Snuff

  So he jumped, and realized that a jump would have to beget another jump and failure to keep the rhythm would mean falling back into the torrent, but jumping on to the next barge, which was swinging and bucking in the swell, you just hoped that you didn’t get a foot stuck between the two of them, because two twenty-five-foot barges colliding as a sandwich with your foot in the middle would do more than just leave a bruise. But Stinky ran and jumped and pirouetted just ahead of him and Vimes was quick enough to get the message, landing squarely on the next barge, and so, surprisingly, did Feeney, who actually laughed, although you had to be within a foot of him to hear that.

  “Well done, sir! We did this when I was a lad…every boy did…the big ones were best…”

  Vimes had got his breath back after the first two jumps. According to what Feeney had told him, the Wonderful Fanny was a bulk carrier, big and slow, but it could take any load. There could be anything in these barges, he thought, but there was no smell of goblins yet and there were two barges still to go and weather that was trying to get even worse.

  With that thought, there was Stinky again, who apparently could come and go without ever being seen either coming or going. And he still glowed faintly. Vimes had to crouch to speak to him. “Where are they, Stinky?”

  The goblin farted, quite probably as a clown does, more for entertainment than relief. Clearly happy at the response, he cracked, “Number one barge! Easy to get to! Easy to feed!”

  Vimes eyed the distance to the barge immediately behind the Fanny. Surely there had to be some kind of walkway? Some means of getting into the barges so that the crew could access the cargo? He turned again to Feeney, dripping with rain and illumined by another flash of lightning. “How many crew, do you think?”

  Even this close, Feeney had to shout. “Probably two men, or a man and boy, down below in what they call the cowshed! Along with the engineer, and generally a loadmaster or cargo captain! Sometimes a cook, if the captain’s wife doesn’t want to do the job, although mostly they do, and then one or two lads learning the business and acting as general lookouts and wharf rats!”

  “Is that all? No guards?”

  “No, sir, this ain’t the high seas!”

  Two barges crashed together, sending up a plume of water that succeeded in at last filling Vimes’s boots right to the top. There was no point in emptying them, but he managed to growl through the storm, “I’ve got news for you, lad. The water’s getting higher.”

  He steeled himself for the jump on to the next erratic barge and wondered: Even so, where are the people? Surely they don’t all want to die? He waited and jumped again as the barge presented itself, and landed heavily just in time to see his sword cartwheeling roguishly into the stormy water. Cursing, and struggling to keep his balance, he awaited the next opportunity to narrowly survive and this time succeed. He leapt again and almost fell backward between the crashing timbers but, balancing perilously, fell forward instead and fell in and right through a tarpaulin, into an indistinct face which cried, “Please! Please don’t kill me! I’m just a complicated chicken farmer! I’m not carrying any weapons! I don’t even like killing chickens!”

  Vimes had managed to land with his arms around a plump man who would have screamed again had Vimes not clamped a hand over his mouth and hissed, “This is the police, sir. Sorry for the inconvenience, sir, but who the hell are you and what is going on? Come on, there’s no time to waste.” He pushed the man further into the barge and a soggy darkness and a recognizable smell told Sam Vimes that whether the frantic speaker was complicated or not he wasn’t lying about the chickens. From the clucking, feathery gloom in the wire baskets beyond, there emanated yet another smell, announcing that a large number of chickens, never the most stoical creatures at the best of times, were now very frightened.

  A vague silhouette demanded, “The police? Here? Pull the other leg, mate! Who do you think you are? Bloody Commander Vimes?”

  The barge bucked again and an errant egg spun out of the darkness and smacked into Vimes’s face. He wiped it off, or at least spread it around a bit and said, “Well, well, sir, are you always this lucky?”

  His name was false; in full it was Praise and Salvation False, and inevitably, when you have a false name you will insist on explaining why, even when imminent watery death is not only staring you in the eye but also everywhere else, possibly including both your trouser legs. “You see, sir, my family originally came from Klatch, and our name was Thalassa but, of course, over a period of time people tend to mispronounce the way they—”

  Vimes interrupted him, because that was a more acceptable alternative to throttling him. “Please, Mr. False, can you tell me what’s been happening on the Fanny?”

  “Oh dear, it was terrible, it really was extremely terrible! There was shouting and yelling and I’m sure I heard a woman screaming! And now we keep hitting the bank, or at least that’s what it sounds like! And the storm, sir, it’ll have us under in two shakes of a lamb’s tail, I’m certain of it!”

