The Fifth Elephant

by Terry Pratchett

  “G’night.”

  “Sam…?”

  There was a snore from Sam Vimes. Sybil sighed, and turned over.

  Vimes awoke a few times, when there were two thuds from downstairs.

  “Snow leopards,” he muttered, and drifted away again.

  There was a louder crash.

  “Moose,” murmured Lady Sybil.

  “Elk?” mumbled Vimes.

  “Def’nitly moose.”

  Some time later there was a muffled scream, a thud, and a sound very much like the sound made when a huge wooden ruler is held against a desk and twanged.

  “Swordfish,” said Sam and Sybil together, and went back to sleep.

  “You should present your credentials to the rulers of Bonk,” said Inigo in the morning.

  Vimes was looking out of the window. Two guards in the rainbow-colored uniforms were standing stiffly to attention outside the embassy.

  “What’re they doing here?” he said.

  “Guarding,” said Inigo.

  “Guarding who from what?”

  “Just generally guarding, mmm. I suppose it’s thought that guards give such a finished look to an important building.”

  “What was that you said about credentials?”

  “They’re just formal letters from Lord Vetinari, confirming your appointment. Mph, mmm…the lore is a little complex, but at the moment the order of precedence is the future Low King, the Lady Margolotta and the Baron von Uberwald. Each, of course, will pretend that you are not calling on the other two. It’s called the Arrangement. It’s an awkward system but it keeps the peace.”

  “If I understood your briefing,” said Vimes, still watching the guards, “in the days of Imperial Uberwald the whole bloody show was run by the werewolves and the vampires and everyone else was lunch.”

  “Somewhat simplistic but broadly true, mmm,” said Inigo, brushing some dust off Vimes’s shoulder.

  “And then it all broke up and the dwarfs became powerful because there’s dwarfs from one end of Uberwald to the other and they all keep in touch…”

  “Their system certainly survives political upheaval, yes.”

  “And then…what was it? A diet of beetles?”

  “The Diet of Bugs, mmm. Diet being an Uberwaldean word for meeting, and Bugs being an important town further up river, famous for its pastries made from flax. Everyone came to an…arrangement. No one would wage war on any of the others, and everyone could live in peace. No garlic to be grown, no silver to be mined. And the werewolves and vampires promised that those things wouldn’t be needed. Mmm, mmm.”

  “Seems a bit trusting,” said Vimes.

  “It appears to have worked, mhm.”

  “What did the humans think about it all?”

  “Well, humans have always been a bit of background noise in the history of Uberwald, Your Grace.”

  “It must be a bit dull for the undead, though.”

  “Oh, the bright ones know the old days can’t come back.”

  “Ah, well…that’s always the trick, isn’t it? Finding the bright ones?” Vimes put on his helmet. “And what’re the dwarfs like?”

  “The future Low King is considered pretty clever, Your Grace. Mhm.”

  “How does he stand on Ankh-Morpork?”

  “He can take Ankh-Morpork or leave it alone, Your Grace. On balance, I believe he doesn’t much like us.”

  “I thought it was Albrecht that didn’t like us?”

  “No, Your Grace. Albrecht is the one who would be happy to see Ankh-Morpork burned to the ground. Rhys merely wishes we didn’t exist.”

  “I thought he was one of the good guys!”

  “Your Grace, I did hear you express some negative sentiments about Ankh-Morpork on the way here, mhm, mhm.”

  “Yes, but I live there! I’m allowed to! That’s patriotic!”

  “Across the whole of the world, Your Grace, there inexplicably appear to be definitions of, mmm, mhm, ‘good guy’ which do not automatically mean ‘likes Ankh-Morpork.’ You will find out, I daresay. The other two are a lot easier to deal with. It may have been the Lady Margolotta who tried the little trick with the guards last night. She was the one who got me to bring you back, anyway. She has invited you for drinks.”

  “Oh.”

  “She’s a vampire, mmm, mmm.”

  “What?”

  Inigo sighed.

