbs.”

  He smiled in the candlelit room.

  People kept on talking about the true king of Ankh-Morpork, but history taught a cruel lesson. It said—often in words of blood—that the true king was the one who got crowned.

  Books filled this room, too. That was the first impression—one of dank, oppressive bookishness.

  The late Father Tubelcek was sprawled across a drift of fallen books. He was certainly dead. No one could have bled that much and still been alive. Or survived for long with a head like a deflated football. Someone must have hit him with a lump hammer.

  “This old lady came running out screaming,” said Constable Visit, saluting. “So I went in and it was just like this, sir.”

  “Just like this, Constable Visit?”

  “Yes, sir. And the name’s Visit-The-Infidel-With-Explanatory-Pamphlets, sir.”

  “Who was the old lady?”

  “She says she’s Mrs. Kanacki, sir. She says she always brings him his meals. She says she does for him.”

  “Does for him?”

  “You know, sir. Cleaning and sweeping.”

  There was, indeed, a tray on the floor, along with a broken bowl and some spilled porridge. The lady who did for the old man had been shocked to find that someone else had done for him first.

  “Did she touch him?” he said.

  “She says not, sir.”

  Which meant the old priest had somehow achieved the neatest death Vimes had ever seen. His hands were crossed on his chest. His eyes had been closed.

  And something had been put in his mouth. It looked like a rolled-up piece of paper. It gave the corpse a disconcertingly jaunty look, as though he’d decided to have a last cigarette after dying.

  Vimes gingerly picked out the little scroll and unrolled it. It was covered with meticulously written but unfamiliar symbols. What made them particularly noteworthy was the fact that their author had apparently made use of the only liquid lying around in huge quantities.

  “Yuk,” said Vimes. “Written in blood. Does this mean anything to anyone?”

  “Yes, sir!”

  Vimes rolled his eyes. “Yes, Constable Visit?”

  “Visit-The-Infidel-With-Explanatory-Pamphlets, sir,” said Constable Visit, looking hurt.

  “‘The-Infidel-With-Explanatory-Pamphlets* ’ I was just about to say it, Constable,” said Vimes. “Well?”

  “It’s an ancient Klatchian script,” said Constable Visit. “One of the desert tribes called the Cenotines, sir. They had a sophisticated but fundamentally flawed…”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” said Vimes, who could recognize the verbal foot getting ready to stick itself in the aural door. “But do you know what it means?”

  “I could find out, sir.”

  “Good.”

  “Incidentally, were you able by any chance to find time to have a look at those leaflets I gave you the other day, sir?”

  “Been very busy!” said Vimes automatically.

  “Not to worry, sir,” said Visit, and smiled the wan smile of those doing good against great odds. “When you’ve got a moment will be fine.”

  The old books that had been knocked from the shelves had spilled their pages everywhere. There were splashes of blood on many of them.

  “Some of these look religious,” Vimes said. “You might find something.” He turned. “Detritus, have a look round, will you?”

  Detritus paused in the act of laboriously drawing a chalk outline around the body. “Yessir. What for, sir?”

  “Anything you find.”

  “Right, sir.”

  With a grunt, Vimes hunkered down and prodded at a gray smear on the floor. “Dirt,” he said.

  “You get dat on floors, sir,” said Detritus, helpfully.

  “Except this is off-white. We’re on black loam,” said Vimes.

  “Ah,” said Sergeant Detritus. “A Clue.”

  “Could be just dirt, of course.”

  There was something else. Someone had made an attempt to tidy up the books. They’d stacked several dozen of them in one neat towering pile, one book wide, largest books on the bottom, all the edges squared up with geometrical precision.
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  “Now that I don’t understand,” said Vimes. “There’s a fight. The old man is viciously attacked. Then someone—maybe it was him, dying, maybe it was the murderer—writes something down using the poor man’s own blood. And rolls it up neatly and pops it into his mouth like a sweetie. Then he does die and someone shuts his eyes and makes him tidy and piles these books up neatly and…does what? Walks out into the seething hurly-burly that is Ankh-Morpork?”

