Snuff

someone in receipt of Young Sam’s hugs: a mixture of surprise and what Vimes had to call non-plussedness.
    At this point Miss Beedle came back into the room holding a plate which she passed to Tears of the Mushroom. “Please be so good as to serve our guests, my dear.”
    Tears of the Mushroom picked up the plate and tentatively pushed it toward Vimes, and said something that sounded like half a dozen coconuts rolling downstairs, but somehow managed to include the syllables you and eat and I make . There seemed to be a pleading in her expression, as if trying to make him understand.
    Vimes stared at her face a while and then thought, Well, I could understand, couldn’t I? It has to be worth a try, and closed his eyes, an errand of some dubiousness when you were face-to-longer-face with a jaw like that. With eyes firmly shut, and one hand over them to cut out the last vestige of light, he said, “Will you say that again, young…lady?” And in the darkness of his skull he heard, quite clearly, “I have baked biscuits today Mr. Po-leees-man. I washed my hands,” she added nervously. “They are clean and tasty. This I have said and it is a thing exact.”
    Baked by a goblin, thought Vimes as he opened his eyes and took a knobbly but appetizing-looking biscuit from the plate in front of him, then shut his eyes again and asked, “Why does the mushroom cry?”
    In the dark he heard the goblin girl gasp, and then say, “It cries so that there are many more mushrooms. This is a certain thing.”
    Vimes heard the faint chink of crockery behind him, but as he took his hands away from his eyes Miss Beedle said, “No, stay in darkness, commander. So it’s true what the dwarfs say about you.”
    â€œI wouldn’t know. What do the dwarfs say about me, Miss Beedle?”
    Vimes opened his eyes. Miss Beedle sat down on a chair almost opposite, while Tears of the Mushroom waited for more biscuit activity with the air of someone who would probably wait forever or until told not to. She looked imploringly at Vimes and then at Young Sam, who was studying Tears of the Mushroom with interest, although, knowing Young Sam, most of the interest had to do with the plate of biscuits. So he said, “Okay, lad, you may ask the lady for a biscuit, but mind your manners.”
    â€œThey say that the dark is in you, commander, but you keep it in a cage. A present from Koom Valley, they say.”
    Vimes blinked in the light. “A dwarf superstition in a goblin cave? You know a lot about dwarfs?”
    â€œQuite a lot,” said Miss Beedle, “but far more about goblins, and they believe in the Summoning Dark, just like the dwarfs, after all, they are both creatures of the caves and the Summoning Dark is real . It’s not all in your head, commander: no matter what you hear, I sometimes hear it too. Oh dear, you of all people must recognize a substition when you’re possessed by it? It’s the opposite of a superstition: it’s real even if you don’t believe in it. My mother taught me that; she was a goblin.”
    Vimes looked at the pleasant brown-haired woman in front of him and said, politely, “No.”
    â€œAll right, perhaps you’ll allow me a little theatricality and misdirection for effect? Truthfully, my mother was found as a child when she was three and raised by goblins in Uberwald. Until she was about eleven—and I say about because she was never quite certain about the passage of time—she pretty much thought and acted like a goblin and picked up their language, which is insanely difficult to learn if you’re not brought up to it. She ate with them, had her own plot in the mushroom farm and was very highly thought of among them for the way she looked after the rat farm. She once told me that until she met my father, all her best recollections were of those years in the goblin cave.”
    Miss Beedle stirred her coffee and continued. “And she also told me her worst recollections, the ones that haunted her nightmares and, I might say, haunt mine now: of one day after some nearby humans had found out that there was a golden-haired, pink-cheeked human girl running around underground with evil, treacherous brutes who, as everybody knows, eat babies. Well, she screamed and fought as they tried to take her away, especially since people who she had thought of as family were being slaughtered around