The Fifth Elephant (7 page)

Skimmer recoiled. “Oh, I couldn’t do that, sir! I’ll travel with your retinue. Mhm-mhm. Mhm-mhm.”

“If you mean Cheery and Detritus, they’re in there with us,” said Vimes, noting the look of horror deepen slightly. “You need four for a decent game of cards and the road’s as boring as hell for most of the way.”

“And, er, your servants?”

“Willikins and the cook and Sybil’s maid are in the other coach.”

“Oh.”

Vimes smiled inwardly. He remembered the saying from his childhood: too poor to paint, but too proud to whitewash…

“Bit of a tough choice, is it?” he said. “I’ll tell you what, you can come in our coach but we’ll give you a hard seat and patronize you from time to time, how about that?”

“I am afraid you are making a mockery of me, Sir Samuel. Mhm-mhm.”

“No, but I may be assisting. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to nip down to the Yard to sort out a few last minute things.”

A quarter of an hour later Vimes walked into the charge room at the Yard. Sergeant Stronginthearm looked up, saluted, and then ducked to avoid the orange that was tossed at his head.

“Sir?” he said, bewildered.

“Just testing, Stronginthearm.”

“Did I pass, sir?”

“Oh yes. Keep the orange. It’s full of vitamins.”

“My mother always told me those things could kill you, sir.”

Carrot was waiting patiently in Vimes’s office. Vimes shook his head. He knew
all
the places to tread in the corridor and he
knew
he didn’t make a sound, and he’d never once caught Carrot reading his paperwork, not even upside down. Just once it’d be nice to catch him out at something. If the man was any straighter you could use him as a plank.

Carrot stood up and saluted.

“Yes, yes, we haven’t got a lot of time for that now,” said Vimes, sitting behind his desk. “Anything new overnight?”

“An unattributed murder, sir. A tradesman called Wallace Sonky. Found in one of his own vats with his throat cut. No guild seal or note or anything. We are treating it as suspicious.”

“Yes, I think that sounds
fairly
suspicious,” said Vimes. “Unless he has a record as a very careless shaver. What kind of vat?”

“Er…rubber, sir.”

“Rubber comes in vats? Wouldn’t he bounce out?”

“No, sir. It’s a liquid in the vat, sir. Mister Sonky makes…rubber things…”

“Hang on, I remember seeing something once…Don’t they make things by dipping them in the rubber? You made sort of…the right shapes and dip them in to get gloves, boots…that sort of thing?”

“Er…that…er…
sort
of thing, sir.”

Something about Carrot’s uneasy manner got through to Vimes. And the little file at the back of his brain eventually waved a card.

“Sonky, Sonky…Carrot, we’re not talking about Sonky as in ‘a packet of Sonkies,’ are we?”

Now Carrot was bright red with embarrassment. “Yes, sir!”

“My gods, what was he dipping in the vat?”

“He’d been thrown in, sir. Apparently.”

“But he’s practically a national hero!”

“Sir?”

“Captain, the housing shortage in Ankh-Morpork would be a good deal worse if it wasn’t for old man Sonky and his penny-a-packet preventatives. Who’d want to do away with him?”

“People do have Views, sir,” said Carrot coldly.

Yes, you do, don’t you, Vimes thought. Dwarfs don’t hold with that sort of thing.

“Well, put some men on it. Anything else?”

“A carter assaulted Constable Swires last night for clamping his cart.”

“Assault?”

“Tried to stamp on him, sir.”

Vimes had a mental picture of Constable Swires, a gnome six inches tall but a mile high in pent-up aggression.

“How is he?”

“Well, the man can speak, but it’ll be a little while before he can climb back on a cart again. Apart from that, it’s all run-of-the-mill stuff.”

“Nothing more about the Scone theft?”

“Not really. Lots of accusations in the dwarf community, but no one really knows anything. Like you say, sir, we’ll probably know more when it goes bad.”

“Any word on the street?”

“Yes, sir. It’s ‘Halt,’ sir. Sergeant Colon painted it at the top of Lower Broadway. The carters are a lot more careful now. Of course, someone has to shovel the manure off every hour or so.”

“This whole traffic thing is not making us very popular, Captain.”