  Sergeant Detritus’s honest brow furrowed with the effort of thought. “Could be a…could be dere’s a footprint outside der window,” he said. “Dat’s always a Clue wort’ lookin’ for.”

  Vimes sighed. Detritus, despite a room-temperature IQ, made a good copper and a damn good sergeant. He had that special type of stupidity that was hard to fool. But the only thing more difficult than getting him to grasp an idea was getting him to let go of it.*

  “Detritus,” he said, as kindly as possible, “There’s a thirty-foot drop into the river outside the window. There won’t be—” He paused. This was the river Ankh, after all. “Any footprints’d be bound to have oozed back by now,” he corrected himself. “Almost certainly.”

  He looked outside, though, just in case. The river gurgled and sucked below him. There were no footprints, even on its famously crusted surface. But there was another smear of dirt on the windowsill.

  Vimes scratched some up, and sniffed at it.

  “Looks like some more white clay,” he said.

  He couldn’t think of any white clay around the city. Once you got outside the walls it was thick black loam all the way to the Ramtops. A man walking across it would be two inches taller by the time he got to the other side of a field.

  “White clay,” he said. “Where the hell is white-clay country round here?”

  “It a mystery,” said Detritus.

  Vimes grinned mirthlessly. It was a mystery. And he didn’t like mysteries. Mysteries had a way of getting bigger if you didn’t solve them quickly. Mysteries pupped.

  Mere murders happened all the time. And usually even Detritus could solve them. When a distraught woman was standing over a fallen husband holding a right-angled poker and crying “He never should’ve said that about our Neville!” there was only a limited amount you could do to spin out the case beyond the next coffee break. And when various men or parts thereof were hanging from or nailed to various fixtures in the Mended Drum on a Saturday night, and the other clientele were all looking innocent, you didn’t need even a Detritic intelligence to work out what had been happening.

  He looked down at the late Father Tubelcek. It was amazing he’d bled so much, with his pipe-cleaner arms and toast-rack chest. He certainly wouldn’t have been able to put up much of a fight.

  Vimes leaned down and gently raised one of the corpse’s eyelids. A milky blue eye with a black center looked back at him from wherever the old priest was now.

  A religious old man who lived in a couple of little poky rooms and obviously didn’t go out much, from the smell. What kind of threat could he…?

  Constable Visit poked his head around the door. “There’s a dwarf down here with no eyebrows and a frizzled beard says you told him to come, sir,” he said. “And some citizens say Father Tubelcek is their priest and they want to bury him decently.”

  “Ah, that’ll be Littlebottom. Send him up.” said Vimes, straightening. “Tell the others they’ll have to wait.”

  Littlebottom climbed the stairs, took in the scene, and managed to reach the window in time to be sick.

  “Better now?” said Vimes eventually.

  “Er…yes. I hope so.”

  “I’ll leave you to it, then.”

  “Er…what exactly did you want me to do?” said Littlebottom, but Vimes was already half-way down the stairs.

  Angua growled. It was the signal to Carrot that he could open his eyes again.

  Women, as Colon had remarked to Carrot once when he thought the lad needed advice, could be funny about little things. Maybe they didn’t like to be seen without their make-up on, or insisted on buying smaller suitcases than men even though they always took more clothes. In Angua’s case she didn’t like to be seen en route from human to werewolf shape, or vice versa. It was just something she had a thing about, she said. Carrot could see her in either shape but not in the various ones she occupied on the way through, in case he never wanted to see her again.

  Through werewolf eyes the world was different.

  For one thing, it was in black-and-white. At least, that small part of it which as a human she’d thought of as “vision” was monochrome—but who cared that vision had to take a back seat when smell drove instead, laughing and sticking its arm out of the window and making rude gestures at all the other senses? Afterward, she always remembered the odors as colors and sounds. Blood was rich brown and deep brass, stale bread was a surprisingly tinkly bright blue, and every human being was a four-dimensional kaleidoscopic symphony. For nasal vision meant seeing through time as well as space: man could stand still for a minute and, an hour later, there he’d still be, to the nose, his odors barely faded.

