The Fifth Elephant Read online

  “Yes, dear.”

  “It’ll be like a second honeymoon,” said Sybil.

  “Yes indeed,” said Vimes, remembering that what with one thing and another they’d never really had a first one.

  “On that, er, subject,” said Sybil, a little more hesitantly, “you remember I told you I was going to see old Mrs. Content?”

  “Oh yes, how is she?” Vimes was staring at the fireplace again. It wasn’t just old school friends, sometimes it seemed Sybil kept in touch with anyone she’d ever met.

  Her Hogswatch card list ran to a second volume.

  “Quite well, I believe. Anyway, she agrees that—”

  There was a knocking at the door.

  She sighed. “It’s Willikins’s evening off,” she said. “You’d better answer it, Sam. I know you want to…”

  “I’ve told them not to disturb me unless it’s serious,” said Vimes, getting up.

  “Yes, but you think all crime is serious, Sam.”

  Carrot was on the doorstep.

  “It’s a bit…political, sir,” he said.

  “What’s so political at a quarter to ten at night, Captain?”

  “The Dwarf Bread Museum’s been broken into, sir,” said Carrot.

  Vimes looked into his honest blue eyes.

  “A thought occurs to me, Captain,” he said, slowly. “And the thought is: A certain item has gone missing.”

  “That’s right, sir.”

  “And it’s the replica Scone.”

  “Yes, sir. Either they broke in just after we left, or,” Carrot licked his lips nervously, “they were hiding while we were there.”

  “Not rats, then.”

  “No, sir. Sorry, sir.”

  Vimes fastened his cloak and took his helmet off its peg.

  “So someone has stolen a replica of the Scone of Stone a few weeks before the real one is due to be used in a very important ceremony,” he said. “I find this intriguing.”

  “That’s what I thought too, sir.”

  Vimes sighed. “I hate the political ones.”

  When they’d gone, Lady Sybil sat for a while staring at her hands. Then she took a lamp into the library and pulled down a slim volume, bound in white leather on which had been embossed in gold the words OUR WEDDING.

  It had been a strange event. Ankh-Morpork’s high society—so high that it’s stinking, Sam always said—had turned up mostly out of curiosity. She was Ankh-Morpork’s most eligible spinster who’d never thought she’d be married, and he was a mere captain of the guard who tended to annoy a lot of people.

  And here were the iconographs of the event. There she was, looking rather more expansive than radiant, and there Sam was, scowling at the camera with his hair hastily smoothed down. There was Sergeant Colon with his chest inflated so much his feet had almost left the ground, and Nobby grinning widely or perhaps just making a face, it was so hard to tell with Nobby.

  Sybil turned over the pages with care. She had put a sheet of tissue between each one, to protect them.

  In many ways, she told herself, she was very lucky. She was very proud of Sam. He worked hard for a lot of people. He cared about people who weren’t important. He always had far more to cope with than was good for him. He was the most civilized man she’d ever met. Not a gentleman, thank goodness, but a gentle man.

  She never really knew what it was he did. Oh, she knew what the job was, but by all accounts he didn’t spend much time behind his desk. He tended to drop his clothes into the laundry basket before he eventually came to bed, so she’d only hear later from the laundry girl about the bloodstains and the mud. There were rumors of chases over rooftops, hand-to-hand and knee-to-groin fights with men who had names like Harry “The Boltcutter” Weems…

  There was a Sam Vimes she knew, who went out and came home again, and out there was another Sam Vimes who hardly belonged to her and lived in the same world as all those men with the dreadful names…

  Sybil Ramkin had been brought up to be thrifty, thoughtful, genteel in an outdoor sort of way, and to think kindly of people.

  She looked at the pictures again, in the silence of the house.

  Then she blew her nose loudly and went off to do the packing and other sensible things.

  Corporal Cheery Littlebottom pronounced her name “Cheri.” She was a she, and therefore a rare bloom in Ankh-Morpork.

