Snuff

Feeney was staring as a child might stare at his first party. The goblin, however, appeared to sneer at its creation and tossed it dismissively behind him, where it smashed on the wall.
    â€œWhy did you do that?” Vimes shouted, so loudly that the goblin he was addressing cowered and looked as if it expected to be struck. It managed to say, “Bad pot! Bad work! For to be ashamed! Make much better one time more! Will start now!” It took another terrified look at Vimes and hurried into the darkness of the cave.
    â€œHe smashed it! He actually smashed it!” Feeney stared at Vimes. “He took one look at it and smashed it! And it was wonderful! That was criminal! You can’t just destroy something as wonderful as that, can you?”
    Vimes put a hand on Feeney’s shoulder. “I think you can if you’ve just made it and think you could have done it better. After all, even the best craftsmen sometimes make mistakes, yes?”
    â€œYou think that was a mistake?” Feeney rushed over to where the debris of the late pot had hit the floor, and picked up a handful of glittering remains. “Sir, he did throw these away, sir?”
    Vimes opened his mouth to reply, but there was a faint noise from Feeney’s hand: dust was falling between his fingers like the sands of time. Feeney grinned nervously at Vimes and said, “Maybe it was a bit shoddy after all, sir!”
    Vimes squatted down and ran his fingers through the pile of dust. And it was just dust, stone dust, no more color or sparkle to it than you would find in a pebble by the road. There was no trace of the scintillating rainbow that they had just seen. But on the other side of this cave another goblin was trying to look inconspicuous as it worked on what was probably another pot. Vimes stepped over to it with care, because it was holding its pot as if prepared to use it to defend itself.
    Casually, to show that he meant no harm, Vimes put his arms behind his back and said in tones learned from his wife, “My word! That looks like a very good pot. Tell me, how do you make a pot, sir? Can you tell me?”
    The potter looked down at the thing in its hands, or the thing in its claws if you wanted to be nasty, and perhaps slightly more accurate, and said, “I make the pot.” It raised the work in progress.
    Vimes wasn’t that good at stone which wasn’t part of masonry, but this one was slightly yellow and shiny. He said, “Yes, I can see that, but how do you actually make the pot?” Once again, the potter sought enlightenment from the universe, looking up and down and everywhere that Vimes wasn’t. At last inspiration dawned. “I make pot.”
    Vimes nodded gravely. “Thank you for sharing the secrets of your success,” he said and turned to Feeney. “Come on, let’s keep going.”
    It seemed that a goblin cave—or lair or burrow, depending on what effect you wanted to give—was not quite the hellhole that you might have thought. Instead it was just, well, a hole, stuffy with the smoke of the innumerable small fires goblins appeared to need, along with the associated small pile of rotted kindling, and not forgetting the personal midden.
    Goblins old and young watched them carefully as they passed, as if expecting them to put on a program of entertainment. There were certainly juvenile goblins. Vimes had to admit that alone among the talking species, goblin babies were plug ugly, merely small versions of their parents who themselves were no oil paintings, and not even a watercolor. Vimes told himself that they could not help it, that some incompetent god had found a lot of bits left over, and decided that the world needed a creature that looked like a cross between a wolf and an ape, and gave them what was surely one of the most unhelpful pieces of religious dogma, even by the standards of celestial idiocy. They looked like the bad guys and, without the intervention of the Summoning Dark, they sounded like them, too. If walnuts could shriek when they were being cracked, then people would say, “Doesn’t that remind you of a goblin?” And it appeared that, not content with all this, the laughing god had apparently given them that worst of gifts, self-knowledge, leaving them so certain that they were irrevocably walking rubbish that metaphorically they couldn’t even find the energy to clean the step.
    â€œOh, blast! I’m treading on