The Fifth Elephant (8 page)

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 ciphers for
you
. I am sorry, my lord, but I must have misunderstood your requirements. What was wrong with the first ones I did?”

Vetinari sighed. “I am afraid they were unbreakable, Leonard.”

“But surely—”

“It is hard to explain,” said Vetinari, aware that what to him were the lucid waters of politics was 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 ciphers will be considered ‘difficult’ by more than ninety-six percent 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 would 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 ciphering messages that very clever enemies couldn’t break? 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. “It arrived yesterday morning, apparently.”

“Strange?”

“It was not ciphered.”

“Not at
all
? I thought everyone used codes.”

“Oh, the sender and recipent 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? Sent 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 far-flung 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 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. The world changes.” There was the 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, coming back to the present. “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 onto the vast, flat Sto Plains. Cheery and Detritus had tactfully decided to ride on the top for the morning, and leave 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 the result was if a human and a werewolf had kids. Maybe 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 FAT-BEARING STRATA OF THE SHMALTZBERG 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 knew 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 carcass. 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 Shmaltzberg 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 flocked back to a page headed
NATURAL RESOURCES
, and under
SILVER
read: “No silver has been mined in Uberwald since the Diet of Bugs in AM1880, 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 which does not exist’ (as we would say ‘Klatchian mist’) ‘a thing which is other than it seems’ and ‘a thing which, while unseen, controls events’ (in the same way that we would use the term
eminence gris
).”

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 sulfur.

“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 gray 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 said, and took a few steps backward.

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 ye just stand there gawpin’, where’s yon stiff?” said Swire, striding into the factory.

“We put him in der cellar,” said the troll. “And now we got half a ton of liquid rubber running 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 dat’s not easy. We was supposed to be dipping 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’ the dippin’ and packin’, ’specially when we’re doin’ der Big Boys.” The troll sniffed. “Pers’nally, I don’t unnerstan der jokes.”

“Dem Big Boys are bludy 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,
*
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 a built-in 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 head-butt 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.

“You’d better show us the d—the person who is currently vitally challenged,” he said.

They were led downstairs. What was hanging from a beam in the cellar would have frightened the life out of anyone who wasn’t already a zombie.

“Sorry ’bout dat,” said the troll, pulling it down and tossing it into a corner, where it coiled into a rubbery heap.

“What d’heel wazzit?” said Constable Swires.

“We had to pull der rubber off’f him,” said the dwarf. “Sets quick, see? Once you get it out in der air.”

“Hey, dat’s a’ biggest Sonky I ever saw,” chuckled Buggy. “A whole-body Sonky! Reckon that’s the way he wanted to go?”

Reg looked at the corpse. He didn’t mind being sent out on murders, even messy ones. The way he saw it, dying was really just a career change. Been there, done that, worn the shroud…And then you got over it and got on with your life. Of course, he knew that many people didn’t, for some reason, but he thought of them as not prepared to make the effort.

There was a ragged wound in the neck.

“Any next of kin?” he said.

“He got a brother in Uberwald. We’ve sent word,” the troll added. “On der clacks. It cost twenty dollars! Dat’s murder!”

“Can you think of any reason why someone would kill him?”

The troll scratched his head.

“Well, ’cos dey wanted him dead, I reckon. Dat’s a good reason.”

“And why would anyone want him dead, do you think?” Reg Shoe could be very, very patient. “Has there been any trouble?”

“Business ain’t been so good, I know dat.”

“Really? I’d have thought you’d be coining money here.”

“Oh
yeah
, dat’s what you’d fink, but not everyfing people calls a Sonky is made by us, see? It’s to do wid us becomin’—” the troll’s face screwed up with cerebral effort, “jer-nair-rick. Lots of other buggers are jumping up and down on the bandwagon, and dey got better plant and new ideas like makin’ ’em in cheese-and-onion flavor an’ wid bells on an’ stuff like dat. Mister Sonky won’t have nothin’ to do wid dat kind of fing and dat’s been costin’ us sales.”

