The Fifth Elephant

by Terry Pratchett

  “Yes, well, it could cost them money,” said Vimes, peering into the mouth of the mortar. “We need this tower working, Inigo. I don’t like being stuck out here.”

  “The roads aren’t too bad yet. They could be here by tomorrow evening—I’m sure you shouldn’t do that, sir!”

  Vimes had pulled the mortar out of its tube. He looked at Inigo quizzically.

  “They won’t go off until you light the charge in the base,” he said. “They’re safe. And they’d make a stupid weapon, ’cos you can’t aim them worth a damn and they’re only made of cardboard in any case. Come on, let’s get it onto the roof.”

  “Not until dark, Your Grace, mmm. That way two or three towers on each side will see it, not just the closest.”

  “But the closest towers are watching they’ll certainly see—”

  “We don’t know that there is anyone there to watch, sir. Perhaps what happened here has happened there, too? Mmm?”

  “Good grief! You don’t think—”

  “No, I don’t think, sir, I’m a civil servant. I advise other people, mmm, mmm. Then they think. My advice is that an hour or two won’t hurt, sir. My advice is that you return with Lady Sybil now, sir. I will send up a flare as soon as it is dark and make my way back to the embassy.”

  “Hold on, I am Commander in—”

  “Not here, Your Grace. Remember? Here you are a civilian in the way, mhm, mmm. I’ll be safe enough—”

  “The crew weren’t.”

  “They weren’t me, mhm, mhm. For the sake of Lady Sybil, Your Grace, I advise you to leave now.”

  Vimes hesitated, hating the fact that Inigo was not only right but was, despite his claim to mindlessness, doing the thinking that he should be doing. He was supposed to be out for an afternoon’s drive with his wife, for heaven’s sake.

  “Well…all right. Just one thing, though. Why are you here?”

  “The last time Sleeps was seen he was on his way up here with a message.”

  “Ah. And am I right in thinking that your Mister Sleeps was not exactly the kind of diplomat that hands around the cucumber sandwiches?”

  Inigo smiled thinly.

  “That’s right, sir. He was…the other sort. Mmm.”

  “Your sort.”

  “Mmm. And now go, Your Grace. The sun will be setting soon. Mmm, mmm.”

  Corporal Nobbs, President and Convenor of the Guild of Watchmen, surveyed his troops.

  “All right, one more time,” he said. “Whadda we want?”

  The strike meeting had been going on for some time, and it had been going on in a bar. The watchmen were already a little forgetful.

  Constable Ping raised his hand.

  “Er…a proper grievance procedure, a complaints committee, an overhaul of the promotion procedures…er…”

  “—better crockery in the canteen,” someone supplied.

  “—freedom from unwarranted accusations of sucrose theft,” said someone else.

  “—no more than seven days straight on nights—”

  “—an increase in the boots allowance—”

  “—at least three afternoons off for grandmother’s funerals per year—”

  “—not having to pay for our own pigeon feed—”

  “—another drink.” This last demand met with general approval.

  Constable Shoe got to his feet. He was still, in his spare time, organizer of the Campaign for Dead Rights, and he knew how this sort of thing went.

  “No, no, no, no, no,” he said. “You’ve got to get it a lot simpler than that. It’s got to have bounce. And rhythm. Like ‘Whadda we want? Dum-dee-dum-dee. When do we want it? Now!’ See? You need one simple demand. Let’s try it again. Whadda we want?”

  The watchmen looked at one another, no one quite wanting to be the first.

  “Another drink?” someone volunteered.

  “Yeah!” said someone at the back. “When do we want it? NOW!”

  “Well, that one seems to have worked,” said Nobby, as the policemen crowded round the bar. “What else are we going to need, Reg?”

  “Signs for the picket,” said Constable Shoe.

  “We’ve got to picket?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “In that case,” said Nobby firmly, “we’ve got to have a big metal drum to burn old scrap wood in, while we’re pickin’ at it.”

  “Why?” said Reg.

  “You got to stand around warmin’ your hands over a big drum,” said Nobby. “That’s how people know you’re an official picket and not a bunch of bums.”

