Feet of Clay

to Nobby. “Thruppence?”
    “Yeah, well…after you started orderin’ all them expensive drinks for the whole bar…well, you din’t have no money and it was either me payin’ for them or…” Colon moved his finger across his throat and went: “Kssssh!”
    “You tellin’ me we paid for Happy Hour in the Drum?”
    “Not so much Happy Hour,” said Colon miserably. “More sort of Ecstatic One-Hundred-and-Fifty Minutes. I didn’t even know you could buy gin in pints.”
    Nobby tried to focus on the fog. “No one can drink gin by the pint, Sarge.”
    “That’s what I kept sayin’, and would you listen?”
    Nobby sniffed. “We’re close to the river,” he said. “Let’s try to get…”
    Something roared, very close by. It was long and low, like a foghorn in serious distress. It was the sound you might hear from a cattleyard on a nervous night, and it went on and on, and then stopped so abruptly it caught the silence unawares.
    “…far away from that as we can,” said Nobby. The sound had done the work of an ice-cold shower and about two pints of black coffee.
    Colon spun around. He desperately needed something that would do the work of a laundry. “Where did it come from?” he said.
    “It was…over there, wasn’t it?”
    “I thought it was that way!”
    In the fog, all directions were the same
    “I think…” said Colon, slowly, “that we ort to go and make a report about this as soon as possible.”
    “Right,” said Nobby. “Which way?”
    “Let’s just run, eh?”

    Constable Downspout’s huge pointy ears quivered as the noise boomed over the city. He turned his head carefully, triangulating for height, direction, and distance. And then he remembered it.

    The cry was heard in the Watch House, but muffled by the fog.
    It entered the open head of the golem Dorfl and bounced around inside, echoing down, down among the small cracks in the clay until, at the very edge of perception, little grains danced together.
    The sightless sockets stared at the wall. No one heard the cry that came back from the dead skull, because there was no mouth to utter it and not even a mind to guide it, but it screamed out into the night:
    CLAY OF MY CLAY, THOU SHALT NOT KILL! THOU SHALT NOT DIE!

    Samuel Vimes dreamed about Clues.
    He had a jaundiced view of Clues. He instinctively distrusted them. They got in the way.
    And he distrusted the kind of person who’d take one look at another man and say in a lordly voice to his companion, “Ah, my dear sir, I can tell you nothing except that he is a left-handed stonemason who has spent some years in the merchant navy and has recently fallen on hard times,” and then unroll a lot of supercilious commentary about calluses and stance and the state of a man’s boots, when exactly the same comments could apply to a man who was wearing his old clothes because he’d been doing a spot of home bricklaying for a new barbecue pit, and had been tattooed once when he was drunk and seventeen * and in fact got seasick on a wet pavement. What arrogance! What an insult to the rich and chaotic variety of the human experience!
    It was the same with more static evidence. The footprints in the flowerbed were probably in the real world left by the window-cleaner. The scream in the night was quite likely a man getting out of bed and stepping sharply on an upturned hairbrush.
    The real world was far too real to leave neat little hints. It was full of too many things. It wasn’t by eliminating the impossible that you got at the truth, however improbable; it was by the much harder process of eliminating the possibilities. You worked away, patiently asking questions and looking hard at things. You walked and talked, and in your heart you just hoped like hell that some bugger’s nerve’d crack and he’d give himself up.
    The events of the day clanged together in Vimes’s head. Golems tramped like sad shadows. Father Tubelcek waved at him and then his head exploded, showering Vimes in words. Mr. Hopkinson lay dead in his own oven, a slice of dwarf bread in his mouth. And the golems marched on, silently. There was Dorfl, dragging its foot, its head open for the words to fly in and out of, like a swarm of bees. And in the middle of it all Arsenic danced, a spiky little green man, crackling and gibbering.
    At one point he thought one of the golems screamed.
    After that, the dream faded, a bit at a time. Golems. Oven. Words. Priest. Dorfl. Golems marching, the thudding of their