Feet of Clay

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