Snuff (Discworld 39)

, because it seems to me that I heard you say some more goblins were sent downriver yesterday. How did you find that out?”

Feeney waved a thumb in the direction of the lockup and grinned. “Here’s the key, sir, just you go and talk to our prisoner. You’ll love it, sir, he was beside himself when he knew they were coming for him and he sang like a nightingale, didn’t he just!”

“Generally, we say that they sing like a canary,” said Vimes, turning toward the stubby little building.

“Yes, sir, but this is a rural police station, sir, and I know my birds, sir, and he sang like a nightingale, right enough! A beautiful watery cadence, sir, second only to the trill of the robin in my opinion, possibly occasioned by his being really, really scared, sir. I’ll have to slosh a bucket in there in a minute.”

“Well done again, Feeney! Might I suggest at this time that you go in and see to your old mum? She’ll be worried about you. Old mums do worry, you know.”

Wee Mad Arthur was impressed. Why hadn’t anybody told him about the craw step before? Well, it was only recently that he had learned that he was, by birth, a Nac mac Feegle instead of, as he had been given to understand, the child of peaceful, shoe-making gnomes. Feegles did not wear shoes and neither were they peaceful. Like many people before and after, Wee Mad Arthur had always thought that he was in the wrong life.

When the truth had fortuitously been uncovered, it all seemed to make sense. He could be proud of being a Nac mac Feegle, albeit one who enjoyed the occasional visit to the ballet and could read a menu in Quirmian and, for that matter, read at all.

He cruised above the warm blue skies of Howondaland in great circles and enjoying himself no end. The whole continent! There were people on it, so he understood, but mostly what he was seeing from the air was either desert, mountain or, most of all, green jungle. He allowed the albatross to drift on the thermals as his keen eyes searched for what he suspected might be there. It was, in fact, not a thing, as such, but a concept: rectangular. People who planted things liked rectangular. It was orderly. It made things easy.

And there it was! Right down there on the coast. Definitely rectangular and quite a lot of it. After a brief meal of hardboiled egg he persuaded the bird to perch in a treetop. Jumping to the ground was no fearsome undertaking for one of Feegle stock.

As evening began to fall, Wee Mad Arthur walked through line after line of fragrant tobacco plants. But also noticeably rectangular, in this land where geometry was rare, were the sheds, visible not far away.

He moved stealthily to begin with and increasingly more stealthily when he saw the pile, white and complex in the gloaming. The whiteness consisted of bones. Small bones, not Feegle but far too small for human; and then, when he investigated further, he saw the corpses. One of them was still moving, more or less.

Wee Mad Arthur recognized a goblin when he saw one. There were enough people who did not like Feegles for Feegles not to be too snotty on the subject of goblins. They were a damn nuisance, but even Feegles would be happy to agree that so were they themselves. And being a nuisance is not something you should die of. In short, Wee Mad Arthur recognized this situation as very bad.

He took a look at the one who was moving. There were wounds all over it. One leg was twisted back on itself and suppurating scars covered its body. Wee Mad Arthur knew death when he saw it and that was in the air right now. He looked at the pleading in the goblin’s one remaining eye, took out his knife and ended its suffering.

While he was staring at this, a voice behind him said, “And where the hell did you escape from?”

Wee Mad Arthur pointed to his badge, which to him was the size of a shield, and said, “Ankh-Morpork City Watch, ye ken?”

The burly human stared at him and said, “There ain’t no law here, whatever you are, you little squirt.”

As Commander Vimes always said in his occasional rousing speeches to his men, it was the mark of a good officer if he or she is able to improvise in unfamiliar circumstances. Wee Mad Arthur recalled the words very clearly. “Nobody expects you to be a first-class lawyer,” Vimes had said, “but if you have evidence that suggests that your proposed action is, on the face of it, justified, then you should take it.”

