Snuff

back to his youth, when if by some means, never entirely legal, he had acquired some cash, he would spend it on a ticket to the fleapit music hall and buy a packet of chocolate raisins with the change. Nobody knew, or cared to guess, what the things were that scuttled and scratched down below the seats, but you soon learned a very important rule: if you dropped your chocolate raisins, it was vitally important not to pick them up!
    Vimes stopped, causing Miss Beedle to walk into the sack of apples that she had asked him to carry, and got a grip on himself sufficiently to say, “I’d like a moment or two to catch my breath, Miss Beedle. Sorry, not as young as I was and all that. I’ll catch you up. What are we carrying these bags for anyway?”
    â€œFruit and vegetables, commander.”
    â€œWhat? To goblins? I’d have thought they found their own food.”
    Miss Beedle inched her way around him and climbed on into the dark, saying, over her shoulder, “Yes, they do.”
    Vimes sat with Young Sam for a moment until he felt better and said, “How are you doing, lad?”
    In the dark a small voice said, “I told Mr. Whistle not to worry, Dad, because he’s a bit silly.”
    So is your father, thought Vimes, and is probably going to continue to be so. But he was on the chase. One way or another he was on the chase. Who you were chasing could wait. The chasing was the thing.
    Anger helped Vimes up the last leg of the climb. Anger at himself and whoever it was who had punctured his holiday. But it was worrying: he had wanted something to happen and now it had. Somebody was dead. Sometimes you had to take a look at yourself and then look away.
    He found Miss Beedle and Tears of the Mushroom waiting with a dozen or so other…ladies. It was a calculated guess, given that he had yet to find any reliable way of telling one goblin from another—except, of course, that Tears of the Mushroom was wearing her apron with pockets, which he hadn’t seen before, and apparently neither had the other ladies, since Tears of the Mushroom was now the hit of the season as far as her sisters were concerned, given that they currently wore daring little outfits of old sacking, plaited grasses and rabbit skin. They gathered around her chorusing, presumably, the goblin equivalent of “Oh my dear, you look fabulous. ” *
    Miss Beedle sidled up to Vimes and said, “I know what you’re thinking, but it’s a start. Carrying things, useful things, without having to use your hands—well, that’s a step in the right direction.” She pulled Vimes a little way from the newly formed goblin branch of the Women’s Institute, who had by now attracted the attention of Young Sam, whose cheerful reluctance to be overawed by anything had clearly won over the girls, resulting in his being where he always felt he should be, the center of attention. It was a knack.
    Miss Beedle went on, “If you want to change a whole people, then you start with the girls. It stands to reason: they learn faster, and they pass on what they learn to their children. I suppose you’re wondering why we were trekking up here with all the sacks?”
    Behind them, the apron was being tried on by one girl after another: this year’s must-have item. Vimes turned back to the woman and said, “Well, this is just a guess, but I see a lot of rabbit bones around the place, and I have heard that you can die if you live only on rabbit, only I don’t know why this is.”
    Miss Beedle lit up. “Well, Commander Vimes, you’ve certainly gone up in my estimation! Yes, rabbit has been the scourge of the goblin nation! I understand it depletes the body of some vital nutrient if you don’t eat other things as well. Just about any green stuff will do, but the male goblins think a proper meal is a rabbit on a stick.” She sighed. “Dwarfs know about this, and they’re absolutely fanatical about good food, as you should be if you spend much of your time underground, but nobody cared to tell the goblins, as if they would listen anyway, and so bad health and premature death is their lot. Some survive, of course, mostly those who prefer rat or eat the whole rabbit, not just the more apparently edible bits, or they simply eat their vegetables.”
    She began to unfasten a sack of cabbages and continued, “I was well in with the wife of the head man here, because he