Something big and dark leapt down, knocked him to the ground and disappeared into the gloom.
Vimes struggled to his feet, shook his head and set off after it. No thought was involved. It is the ancient instinct of terriers and policemen to chase anything that runs away.
As he ran he felt automatically for his bell, which would summon other Watchmen, but the Commander of the Watch didn’t carry a bell. Commanders of the Watch were on their own.
In Vimes’s squalid office Captain Carrot stared at a piece of paper:
REPAIRS TO GUTTERING, WATCH HOUSE,
PSEUDOPOLIS YARD. NEW DOWNPIPE,
35° MICKLEWHITE BEND,
FOUR RIGHT-ANGLED TRUSSES,
LABOR AND MAKING GOOD.
$16.35.
There were more like them, including Constable Downspout’s pigeon bill. He knew Sergeant Colon objected to the idea of a policeman being paid in pigeons, but Constable Downspout was a gargoyle and gargoyles had no concept of money. But they knew a pigeon when they ate it.
Still, things were improving. When Carrot had arrived the entire Watch’s petty cash had been kept on a shelf in a tin marked “Stronginthearm’s Armor Polish for Gleaming Cohorts” and, if money was needed for anything, all you had had to do was go and find Nobby and force him to give it back.
Then there was the letter from a resident in Park Lane, one of the most select addresses in the city:
Commander Vimes,
The Night Watch patrol in this street appears to be made up entirely of dwarfs. I have nothing against dwarfs amongst their own kind, at least they are not trolls, but one hears stories and I have daughters in the house. I demand that this situation is remedied instantly otherwise I shall have no option but to take up the matter with Lord Vetinari, who is a personal friend.
I am, sir, your obt. servant,
J. H. Catterail
This was police work, was it? He wondered if Mr. Vimes were trying to tell him something. There were other letters. The Community Coordinator of Equal Heights for Dwarfs was demanding that dwarfs in the Watch be allowed to carry an axe rather than the traditional sword, and should be sent to investigate only those crimes committed by tall people. The Thieves’ Guild was complaining that Commander Vimes had said publicly that most thefts were committed by thieves.
You’d need the wisdom of King Isiahdanu to tackle them, and these were only today’s letters.
He picked up the next one and read: “Translation of text found in Fr. Tubelcek’s mouth. Why? SV.”
Carrot dutifully read the translation.
“In his mouth? Someone tried to put words in his mouth?” said Carrot, to the silent room.
He shivered, but not because of the cold that came from fear. Vimes’s office was always cold. Vimes was an outdoors person. Fog was dancing in the open window, little fingers of it drifting in the light.
The next paper down the heap was a copy of Cheery’s iconograph. Carrot stared at the two blurred red eyes.
“Captain Carrot?”
He half-turned his head, but kept looking at the picture.
“Yes, Fred?”
“We’ve got the murderer! We’ve got ’im!”
“Is he a golem?”
“How did you know that?”
The tincture of night began to suffuse the soup of the afternoon.
Lord Vetinari considered the sentence, and found it good. He liked “tincture” particularly. Tincture. Tincture. It was a distinguished word, and pleasantly countered by the flatness of “soup.” The soup of the afternoon. Yes. In which may well be found the croutons of teatime.
He was aware that he was a little light-headed. He’d never have thought a sentence like that in a normal frame of mind.
In the fog outside the window, just visible by the candlelight, he saw the crouching shape of Constable Downspout.
A gargoyle, eh? He’d wondered why the Watch was indebted for five pigeons a week on its wages bill. A gargoyle in the Watch, whose job it was to watch. That would be Captain Carrot’s idea.
Lord Vetinari got up carefully from the bed and closed the shutters. He walked unsteadily to his writing table, pulled his journal out of its drawer, then tugged out a wad of manuscript and unstopped the ink bottle.
Now then, where had he got to?
Chapter Eight, he read unsteadily, The Rites of Man.
