Snuff

honeycombed with caves linked by 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 onwards 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 funnelled 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. 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 over its shoulder, where it smashed on the wall.
    ‘Why 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.
    ‘He 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?’
    ‘You 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 colour or sparkle to it than you would find in a pebble by the road. There was no trace