accustomed to “Mrs”.’
‘I’m sorry about that, madam. Had I known I’d have been a lot less flippant,’ said Vimes.
Miss Beedle gave him a wan smile. ‘Don’t worry, flippant sometimes does the trick.’ Beside the teacher the little goblin said, ‘Flip-ant? The ant is turned over?’
‘Tears of the Mushroom is my star pupil. You’re wonderful, aren’t you, Tears of the Mushroom?’
‘Wonderful is good,’ said the goblin girl, as though tasting every word. ‘Gentle is good, the mushroom is good. Tears are soft. I am Tears of the Mushroom, this much is now said.’
It was a strange little speech: the girl spoke as if she were pulling words out of a rack and then tidily putting them back in their places as soon as they had been said. It sounded very solemn and it came from an odd, flat, pale face. In a way, Tears of the Mushroom looked handsome, if not exactly pretty, in what looked like a wraparound apron, and Vimes wondered how old she was. Thirteen? Fourteen, maybe? And he wondered if they would all look as smart as this if they got their hands on some decent clothing and did something about their godawful hair. The girl’s hair was long and braided and pure white. Amazingly, in this place, she looked like a piece of fragile porcelain.
Not knowing what to say, he said it anyway: ‘Pleased to meet you, Tears of the Mushroom.’ Vimes held out his hand.
The goblin girl looked at it, then looked at him, and then turned to Miss Beedle, who said, ‘They don’t shake hands, commander. For people who seem so simple they’re astoundingly complicated.’ She went on. ‘It would seem that providence has brought you here in time to solve the murder of Pleasant Contrast, who was an excellent pupil. I came up here as soon as I heard, but the goblins are used to undeserved and casual death. I’ll walk with you to the entrance, and then I’ve got a class to teach.’
Vimes tugged at Feeney to make him keep up as they followed Miss Beedle and her charge towards the surface and blessed fresh air. He wondered what had become of the corpse. What did they do with their dead? Bury them, eat them, throw them on the midden? Or was he just not thinking right, a thought which itself had been knocking at his brain for some time. Without thinking, he said, ‘What else do you teach them, Miss Beedle? To be better citizens?’
The slap caught him on the chin, probably because even in her anger Miss Beedle realized that he still had his steel helmet on. It was a corker, nonetheless, and out of the corner of his stinging gaze he saw Feeney take a step back. At least the boy had some sense.
‘You are the gods’ own fool, Commander Vimes! No, I’m not teaching them to be fake humans, I’m teaching them how to be goblins, clever goblins! Do you know that they have only five names for colours? Even trolls have around sixty, and a lot more than that if they find a paint salesman! Does this mean goblins are stupid? No, they have a vast number of names that even poets haven’t come up with, for things like the way colours shift and change, the melting of one hue into another. They have single words for the most complicated of feelings; I know about two hundred of them, I think, and I’m sure there are a lot more! What you may think are grunts and growls and snarls are in fact carrying vast amounts of information! They’re like an iceberg, commander: most of them is where you can’t see or understand, and I’m teaching Tears of the Mushroom and some of her friends so that they may be able to speak to people like you, who think goblins are dumb. And do you know what, commander? There isn’t much time! They’re being slaughtered! It’s not called that, of course, but slaughter is how it ends, because they’re just dumb nuisances, you see. Why don’t you ask Mister Upshot what happened to the rest of the goblins three years ago, Commander Vimes?’
And with that Miss Beedle turned on her heel and disappeared down into the darkness of the cave with Tears of the Mushroom bobbing along behind her, leaving Vimes to walk the last few yards out into the glorious sunlight.
The feeling that hit Samuel Vimes when he stepped into the vivid light of day was as if somebody had pushed an iron wire through his body and then, in one moment, pulled it out again. It was all he could do to keep his balance and the boy grabbed him by the arm. Full marks, Vimes thought, for being either smart enough to see how the land lay, or at least smart enough not to make a run for it just now.
He sat down on the turf, relishing the breeze through the gorse bushes and sucking in pure fresh air. Whatever you thought about goblins, their cave had the kind of atmosphere about which people say, ‘I should wait two minutes before going in there, if I was you.’
‘I’d like to talk with you, chief constable,’ he said now. ‘Copper to copper. About the past and maybe about the shape of things to come.’
‘Actually, I meant to thank you, commander, for thinking that I’m a policeman.’
‘Your father was policeman down here three years ago, yes?’
Feeney stared straight ahead. ‘Yes, sir.’
‘So, what happened with the goblins, Feeney?’
Feeney cleared his throat. ‘Well, Dad told me and Mum to stay indoors. He said we was not to look, but he couldn’t tell us not to listen, and there was a lot of shouting and I don’t know what, and it upset my old mum no end. I heard later that a load of goblins had been taken out of the hill, but Dad never spoke about it until much later. I think it broke him, sir, it really did. He said he watched while a bunch of men, gamekeepers and roughs mostly, came down from the cave dragging goblins behind them, sir. Lots of them. He said what was so dreadful was that the goblins were all sort of meek, you know? Like they didn’t know what to do.’
Vimes relented a little at the sight of Feeney’s face. ‘Go on, lad.’
‘Well, sir, he told me people came out of their houses and there was a lot of running about and he started to ask questions and, well, the magistrates said it was all right because they were nothing more than vermin, and they were going to be taken down to the docks so they could earn their living for a change and not bother other people. It was all right, Dad said. They were going somewhere sunny, a long way away from here.’
‘Just out of interest, Mister Feeney, how could he know that?’
‘Dad said the magistrates were very firm about it, sir. They were just to be put to work for their living. He said that it was doing them a favour. It wasn’t as if they were going to be killed.’
Vimes kept his expression deliberately blank. He sighed. ‘If it was without their consent, then that would be slavery, and if a slave doesn’t work for his living he’s dead. Do you understand?’
Feeney looked at his boots. If eyeballs had polish on them his boots would have been gleaming. ‘After he told