  “And you didn’t go forward to see, Mr. False?” said Vimes.

  The man looked startled. “Commander, I breed complicated chickens, sir, extremely complicated chickens. I don’t know anything about fighting! Chickens never get all that aggressive! I’m really sorry, sir, but I didn’t go to see in case I saw, sir, see? And if I saw, sir, then I’m sure people would see me, sir, and since I reasoned that they would be people who were alive after other people might possibly be dead, sir, and maybe had a responsibility for said deaths, sir, I made certain that they didn’t see me, sir, if you see what I mean? Besides, I have no weapons, weak lungs and a wooden toe. And I’m alive, at the moment.”

  In truth, Vimes thought there was an inescapable logic to all this, so he said, “Don’t worry about it, Mr. False, I bet you’ve got enough to do with your complicated chickens. So, no weapons at all, then?”

  “I’m very sorry to disappoint you, commander, but I’m not a strong man. It was all I could do to drag my toolbox on board!”

  Vimes’s face stayed blank. “Toolbox? You have a toolbox?”

  Mr. False clutched the wall again as the barge bounced off something it shouldn’t have, and said, “Well, yes, of course. If we manage to get off at Quirm I’ve got a site that I must make ready for a hundred chicken houses, and if you want a job done properly these days then you have to do it yourself, right?”

  “You’re telling an expert,” said Vimes as another crash sent them both staggering. “I wonder if I could take a look at this toolbox of yours?”

  There are times in the symphony of the world, when its aural kaleidoscope of crashes, thunderbolts, screams and storms suddenly merges into one great hallelujah! And the contents of the chicken farmer’s innocent toolbox, which contained nothing not made of ordinary iron and steel and wood, nevertheless gleamed in the eyes of Commander Sam Vimes like the hosts of heaven. Mallets, hammers, saws, oh my! There was even a large spiral awl! What could Willikins have managed with a toy like that? Hal-le-lu-jah! Oh, and here was a crowbar! Vimes balanced it in his hand, and felt the Street rise until it touched his feet. The complicated chicken man had heard a woman screaming…

  Vimes spun around as the tarpaulin was pushed aside and Feeney dropped into the barge in a flurry of spray. “I know you didn’t give me the signal, commander, but I thought I’d better tell you the water is going down.”

  Vimes saw Mr. False close his eyes and groan, but turned back to Feeney and said, “Well, that’s a good thing, isn’t it? The water? Going down?”

  “No, it isn’t, sir!” yelled Feeney. “It’s still raining hard and the water level is going down, and that means that upstream of us enough broken trees and bushes and mud and other junk are piling up to make a dam which is getting bigger and bigger and growing out sideways as the water builds up behind it, sir. Can you see what I mean?”

  Vimes did. “Damn slam?”

  Feeney nodded. “Damn right! We have two choices: would you rather die on the
river or under it? What are your orders, please, sir?”

  Another collision shook the barge, and Vimes stared at darkness. In this terrible twilight somebody was managing to stop this boat from foundering. A woman had screamed and Vimes had a crowbar. Almost absent-mindedly he reached down into the open toolbox and picked up a sledgehammer, handing it to Feeney. “There you go, lad. I know you’ve got your official firewood, but things might get up close and personal. Chalk it up to the dreadful algebra of necessity, but try not to hit me with it.”

  He heard the voice of Feeney saying, more frantically this time, “What are we going to do, commander?!”

  And Vimes blinked and said, “Everything!”

  The wind caught the tarpaulin as Vimes pulled it open, and it flapped off across the river, leaving the complicated chicken farmer living in hope and broken eggs. They pulled themselves out into the darkness, their shadows dancing to the rhythm of the lightning. How the hell was the pilot navigating in all this? Lamps up front? Surely they could do nothing on a night like this except show up the darkness. But although there was a suspicion, at every bang and bounce, that the Fanny was in real trouble, Vimes could hear now the splashing of the paddle wheels like one solid dependable theme in the cacophony, a regular, reassuring sound. It was making way. There was some order in the world, but how could the pilot manage the chaos? How could you steer when you couldn’t see?

  Feeney had explained in a hurry and Vimes had expressed utter disbelief even faster. “It’s true, sir! He knows every bend in the river, he knows the wind, he knows how fast we’re going and has a stopwatch and an hourglass in reserve. He takes a turn when it’s time to take it. Okay, he’s shaving the banks a bit with the old Fanny, but she’s pretty tough.”

