Anyone overhearing his progress along the passages and stairs might have caught muttered phrases on the lines of 'The moon is waxing...' and 'Yes, it is before noon.' A really keen listener would have heard the faint whirring and ticking inside the walls.
A really keen and paranoid listener would have reflected that anything Lord Vetinari said aloud even while he was alone might not be totally worth believing. Not, certainly, if your life depended on it.
Eventually he reached a door, which he unlocked.
There was a large attic room beyond, suddenly airy and bright and cheerful with sunlight from the windows in the roof. It seemed to be a cross between a workshop and a storeroom. Several bird skeletons hung from the ceiling and there were a few other bones on the worktables, along with coils of wire and metal springs and tubes of paint and more tools, many of them probably unique, than you normally saw in any one place. Only a narrow bed, wedged between a thing like a loom with wings and a large bronze statue, suggested that someone actually lived here. They were clearly someone who was obsessively interested in everything.
What interested Lord Vetinari right now was the device, all by itself on a table in the middle of the room. It looked like a collection of copper balls balanced on one another. Steam was hissing gently from a few rivets, and occasionally the device went blup.
'Your lordship!'
Vetinari looked around. A hand was waving desperately at him from behind an upturned bench.
And something made him look up, as well. The ceiling above him was crusted with some brownish substance, which hung from it like stalactites.
Blup
With quite surprising speed the Patrician was behind the bench. Leonard of Quirm smiled at him from underneath his home-made protective helmet.
'I do apologize,' he said. 'I'm afraid I wasn't expecting anyone to come in. I'm sure it will work this time, however.'
Blup
'What is it?' said Vetinari.
Blup
'I'm not quite sure, but I hope it's a—'
And then it was, suddenly, too noisy to talk.
Leonard of Quirm never dreamed that he was a prisoner. If anything, he was grateful to Vetinari for giving him this airy work space, and regular meals, and laundry, and protecting him from those people who for some reason always wanted to take his perfectly innocent inventions, designed for the betterment of mankind, and use them for despicable purposes. It was amazing how many of them there were - both the people and the inventions. It was as if all the genius of a civilization had funnelled into one head which was, therefore, in a constant state of highly inventive spin. Vetinari often speculated upon the fate of mankind should Leonard keep his mind on one thing for more than an hour or so.
The rushing noise died away. Blup.
Leonard peered cautiously over the bench and smiled broadly. 'Ah! Happily, we appear to have achieved coffee,' he said.
'Coffee?'
Leonard walked over to the table and pulled a small lever on the device. A light brown foam cascaded into a waiting cup with a noise like a clogged drain.
'Different coffee,' he said. 'Very fast coffee. I rather think you will like it. I'm calling this the Very-Fast-Coffee machine.'
'And that's today's invention, is it?' said Vetinari.
'Well, yes. It would have been a scale model of a device for reaching the moon and other celestial bodies, but I was thirsty.'
'How fortunate.' Lord Vetinari carefully removed an experimental pedal-powered shoepolishing machine from a chair and sat down. 'And I've brought you some more little... messages.'
Leonard almost clapped his hands. 'Oh, good! And I've finished the other ones you gave me last night.'
Lord Vetinari carefully removed a moustache of frothy coffee from his upper lip. 'I beg your...? All of them? You broke the cyphers on all those messages from Uberwald?'
'Oh, they were quite easy after I'd finished the new device,' said Leonard, rummaging through the piles of paper on a bench and handing the Patrician several closely written sheets. 'But once you realize that there are only a limited number of birth dates a person can have, and that people do tend to think the same way, cyphers are really not very hard.'
'You mentioned a new device?' said the Patrician.
'Oh, yes. The... thingy. It's all very crude at the moment, but it suffices for these simple codes.'
Leonard pulled a sheet off something vaguely rectangular. It seemed to Vetinari to be all wooden wheels and long thin spars which, he saw when he moved closer, were inscribed thickly with letters and numbers. A number of the wheels were not round but oval or heartshaped or some other curious curve. When Leonard turned a handle, the whole thing moved with a complex oiliness quite disquieting in something merely mechanical.