  “Your Grace, I thought you understood. Vampires are simply part of Uberwald. This is where they belong. I’m afraid this is something you will have to come to terms with. I understand that now they…obtain blood by arrangement. Some people are…impressed by a title, Your Grace.”

  “Good grief…”

  “Quite so. In any case, you will be safe. Remember your diplomatic immunity, mmm, mhm.”

  “I didn’t quite see that working in the Wilinus Pass the other day.”

  “Oh, they were common bandits.”

  “Really? Has your man Sleeps turned up? Haven’t you taken this to the Watch here?”

  “There’s no Watch here, as you understand the term. You saw them. They’re…gate guards, enforcers for the city rulers, mhm, mmm, not officers of the law. But…inquiries are being made.”

  “Does Sybil come with me for this bit?” said Vimes, and thought: We were guards like that, not so long ago…

  “It is usually done by the new ambassador and his guards.”

  “Well, Detritus is staying here to keep an eye on her, all right? She said this morning she really thinks this place would be better for some decent carpet, and there’s no stopping her when she’s in a tape-measure mood. I’ll take Cheery and one of the lads from outside, for the look of the thing. I assume you’re coming?”

  “I won’t be required, sir. Mmm. The new coachman knows the way, Morporkian is the diplomatic language, after all, and…I shall be making inquiries.”

  “Delicate ones?”

  “Indeed, Your Grace.”

  “If he’s been killed, won’t that be an act of war?”

  “Yes and no, Your Grace.”

  “What? Sleeps was—is our man!”

  Inigo looked awkward. “It would depend on…exactly where he was and what he was doing…”

  Vimes gave him a blank look, and then the penny dropped and operated his brain.

  “Spying?”

  “Acquiring information. Everyone does it, mm, mmm.”

  “Yes, but if you find a diplomat going too far you just sent him home with a sharp note, don’t you?”

  “Around the Circle Sea, Your Grace, that is the case. Here…they may have a different approach…”

  “Something rather sharper than a note?”

  “Exactly. Mmm.”

  Captain Tantony was one of the guards. There was some minor difficulty, but the argument that, since he was guarding Vimes, he might as well be where Vimes was, eventually carried some weight. Tantony had the look of an agonizingly logical man.

  He kept giving Vimes curious looks as the coach rattled out of the town. Beside him, Cheery sat with her legs dangling. Vimes noticed, although it was not the kind of thing he generally made a habit of noticing, that the shape of her breastplate had been subtly altered, probably by the same armorer that Angua went to, to indicate that the chest underneath it was not quite the same shape of chest that you got under the armor of, say, Corporal Nobbs, although of course probably no one had a chest the same shape as that of Corporal Nobbs.

  She was wearing her high-heeled iron boots, too.

  “Look, you don’t have to come,” he said out loud.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “I mean I could go and get Detritus instead. Although I suppose there’d be even more upshot if I took a troll into a dwarf mine…I mean, rather than a…a…”

  “…girl,” said Cheery helpfully.

  “Er…yes.” Vimes felt the coach slow to a halt, even though they hadn’t left the town yet, and he looked out.

  In front of them, across a small square, was a fort
of sorts, but with much larger gates than you’d expect for its size. As Vimes stared at them, they were swung open from within.

  Inside, there was a slope. All the fort consisted of was four walls around a large, sloping tunnel.

  “The dwarfs live underneath the town?” he said, as the light from outside was gradually replaced by the infrequent glow of torches. But they clearly showed the coach was rattling past a long, long line of stationary carts. The pools of light revealed horses, and drivers talking in groups.

  “Under quite a lot of Uberwald,” said Cheery. “This is just the nearest entrance, sir. We’ll probably have to stop in a minute, because the horses don’t like—ah.”

  The coach stopped again, and the coachman banged on the side to indicate that this was the end of the line. The queue of carts wound off down another tunnel, but the coach had stopped in a small cave with a big door. A couple of dwarfs were waiting there. They had axes slung across their backs, although by dwarf standards this counted merely as “politely dressed” rather than “heavily armed.” Their attitude, however, was in the international language of people guarding gates everywhere.