  They jumped together on to the last barge and found a hatch that was locked. However, a crowbar is a universal pass key. And there, under the hatch, were goblins, tied hand and foot, every one, and they had been stacked like cabbages. There were hundreds of them. Overwhelmed, Vimes looked around for Stinky, who turned out to be behind him.

  “Okay, my friend, over to you. We’ll cut them loose, certainly, but I wouldn’t mind a bit of reassurance that I won’t suddenly have a load of angry goblins twisting my head backward and forward to see which way would take it off, understand?”

  Stinky, already as skinny as a skeleton, looked even thinner when he shrugged. He pointed at the groaning heaps. “Too sore, too stiff, too hungry, too…” Stinky looked closely at a goblin at the bottom of a pile and touched a flaccid hand, “too dead to chase anyone, Mr. Po-leess-maan. Hah! But later, give food, give water and they chase. Oh, they chase like the buggery, you bet! Once I talk to them, oh you bet! But I will say to them, po-leess-maan, him big arsehole, okay, but kind arsehole. I will say to them, you whack him, I whack you on account that I po-leess-maan now. Special Po-leess-maan Stinky!”

  Vimes considered that was the best valedictory he could expect in the circumstances. Just then Feeney managed to lever the lid off a large drum, one of several rolling around on the deck. Immediately the terrible stench in the barge doubled in intensity, and he backed away with his hands over his mouth. Stinky, on the other hand, sniffed approvingly. “Hot damn! Turkey gizzards! Food of the gods! Bastard murder voyage, but okay catering.”

  Vimes stared at him. Well, okay, he thought, he hangs around near humans so he picks up a vocabulary, maybe that is suspiciously clever. Perhaps Miss Beedle gave him language lessons? Or maybe he’s just some occult adventurer from hell knows where having fun at the expense of a hardworking copper. Not for the first time.

  Feeney was already cutting ropes, and Vimes tried to resurrect as many goblins as he could in a hurry. It was no errand for anyone with a concern for hygiene or even a notion of what the word meant—though after an hour in a storm on Old Treachery, it had no meaning anyway. They staggered up, and fell down again, found their way to the upended barrel of dead turkey bits and stumbled over slippery decks to a sloshing and now half-empty water trough that Feeney had found and was filling by the simple expedient of sticking a bucket over the side. They were coming back to life; mostly they were coming back to life.

  The barge bounced off a bank again, and amid tumbling goblins Vimes grabbed for a handhold. Half the entire barge was full of barrels which, if you sniffed anywhere near them, were certainly not full of sweet roses. He braved the rocking deck again and said, “I don’t think all this is for a little voyage to the seaside, do you? There’s more barrels of stinking turkey entrails than this lot of poor devils could possibly get through in a week! Someone was expecting a long journey! Good grief!”

  The barge had smacked into something and, by the sound of breaking glass, that something had been smashed. Feeney stood up, holding on to a rope, and, wiping turkey gizzard off his coat, said, “Voyage, sir. Not journey, sir. You wouldn’t need all this stuff if you’re traveling on land. I reckon they’re bound for somewhere a long way away.”

  “Do you think it’ll be a holiday of sun, sea, surf and fun?” said Vimes.

  “No, sir,” said Feeney, “and they wouldn’t like it if it was, would they? Goblins like the dark.”

  Vimes slapped him on the shoulder. “Okay, Chief Constable Upshot, don’t hit somebody who surrenders and, if a man drops his weapon, be a little bit wary of him until you’re certain he hasn’t got another one tucked away somewhere, right? If in doubt, knock ’em out. And you know how to do that: use the old Bang Suck Cling Buck on them, eh?!”

  “Yes, sir, that’s a recipe for shoe polish, sir, but I’ll bear it in mind.”

  Vimes turned to Stinky, who already looked slightly fatter than usual. “Stinky, I don’t have the faintest idea what is going to happen next. I can see your chums are starting to look alive, and so you’ve got the chance that we all get, sink or swim, and I can’t say better than that. Come on, let’s go, Feeney.”

  This close, the Wonderful Fanny was now a rolling, creaking mess, half-covered by flying weeds and sticks. Apart from the storm and the clanging and creaking of the mechanisms, it was silent.

