Snuff

perceptibly sloping downward.
    â€œWhat’s going on here, sir, if you don’t mind me asking? I mean, I know that there’s been a murder and maybe some bugger wanted me to think it was you as done it, but how come, sir, that you understand that heathen lingo of theirs? I mean, I hear you talking to them, and they must understand you, ’cos they talk back, sir, but they talk like somebody cracking walnuts under their foot, sir, and I can’t understand a damn word of it, sir, if you’ll excuse my Klatchian, not a damn word. I want an answer, sir, because I feel enough of a bloody fool as it is; I don’t want to be even more foolish than I feel now.”
    Vimes, in the privacy of his own head, tried out the statement, “Well, since you ask, I have a deadly demon sharing my mind, which seems to be helping me for reasons of its own. It lets me see in this gloom and somehow allows me and goblins to communicate. It’s called the Summoning Dark. I don’t know what its interest in goblins is but the dwarfs think it brings down wrath on the unrighteous. If there has been a murder I’ll use any help I can get.” He did not in fact articulate this, on the basis that most people would have left very quickly by the time he had finished, so he settled for saying, “I have the support of a higher power, chief constable. Now, let’s check out this place.” This didn’t satisfy Feeney, but he appeared to understand that this was all he was going to get.

I t was an eerie journey. The hill was honeycombed with passages natural and, occasionally, by the look of it, artificial. It was a small city. There were middens, crude cages now empty of whatever had been in them, and here and there quite large beds of fungus, in some cases being harvested very, very slowly, by goblins who barely glanced at the policemen. At one point they passed an opening which appeared to lead to a crèche, by the sound of it, in which case baby goblins twittered like birds. Vimes couldn’t bring himself to look further inside.
    As they went lower down they came across a very small rivulet that trickled out of one wall. The goblins in a rough and ready way had made a culvert, so that their journey onward was to the sound of running water. And everywhere there were goblins, and the goblins were making pots. Vimes was prepared for this, but badly prepared. He had expected something like the dwarf workshops he had seen in Uberwald—noisy, busy and full of purposeful activity. But that wasn’t the goblin way. It appeared that if a goblin wanted to start on a pot, all it needed to do was find a place to hunker down, rummage through whatever it was it had in its pockets and get to work, so slowly that it was hard to tell that anything was going on. Several times Vimes thought he heard the chip of stone on stone, or the sound of scratching, or what might be sawing, but whenever he came close to a squatting goblin it politely edged around and leaned over the work like a child trying to keep a secret. How much snot, he thought, how many fingernail clippings, how much earwax did a goblin accumulate in one year? Would an annual pot of snot be something like a lady’s delicate snuffbox, or would it be a sloshing great bucketful?
    And why not, yes, why not teeth? Even humans were careful when it came to the escaped teeth, and, come to that, there were people, especially wizards, who made a point of ensuring that their toenails were put beyond use. He smiled to himself. Maybe the goblins weren’t all that stupid, only more stupid than humans were, which, when you came to think about it, took some effort.
    And then, as they crept past a cross-legged goblin, it sat back on its haunches and held up…light. Vimes had seen plenty of jewels: generations of rings, brooches, necklaces and tiaras had funneled down the centuries and into Lady Sybil’s lap, although these days most of them were kept in a vault. That always amused him.
    Sparkle though Sybil’s jewels might, he would have sworn that none of them could have filled the air with light as much as the little pot did when its creator held it up for a critical appraisal. The goblin turned it this way and that, inspecting it like a man thinking of buying a horse from somebody called Honest Harry. White and yellow beams of light shimmered as it moved, filling the drab cave with what Vimes could only think of as echoes of light.