  “Commander Sam Vimes, Ankh-Morpork Ci—ambassador from Ankh-Morpork,” said Vimes, handing one of them his papers. At least it was not hard to assume a lofty air with dwarfs.

  To his surprise, the document was read thoroughly, one dwarf looking over the other one’s shoulder and pointing out interesting subclauses. The official seal was carefully examined.

  One guard pointed to Cheery.

  “Kra’k?”

  “My official guard,” said Vimes. “Included in ‘associated members of staff’ on page two,” he added helpfully.

  “Mhust searhch thy coash,” said the guard.

  “No. Diplomatic immunity,” said Vimes. “Tell ’em, Cheery.”

  They listened to Cheery’s urgent Dwarfish. Then the other guard, whose face had indicated that there was something on his mind and it was jumping up and down, nudged his companion and pulled him aside.

  There was a torrent of whispers. Vimes couldn’t understand, but he caught the word “Wilinus.” And, shortly afterward, the word “hr’grag,” Dwarfish for “thirty.”

  “Oh gods,” he said. “And a dog?”

  “Good guess, sir,” said Cheery.

  The document was handed back, hurriedly. Vimes could read the body language, even written smaller than usual—there was probably an expensive problem here, so the guards were inclined to leave it to someone who earned more money than they did.

  One of them pulled a bellpull by the door. After some time, the door slid open, revealing a small room.

  “We have to go in, sir,” said Cheery.

  “But there’s no other doors!”

  “It’s all right, sir.”

  Vimes stepped inside. The dwarfs slid the door back, leaving them in the room lit only by one candle.

  “Some kind of waiting room?” said Vimes.

  Somewhere far off, something went clonk. The floor trembled for a moment, and then Vimes has an uneasy sensation of movement.

  “The room moves?” he said.

  “Yes, sir. Several hundred feet down, probably. I think it’s all done by counterweights.”

  They stood silently, unsure of what to say, as walls around them creaked and groaned. Then there was a rattle, a passing sensation of weight, and the room stopped moving.

  “Wherever we’re headed, keep your ears open,” said Vimes. “Something’s going on, I can feel it…”

  The door slid back.

  Vimes looked out onto the night sky, underground. The stars were all around him…below him…

  “I think we went down…too far,” he said. And then his brain made sense of what his eyes had seen. The moving room had brought them out somewhere on the side of a huge cave. He was looking at a thousand points of candlelight, spread out on the cavern floor and in other galleries. Now that he could grasp the scale of things, he realized that many of them were moving.

  The air was full of one huge sound made up of thousands of voices, echoed and re-echoing. Occasionally a shout or a laugh would stand out, but mostly it was just an endless sea of sound, beating on the shores of the eardrum.

  “I thought you people lived in little mines,” said Vimes.

  “Well, I thought humans lived in little cottages, sir,” said Cheery, taking a candle from a large rack beside the door and lighting it. “And then I saw Ankh-Morpork.”

  There was something recognizable about the way the lights were moving. A whole constellation of them was heading in toward one invisible wall, where reflected light now indicated, very faintly, the mouth of a large tunnel. In front of it was a row of lights.

  Think of it as a lot of people heading for something which one row of people was…guarding.

  “People down there aren’t happy,” said Vimes. “That looks like a mob to me. Look, you can tell by the way they move…”

  “Commander Vimes?”

  He turned. In the gloom he could make out several dwarfs, each with a candle fixed to his helmet. In front of them was, presumably, another dwarf.

  He’d seen clothes like this in Ankh-Morpork, but always scurrying away. This was…a deep-down dwarf.

  It was wearing some sort of robe made of overlapping leather plates. Instead of the small round iron helmet which Vimes had always thought dwarfs were born with, it had a pointed leather hat with more leather flaps all around it. The one at the front had been tied up, to allow the wearer to look out at the world, or at least that part of it that was underground. The general effect was of a mobile cone.

  “Er…yes, that’s me,” said Vimes.