Ah, yes…
“Concerning Truth,” he wrote, “that which May be Spoken as Events Dictate, but should be Heard on Every Ocassion…”
He wondered how he could work “soup of the afternoon” into the treatise, or at least “tincture of night.”
The pen scratched across the paper.
Unheeded on the floor lay the tray that had contained a bowl of nourishing gruel, concerning which he had resolved to have strong words with the cook when he felt better. It had been tasted by three tasters, including Sergeant Detritus, who was unlikely to be poisoned by anything that worked on humans…but probably not by most things that worked on trolls.
The door was locked. Occasionally he could hear the reassuring creak of Detritus on his rounds. Outside the window, the fog condensed on Constable Downspout.
Vetinari dipped the pen in the ink and started a new page. Every so often he consulted the leather-bound journal, licking his fingers delicately to turn the thin pages.
Tendrils of fog slipped in around the shutters and brushed against the wall until they were frightened away by the candlelight.
Vimes pounded through the fog after the fleeing figure. It wasn’t quite so fast as him, despite the twinges in his legs and one or two warning stabs from his left knee, but whenever he came close to it some muffled pedestrian got in the way, or a cart pulled out of a cross-street.*
His soles told him that they’d gone right down Broad Way and had turned left into Nonesuch Street (small square paving stones). The fog was even thicker here, trapped between the trees of the park.
But Vimes was triumphant. You’ve missed your turning if you’re heading for the Shades, my lad! There’s only the Ankh Bridge now and there’ll be a guard on that—
His feet told him something else. They said: “Wet leaves, that’s Nonesuch Street in the autumn. Small square paving stones with occasional treacherous drifts of wet leaves.”
They said it too late.
Vimes landed on his chin in the gutter, staggered upright, fell over again as the rest of the universe spun past, got up, tottered a few steps in the wrong direction, fell over again and decided to accept the majority vote for a while.
Dorfl was standing quietly in the station office, heavy arms folded across its chest. In front of the golem was the crossbow belonging to Sergeant Detritus, which had been converted from an ancient siege weapon. It fired a six-foot-long iron arrow. Nobby sat behind it, his finger on the trigger.
“Put it away, Nobby! You can’t fire that in here!” said Carrot. “You know we never find where the arrows stop!”
“We wrestled a confession out of it,” said Sergeant Colon, hopping up and down. “It kept on admitting it but we got it to confess in the end! And we’ve got these other crimes we’d like taken into consideration.”
Dorfl held up its slate.
I AM GUILTY.
Something fell out of its hand.
It was short, and white. A piece of matchstick, by the look of it. Carrot picked it up and stared at it. Then he looked at the list Colon had drawn up. It was quite long, and consisted of every unsolved crime in the city for the past couple of months.
“It’s confessed to all these?”
“Not yet,” said Nobby.
“We haven’t read ’em all out yet,” said Colon.
Dorfl wrote:
I DID EVERYTHING.
“Hey!” said Colon. “Mr. Vimes is going to be really pleased with us!”
Carrot walked up to the golem. There was a faint orange glow in its eyes.
“Did you kill Father Tubelcek?” he said.
YES.
“See?” said Sergeant Colon. “You can’t argue with that.”
“Why did you do it?” said Carrot.
No reply.
“And Mr. Hopkinson at the Bread Museum?”
YES.
“You beat him to death with an iron bar?” said Carrot.
YES.
“Hang on,” said Colon, “I thought you said he was…”
“Leave it, Fred,” said Carrot. “Why did you kill the old man, Dorfl?”
No reply.
“Does there have to be a reason? You can’t trust golems, my dad always used to say,” said Colon. “Turn on you soon as look at you, he said.”
“Have they ever killed anyone?” said Carrot.
“Not for want of thinking about it,” said Colon darkly. “My dad said he had to work with one once and it used to look at him all the time. He’d turn around and there it would be…looking at him.”
Dorfl sat staring straight in front.
“Shine a candle in its eyes!’ said Nobby.