  “But we are a bunch of bums, Nobby. People think we are, anyway.”

  “All right, but let’s be warm ones.”

  The sun was a finger’s width above the rim when Vimes’s coach set off from the tower. Igor whipped the horses up. Vimes looked out of the window at the road’s edge, a few feet away and several hundred feet above the river.

  “Why so fast?” he shouted.

  “Got to be home by thunthet!” Igor shouted. “It’th tradithional.”

  The big red sun was moving through bars of cloud.

  “Oh, let him, dear, if it gives the poor soul any pleasure,” said Lady Sybil, shutting the window. “Now, Sam, what happened at the tower?”

  “I don’t really want to worry you, Sybil…”

  “Well, now that you’ve got me really worried, you may as well tell me. All right?”

  Vimes gave in and explained the little that he knew.

  “Someone’s killed them?”

  “Possibly.”

  “The same people that ambushed us back in that gorge?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “This isn’t turning out to be much of a holiday, Sam.”

  “It’s not being able to do anything that makes me sick,” said Vimes. “Back in Ankh-Morpork…well, I’d have leads, contacts, some kind of a map. Everyone here is…well, hiding something, I think. The new king thinks I’m a fool, the werewolves treated me as if I was something the cat dragged in…the only person who’s been halfway civil was a vampire!”

  “Not the cat,” said Sybil.

  “What?” said Vimes, mystified.

  “Werewolves hate cats,” said Sybil. “I distinctly remember that. Definitely not cat people.”

  “Hah. No. Dog people. They don’t like words like bath or vet, either. I reckon if you threw a stick at the baron he’d leap out of his chair to catch it—”

  “I suppose I ought to tell you about the carpets,” said Sybil, as the coach rocked around a corner.

  “What, isn’t he house-trained?”

  “I meant the carpets in the embassy. You know I said I’d measure up for them? But the measurements aren’t right, on the first floor…”

  “I don’t want to sound impatient, dear, but is this a carpet moment?”

  “Sam?”

  “Yes, dear?”

  “Just stop thinking like a husband and start listening like a…a copper, will you?”

  Vimes marched into the embassy and summoned Detritus and Cheery.

  “You two are coming with us to the ball tonight,” he said. “It’ll be posh. Have you got anything to wear apart from your uniform, Sergeant?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well, go and see Igor. There’s a good man with a needle if I ever saw one. How about you, Cheery?”

  “I do, er, have a gown,” said Cheery, looking down shyly.

  “You do?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Oh. Well. Good. I’m putting the two of you on the embassy staff, too. Cheery, you’re…you’re Military Attaché.”

  “Oh,” said Detritus, disappointed.

  “And, Detritus, you’re Cultural Attaché.”

  The troll brightened up considerably. “You will not regret dis, sir!”

  “I’m sure I won’t,” said Vimes. “Right now, I’d like you to come with me.”

  “Is dis a cultural matter, sir?”

  “Broadly. Perhaps.”

 
Vimes led the troll and Sybil up the stairs and into the office, where he stopped in front of a wall.

  “This one?” he said.

  “Yes,” said his wife. “It’s hard to notice until you measure the rooms, but that wall really is rather thick—”

  Vimes ran his hands along the paneling, looking for anything that might go click. Then he stood back.

  “Give me your crossbow, Sergeant.”

  “Here we are, sir.”

  Vimes staggered under its weight, but managed to get it pointed at the wall.

  “Is this wise, Sam?” said Sybil.

  Vimes stood back to take aim, and the floorboard moved under his heel. A panel in the wall swung gently.

  “You scared der hell out of it, sir,” said Detritus loyally.

  Vimes carefully handed the crossbow back, and tried to look as though he’d meant things to happen this way.

  He’d expected a secret passage. But this was a tiny workroom. There were jars on shelves, with labels…NEW SUET STRATA, AREA 21, GRADE A FAT, THE BIG HOLE. There were lumps of crumbling rock, with neat cardboard tags attached to them saying things like LEVEL #3, SHAFT 9, DOUBLE-PICK MINE.

  There was a set of drawers. One of them was full of makeup, including a selection of mustaches.

