Feet of Clay

who’s really unhappy about you,” said Shlitzen, alcohol crystallizing on his breath.
    “That’s my business, Shlitzen,” said Angua. “Why don’t you just go back behind your door like the good bogeyman that you are?”
    “Hah, he’s sayin’ where you’re disgracin’ the Old Country—”
    “Let go, please,” said Angua. Her skin was white where Shlitzen was gripping her.
    Cheery looked from the wrist to the bogeyman’s shoulder. Rangy though the creature was, muscles were strung along the arm like beads on a wire.
    “Hah, you wearin’ a badge ,” it sneered. “What’s a good we—?”
    Angua moved so fast she was a blur. Her free hand pulled something from her belt and flipped it up and on to Shlitzen’s head. He stopped, and stood swaying back and forth gently, making faint moaning sounds. On his head, flopping down around his ears like the knotted hanky of a style-impaired seaside sunbather, was a small square of heavy material.
    Angua pushed back her chair and grabbed the beermat. The shadowy figures around the walls were muttering.
    “Let’s get out of here,” she said. “Igor, give us half a minute and then you can take the blanket off him. Come on.”
    They hurried out. The fog had already turned the sun into a mere suggestion, but it was vivid daylight compared to the gloom in Biers.
    “What happened to him?” said Cheery, running to keep up with Angua’s stride.
    “Existential uncertainty,” Angua said. “He doesn’t know whether he exists or not. It’s cruel, I know, but it’s the only thing we’ve found that works against bogeymen. Blue fluffy blanket, for preference.” She noted Cheery’s blank expression. “Look, bogeymen go away if you put your head under the blankets. Everyone knows that, don’t they? So if you put their head under a blanket…”
    “Oh, I see. Ooo, that’s nasty .”
    “He’ll feel all right in ten minutes.” Angua skimmed the beermat across the alley.
    “What was he saying about a baron?”
    “I wasn’t really listening,” said Angua carefully.
    Cheery shivered in the fog, but not just from the cold. “He sounded like he came from Uberwald, like us. There was a baron who lived near us and he hated people to leave.”
    “Yes…”
    “The whole family were werewolves. One of them ate my second cousin.”
    Angua’s memory spun in a hurry. Old meals came back to haunt her from the time before she’d said, no, this is not the way to live. A dwarf, a dwarf…No, she was pretty sure she’d never…The family had always made fun of her eating habits…
    “That’s why I can’t stand them,” said Cheery. “Oh, people say they can be tamed but I say, once a wolf, always a wolf. You can’t trust them. They’re basically evil, aren’t they? They could go back to the wild at any moment, I say.”
    “Yes. You may be right.”
    “And the worst thing is, most of the time they walk around looking just like real people.”
    Angua blinked, glad of the twin disguises of the fog and Cheery’s unquestioning confidence. “Come on. We’re nearly there.”
    “Where?”
    “We’re going to see someone who’s either our murderer or who knows who the murderer is.”
    Cheery stopped. “But you’ve got only a sword and I haven’t even got that!”
    “Don’t worry, we won’t need weapons.”
    “Oh, good.”
    “They wouldn’t be any use.”
    “Oh.”

    Vimes opened his door to see what all the shouting was about down in the office. The corporal manning—or in this case dwarfing—the desk was having trouble.
    “Again? How many times have you been killed this week?”
    “I was minding my own business!” said the unseen complainer.
    “Stacking garlic? You’re a vampire , aren’t you? I mean, let’s see what jobs you have been doing…Post sharpener for a fencing firm, sunglasses tester for Argus Opticians…Is it me, or is there some underlying trend here?”
    “Excuse me, Commander Vimes?”
    Vimes looked round into a smiling face that sought only to do good in the world, even if the world had other things it wanted done.
    “Ah…Constable Visit, yes,” he said hurriedly. “At the moment I’m afraid I’m rather busy, and I’m not even sure that I have got an immortal soul, ha-ha, and perhaps you could call again when…”
    “It’s about those words you asked me to check,” said Visit reproachfully.
    “What words?”
    “The ones Father Tubelcek wrote in his own blood? You said to try and find out what they