Men at Arms (Discworld #15)(35)

He slipped the disc into his pocket.

'That seems about it, then,' he said, straightening up. 'We'd better – ow! – oh, fish out that clockwork soldier, will you? Better leave the place tidy.'

Carrot scrabbled in the darkness under the bench. There was a rustling noise.

'There's a piece of paper under here, sir.'
Carrot emerged, waving a small yellowing sheet. Vimes squinted at it.

'Looks like nonsense to me,' he said, eventually. 'It's not dwarfish, I know that. But these symbols – these things I've seen before. Or something like them.' He passed the paper back to Carrot. 'What can you make of it?'

Carrot frowned. 'I could make a hat,' he said, 'or a boat. Or a sort of chrysanthemum—'

'I mean the symbols. These symbols, just here.'

'Dunno, captain. They do look familiar, though. Sort of . . . like alchemists' writing?'

'Oh, no!' Vimes put his hands over his eyes. 'Not the bloody alchemists! Oh, no! Not that bloody gang of mad firework merchants! I can take the Assassins, but not those idiots! No! Please! What time is it?'

Carrot glanced at the hourglass on his belt. 'About half past eleven, captain.'

'Then I'm off to bed. Those clowns can wait until tomorrow. You could make me a happy man by telling me that this paper belonged to Hammerhock.'

'Doubt it, sir.'

'Me too. Come on. Let's go out through the back door.'

Carrot squeezed through.

'Mind your head, sir.'

Vimes, almost on his knees, stopped and stared at the doorframe.

'Well, corporal,' he said eventually, 'we know it wasn't a troll that did it, don't we? Two reasons. One, a troll couldn't get through this door, it's dwarf sized.'

'What's the other reason, sir?'

Vimes carefully pulled something off a splinter on the low door lintel.

'The other reason, Carrot, is that trolls don't have hair.'

The couple of strands that had been caught in the grain of the beam were red and long. Someone had left them there inadvertently. Someone tall. Taller than a dwarf, anyway.

Vimes peered at them. They looked more like threads than hair. Fine red threads. Oh, well. A clue was a clue.

He carefully folded them up in a scrap of paper borrowed from Carrot's notebook, and handed them to the corporal.

'Here. Keep this safe.'

They crawled out into the night. There was a narrow, plank walkway attached to the walls, and beyond that was the river.

Vimes straightened up carefully.

'I don't like this, Carrot,' he said. 'There's something bad underneath all this.'

Carrot looked down.

'I mean, there are hidden things happening,' said Vimes, patiently.

'Yes, sir.'

'Let's get back to the Yard.'

They proceeded to the Brass Bridge, quite slowly, because Carrot cheerfully acknowledged everyone they met. Hard-edged ruffians, whose normal response to a remark from a Watchman would be genteelly paraphrased by a string of symbols generally found on the top row of a typewriter's keyboard, would actually smile awkwardly and mumble something harmless in response to his hearty, 'Good evening, Masher! Mind how you go!'

Vimes stopped halfway across the bridge to light his cigar, striking a match on one of the ornamental hippos. Then he looked down into the turbid waters.

'Carrot?'

'Yes, captain?'

'Do you think there's such a thing as a criminal mind?'

Carrot almost audibly tried to work this out.

'What . . . you mean like . . . Mr Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler, sir?'

'He's not a criminal.'

'You have eaten one of his pies, sir?'

'I mean . . . yes . . . but . . . he's just geographically divergent in the financial hemisphere.'

'Sir?'

'I mean he just disagrees with other people about the position of things. Like money. He thinks it should all be in his pocket. No, I meant—' Vimes closed his eyes, and thought about cigar smoke and flowing drink and laconic voices. There were people who'd steal money from people. Fair enough. That was just theft. But there were people who, with one easy word, would steal the humanity from people. That was something else.

The point was. . . well, he didn't like dwarfs and trolls. But he didn't like anyone very much. The point was that he moved in their company every day, and he had a right to dislike them. The point was that no fat idiot had the right to say things like that.

He stared at the water. One of the piles of the bridge was right below him; the Ankh sucked and gurgled around it. Debris – baulks of timber, branches, rubbish – had piled up in a sort of sordid floating island. There was even fungus growing on it.

What he could do with right now was a bottle of Bearhugger's. The world swam into focus when you looked at it through the bottom of a bottle.

Something else swam into focus.

Doctrine of signatures, thought Vimes. That's what the herbalists call it. It's like the gods put a 'Use Me' label on plants. If a plant looks like a part of the body, it's good for ailments peculiar to that part. There's teethwort for teeth, spleenwort for . . . spleens, eyebright for eyes . . . there's even a toadstool called Phallus impudicus, and I don't know what that's for but Nobby is a big man for mushroom omelettes. Now . . . either that fungus down there is exactly the medicine for hands, or . . .