And then Wee Mad Arthur, ticking off points in his head, thought: slavery is illegal. I know it used to be done, but I don’t know anywhere it’s done anymore. The dwarfs don’t do it and neither do the trolls and I know that Lord Vetinari is dead against it. He checked all this again to make certain that he had got it right, and then looked up at the scowling human and said, “Excuse me, sir? What was that you just said to me?”

The man smiled horribly, grasping the handle of his whip. “I said, there ain’t no law here, you rabid little skunk.”

There was a pause and Wee Mad Arthur glanced down at the dead goblin on the stinking bone-filled midden. “Guess again,” he said.

As battles go, it was one of the most one sided, because that side belonged to Wee Mad Arthur. There were only a dozen or so guards on the plantation, because starving creatures in chains do not, as a rule, fight back. And they never knew who they were fighting. It was some kind of force that sped backward and forward across the ground and then up your trouser leg, leaving you in no heart whatsoever for fighting or, for that matter, anything else.

Punches came out of nowhere. Those who ran were tripped. Those who didn’t were left unconscious. It was, of course, an unfair fight. It generally is if you are fighting even one Nac mac Feegle, even if you are a platoon.

Afterward, Wee Mad Arthur found chains in some of the huts and carefully chained every recumbent guard. Only then did he open the other huts.

The iron door of the lockup slammed against the stone as Vimes entered; nevertheless he was taking care where he placed his feet.

And Mr. Flutter sang, he certainly sang. Vimes was in no ornithological position to judge the singing in terms of nightingale or robin equivalent, but even if he had sung like a frog it would not have mattered, because he sang about a moocher called Benny No-Nose, who hung about as such men do in the hope of picking up unconsidered trifles and had traded a pair of boots—“I don’t know where they came from, and no more do you, okay?”—for a turkey the very evening before the nightmare began for Ted.

“Well, sir,” Flutter told him. “You asked me about what happened years ago, see, and what with one thing and another, what might have happened yesterday didn’t cross my mind, if you see what I mean? It was all so sudden like. Anyway, yeah, he said they’d coupled a tender behind a two-oxen riverboat that very afternoon, and it smelled to him like goblins, him living near their cave in Overhang, and you never forget that smell, or so he said to the dockmaster, a man known to one and all as Wobbly No-Name, on account of him often walking funny when the drink is on him, and was told, ‘Yeah, they’re sending them down while the going is good, and you never saw them, and neither did I, understand?’ Someone must think it very important ’cos Stratford is on the boat. Someone must have stamped their foot about that because Stratford, well, he don’t like boats. Don’t like water, come to that. Won’t travel on a boat at all if he can help it.”

Vimes didn’t whoop. He didn’t even smile, he hoped—you made sure you didn’t if you could help it—but he gave himself a point for being civil to Flutter. You couldn’t get off Feegle free after a charge of accessory to murder, but there were ways and ways of doing time, and if this all worked out as he hoped it would, Flutter might find that time would pass comfortably, and even, perhaps, faster than usual.

He said, “Well, thank you, Ted, I’ll look into it. In the meantime, I’ll leave you in the capable hands of Chief Constable Upshot, to whom a prisoner is as sacred as his dear old mum, trust me.” He pulled out the key to let himself out, and then paused as if an important point had just aimlessly struck him. “A two-oxen boat? Does that go twice as fast?”

And now Flutter was a riverboat expert. “Not really, but you can pull more load, even through the night, see? Now, your one-ox boat has to stop overnight at a cattle landing, so as the beast can have its rations and a jolly good chew and some shut-eye before dawn and there’s a cost in time and money, right there.”

Prisoner or not, Ted was now a self-styled lecturer to the unfortunately ignorant. “But with two oxen, well, one can be taking a bit of a rest while the other is keeping the boat moving. I reckon there were three barges behind that one, not too much for one ox downstream at this time of year.” He sniffed. “I wanted to be an ox boat pilot, but of course, the bloody Zoons* had got it sewn up. I did do a season on one, mucking out and feeding, but I prefer turkeys.”