“I can see this would worry him,” said Reg, in a keep-on-talking tone of voice.

“He’s been locking himself in his office a lot.”

“Oh? Why’s that?” said Reg.

“He’s der boss. You don’t ask der boss. But he did say dat dere was a special job comin’ up and dat’d put us back on our feets.”

“Really?” said Reg, making a mental note. “What kind of job?”

“Dunno. You don’t—”

“—ask the boss,” said Reg. “Right. I suppose no one saw the murder, did they?”

Once again the troll screwed up its enormous face in thought.

“Der murderer, yeah, an’ prob’ly Mister Sonky.”

“Was there a third party?”

“I dunno, I never get invited to dem things.”

“Apart from Mister Sonky and the murderer,” said Shoe, still as patient as the grave, “was there anyone else here last night?”

“Dunno,” said the troll.

“Thank you, you’ve been very helpful,” said Shoe. “We’ll have a look around, if you don’t mind.”

“Sure.”

The troll went back to his vat.

Reg Shoe hadn’t expected to find anything and was not disappointed. But he was thorough. Zombies usually are. Mr. Vimes had told him never to get too excited about clues, because clues could lead you on a dismal dance. They could become a habit. You ended up finding a wooden leg, a silk slipper and a feather at the scene of a crime and constructing an elegant theory involving a one-legged ballet dancer and a production of
Chicken Lake.

The door to the office was open. It was hard to tell if things had been disturbed; Shoe got the impression that the mess was normal. A desk was awash with paperwork, Mr. Sonky having followed the usual “put it down somewhere” method of filing. A bench was covered with samples of rubber, bits of sacking, large bottles of chemicals and some wooden molds that Reg refrained from looking at too closely.

“Did you hear Corporal Littlebottom talking about that museum theft when we came on duty today, Buggy?” he said, opening a jar of yellow powder and sniffing it.

“No.”

“I did,” said Reg.

He put the lid on the sulfur again and sniffed the air of the factory. It smelled of liquid rubber, which is very much like the smell of incontinent cats.

“And some things stick in the mind,” he said. “Special job, eh?”

It was Constable Visit-The-Infidel-With-Explanatory-Pamphlets’s week as Communications Officer, which largely meant looking after the pigeons and keeping an eye on the clacks, with of course the assistance of Constable Downspout. Constable Downspout was a gargoyle. When it came to staring fixedly at one thing, you couldn’t beat a gargoyle. The gargoyles were getting a lot of employment in the clacks industry.

Constable Visit quite enjoyed the pigeons. He sang them hymns.

They listened to short homilies, cocking their heads from side to side. After all, he reasoned, had not Bishop Horn preached to the mollusks of the sea? And there was no record of them actually listening, whereas he was certain that the pigeons were taking it in. And they seemed to be interested in his pamphlets on the virtues of Omnianism, admittedly as nesting material at the moment, but this was certainly a good start.

A pigeon fluttered in as he was scraping the perches.

“Ah, Zebedinah,” he said, lifting her up and removing the message capsule from her leg. “Well done. This is from Constable Shoe. And you shall have some corn, provided locally by Josiah Frument and Sons, Seed Merchants, but ultimately by the grace of Om.”

There was a whir of wings and another pigeon settled on the perch. Constable Visit recognized it as Wilhelmina, one of Sergeant Angua’s pigeons.

He removed the message capsule. The thin paper inside was tightly folded and on it someone had written
CPT. CARROT, PERSONAL
.

He hesitated, then put the message from Reg Shoe into the pneumatic tube and heard the whoosh of the suction as it headed off to the main office. The other one, he decided, required a more careful delivery.

Carrot was working in Vimes’s office but, Visit noticed, not at the Commander’s desk. Instead, he’d set up a folding table in the corner. The tottering piles of paperwork on the desk were slightly less alpine than yesterday. There were even occasional patches of desktop.

“Personal message for you, Captain.”

“Thank you.”