  “Welcome to Shmaltzberg, Your Excellency. I am the king’s jar’ahk’haga, which in your language you would call—”

  But Vimes’s lips had been moving fast as he tried to translate.

  “Ideas…taster?” he said.

  “Hah! That would be a way of putting it, yes. My name…is Dee. Would you care to follow me? This should not take long.”

  The figure swept away. One of the other dwarfs prodded Vimes very gently, indicating that he should follow.

  The sound from far below redoubled. Someone was yelling.

  “Is there some problem?” said Vimes, catching up with the fast-moving Dee.

  “We have no problems.”

  Ah, he’s already lied to me, thought Vimes. We’re being diplomatic.

  Vimes trailed after the dwarf through more caves. Or tunnels…it was hard to tell, because in the darkness Vimes could only rely on a sense of the space around him. Occasionally they passed the lighted entrance to another cave or tunnel. Several guards, with candles on their helmets, stood at each one.

  The well-honed copper’s radar was beeping at him continuously. Something bad was going on. He could smell the tension, the sense of quiet panic. The air was thick with it. Occasionally other dwarfs scuttled past, distracted, on some mission. Something very bad. People didn’t know what to do next, so they were trying to do everything. And, in the middle of this, important officials had to stop what they were doing because some idiot from some distant city had to hand over a piece of paper.

  Eventually a door opened in the darkness. It led into a large, roughly oblong cave that, with its book-lined walls and paper strewn tables, had the look of an office about it.

  “Do be seated, Commander.”

  A match burst into life. One candle was lit, all lost and alone in the dark.

  “We try to make guests feel welcome,” said Dee, scuttling behind his desk. He pulled off his pointed hat and, to Vimes’s amazement, put on a pair of thick smoked glasses.

  “You had papers?” he said. Vimes handed them over.

  “It says here ‘His Grace,’” the dwarf said, after reading them for a while.

  “Yes, that’s me.”

  “And there’s a sir.”

  “That’s me, too.”

  “And an Excellency.”

  “’Fraid so.�
�� Vimes narrowed his eyes. “I was blackboard monitor for a while, too.”

  There was the sound of angry voices from behind a door at the far end of the room.

  “What does a blackboard monitor do?” said Dee, raising his voice.

  “What? Er…I had to clean the blackboard after lessons.”

  The dwarf nodded. The voices grew louder, more intense. Dwarfish was such a good language to be annoyed in.

  “Erasing the teachings when they were learned!” said Dee, shouting to be heard.

  “Er…yes!”

  “A task only given to the trustworthy!”

  “Could be, yes!”

  Dee folded up the letter and handed it back, glancing briefly at Cheery.

  “Well, these seem to be in order,” he said. “Would you care for a drink before you go?”

  “Sorry? I thought I had to present myself to your king.” The swearing from the other side of the door was threatening to burn through the woodwork.

  “Oh, that won’t be necessary,” said Dee. “At the moment he should not be bothered with—”

  “—trivial matters?” said Vimes. “I thought it was how the thing ought to be done. I thought dwarfs always did the thing that ought to be done.”

  “At the moment it…would not be advisable,” said Dee, talking very loudly again in an effort to drown out the noise. “I’m sure you understand.”

  “Let’s assume I’m very stupid,” said Vimes.

  “I assure you, Your Excellency, that what I see the king sees, and what I hear the king hears.”

  “That’s certainly true at the moment, isn’t it?”

  Dee drummed his fingers on his desk.

  “Your Excellency, I have spent only long enough in your…city to gain a general insight into your ways, but I might feel you are making fun of me.”

  “May I speak freely?”

  “From what I have heard of you, Your Monitorship, you usually do.”

  “Have you found the Scone of Stone yet?”

  The expression on Dee’s face told Vimes that he had scored. And that, almost certainly, the next thing the dwarf said would be another lie.

  “What a strange and untruthful thing to say! There is no possibility that the Scone could have been stolen! This has been firmly declared! This is not a lie we wish to hear repeated!”