  It wasn’t that dwarfs weren’t interested in sex. They saw the vital need for fresh dwarfs to leave their goods to and continue the mining work after they had gone. It was simply that they also saw no point in distinguishing between the sexes anywhere but in private. There was no such thing as a Dwarfish female pronoun or, once the children were on solids, any such thing as women’s work.

  Then Cheery Littlebottom had arrived in Ankh-Morpork, and had seen that there were men out there who did not wear chain mail or leather underwear*, but did wear interesting colors and exciting makeup, and these men were called “women.”†

  And in the little bullet head the thought had arisen: “Why not me?”

  Now she was being denounced in cellars and dwarf bars across the city as the first dwarf in Ankh-Morpork to wear a skirt. It was hard-wearing brown leather and as objectively erotic as a piece of wood but, as some older dwarfs would point out, somewhere under there were his knees.*

  Worse, they were now finding that among their sons were some—they choked on the word—“daughters.” Cheery was only the frothy bit on the tip of the wave. Some younger dwarfs were shyly wearing eye shadow and declaring that, as a matter of fact, they didn’t like beer. A current was running through dwarf society.

  Dwarf society was not against a few well-thrown rocks in the direction of those bobbing on the current, but Captain Carrot had put the word on the street that this would be assault on an officer, a subject on which the Watch held views, and however short the miscreants, their feet really would not touch the ground.

  Cheery had retained her beard and round iron helmet, of course. It was one thing to declare that you were female, but quite unthinkable to declare that you weren’t a dwarf.

  “Open and shut case, sir,” she said, when she saw Vimes come in. “They opened the window in the back room to get in, a very neat job, and didn’t shut the front door after they left. Smashed the Scone’s case; there’s the glass all round the stand. Didn’t take anything else that I can see. Left a lot of footprints in the dust. I took a few pictures, but they’re scuffed up and weren’t much good in the first place. That’s about it, really.”

  “No dropped cigarette butts, wallets or bits of paper with an address on them?” said Vimes.

  “No, sir. They were inconsiderate thieves.”

  “They certainly were,” said Carrot grimly.

  “A question that springs to mind,” said Vimes, “is: Why does it reek even worse of cat’s piss now?”

  “It is rather sharp, isn’t it,” said Cheery. “With a hint of sulfur, too. Constable Ping said it was like this when he arrived, but there’s no cat prints.”

  Vimes crouched down and looked at the broken glass.

  “How did we find out about this?” he said, prodding a few fragments.

  “Constable Ping heard the tinkle, sir. He went around the back and saw the window was opened. Then the crooks got out through the front door.”

  “Sorry about that, sir,” said Ping, stepping forward and saluting. He was a cautious-looking young man, who appeared permanently poised to answer a question.

  “We all make mistakes,” said Vimes. “You heard glass break?”

  “Yessir. And someone swore.”

  “Really? What did they say?”

  “Er…‘bugger,’ sir?”

  “And you went around the back and saw the broken window and you…?”

  “I called out ‘is there anyone there?,’ sir.”

  “Really? And what would you have done if a voice had said ‘no’? No, don’t answer that. What happened next?”

  “Er…I heard a lot
more glass break and when I got around to the front the door was open and they were gone. So I legged it back to the Yard and told Captain Carrot, sir, knowing he sets a lot of store by this place…”

  “Thank you…Ping, is it?”

  “Yessir.” Entirely unasked, but obviously prepared to answer, Ping said, “It’s a dialect word meaning ‘water-meadow,’ sir.”

  “Off you go, then.”

  The lance-constable visibly sagged with relief, and left.

  Vimes let his mind unfocus a little. He enjoyed moments like these, the little bowl of time when the crime lay before him and he believed that the world was capable of being solved. This was the time you really looked to see what was there, and sometimes the things that weren’t there were the most interesting things of all.

  The Scone had been kept on a plinth about three feet high, inside a case made of five sheets of glass, forming a box that was screwed down on the plinth.

  “They smashed the glass by accident,” he said, eventually.

  “Really, sir?”

