Discworld 39 - Snuff

by Terry Pratchett

  “This is my land,” said Vimes, “and I think I can see to it that you’re not disturbed here.”

  Something like a chuckle found its way through the old goblin’s ragged beard. “We know what the law is, Mr. Po-leess-maan. The law is the land. You say “ ‘This is my land,’ but you did not make the land. You did not make your sheep, you did not make the rabbits on which we live, you did not make the cows, or the horses, but you say, ‘These things are mine.’ This cannot be a truth. I make my ax, my pots, and these are mine. What I wear is mine. Some love was mine. Now it has gone. I think you are a good man, Mr. Po-leess-maan, but we see the turning of the times. Maybe a hundred, or two hundred years ago there was in the world what people called ‘the wilderness,’ or ‘no man’s land,’ or ‘wasteland,’ and we lived in such places, we are waste people. There was the troll race, the dwarf race, the human race and I am sorry for the goblin race that we cannot run so fast.”

  Somebody pulled at Vimes’s shirt. This time it was Feeney. “You’d best be going now, sir.”

  Vimes turned. “Why?”

  “Sorry, sir, but her ladyship did instruct you to be back for tea.”

  “We’re conducting a murder investigation, chief constable! I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m sure Mr. Rain on Hard Ground here will understand. We must see for ourselves that the missing blacksmith is not here.”

  Feeney fidgeted. “I couldn’t help noticing that her Ladyship was very expressive on the subject, sir.”

  Vimes nodded to the old goblin. “I’ll find out who killed your wife, sir, and I’ll bring them to justice.” He paused on cue as another chorus of “Just ice!” echoed around the caves. “But first I must, for police reasons, inspect the rest of this … establishment, if you have no objection.”

  The goblin looked at him bright-eyed. “And if I object, Mr. Po-leess-maan?”

  Vimes matched his stare. “An interesting question,” he said “and if you threatened us with violence I would leave. Indeed, if you forbade me to search then I would leave, and, sir, the worst part is that I would not come back. Sir, I respectfully ask that I may in the pursuit of my inquiries be shown around the rest of these premises.”

  Was that a smile on the old goblin’s face? “Of course, Mr. Po-leess-maan.”

  Behind the old goblin the rest of the crowd began to move away, presumably to either make pots or fill them. Rain on Hard Ground, who, it had to be assumed, because nothing had been said to the contrary, was either a chieftain (as Vimes would understand it) or simply a goblin tasked with talking to stupid humans, said, “You are seeking the blacksmith? He visits us sometimes. There is iron down here, not much, but he finds it useful. Of course it is no good for pots, but we trade it for food. I don’t think I have seen him for several days. However, by all means look for him without hindrance. The dark is in you. I would not dare to stand in your way, Mr. Po-leess-maan. Such as it is, this place is yours.”

  With that the old goblin beckoned to some juvenile goblins to pick up all that was left of his wife and drifted away toward another cave mouth.

  “Have you seen a lot of dead bodies, commander?” said Feeney, in a voice that almost managed not to shake.

  “Oh yes, lad, and some of them I helped to make.”

  “You’ve killed people?”

  Vimes looked at the ceiling so as not to have to look at Feeney’s face. “I like to think I did my best not to,” he said, “and on the whole I’ve been good at that, but sooner or later there’s always going to be somebody who is determined to finish you off and you end up having to take him down the wrong way because he’s just too damn stupid to surrender. It doesn’t get any better, and I’ve never seen a corpse that looked good.”

  The funeral group had disappeared into the other cave now, and the two policemen were left alone, but feeling, however, that around them people were going about their business.

  The old goblin had just stood there and mentioned that the woman was his wife almost as an afterthought. He hadn’t even raised his voice! Vimes couldn’t have stood there like that if it had been Sybil’s body on the ground in front of him, and as sure as hell he would not be polite to any goblins who were in front of him either. How can you get like that? How can life so beat you down?

  The Street was always with you, just as Willikins had said. And Vimes remembered the ladies who scrubbed. Cockbill Street got scrubbed so often that it was surprising it wasn’t now at a lower level than the ground around it. The doorstep was scrubbed, and then whitened; the red tiles on the floor inside were scrubbed and then polished with red lead; and the black cooking stove was blackened even further by being rubbed ferociously with black lead. Women in those days had elbows that moved like pistons. And it was all about survival, and survival was all about pride. You didn’t have much control over your life but by Jimmy you could keep it clean and show the world you were poor but respectable. That was the dread: the dread of falling back, losing standards, becoming no better than those people who bred and fought and stole in that ferocious turmoil of a rookery known as the Shades.

  The goblins had succumbed, had they? Going through the motions now, while the world gently expelled them, they were giving up, letting go … but murder was murder in any jurisdiction or none at all. He tied his thoughts in a knot under his chin, snatched a couple of smouldering torches and said, “Come on, chief constable, let’s go and fight crime.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Feeney, “but can I ask you another question?”

  “Of course,” said Vimes, heading toward a tunnel that was perceptibly sloping downward.

  “What’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.

  It 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. 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.

  “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 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.

  “Oh, blast! I’m treading on something. . . in something,” said Feeney. “You seem to be able to see much better than me down here, sir.”

  “Good clean living, lad, carrots and whatnot.”

  “Jefferson could be in here somewhere. I’m sure there are caves that we’re missing.”

  “I know he’s not in here, lad, only don’t ask me how I know because I would have to lie to you. I’m going through the motions to help myself think. It’s an old copper trick.”

  “Yes, sir, treading in every motion, I should think!”

  Vimes smiled in the gloom. “Well done, lad. A sense of humor is the copper’s friend. I always say the day isn’t complete without a little chuckle—” He paused because something had clanged against his helmet. “We’ve reached Jefferson’s iron workings, my lad. I just found an oil lamp; I certainly haven’t seen those higher up.” He felt in his pocket and soon a match flame bloomed.

  Well, Vimes thought, it’s not that much of a mine, but I bet it works out better than paying dwarf prices.

  “I can’t see any way out,” F
eeney volunteered. “I suppose he drags the ore out through the main entrance.”

  “I don’t think that the goblins are stupid enough to live in a set of caves that have just one entrance. There’s probably one that doesn’t even show up on the outside. Look, you can see where somebody’s been lugging heavy weights across the stone—” Vimes stopped. There was another human in the cave. Well, thank you, darkness, he thought. I suppose asking who it is might be in order?

  “Sir, I don’t think it’s just mining that goes on here. Take a look at these,” said Feeney, behind Vimes.

  Feeney held out some books, children’s books, by the look of it. They were grubby—this was, after all, the home of goblins—but Vimes turned to the first page of the first book and was not surprised to see an unfeasibly large red apple, currently somewhat soiled by the pressure of many dirty hands.

  A voice in the gloom, a female voice, said, “Not all questions are answered, commander, but fortunately some answers are questioned. I’m attempting to teach the goblin children. Of course, I had to bring in an apple for the young ones to see,” the woman in the shadows added. “Not many knew what one was, and certainly not what they were called. Troll language is unbelievably complex compared with what these poor devils have got. “Good day to you too, Mr. Upshot. Not cowering away from the truth in your lockup?”

  Vimes had spun round when he first heard that voice, and was now staring with his mouth open. “You? Aren’t you the, er … .”