  “Okay,” said Feeney quietly, “we’d better go in by the cattle door at the stern, sir, or as you would say, ‘the back.’ It won’t be a difficult jump, there’s lots of handholds because the loadmaster has to come out here to see to the barges. Can you see that double door and the little wicket gate? We go in that way. There’ll likely be more cargo along the cattle ramp, because a loadmaster never wastes floor space, and then we go midships…”

  “That is to say ‘the middle of the ship’?” said Vimes.

  Feeney smiled. “Yes, sir, and watch out because it’s a mass of machinery. You’ll see what I mean, because you’re smart. Take the wrong step and you could fall into a gear or on top of an ox, never a happy occasion. It’s noisy, smelly and dangerous, so if there are many bandits on this boat I wouldn’t expect to find them there.”

  I would, Vimes thought; our Mr. Stratford is the kind of maniac who would want to keep going in suicidal circumstances. Why? So that the cargo is a long way away before anyone knows about it? And Stratford works for Lord Rust and the Rusts believe the world belongs to them. We’re taking goblins somewhere, but they want to keep them alive—why?

  The shock of another collision brought him back to the dreadful here and now, and he said, “I’d expect to find any crew here being watched like hawks in case they put a spanner in the works.”

  “Oh, very smart, sir, very smart indeed. There has to be some light in there for safety’s sake, but not much and all behind glass ’cos of…”

  Feeney hesitated, so Vimes suggested, “Fire, perhaps? I’ve never known an engineer who doesn’t shove grease wherever he can.”

  “Oh, it’s not exactly the grease, sir, it’s the beasts. The gas does build up, so it does! And if the glass breaks, well, it’s regrettably spectacular. Two years ago the Glorious Peggy was blown out of the water for just such a reason!”

  “Do they eat the Hang Suck Butt Dog with tur
nips around here?”

  “No, sir, not as far as I know, but Bhangbhangduc fusion cookery is very popular on the boats, it’s true. Anyway, further on you’ll find the pilot’s cabin, the sleeping quarters and then the wheelhouse, which has very wide windows, which is another good reason to attack from behind.”

  Refreshingly, it was a short leap with a good handhold at the end of it. Vimes had no worries about being heard. The deck creaked under his feet as he crept inside the Wonderful Fanny and sidled toward the middle of the ship, or whatever the hell the real term for it was, but then she creaked everywhere, and all the time, and groaned, too. The boat was so noisy that a sudden patch of silence might have drawn attention to itself. And I’m looking for somebody who looks like everybody else, he thought, right up until he looks like the vicious killer he is. Well, that seems straightforward.

  Vimes was vaguely aware of huge wheels spinning frantically off to either side and chains traveling overhead and now, here, at the top of the flight of stairs, was somebody who clearly wasn’t where they should have been…

  It was a woman, with a small girl clinging to her dress. They had been loosely tied to a creaking beam, and a small oil lamp overhead held them in the center of its circle of light. And this was probably because there was a man sitting a little way away from them on a stool, with a crossbow lying on his lap.

  And here was a puzzle because a length of string had been tied to each of his legs. One length of string ran across the floor and disappeared downward into what was, to judge by the heat, the farmyard stink and the occasional bellow of troubled ungulate, the cowshed that Vimes had just passed. The other string disappeared forward toward the wheelhouse.

  The woman spotted him and immediately clasped the child to her chest and very slowly put a finger to her lips. He had to hope that the man hadn’t noticed, and did not have to hope that the woman realized that he was there to rescue her, not to add to her troubles. That wasn’t necessary, but he did feel better that she was a lady fast on the uptake. He held up a hand in front of Feeney, but the lad was definitely future captain material; he hadn’t moved at all. Like Vimes, he had become an observer. And Vimes observed, and let the dark rise up to assess the situation in its own inimitable way. This wasn’t the Summoning Dark, or at least he fervently hoped not. It was just his own human darkness and internal enemy, which knew his every thought, which knew that every time Commander Vimes dragged some vicious and inventive murderer to such mercy or justice as the law in its erratic wisdom determined, there was another Vimes, a ghost Vimes, whose urge to chop that creature into pieces on the spot had to be chained. This, regrettably, was harder every time, and he wondered if one day that darkness would break out and claim its heritage, and he wouldn’t know…the brakes and chains and doors and locks in his head would have vanished and he wouldn’t know.