'And what are you calling it?'
'Oh, you know me and names, my lord. I think of it as the Engine for the Neutralizing of Information by the Generation of Miasmic Alphabets, but I appreciate that it does not exactly roll off the tongue. Er...'
'Yes, Leonard?'
'Er... it's not... wrong, is it - reading other people's messages?'
Vetinari sighed. The worried man in front of him, who was so considerate of life that he carefully dusted around spiders, had once invented a device that fired lead pellets with tremendous speed and force. He thought it would be useful against dangerous animals. He'd designed a thing that could destroy whole mountains. He thought it would be useful in the mining industries. Here was a man who, in his tea break, would doodle an instrument for unthinkable mass destruction in the blank spaces around an exquisite drawing of the fragile beauty of the human smile. With a list of numbered parts. And if you taxed him with it he'd say: ah, but such a thing would make war completely impossible, you see? Because no one would dare use it.
Leonard brightened up as a thought apparently struck him. 'But, on the other hand, the more we know about one another the more we will learn to understand. Now, you asked me to construct some more cyphers for you. I'm sorry, my lord, but I must have misunderstood your requirements. What was wrong with the first ones I did?'
Vetinari sighed. 'I'm afraid they were unbreakable, Leonard.'
'But surely—'
'It's hard to explain,' said Vetinari, aware that what to him were the lucid waters of politics were so much mud to Leonard. 'These new ones you have are... merely devilishly difficult?'
'You specified fiendishly, sir,' said Leonard, looking worried.
'Oh, yes.'
'There does not appear to be a common standard for fiends, my lord, but I did some research in the more accessible occult texts and I believe these cyphers will be considered "difficult" by more than 96 per cent of fiends.'
'Good.'
'They may perhaps verge on the diabolically difficult in places—'
'That is not a problem. I shall use them forthwith.'
Leonard still seemed to have something on his mind. 'It would be so easy to make them archdemonically diff—'
'But these will suffice, Leonard,' said Vetinari.
'My lord,' Leonard almost wailed, 'I really cannot guarantee that sufficiently clever people will be unable to read your messages!'
'Good.'
'But, my lord, they will know what you are thinking!'
Vetinari patted him on the shoulder. 'No, Leonard. They will merely know what is in my messages.'
'I really do not understand, my lord.'
'No, but on the other hand I cannot make exploding coffee. What would the world be like if we were all alike?'
Leonard's face clouded for a moment. 'I'm not sure,' he said, 'but if you'd like me to work on the problem I may be able to devise a—'
'It was merely a figure of speech, Leonard.'
Vetinari shook his head ruefully. It often seemed to him that Leonard, who had pushed intellect into hitherto undiscovered uplands, had discovered there large and specialized pockets of stupidity. What would be the point of cyphering messages that very clever enemies couldn't brea
k? You'd end up not knowing what they thought you thought they were thinking...
'There was one rather strange message from Uberwald, my lord,' said Leonard. 'Yesterday morning.'
'Strange?'
'It was not cyphered.'
'Not at all? I thought everyone used codes.'
'Oh, the sender and recipient are code names, but the message is quite plain. It was a request for information about Commander Vimes, of whom you have often spoken.'
Lord Vetinari went quite still.
'The return message was mostly clear, too. A certain amount of... gossip.'
'All about Vimes? Yesterday morning? Before I—?'
'My lord?'
'Tell me,' said the Patrician. 'This message from Uberwald. It yields no clue at all to the sender?'
Sometimes, like a ray of light through clouds, Leonard could be quite perceptive. 'You think you might know the originator, my lord?'
'Oh, in my younger days I spent some time in Uberwald,' said the Patrician. 'In those days rich young men from Ankh-Morpork used to go on what we called the Grand Sneer, visiting farflung countries and cities in order to see at first hand how inferior they were. Or so it seemed, at any rate. Oh, yes. I spent some time in Uberwald.'
It was not often that Leonard of Quirm paid attention to what people around him were doing, but he saw the faraway look in Lord Vetinari's eye.
'You have fond memories, my lord?' he ventured.
