Feet of Clay (7 page)

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 window-sill.

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 centre 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? Afterwards, she always remembered the odours as colours and sounds. Blood was rich brown and deep bass, 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: a man could stand still for a minute and, an hour later, there he’d still be, to the nose, his odours 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 artefact.’

‘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 … I 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-change 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 wherefores.

‘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, okay, 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.

Definitely
, she reassured herself.

It was Angua’s mind that prowled the night, not a werewolf mind. She was almost entirely sure of that. A werewolf wouldn’t stop at chickens, not by a long way.

She shuddered.

Who was she kidding? It was easy to be a vegetarian by day. It was preventing yourself from becoming a humanitarian at night that took the real effort.

The first clocks were striking eleven as Vimes’s sedan chair wobbled to a halt outside the Patrician’s palace. Commander Vimes’s legs were beginning
to
give out, but he ran up five flights of stairs as fast as possible and collapsed on a chair in the waiting salon.

Minutes went past.

You didn’t knock on the Patrician’s door. He summoned you in the certain knowledge that you would be there.

Vimes sat back, enjoying a moment’s peace.

Something inside his coat went: ‘Bing bing bingley bing!’

He sighed, pulled out a leather-bound package about the size of a small book, and opened it.

A friendly yet slightly worried face peered up at him from its cage.

‘Yes?’ said Vimes.

‘11 am. Appointment with the Patrician.’

‘Yes? Well? It’s five past now.’

‘Er. So you’ve had it, have you?’ said the imp.

‘No.’

‘Shall I go on remembering it or what?’

‘No. Anyway, you didn’t remind me about the College of Arms at ten.’

The imp looked panic-stricken.

‘That’s Tuesday, isn’t it? Could’ve sworn it was Tuesday.’

‘It was an hour ago.’

‘Oh.’ The imp was downcast. ‘Er. All right. Sorry. Um. Hey, I could tell you what time it is in Klatch, if you like. Or Genua. Or Hunghung. Any of those places. You name it.’

‘I don’t need to know the time in Klatch.’

‘You might,’ said the imp desperately. ‘Think
how
people will be impressed if, during a dull moment of the conversation, you could say “Incidentally, in Klatch it’s an hour ago”. Or Bes Pelargic. Or Ephebe. Ask me. Go on. I don’t mind. Any of those places.’

Vimes sighed inwardly. He had a notebook. He took notes in it. It was always useful. And then Sybil, gods bless her, had brought him this fifteen-function imp which did so many other things, although as far as he could see at least ten of its functions consisted of apologizing for its inefficiency in the other five.

‘You could take a memo,’ Vimes said.

‘Wow! Really? Gosh! Okay. Right.
No
problem.’

Vimes cleared his throat. ‘See Corporal Nobbs re time-keeping; also re Earldom.’

‘Er … sorry, is this the memo?’

‘Yes.’

‘Sorry, you should have said “memo” first. I’m pretty certain it’s in the manual.’

‘All right, it
was
a memo.’

‘Sorry, you have to say it again.’

‘Memo: See Corporal Nobbs re time-keeping; also re Earldom.’

‘Got it,’ said the imp. ‘Would you like to be reminded of this at any particular time?’

‘The time here?’ said Vimes, nastily. ‘Or the time in, say, Klatch?’

‘As a matter of fact, I can tell you what time it—’

‘I think I’ll write it in my notebook, if you don’t mind,’ said Vimes.

‘Oh, well, if you prefer, I can recognize
handwriting
,’ said the imp proudly. ‘I’m quite advanced.’

Vimes pulled out his notebook and held it up. ‘Like this?’ he said.

The imp squinted for a moment. ‘Yep,’ it said. ‘That’s handwriting, sure enough. Curly bits, spiky bits, all joined together. Yep. Handwriting. I’d recognize it anywhere.’

‘Aren’t you supposed to tell me what it says?’

The imp looked wary. ‘Says?’ it said. ‘It’s supposed to make noises?’

Vimes put the battered book away and shut the lid of the organizer. Then he sat back and carried on waiting.

Someone very clever – certainly someone much cleverer than whoever had trained that imp – must have made the clock for the Patrician’s waiting room. It went tick-tock like any other clock. But somehow, and against all usual horological practice, the tick and the tock were irregular. Tick tock tick … and then the merest fraction of a second longer before … tock tick tock … and then a tick a fraction of a second earlier than the mind’s ear was now prepared for. The effect was enough, after ten minutes, to reduce the thinking processes of even the best-prepared to a sort of porridge. The Patrician must have paid the clockmaker quite highly.

The clock said quarter past eleven.

Vimes walked over to the door and, despite precedent, knocked gently.

There was no sound from within, no murmur of distant voices.

He tried the handle. The door was unlocked.

Lord Vetinari had always said that punctuality was the politeness of princes.

Vimes went in.

Cheery dutifully scraped up the crumbly white dirt and then examined the corpse of the late Father Tubelcek.

Anatomy was an important study at the Alchemists’ Guild, owing to the ancient theory that the human body represented a microcosm of the universe, although when you saw one opened up it was hard to imagine which part of the universe was small and purple and went
blomp-blomp
when you prodded it. But in any case you tended to pick up practical anatomy as you went along, and sometimes scraped it off the walls as well. When new students tried an experiment that was particularly successful in terms of explosive force, the result was often a cross between a major laboratory refit and a game of Hunt-the-other-Kidney.