Snuff

than sufficient at close quarters. There was the smell, to begin with, and not to end with either, because it appeared to permeate the world. Yet it wasn’t the stink—although heavens knew that they stank with all the stinks an organic creature could generate—no, anyone who walked the streets of Ankh-Morpork was more or less immune to stinks, and indeed there was now a flourishing, if that was the word, hobby of stink-collecting, * and Dave, of Dave’s Pin and Stamp Emporium, was extending the sign over his shop again. You couldn’t bottle (or whatever it was the collectors did) the intrinsic smell of a goblin because it wasn’t so much a stink as a sensation, the sensation in fact that your dental enamel was being evaporated and any armor you might have was rusting at some speed. Vimes punched at the thing but it hung on with arms and legs together, screaming in what was theoretically a voice, that sounded like a bag of walnuts being jumped on. And yet it wasn’t attacking—unless you considered the biological warfare. It clung with its legs and waved its arms, and Vimes just managed to stop Feeney braining it with his official truncheon, because, once you paid attention, the goblin was using words, and the words were: Ice! Ice! We want just ice! Demand! Demand just ice! Right? Just ice!
    Feeney, on the other hand, was shouting, “Stinky, you little devil, I told you what I’d do to you if ever I saw you stealing the pigswill again!” He looked at Vimes as if for support. “They can give you horrible diseases, sir!”
    â€œWill you stop dancing around with that damn weapon, boy!” Vimes looked down at the goblin now struggling in his grasp, and said, “As for you, you little bugger, stop your racket!”
    The little room went silent, apart from the dying strains of “They eat their own babies!” from Feeney and “Just ice!” from the goblin, simply and accurately named as “Stinky.”
    Not panicking now, the goblin pointed a claw at Vimes’s left wrist, looked him in the face, and said, “Just ice?” It was a plea. The claw tugged at his leg. “Just ice?” The creature hobbled to the door and looked up at the glowering chief constable and then turned to Vimes with an expression that bored into the man’s face and said very deliberately, “Just ice? Mr. Po-leess-maan?”
    Vimes pulled out his snuffbox. You could say this for the brown stuff: all that ceremony you went through before you took a pinch gave you rather more thinking time than lighting a cigar. It also got people’s attention. He said, “Well now, chief constable, here is somebody asking you for justice. What are you going to do about it?”
    Feeney looked uncertain, and took refuge in a certainty. “It’s a stinking goblin!”
    â€œDo you often see them around the lockup?” said Vimes, keeping his tone mild.
    â€œOnly Stinky,” said Feeney, glowering at the goblin, who stuck out his worm-like tongue. “He’s always hanging around. The rest of them know what happens if they’re caught thieving around here!”
    Vimes glanced down at the goblin and recognized a badly set broken leg when he saw one. He turned the snuffbox over and over in his hands, and did not look at the young man. “But surely a policeman wonders what has happened for a wretched thing like this to walk right up to the law and risk being maimed… again ?”
    It was a leap in the dark, but, hell, he had leapt so often that the dark was a trampoline.
    His arm itched. He tried to ignore it, but just for a moment there was a dripping cave in front of him, and no other thought except of terrible endless vengeance. He blinked and the goblin was tugging at his sleeve again and Feeney was getting angry.
    â€œI didn’t do that! I didn’t see it done!”
    â€œBut you know it happens, yes?” And again Vimes remembered the darkness and the thirst for vengeance, in fact vengeance itself made sapient and hungry. And the little bugger had touched him on that arm. It all came back, and he wished that it hadn’t, because while all coppers must have a bit of villain in them, no copper should walk around with a piece of demon as a tattoo.
    Feeney had lost his anger now, because he was frightened. “Bishop Scour says they’re demonic and insolent creations made as a mockery of mankind,” he