Men at Arms (Discworld 15)
Page 153
'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?'