“No, sir. But we aren’t popular anyway. And at least it’s bringing in money for the city treasury. Er…there is another thing, sir.”

“Yes?”

“Have you seen Sergeant Angua, sir?”

“Me? No. I was expecting her to be here.” Then Vimes noticed just the very edge of concern in Carrot’s voice. “Something wrong?”

“She didn’t turn up for duty last night. It wasn’t full moon, so it’s a bit…odd. Nobby said she was rather concerned about something when they were on duty the other day.”

Vimes nodded. Of course, most people were concerned about something if they were on duty with Nobby. They tended to look at clocks a lot.

“Have you been to her lodgings?”

“Her bed hadn’t been slept in,” said Carrot. “Or her basket, either,” he added.

“Well, I can’t help you there, Carrot. She’s your girlfriend.”

“She’s been a bit…worried about the future, I think,” said Carrot.

“Um…you…she…the, er, werewolf thing…?” Vimes stopped, acutely embarrassed.

“It preys on her mind,” said Carrot.

“Perhaps she’s just gone somewhere to think about things?” Like how on earth could she go out with a young man who, magnificent though he was, blushed at the idea of a packet of Sonkies.

“That’s what I hope, sir,” Carrot said. “She does that sometimes. It’s really quite stressful, being a werewolf in a big city. I
know
we’d have heard if she’d run into any trouble—”

There was the sound of harness outside, and the rattle of a coach. Vimes was relieved. Seeing Carrot worried was so unusual that it had the shock of the unfamiliar.

“Well, we’ll have to go without her,” he said. “I want to be kept in touch about everything, Captain. A fake Scone going missing a week or two before a big dwarf coronation—that sounds like another shoe is about to drop and it might just hit me. And while you’re about it, put the word out that I’m to be sent anything about Sonky, will you? I don’t like mysteries. The clacks do a skeleton service as far as Uberwald now, don’t they?”

Carrot brightened up. “It’s wonderful, sir, isn’t it? In a few months they say we’ll be able to send messages all the way from Ankh-Morpork to Genua in less than a day!”

“Yes, indeed. I wonder if by then we’ll have anything sensible to say to each other?”

Lord Vetinari stood at his window, watching the semaphore tower on the other side of the river. All eight of the big shutters facing him were blinking furiously—black, white, white, black, white…

Information was flying into the air. Twenty miles behind him, on another tower in Sto Lat, someone was looking through a telescope and shouting out numbers…

How quickly the future comes upon us, he thought.

He always suspected the poetic description of Time like an ever-rolling stream. Time, in his experience, moved more like rocks…sliding, pressing, building up force underground and then, with one jerk that shakes the crockery, a whole field of turnips has mysteriously slipped sideways by six feet.

Semaphore had been around for centuries, and everyone knew that knowledge had a value, and everyone knew that exporting goods was a way of making money. And then, suddenly, someone realized how
much
money you could make by exporting to Genua by tonight things known in Ankh-Morpork today. And some bright young man in the Street of Cunning Artificers had been unusually cunning.

Knowledge, information, power, words…flying through the air, invisible…

And suddenly the world was tap dancing on quicksand.

In that case, the prize went to the best dancer.

Lord Vetinari turned away, took some papers from a desk drawer, walked to a wall, touched a certain area and stepped quickly through the hidden door that noiselessly swung open.

Beyond was a corridor, lit by borrowed light from high windows and paved with small flagstones. He walked forward, hesitated, said “…no, this is Tuesday…” and moved his descending foot so that it landed on a stone that in every respect appeared to be exactly the same as its fellows.
*

Anyone overhearing his progress along the passages and stairs may 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 the 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 homemade 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 is 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 funneled 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 shoe polishing machine from a chair and sat down. “And I have brought you some more little…messages.”

Leonard almost clapped his hands.

“Oh, good! And I have finished the other ones you gave me last night.”

Lord Vetinari carefully removed a mustache of frothy coffee from his upper lip. “I beg your…?
All
of them? You broke the ciphers on
all
those messages from Uberwald?”

“Oh, they were quite easy after I had 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, ciphers are really not very hard.”

“You mentioned a new device?” said the Patrician.

“Oh yes. The…thingy. It is 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 heart shaped 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.