Nobby fired the crossbow.
Dorfl snatched the long bolt out of the air. There was the sound of screaming metal and the bolt became a thin bar of red-hot iron with a bulge piled up around the golem's grip.
But Carrot was behind the golem, flipping open its head. As the golem turned, raising the iron bar like a club, the fire died in its eyes.
'Got it,' said Carrot, holding up a yellowed scroll.
At the end of Nonesuch Street was a gibbet, where wrongdoers - or, at least, people found guilty of wrongdoing - had been hung to twist gently in the wind as examples of just retribution and, as the elements took their toll, basic anatomy as well.
Once, parties of children were brought there by their parents to learn by dreadful example of the snares and perils that await the criminal, the outlaw and those who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and they would see the terrible wreckage creaking on its chain and listen to the stern imprecations and then usually (this being Ankh-Morpork) would say 'Wow! Brilliant!' and use the corpse as a swing.
These days the city had more private and efficient ways of dealing with those it found surplus to requirements, but for the sake of tradition the gibbet's incumbent was a quite realistic wooden body. The occasional stupid raven would have a peck at the eyeballs even now, and end up with a much shorter beak.
Vimes tottered up to it, fighting for breath.
The quarry could have gone anywhere by now. Such daylight as had been filtering through the fog had given up.
Vimes stood beside the gibbet, which creaked.
It had been built to creak. What's the good of a public display of retribution, it had been argued, if it didn't creak ominously? In richer times an elderly man had been employed to operate the creak by means of a length of string, but now there was a clockwork mechanism that needed to be wound up only once a month.
Condensation dripped off the artificial corpse.
'Blow this for a lark,' muttered Vimes, and tried to head back the way he came.
After ten seconds of blundering, he tripped over something.
It was a wooden corpse, hurled into the gutter.
When he got back to the gibbet, the empty chain was swinging gently, jingling in the fog.
Sergeant Colon tapped the golem's chest. It went donk.
'Like a flowerpot,' said Nobby. 'How can they move around when they're like a pot, eh? They ought to keep cracking all the time.'
'They're daft, too,' said Colon. 'I heard there was one over in Quirm who was made to dig a trench and they forgot about it and they only remembered it when there was all this water 'cos it had dug all the way to the river...'
Carrot unrolled the chem on the table, and laid beside it the paper that had been put in Father Tubelcek's mouth.
'It's dead, is it?' said Sergeant Colon.
'It's harmless,' said Carrot, looking from one piece of paper to the other.
'Right. I've got a sledgehammer round the back somewhere, I'll just...'
'No,' said Carrot.
'You saw the way it was acting!'
'I don't think it could actually have hit me. I think it just wanted to scare us.'
'It worked!'
'Look at these, Fred.'
Sergeant Colon glanced at the desk. 'Foreign writing,' he said, in a voice which suggested that it was nothing like as good as decent home writing, and probably smelled of garlic.
'Anything strike you about them?'