  Wordlessly, Vimes opened one of a stack of notebooks. The first pages had a pencil drawn street map of Bonk, with red lines threading through it.

  “Good grief, look at this,” he breathed, flicking onward. “Maps. Drawings. There’s pages of stuff about the assaying of fat deposits. Huh, says here ‘…the new suets, while initially promising, are now suspected of having high levels of BCBs and are likely to be soon exhausted.’ And here it says ‘A werewolf putsch is clearly planned in the chaos following the loss of the Scone’…‘K. reports that many of the younger werewolves now follow W., who has changed the nature of the Game’…This stuff…this stuff is spying. I wondered how Vetinari always seems to know so much!”

  “Did you think it came to him in dreams, dear?”

  “But there’s loads of details here…notes about people, lots of figures about dwarf mining production, political rumors…I didn’t know we did this sort of thing!”

  “You use spies all the time, dear,” said Sybil.

  “I do not!”

  “Well, what about people like Foul Ole Ron and No Way José and Cumbling Michael?”

  “That is not spying, that is not spying! That’s just ‘information received.’ We couldn’t do the job if we didn’t know what’s happening on the street!”

  “Well…perhaps Havelock just thinks in terms of…a bigger street, dear.”

  “There’s loads more of this muck, look. Sketches, more bits of ore…what the hell’s this?”

  It was oblong, and about the size of a cigarette packet. There was a round glass disk on one face, and a couple of levers on one side.

  Vimes pushed one of them. A tiny hatch opened on one side, and the smallest head that he’d ever seen that could speak said “’s?”

  “I know dat!” said Detritus. “Dat’s a nano-imp! Dey cost over a hundred dollars! Dey’re really small!”

  “No one’s bloody fed me for a fortnight!” the imp squeaked.

  “It’s an iconograph small enough to fit in a pocket,” said Vimes. “Something for a spy…it’s as bad as Inigo’s damn one-shot crossbow. And look…”

  Steps led downward. He took them carefully, and swung open the little door at the end.

  Wet heat slapped into him.

  “Pass me down a candle, will you, dear?” he said. And by its light he looked out into a long dank tunnel. Crusted pipes, leaking steam at every joint, lined the far wall.

  “A way in and out where no one will see him, too,” he said. “What a dirty world we live in…”

  The clouds had covered the sky and the wind was whipping thick snowflakes around the tower when Inigo finished setting up the red mortar on the platform below the big square shutters.

  He lit a couple of matches but the wind streamed them out before he could even cup his hands around them.

  “Damn. Mmm, mmm.”

  He slid down the ladder and into the warmth of the tower. It’d be better to spend the night here, he thought, as he rummaged in drawers. The night didn’t hold many terrors for him, but this storm had the feel of another big snow and the mountain roads would soon be treacherous.

  Finally an idea struck him, and he opened the door of the stove and pulled out a smoldering log on the tongs.

  It burst into flame when he carried it out at the top of the tower, and he directed them into the touch hole at the base of the tube.

  The mortar fired with a phut that was lost in the wind. The flare itself tumbled invisibly up into the snow and then, a few seconds later, exploded a hundred feet overhead, casting a brief red glare over the forests.

  Inigo had just gotten back into the room when there was a knock at the door, down at ground level.

  He paused. There was a window and hatch at this level; the designers of the tower had at least realized that it would be a good idea to be able to look down and see who was a-knocking.

  There was no one there.

  When he’d climbed back into the room, the knock came again.

  He hadn’t locked the door after Vimes went. A bit late to regret that now, he realized. But Inigo Skimmer had trained in an academy that made the School of Hard Knocks look like a sandpit.

  He lit a candle and crept down the ladder in the darkness, shadows fleeing and dancing among the stacks of provisions.

  With the candle set down on a box, he pulled the one-shot crossbow from inside his coat and, with an effort, cocked it against the wall. Then he flexed his left arm and felt the palm dagger ease itself into position.

  He clicked his heels in a certain way and sensed the tiny blades slide out from the toes.

  And Inigo settled down to wait.

  Behind him, something blew the candle out.