'Hmm? Oh, she was a very... unusual lady but, alas, rather older than me,' said Vetinari.
'Much older, I have to say. But it was a long time ago. Life teaches us its small lessons and we move on.' There was that distant look again. 'Well, well, well...'
'And no doubt the lady is now dead,' said Leonard. He was not much good at this sort of conversation.
'Oh, I very much doubt that,' said Vetinari. 'I have no doubt she thrives.' He smiled. The world was becoming more... interesting. 'Tell me, Leonard,' he said. 'Has it ever occurred to you that one day wars will be fought with brains?'
Leonard picked up his coffee cup. 'Oh dear. Won't that be rather messy?' he said.
Vetinari sighed again. 'Not perhaps as messy as the other sort,' he said, trying the coffee. It really was rather good.
The ducal coach rolled past the last of the outlying buildings and on to the vast, flat Sto Plains. Cheery and Detritus had tactfully decided to ride on the top for the morning, leaving the Duke and Duchess alone inside. Skimmer was indulging in some uneasy class solidarity and riding with the servants for a while.
'Angua seems to have gone into hiding,' said Vimes, watching the cabbage fields pass by.
'Poor girl,' said Sybil. 'The city's not really the place for her.'
'Well, you couldn't winkle Carrot out of it with a big pin,' said Vimes. 'And that's the problem, I suppose.'
'Part of the problem,' said Sybil.
Vimes nodded. The other part, which no one talked about, was children.
Sometimes it seemed to Vimes that everyone knew that Carrot was the true heir to the redundant throne of the city. It just so happened that he didn't want to be. He wanted to be a copper, and everyone went along with the idea. But kingship was a bit like a grand piano - you could put a cover over it, but you could still see what shape it was underneath.
Vimes wasn't sure what you got if a human and a werewolf had kids. Possibly you just got someone who had to shave twice a day around full moon and occasionally felt like chasing carts. And when you remembered what some of the city's rulers had been like, a known werewolf as ruler ought to hold no terrors. It was the buggers who looked human all the time that were the problem. That was just his view, though. Other people might see things differently. No wonder she'd gone off to think about things.
He realized he was looking, unseeing, out of the window.
To take his mind off this he opened the package of papers that Skimmer had handed him just as he got on the coach. It was called 'briefing material'. The man seemed to be an expert on Uberwald, and Vimes wondered how many other clerks there were in the Patrician's palace, beavering away, becoming experts. He settled down glumly and began to read.
The first page showed the crest of the Unholy Empire that had once ruled most of the huge country. Vimes couldn't recall much about it, except that one of the emperors once had a man's hat nailed to his head for a joke. Uberwald seemed to be a big, cold, depressing place, so perhaps people would do anything for a laugh.
The crest was altogether too florid for Vimes's taste, and was dominated by a double-headed bat.
The first document was entitled: THE FATBEARING STRATA OF THE SCHMALTZBERG REGION ('THE LAND OF THE FIFTH ELEPHANT').
He knew the legend, of course. There had once been five elephants, not four, standing on the back of Great A'Tuin, but one had lost its footing or had been shaken loose and had drifted off into a curved orbit before eventually crashing down, a billion tons of enraged pachyderm, with a force that had rocked the entire world and split it up into the continents people know today. The rocks that fell back had , covered and compressed the corpse and the rest, after millennia of underground cooking and rendering, was fat history. According to legend, gold and iron and all the other metals were also part of the carcase. After all, an elephant big enough to support the world on its back wasn't going to have ordinary bones, was it?
The notes in front of him were a little more believable, talking about some unknown catastrophe that had killed millions of the mammoths, bison, and giant shrews and then covered them over, pretty much like the Fifth Elephant in the story. There were notes about old troll sagas and legends of the dwarfs. Possibly ice had been involved. Or a flood. In the case of the trolls, who were believed to be the first species in the world, maybe they'd been there and seen the elephant trumpeting across the sky.
The result, anyway, was the same. Everyone well, everyone except Vimes - knew the best fat came from the Schmaltzberg wells and mines. It made the whitest, brightest candles, the creamiest soap, the hottest, cleanest lamp oil. The yellow tallow from Ankh-Morpork's boilers didn't come close.