Carrot pulled a chair across the floor and straddled it, facing Dorfl. He absentmindedly twirled the broken match between his fingers.
“I know you didn’t kill Mr. Hopkinson and I don’t think you killed Father Tubelcek,” he said. “I think he was dying when you found him. I think you tried to save him, Dorfl. In fact, I’m pretty sure I can prove it if I can see your chem—”
The light from the golem’s flaring eyes filled the room. He stepped forward, fists upraised.
Nobby fired the crossbow.
Dorfl snatched the long bolt out of the air. There was the sound of screaming metal and the bolt became a thin bar of red-hot iron with a bulge piled up around the golem’s grip.
But Carrot was behind the golem, flipping open its head. As the golem turned, raising the iron bar like a club, the fire died in its eyes.
“Got it,” said Carrot, holding up a yellowed scroll.
At the end of Nonesuch Street was a gibbet, where wrongdoers—or, at least, people found guilty of wrongdoing—had been hung to twist gently in the wind as examples of just retribution and, as the elements took their toll, basic anatomy as well.
Once parties of children were brought there by their parents to learn by dreadful example of the snares and perils that await the criminal, the outlaw, and those who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and they would see the terrible wreckage creaking on its chain and listen to the stern imprecations and then usually (this being Ankh-Morpork) would say “Wow! Brilliant!” and use the corpse as a swing.
These days the city had more private and efficient ways of dealing with those it found surplus to requirements, but for the sake of tradition the gibbet’s incumbent was a quite realistic wooden body. The occasional stupid raven would have a peck at the eyeballs even now, and end up with a much shorter beak.
Vimes tottered up to it, fighting for breath.
The quarry could have gone anywhere by now. Such daylight as had been filtering through the fog had given up.
Vimes stood beside the gibbet, which creaked.
It had been built to creak. What’s the good of a public display of retribution, it had been argued, if it didn’t creak ominously? In richer times an elderly man had been employed to operate the creak by means of a length of string, but now there was a clockwork mechanism that needed to be wound up only once a month.
Condensation dripped off the artificial corpse.
“Blow this for a lark,” muttered Vimes, and tried to head back the way he came.
After ten seconds of blundering, he tripped over something.
It was a wooden corpse, hurled into the gutter.
When he got back to the gibbet, the empty chain was swinging gently, jingling in the fog.
Sergeant Colon tapped the golem’s chest. It went donk.
“Like a flowerpot,” said Nobby. “How can they move around when they’re like a pot, eh? They ought to keep cracking all the time.”
“They’re daft, too,” said Colon. “I heard there was one over in Quirm who was made to dig a trench and they forgot about it and they only remembered it when there was all this water ’cos it had dug all the way to the river…”
Carrot unrolled the chem on the table, and laid beside it the paper that had been put in Father Tubelcek’s mouth.
“It’s dead, is it?” said Sergeant Colon.
“It’s harmless,” said Carrot, looking from one piece of paper to the other.
“Right. I’ve got a sledgehammer round the back somewhere, I’ll just…”
“No,” said Carrot.
“You saw the way it was acting!”
“I don’t think it could actually have hit me. I think it just wanted to scare us.”
“It worked!”
“Look at these, Fred.”
Sergeant Colon glanced at the desk. “Foreign writing,” he said, in a voice which suggested that it was nothing like as good as decent home writing, and probably smelled of garlic.
“Anything strike you about them?”
“Well…they looks the same,” Sergeant Colon conceded.
“This yellowing one is Dorfl’s chem. The other one is from Father Tubelcek,” said Carrot. “Letter for letter the same.”
“Why’s that?”
“I think Dorfl wrote these words and put them in old Tubelcek’s mouth after the poor man died,” said Carrot slowly, still looking from one piece of paper to the other.
“Urgh, yuk,” said Nobby. “That’s mucky, that is…”
“No, you don’t understand,” said Carrot. “I mean he wrote them because they were the only ones he knew that worked…”
“Worked how?”