  As he turned, and the crossbow’s one bolt whirred into darkness, and the palm dagger scythed at nothing, it occurred to Inigo Skimmer that you could knock on either side of a door.

  They really were very clever…

  “Mhm, m—”

  Cheery twirled, or at least attempted to. It was not a movement that came naturally to dwarfs.

  “You look very…nice,” said Lady Sybil. “It goes all the way to the ground, too. I don’t think anyone could possibly complain.”

  Unless they were remotely fashion conscious, she had to admit.

  The problem was that the…well, she had to think of them as the new dwarf women—hadn’t quite settled on a look.

  Lady Sybil herself usually wore ball gowns of a light blue, a color often chosen by ladies of a certain age and girth to combine the maximum of quiet style with the minimum of visibility. But dwarf girls had heard about sequins. They seemed to have decided in their bones that, if they were going to overturn thousands of years of subterranean tradition, they weren’t going to go all through that for no damn twin-set and pearls.

  “And red is good,” said Lady Sybil sincerely. “Red is a very nice color. It’s a nice red dress. Er. And the feathers. Er. The bag to carry your ax, er—”

  “Not glittery enough?” said Cheery.

  “No! No…if I was going to carry a large ax on my back to a diplomatic function, I think I’d want it glittery, too. Er. It is such a very large ax, of course,” she finished lamely.

  “You think perhaps a smaller one might be better? For evening wear?”

  “That would be a start, yes.”

  “Perhaps with a few rubies set in the handle?”

  “Yes,” said Lady Sybil weakly. “Why not, after all?”

  “What about me, Ladyship?” Detritus rumbled.

  Igor had certainly risen to the occasion, applying to a number of suits found in the embassy wardrobes the same pioneering surgical skills that he used on unfortunate loggers and other people who may have strayed too close to a ba
nd saw. It had taken him just ninety minutes to construct something around Detritus. It was definitely evening dress. You couldn’t get away with it in daylight. The troll looked like a wall with a bow tie.

  “How does all it feel?” said Lady Sybil, playing for safety.

  “It are rather tight around der—what’s this bit called?”

  “I really have no idea,” said Lady Sybil.

  “It makes me lurch a bit,” said Detritus. “But I feel very diplomatic.”

  “Not the crossbow, however,” said Lady Sybil.

  “She got her ax,” said Detritus accusingly.

  “Dwarf axes are accepted as a cultural weapon,” said Lady Sybil. “I don’t know the etiquette here, but I suppose you could get away with a club.” After all, she added to herself, it’s not as though anyone would try to take it off you.

  “Der crossbow ain’t cultural?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “I could put, like, glitter on it.”

  “Not enough, I’m afraid—Oh, Sam…”

  “Yes, dear?” said Vimes, coming down the stairs.

  “That’s just your Watch dress uniform! What about your ducal regalia?”

  “Can’t find it anywhere,” said Vimes innocently. “I think the bag must have fallen off the coach in the pass, dear. But I’ve got a helmet with feathers in it and Igor’s buffed up the breastplate until he could see his face in it, although I’m not sure why.” He quailed at her expression. “Duke is a military term, dear. No soldier would ever go to war in tights. Not if he thought he might be taken prisoner.”

  “I find this highly suspicious, Sam.”

  “Detritus will back me up on this,” said Vimes.

  “Dat’s right, sir,” the troll rumbled. “You distinctly said to say dat—”

  “Anyway, we’d better be goi—Good grief, is that Cheery?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Cheery nervously.

  Well, thought Vimes, she comes from a family where people go off in strange clothes to face explosions far away from the sun.

  “Very nice,” he said.

  Lamps were lit all along the tunnel to what Vimes had come to think of as Downtown Bonk. Dwarf guards waved the coach through after mere glances at the Ankh-Morpork crest. The ones around the giant elevator were more uncertain. But Sam Vimes had learned a lot from watching Lady Sybil. She didn’t mean to act like that, but she’d been born to it, into a class which had always behaved this way: You went through the world as if there was no possibility that anyone would stop you or question you, and most of the time that’s exactly what didn’t happen.