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Feet of Clay quotes page 2
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'Fred, what am I gonna do?' 'Sit back and eat of ermine plates, I should think!' [I feel this really ought to be vermine, not ermine: as mentioned in several earlier Discworld chronicles this is a small rodent prized for its fur; it is a more cautious relative of the lemming and only jumps off small pebbles. Queen Keli has vermine on her coronation robes leading me to think that it ought to be used on the Disc where we would use ermine.]  But the Watch was back and out on the streets, and if they weren’t actually as good as Detritus at kicking arse they were definitely prodding buttock. ‘It’s confessed to all these?’ ‘Not yet,’ said Nobby. ‘We haven’t read ‘em all out yet,’ said Colon. Dorfl wrote: I DID EVERYTHING. ‘Hey!’ said Colon. ‘Mr Vimes is going to be really pleased with us!’ ‘It’s gone all cold in here,’ Nobby quavered. ‘I def’nitly felt a aura flick’rin’ in the air just then! It was like someone…’ ‘What’s going on?’ said Vimes, shaking the damp off his cloak. ‘…openin’ the door,’ said Nobby. He’d learned not to scoff at Angua’s feelings. She always knew where Carrot was, for one thing. If she were in the Watch House you could tell if he were coming up the street by the way she turned to look at the door. ‘Well, I’ll tell you,’ said Nobby, the swaying now so regular that he looked like an inverted pendulum, ‘all that stuff’s nothing, nothing! I tell you, compared to pride inna man’s linneneage…eage.’ ‘Linneneageeage?’ said Sergeant Colon. The thieves were now so close together they looked like a fat six-armed man with a very large bill for hats. And a scream. Ancl then another scream. [This is the first of two times in my copy that 'ancl' is used where 'and' should be.] 'I think you'd better put it in your report as "self-inflicted wounds while resisting arrest",' said Vimes. 'Yes, sir,' said Angua. 'Not all of them,' said Carrot. 'They tried to rob our bar and take a wer- Angua hostage,' said Vimes. 'Oh, I see what you mean, sir,' said Carrot. 'Self-inflicted. Yes. Of course.' It had gone very quiet in the Mended Drum. This was because it is usually very hard to be both loud and unconscious. That was another thing. Her books on alchemy were marvellous objects, every page a work of the engraver’s art, but they nowhere contained instructions like ‘Be sure to open a window’. They did have instructions like ‘Adde Aqua Quirmis to the Zinc untile Rising Gas Yse Vigorously Evolved’, but never added ‘Don’t Doe Thys Atte Home’ or even ‘And Say Fare-thee-Welle to Thy Eyebrows’. 'I thought he might have scratched the murderer,' said Cheery. 'You know... put up a fight...' 'With the Arsenic Monster?' said Angua. ‘I thought dwarfs loved gold,’ said Angua. ‘They just say that to get it into bed.’ [Cuddy says something very similar to Nobby in MAA: “ ‘There’s one thing that’s true at least,’ [Nobby] said. ‘You dwarfs really love gold, don’t you?’ ‘Of course we don’t. Don’t be silly.’ ‘Well –’ ‘We just say that to get it into bed.’ ”] ‘And you’ll have to be prepared for sexually explicit jokes in the Watch House.’ Cheery blushed. ‘Mind you, that seems to have ended now,’ said Angua. ‘Why? Did you complain?’ ‘No, after I joined in at all seemed to stop,’ said Angua. ‘And, you know, they didn’t laugh? Not even when I did the hand gestures too? I thought that was unfair. Mind you, some of them were quite small gestures.’ Ron had a small greyish-brown, torn-eared terrier on the end of a string, although in truth it would be hard for an observer to know exactly who was leading whom and who, when push came to shove, would be the one to fold at the knees if the other one shouted ‘Sit!’ Because, although trained canines as aids for those bereft of sight, and even of hearing, have frequently been used throughout the universe, Foul Ole Ron was the first person ever to own a Thinking-Brain Dog. The Committee for Equal Heights had objected, but things had mired somewhat because […] their position hinged on pointing out that Mr Stronginthearm né Smith was too tall, which was clearly a sizeist discrimination and technically illegal under the Committee’s own rules. Stronginthearm took off his helmet (the Committee had been round again) ancl wiped the inside. [That’s what it says in my copy: ‘ancl’, not ‘and’. Odd typo.] Sergeant Colon, aíter some considerable effort... [Yet another odd typo. 'aíter'? Someone's been using some dodgy character recognition software.] ‘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.’ Gods, he thought as he struggled up the stairs, it’s not like the old truncheon-and-bell days. You wouldn’t think twice about running half-way across the city, coppers and criminals locked in hot pursuit. With a mixture of pride and shame he added: And none of the buggers ever caught me, either. The effect was like one of the wicker men built by some of the more outlandish tribes near the Hub, when they annually celebrated the great cycle of Nature and their reverence for life by piling as much of it as possible in a great heap and setting fire to it. Lord Vetinari had a very good memory. But everyone wrote things down, didn't they? You couldn't remember every little thing. Wednesday, 3pm, reign of terror; 3.15pm, clean out scorpion pit... ‘You’re not suggesting we have some sort of… vote, are you? Some kind of popularity contest?’ ‘And Snori Glodssonsunclesson said…’ [Some surname! ‘Glodsnephew’ would have been shorter.] There was a sudden and general ‘Axe? What axe? Oh, this axe? I was just showing it to my friend Bjorn here, good old Bjorn’ feel to the atmosphere. There were no public health laws in Ankh-Morpork. It would be like installing smoke detectors in hell. ‘Let me put it like this,’ said Cheery. ‘If these rats had been poisoned with lead instead of arsenic, you’d have been able to sharpen their noses and use them as a pencil.’ ‘D*mn!’ said Carrot, a difficult linguistic feat. Of course, everyone knew that, somewhere down under all those layers of leather and chain mail, dwarfs came in enough different types to ensure the future production of more dwarfs, but it was not a subject that dwarfs discussed other than at those essential points in a courtship when embarrassment might otherwise arise. ‘I mean, I’ve nothing against females. I’m pretty sure my stepmother is one.’ [A bit of Carrot’s family background: but is this the same mother he has written to before, or a new wife for his father?] I, after hearing evidence from a number of experts, including Mrs Slipdry the midwife, certify that the balance of probability is that the bearer of this document, C. W. St John Nobbs, is a human being. Signed, Lord Vetinari. Automatically his hand trailed down to the bottom drawer of his desk, as it always did when he was worried and trying to think. It wasn’t as though there was ever a bottle there these days… [He’s presumably put one in by the time of TFE, as Lady Margolotta remarks that he keeps one there ‘as a sort of permanent test.’] He managed to get on to his knees again and shuffled across the planks. Even a splinter would do. A lump of metal. A wide-open doorway marked FREEDOM. He’d settle for anything. ‘You’re being reasonable again!’ snapped Angua. ‘You’re deliberately seeing everyone’s point of view! Can’t you try to be unfair even once?’ It is traditionally the belief of policemen that they can tell what a substance is by sniffing it and then gingerly tasting it, but this practice had ceased in the Watch ever since Constable Flint had dipped his finger into a blackmarket consignment of ammonium chloride cut with radium, said ‘Yes, this is definitely slab wurble wurble sclup’, and had to spend three days tied to his bed until the spiders went away. Downey dabbed at his nose. ‘What’s the guild price on your head, Sir Samuel?’ he said. ‘Twenty thousand dollars.’ ‘Really? I think we shall definitely have to upgrade you.’ ‘Delighted. I shall have to buy a new beartrap.’ [And Vimes' price is indeed upgraded: in tfe Skimmer informs him: “ ‘The Guild has set your fee at $600,000.’ ”] ‘What is it I’m always telling you?’ ‘Er… er… Never trust anybody, sir?’ ‘No, not that.’ ‘Er… er… Everybody’s guilty of something, sir?’ ‘Not that, either.’ ‘Er… er… Just because someone’s a member of an ethnic minority doesn’t mean they’re not a nasty small-minded little jerk, sir?’ ‘N– When did I say that?’ ‘Last week, sir. After we’d had that visit from the Campaign for Equal Heights, sir.’ ‘Well, not that. I mean… I’m pretty sure I’m always saying something else that’s very relevant here. Something pithy about police work.’ ‘Can’t remember anything right now, sir.’ ‘Well, I’ll damn well make up something and start saying it a lot from now on.’ ‘Jolly good, sir.’ [Vimes still doesn’t seem to have settled on any one saying by Jingo, when we get the following exchange: “Vimes stood up. ‘You know what I always say,’ he said. Carrot removed his helmet and polished it with his sleeve. ‘Yes, sir. “Everyone’s guilty of something, especially the ones that aren’t,” sir.’ ‘No, not that one…’ ‘Er… “Always take into consideration the fact that you might be dead wrong,” sir?’ ‘No, nor that one either.’ ‘Er… “How come Nobby ever got a job as a watchman?”, sir? You say that a lot.’ ‘No! I meant “Always act stupid,” Carrot.’ ‘Ah, right, sir. From now on I shall remember that you always said that, sir.’”] |
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Feet of Clay quotes page 2
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