Vimes didn't see the point. Gold... now that was important. People died for it. And iron Ankh-Morpork needed iron. Timber, too. Stone, even. Silver, now, was very...
He flicked back to a page headed 'Natural Resources', and under 'Silver' read: 'Silver has not been mined in Uberwald since the Diet of Bugs in Am 1880, and the possession of the metal is technically illegal.'
There was no explanation. He made a note to ask Inigo. After all, where you got werewolves, didn't you need silver? And things must have been pretty bad if everyone had to eat insects.
Anyway, silver was useful, too, but fat was just... fat. It was like biscuits, or tea, or sugar. It was just something that turned up in the cupboard. There was no style to it, no romance. It was stuff in tubs.
A note was clipped to the next page. He read:
'The Fifth Elephant as a metaphor also appears in the Uberwald languages. Depending on context it can mean "a thing that does not exist" (as we would say, "Klatchian mist"), "a thing that is other than it seems" and "a thing that, while unseen, controls events" (in the same way that we would use the term eminence grise).'
I wouldn't, thought Vimes. I don't use words like that.
'Constable Shoe,' said Constable Shoe, when the door of the bootmaker's factory was opened. 'Homicide.'
'You come 'bout Mister Sonky?' said the troll who'd opened the door. Warm damp air blew out into the street, smelling of incontinent cats and sulphur.
'I meant I'm a zombie,' said Reg Shoe. 'I find that telling people right away saves embarrassing misunderstandings later on. But coincidentally, yes, we've come about the alleged deceased.'
'We?' said the troll, making no comment about Reg's grey skin and stitch marks.
'Doon here, bigjobs!'
The troll looked down, not a usual direction in Ankh-Morpork, where people preferred not to see what they were standing in.
'Oh,' he sai
d, and took a few steps backwards.
Some people said that gnomes were no more belligerent than any other race, and this was true. However, the belligerence was compressed down into a body six inches high and, like many things when they are compressed, had an inclination to explode. Constable Swires had been on the force only for a few months, but news had gone around and already he inspired respect, or at least the bladder-trembling terror that can pass for respect on these occasions.
'Don't just stand there gawpin', where's yon stiff?' said Swires, striding into the factory.
'We put him in der cellar,' said the troll. 'And now we got half a ton of liquid rubber runnin' to waste. He'd be livid 'bout that... if he was alive, o'course.'
'Why's it wasted?' said Reg.
'Gone all thick and manky, hasn't it? I'm gonna have to dump it later on, and days not easy. We was supposed to be dippin' a load of Ribbed Magical Delights today, too, but all der ladies felt faint when I hauls him outa der vat and dey went off home.'
Reg Shoe looked shocked. He was not, for various reasons, a patron of Mr Sonky's wares, romance not being a regular feature of the life of the dead, but surely the world of the living had some standards, didn't it?
'You employ ladies here?' he said.
The troll looked surprised. 'Yeah. Sure. It's good steady work. Dey're good workers, too. Always laughing and tellin' jokes while dey're doin' der dippin' and packin', 'specially when we're doin' der Big Boys.' The troll sniffed. 'Pers'nally, I don't unnerstan' der jokes.'
'Them Big Boys are bloody good value for a penny,' said Buggy Swires.
Reg Shoe stared at his tiny partner. There was just no way that he was going to ask the question. But Swires must have seen his expression.
'After a bit of work wi' yon scissors, ye won't find a better mackintosh in the whole city,' said the gnome, and laughed nastily.
Constable Shoe sighed. He knew that Mr Vimes had an unofficial policy of getting ethnic minorities into the Watch,[11] but he wasn't sure this was wise in the case of gnomes, even though there was, admittedly, no ethnic group that was more minor. They had an inbuilt resistance to rules. This didn't just apply to the law, but to all the invisible rules that most people obeyed unthinkingly, like 'Do not attempt to eat this giraffe' or 'Do not headbutt people in the ankle just because they won't give you a chip'. It was best to think of Constable Swires simply as a small independent weapon.
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