Snuff

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 on 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 any more. 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, and 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 backwards and forwards 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.

Afterwards, 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 lock-up slammed against the stone as Vimes entered; nevertheless he was taking care where he placed his feet.

And Mister 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 or four 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 Zoons²⁶ had got it sewn up. I did do a season on one, mucking out and feeding, but I prefer turkeys.’

‘And the name of the boat?’ said Vimes carefully.

‘Oh, everybody knows it! It’s the biggest on the river. Everybody knows the Wonderful Fanny!’

Internal monologues can play themselves out quite fast, and Vimes’s went: let me think. Ah yes, almost certainly there was a captain who had a wife who was probably named Francesca at birth, but that’s too much of a mouthful, and he named his boat after her because he loved her very much. And there you have it. There is no need to dwell on the subject, because there are only so many words, letters and syllables available to the tongue, and if you can’t come to terms with that then you might as well never get out of bed. And so, having got his brain sorted out, he released the clamps on his silly-embarrassed-face reflex and said, ‘Thank you for your cooperation, Ted, but if you had told us earlier we might have been able to catch the damn boat!’

Flutter looked at him in astonishment. ‘Catch the Fanny? Bless you, sir, a man with one leg could do that! She’s a bulk carrier, not a streaker! Even going all night she won’t have got much past Fender’s Bend by now. There are bends all the way, you see? I reckon you never get more than half a mile without a bend! And it’s full of rocks, too. Seriously, you have to zigzag so much on Old Treachery that you’re often crossing your own wake.’

Vimes nodded at this. ‘One last thing, Ted. Remind me again … What exactly does Mister Stratford look