  She prowled the aisles of the Dwarf Bread Museum, muzzle to the ground. Then she went out into the alley for a while and tried there too.

  After five minutes she padded back to Carrot and gave him the signal again.

  When he re-opened his eyes she was pulling her shirt on over her head. That was one thing where humans had the edge. You couldn’t beat a pair of hands.

  “I thought you’d be down the street and following someone,” he said.

  “Follow who?” said Angua.

  “Pardon?”

  “I can smell him, and you, and the bread, and that’s it.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “Dirt. Dust. The usual stuff. Oh, there are some old traces, days old. I know you were in here last week, for example. There are lots of smells. Grease, meat, pine resin for some reason, old food…but I’ll swear no living thing’s been in here in the last day or so but him and us.”

  “But you told me everyone leaves a trail.”

  “They do.”

  Carrot looked down at the late curator. However you phrased it, however broadly you applied your definitions, he definitely couldn’t have committed suicide. Not with a loaf of bread.

  “Vampires?” said Carrot. “They can fly…”

  Angua sighed. “Carrot, I could tell if a vampire had been in here in the last month.”

  “There’s almost half a dollar in pennies in the drawer,” said Carrot. “Anyway, a thief would be here for the Battle Bread, wouldn’t they? It is a very valuable cultural artifact.”

  “Has the poor man got any relatives?” said Angua.

  “He’s got an elderly sister, I believe. I come in once a month just to have a chat. He lets me handle the exhibits, you know.”

  “That must be fun,” said Angua, before she could stop herself.

  “It’s very…satisfying, yes,” said Carrot solemnly. “It reminds me of home.”

  Angua sighed and stepped into the room behind the little museum. It was like the back rooms of museums everywhere, full of junk and things there is no room for on the shelves and also items of doubtful provenance, such as coins dated “52 BC.” There were some benches with shards of dwarf bread on them, a tidy tool rack with various sizes of kneading hammer, and papers all over the place. Against one wall, and occupying a large part of the room, was an oven.

  “He researches old recipes,” said Carrot, who seemed to feel he had to promote the old man’s expertise even in death.

  Angua opened the oven door. Warmth spilled out into the room. “Hell of a bake oven,” she said. “What’re these things?”

  “Ah…see he’s been making drop scones,” said Carrot. “Quite deadly at short range.”

  She shut the door. “Let’s get back to the Yard and they can send someone out to—”

  Angua stopped.

  These were always the dangerous moments, just after a shape-ch
ange this close to full moon. It wasn’t so bad when she was a wolf. She was still as intelligent, or at least she felt as intelligent, although life was a lot simpler and so she was probably just extremely intelligent for a wolf. It was when she became a human again that things were difficult. For a few minutes, until the morphic field fully reasserted itself, all her senses were still keen; smells were still incredibly strong, and her ears could hear sounds way outside the stunted human range. And she could think more about the things she experienced. A wolf could sniff a lamp-post and know that old Bonzo had been past yesterday, and was feeling a bit under the weather, and was still being fed tripe by his owner, but a human mind could actually think about the whys and where-fores.

  “There is something else,” she said, and breathed in gently. “Faint. Not a living thing. But…can’t you smell it? Something like dirt, but not quite. It’s kind of…yellow-orange…”

  “Um…” said Carrot, tactfully. “Some of us don’t have your nose.”

  “I’ve smelled it before, somewhere in this town. Can’t remember where…It’s strong. Stronger than the other smells. It’s a muddy smell.”

  “Hah, well, on these streets…”

  “No, it’s not…exactly mud. Sharper. More treble.”

  “You know, sometimes I envy you. It must be nice to be a wolf. Just for a while.”

  “It has its drawbacks.” Like fleas, she thought, as they locked up the museum. And the food. And the constant nagging feeling that you should be wearing three bras at once.

  She kept telling herself she had it under control and she did, in a way. She prowled the city on moonlit nights and, OK, there was the occasional chicken, but she always remembered where she’d been and went round next day to shove some money under the door.

  It was hard to be a vegetarian who had to pick bits of meat out of her teeth in the morning. She was definitely on top of it, though.