up at his father and said, ‘They tend to get rather tongue-tied, don’t they?’
‘You know, I’ve got lots of poo,’ said Young Sam proudly. ‘I keep it in jam jars and I’ve got a laboratory in the lavatory. Have you got any elephant poo? It goes – and here he paused for effect – ‘
For a moment Miss Beedle had that slightly glazed sheen often seen on the face of someone meeting Young Sam for the first time. She looked at Vimes. ‘You must be very proud of him.’
The proud father said, ‘It’s very hard to keep up – I know that.’
Miss Beedle led the way out of the hall and into a room in which chintz played a major part, and drew young Sam over to a large bureau. She opened a drawer and handed the boy what looked like a small book. ‘This is a bound proof of
Young Sam took it like one receiving a holy object, and his father, temporarily becoming his mum, said, ‘What do you say?’ To which Young Sam responded with a beam and a thank you and a ‘Please don’t scribble on it. I’m not allowed to scribble in books.’
While Young Sam was happily turning the pages of his new book, his father was introduced to an overstuffed chair. Miss Beedle gave him a smile and hurried off towards the kitchen, leaving Vimes with not much to look at except for a room full of bookcases, more overstuffed furniture, a full-size concert harp, and a wall clock made to look like an owl, whose eyes swung backwards and forwards hypnotically in time with the tick – presumably to the point where you either committed suicide or picked up the poker in the hearth nearby and beat the damn thing until the springs broke.
While Vimes was warmly contemplating this he realized that he was being watched, and he looked round into the worried face and prognathous jaw of the goblin called Tears of the Mushroom.
Instinctively he looked at Young Sam, and suddenly the biggest raisin in his cake of apprehension was: what will Young Sam do? How many books had he read? They hadn’t told him nasty tales about goblins, had they, or read him too many of those innocent, colourful fairytale books which contain nightmares ready to leap out and some needless fear that will cause trouble one day?
And what Young Sam did was march across the floor, stop dead in front of the girl and say, ‘I know a lot about poo. It’s very interesting!’
Tears of the Mushroom looked frantically for Miss Beedle while Young Sam, totally at ease, began a brief dissertation on sheep poo. In response, with words slapping together like little bricks, she said, ‘What … is …
Young Sam frowned at this as if somebody was questioning his life’s work. Then he looked up brightly and said, ‘Without poo, you would go off bang!’ And he stood there beaming, the meaning of life completely solved.
And Tears of the Mushroom laughed. It was a rather staccato laugh, reminding Vimes of the laughter of certain kinds of women, after certain kinds of too much gin. But it was laughter – straight, genuine and unaffected – and Young Sam bathed in it, giggling, and so did Sam Vimes, with sweat beginning to cool on his neck.
Then Young Sam said, ‘I wish I had big hands like you. What’s your name?’
In that clipped way Vimes was learning to recognize, the goblin girl said, ‘I am the Tears of the Mushroom.’
Instantly Young Sam threw his arms around as much of her as he could encompass and shouted, ‘Mushrooms shouldn’t cry!’
The look that the goblin girl gave Vimes was one that he had seen many times before on the face of someone in receipt of Young Sam’s hugs: a mixture of surprise and what Vimes had to call non-plussedness.
At this point Miss Beedle came back into the room holding a plate which she passed to Tears of the Mushroom. ‘Please be so good as to serve our guests, my dear.’
Tears of the Mushroom picked up the plate and tentatively pushed it towards Vimes, and said something that sounded like half a dozen coconuts rolling downstairs, but somehow managed to include the syllables
Vimes stared at her face a while and then thought, Well, I could understand, couldn’t I? It has to be worth a try, and closed his eyes, an errand of some dubiousness when you were face-to-longer-face with a jaw like that. With eyes firmly shut, and one hand over them to cut out the last vestige of light, he said, ‘Will you say that again, young … lady?’ And in the darkness of his skull he heard, quite clearly, ‘I have baked biscuits today, Mister Po- leess-man. I washed my hands,’ she added nervously. ‘They are clean and tasty. This I have said and it is a thing exact.’
Baked by a goblin, thought Vimes as he opened his eyes and took a knobbly but appetizing-looking biscuit from the plate in front of him, then shut his eyes again and asked, ‘Why does the mushroom cry?’
In the dark he heard the goblin girl gasp, and then say, ‘It cries so that there are many more mushrooms. This is a certain thing.’
Vimes heard the faint chink of crockery behind him, but as he took his hands away from his eyes Miss Beedle said, ‘No, stay in darkness, commander. So it’s true what the dwarfs say about you.’
‘I wouldn’t know. What do the dwarfs say about me, Miss Beedle?’
Vimes opened his eyes. Miss Beedle sat down on a chair almost opposite, while Tears of the Mushroom waited for more biscuit activity with the air of someone who would probably wait for ever or until told not to. She looked imploringly at Vimes and then at Young Sam, who was studying Tears of the Mushroom with interest, although, knowing Young Sam, most of the interest had to do with the plate of biscuits. So he said, ‘Okay, lad, you may ask the lady for a biscuit, but mind your manners.’
‘They say that the dark is in you, commander, but you keep it in a cage. A present from Koom Valley, they say.’
Vimes blinked in the light. ‘A dwarf superstition in a goblin cave? You know a lot about dwarfs?’
‘Quite a lot,’ said Miss Beedle, ‘but far more about goblins, and they believe in the Summoning Dark, just like the dwarfs; after all, they are both creatures of the caves and the Summoning Dark is