“Well…you know the kiss of life?” said Carrot. “I mean first aid? I know you know, Nobby. You came with me when they had that course at the YMPA.”
“I only went ’cos you said you got a free cup of tea and a biscuit,” said Nobby sulkily. “Anyway, the dummy ran away when it was my turn.”
“It’s the same with life-saving, too,” said Carrot. “We want people to breathe, so we try to make sure they’ve got some air in them…”
They all turned back to look at the words.
“But golems don’t breathe,” said Colon.
“No, a golem knows only one thing that keeps you alive,” said Carrot. “It’s the words in your head.”
They all turned to look at the statue that was Dorfl.
“It’s gone all cold in here,” Nobby quavered. “I def’nitly felt a aura flick’rin’ in the air just then! It was like someone…”
“What’s going on?” said Vimes, shaking the damp off his cloak.
“…openin’ the door,” said Nobby.
It was ten minutes later.
Sergeant Colon and Nobby had gone off-duty, to everyone’s relief. Colon in particular had great difficulty with the idea that you went on investigating after someone had confessed. It outraged his training and experience. You got a confession and there it ended. You didn’t go around disbelieving people. You disbelieved people only when they said they were innocent. Only guilty people were trustworthy. Anything else struck at the whole basis of policing.
“White clay,” said Carrot. “It was white clay we found. And practically unbaked. Dorfl’s made of dark terracotta, and rock-hard.”
“The last thing the old priest saw was a golem,” said Vimes.
“Dorfl, I’m sure,” said Carrot. “But that’s not the same as saying Dorfl was the murderer. I think it turned up as the man was dying, that’s all.”
“Oh? Why?”
“I’m…not sure yet. But I’ve seen Dorfl around. It’s always seemed a very gentle person.”
“It works in a slaughterhouse!”
“Maybe that’s not a bad place for a gentle person to work, sir,” said Carrot. “Anyway, I’ve checked up all the records I can find and I don’t think a golem has ever attacked anyone. Or committed any kind of crime.”
“Oh, come on,” said Vimes.
“Everyone knows…” He stopped as his cynical ears heard his incredulous voice. “What, never?”
“Oh, people are always saying that they know someone who had a friend whose grandfather heard of one killing someone, and that’s about as real as it gets, sir. Golems aren’t allowed to hurt people. It’s in their words.”
“They give me the willies, I know that,” said Vimes.
“They give everyone the willies, sir.”
“You hear lots of stories about them doing stupid things like making a thousand teapots or digging a hole five miles deep,” said Vimes.
“Yes, but that’s not exactly criminal activity, is it, sir? That’s just ordinary rebellion.”
“What do you mean, ‘rebellion’?”
“Dumbly obeying orders, sir. You know…someone shouts at it ‘Go and make teapots,’ so it does. Can’t be blamed for obeying orders, sir. No one told them how many. No one wants them to think, so they get their own back by not thinking.”
“They rebel by working?”
“It’s just a thought, sir. It’d make more sense to a golem, I expect.”
Automatically, they all turned again to look at the silent shape of the golem.
“Can it hear us?” said Vimes.
“I don’t think so, sir.”
“This business with the words…?”
“Er…I think they think a dead human is just someone who’s lost his chem. I don’t think they understand how we work, sir.”
“Them and me both, Captain.”
Vimes stared at the hollow eyes. The top of Dorfl’s head was still open so that light shone down through the sockets. Vimes had seen many horrible things on the street, but the silent golem was somehow worse. You could too easily imagine the eyes flaring and the thing standing up and striding forward, fists flailing like sledgehammers. It was more than just his imagination. It seemed to be built into the things. A potentiality, biding its time.
That’s why we all hate ’em, he thought. Those expressionless eyes watch us, those big faces turn to follow us, and doesn’t it just look as if they’re making notes and taking names? If you heard that one had bashed in someone’s head over in Quirm or somewhere, wouldn’t you just love to believe it?