Men at Arms

the singer apples and join in and a dozen lowly matchgirls suddenly show amazing choreographical ability and everyone acts like cheery lovable citizens instead of the murderous, evil-minded, self-centered individuals they suspect themselves to be. But the point was that if Carrot had erupted into a song and dance, people would have joined in. Carrot could have jollied a circle of standing stones to form up behind him and do a rumba.
    “There’s some very interesting old statuary in the main courtyard,” he said. “Including a very good one of Jimi, the God of Beggars. I’ll show you. They won’t mind.”
    He rapped on the door.
    “You don’t have to,” said Angua.
    “It’s no trouble—”
    The door opened.
    Angua’s nostrils flared. There was a smell…
    A beggar looked Carrot up and down. His mouth dropped open.
    “It’s Cumbling Michael, isn’t it?” said Carrot, in his cheery way.
    The door slammed.
    “Well, that wasn’t very friendly,” said Carrot.
    “Stinks, don’t it?” said a nasty little voice from somewhere behind Angua. While she was in no mood to acknowledge Gaspode, she found herself nodding. Although the beggars were an entire cocktail of odors the second biggest one was fear, and the biggest of all was blood. The scent of it made her want to scream.
    There was a babble of voices behind the door, and it swung open again.
    This time there was a whole crowd of beggars there. They were all staring at Carrot.
    “All right, yer honor,” said the one hailed as Cumbling Michael, “we give in. How did you know?”
    “How did we know wh—” Carrot began, but Angua nudged him.
    “Someone’s been killed here,” she said.
    “Who’s she?” said Cumbling Michael.
    “Lance-Constable Angua is a man of the Watch,” said Carrot.
    “Har, har,” said Gaspode.
    “I must say you people are getting better,” said Cumbling Michael. “We only found the poor thing a few minutes ago.”
    Angua could feel Carrot opening his mouth to say “Who?” She nudged him again.
    “You’d better take us to him,” she said.
    He turned out to be—
    —for one thing, he turned out to be a she. In a rag-strewn room on the top floor.
    Angua knelt beside the body. It was very clearly a body now. It certainly wasn’t a person. A person normally had more head on their shoulders.
    “Why?” she said. “Who’d do such a thing?”
    Carrot turned to the beggars clustered around the doorway.
    “Who was she?”
    “Lettice Knibbs,” said Cumbling Michael. “She was just the lady’s maid to Queen Molly.”
    Angua glanced up at Carrot.
    “Queen?”
    “They sometimes call the head beggar king or queen,” said Carrot. He was breathing heavily.
    Angua pulled the maid’s velvet cloak over the corpse.
    “Just the maid,” she muttered.
    There was a full-length mirror in the middle of the floor, or at least the frame of one. The glass was scattered like sequins around it.
    So was the glass from a window pane.
    Carrot kicked aside some shards. There was a groove in the floor, and something metallic embedded in it.
    “Cumbling Michael, I need a nail and a length of string,” said Carrot, very slowly and carefully. His eyes never left the speck of metal. It was almost as if he expected it to do something.
    “I don’t think—” the beggar began.
    Carrot reached out without turning his head and picked him up by his grubby collar without apparent effort.
    “A length of string,” he repeated, “and a nail.”
    “Yes, Corporal Carrot.”
    “And the rest of you, go away,” said Angua.
    They goggled at her.
    “Do it!” she shouted, clenching her fists. “And stop staring at her!”
    The beggars vanished.
    “It’ll take a while to get the string,” said Carrot, brushing aside some glass. “They’ll have to beg it off someone, you see.”
    He drew his knife and started digging at the floorboards, with care. Eventually he excavated a metal slug, flattened slightly by its passage through the window, the mirror, the floorboards and certain parts of the late Lettice Knibbs that had never been designed to see daylight.
    He turned it over and over in his hand.
    “Angua?”
    “Yes?”
    “How did you know there was someone dead in here?”
    “I…just had a feeling.”
    The beggars returned, so unnerved that half a dozen of them were trying to carry one piece of string.
    Carrot hammered the nail into the frame under the smashed pane to hold one end of the string. He stuck his knife in the groove and