“And Constable Shoe wants a sergeant down at Sonky’s boot factory.”

“Did you send the message down to the office?”

“Yes, sir. The pneumatic tube is very useful,” Visit added dutifully.

“Commander Vimes isn’t very keen on it, but I’m sure it will eventually save us time,” said Carrot. He unfolded the note.

Visit watched him. Carrot’s lips moved slightly as he read.

“Where did the pigeon come from?” he said at last, screwing up the note.

“It looks pretty worn out, sir. Not from inside the city, I’m sure.”

“Ah. Right. Thank you.”

“Bad news, sir?” Visit angled.

“Just news, Constable. Don’t let me detain you.”

“Right, sir.”

When the disappointed Visit had gone, Carrot went and looked out of the window.

There was a typical Ankh-Morpork street scene outside, although people were trying to separate them.

After a few minutes he went back to his table, wrote a short note, put in into one of the little carriers and sent it away with a hiss of air.

A few minutes later, Sergeant Colon came panting along the corridor. Carrot was very keen on modernizing the Watch, and in some strange way sending a message via the tube was so much more
modern
than simply opening the door and shouting, which is what Mr. Vimes did.

Carrot gave Fred Colon a bright smile.

“Ah, Fred. Everything going well?”

“Yessir?” said Fred Colon, uncertainly.

“Good. I am off to see the Patrician, Fred. As senior sergeant you are in charge of the Watch until Mister Vimes gets back.”

“Yessir. Er…until you get back, you mean…”

“I shall not be coming back, Fred. I am resigning.”

The Patrician looked at the badge on the desk.

“…and well-trained men,” Carrot was saying, somewhere in front of him. “After all, a few years ago there were only four of us in the Watch. Now it’s functioning just like a machine.”

“Yes, although bits of it do go
boing
occasionally,” said Lord Vetinari, still staring at the badge. “Could I invite you to reconsider, Captain?”

“I’ve reconsidered several times, sir. And it’s not Captain, sir.”

“The Watch
needs
you, Mister Ironfoundersson.”

“The Watch is bigger than one man, sir,” said Carrot, still looking straight ahead.

“I’m not sure if it’s bigger than Sergeant Colon, though.”

“People get mistaken about old Fred, sir. He’s a man with a solid bottom to his character.”

“He’s got a solid bottom to his bottom, Ca—Mister Ironfoundersson.”

“I mean he doesn’t flap in an emergency, sir.”

“He doesn’t do
anything
in an emergency,” said the Patrician. “Except possibly hide. I might go so far as to say that the man appears to consist of an emergency in his own right.”

“My mind is made up, sir.”

Lord Vetinari sighed, sat back, and stared up the ceiling for a moment.

“Then all I can do is thank you for your services,
Captain
, and wish you good luck in your future endeavor. Do you have enough money?”

“I’ve saved quite a lot, sir.”

“Nevertheless, it is a long way to Uberwald.”

There was silence.

“Sir?”

“Yes?”

“How did you
know
?”

“Oh, people measured it years ago. Surveyors and so forth.”

“Sir!”

Vetinari sighed. “I think the term is…deduction. Be that as it may…Captain, I am choosing to believe that you are merely taking an extended leave of absence. I understand that you’ve never taken a holiday while you have been here. I am sure you are owed a few weeks.”

Carrot said nothing.

“And if I were you, I’d begin my search for Sergeant Angua at the Shambling Gate,” Vetinari added.

After a while, Carrot said quietly: “Is that as a result of information received, my lord?”

Vetinari smiled a thin little smile. “No. But Uberwald is going through some troubling times, and of course she is from one of the aristocratic families. I surmise that she has been called away. Beyond that, I cannot be of much help. You will have to follow, as they say, your nose.”

“No, I think I can find a much more reliable nose than mine,” said Carrot.

“Good.” Lord Vetinari went back to his desk and sat down. “I wish you well in your…search. Nevertheless, I’m sure we will be seeing you again. A lot of people here…depend on you.”