  “Look here, see?” Vimes pointed to three loose screws, neatly lined up. “They were trying to take the box apart carefully. It must have slipped.”

  “But what’s the point?” said Carrot. “It’s just a replica, sir! Even if you could find a buyer, it’s not worth more than a few dollars.”

  “If it’s a good one, you could swap it with the real thing,” said Vimes.

  “Well, yes, I suppose you could try,” said Carrot. “There would be a bit of a problem, though.”

  “What is it?”

  “Dwarfs aren’t stupid, sir. The replica has got a big cross carved into the underside. And it’s only made of plaster in any case.”

  “Oh.”

  “But it was a good idea, sir,” Carrot said encouragingly. “You weren’t to know.”

  “I wonder if the thieves knew.”

  “Even if they didn’t, they wouldn’t have a hope of getting away with it, sir.”

  “The real Scone is very well guarded,” said Cheery. “It’s very rare that most dwarfs get a chance to see it.”

  “And other people would notice if you had a great lump of rock up your sweater,” said Vimes, more or less to himself. “So…this was a stupid crime. But it doesn’t feel stupid. I mean, why go to all this trouble? The lock on that door is a joke, you could kick it right out of the woodwork. If I was going to pinch this thing, I could be in here and out again before the glass had stopped tinkling. What would be the point of being quiet at this time of night?”

  The dwarf had been rummaging under a nearby display cabinet. She drew her hand out. Drying blood glistened on the blade of a screwdriver.

  “See?” said Vimes. “Something slipped, and someone cut their hand. What’s the point of all this, Carrot? Cat’s piss and sulfur and screwdrivers…I hate it when you get too many clues, it makes it so damn hard to solve anything.”

  He threw the screwdriver down. By sheer luck it hit the floorboards tip first and stood there shuddering.

  “I’m going home,” he said. “We’ll find out what this is all about when it starts to smell.”

  Vimes spent the following morning trying to learn about two foreign countries. One of them turned out to be called Ankh-Morpork.

  Uberwald was easy. It was five or six times bigger than the whole of the Sto Plains, and stretched all the way up to the Hub. It was mostly so thickly forested, so creased by little mountain ranges and beset by rivers, that it was largely unmapped. It was mostly unexplored, too.* The people who lived there had other things on their mind, and the people from outside who came to explore went into the forests and never came out again. And for centuries no one had bothered about the place. You couldn’t sell things to people hidden by too many trees.

  It was probably the coach road that had changed everything, a few years back, when they drove it all the way through to Genua. A road is built to follow. Mountain people had always gravitated to the plains, and in recent years Uberwald folk had joined them. The news got back home: There’s money to be made in Ankh-Morpork, bring the kids. You don’t need to bring the garlic, though because all the vampires work down at the kosher butchers’. And if you’re pushed in Ankh-Morpork, you are allowed to push back. No one cares enough about you to want to kill you.

  Vimes could just about tell the difference between the Uberwald dwarfs and the ones from Copperhead, who were shorter, noisier and rather more at home among humans. The Uberwald dwarfs were quiet, tended to scuttle around corners, and often didn’t speak Morporkian. In some of the alleys off Treacle Mine Road you could believe you were in another country. But they were what every copper desires in a citizen. They were no trouble. They mostly had jobs working for one another, they paid their taxes rather more readily than humans did, although to be honest there were small piles of mouse droppings that yielded more money than most Ankh-Morpork citizens, and generally any problems they had they sorted out among themselves. If such people ever come to the attention of the police, it’s usually only as a chalk outline.

  It turned out, though, that within the community, behind the grubby facades of all those tenements and workshops in Cable Street and Whalebone Lane, there were vendettas and feuds that had their origins in two adjoining mine shafts five hundred miles away and a thousand years ago. There were pubs you only drank in if you were from a particular mountain. There were streets you didn’t walk down if your clan mined a particular lode. The way you wore your helmet, the way you parted your beard, spoke complicated volumes to other dwarfs. They didn’t even hand a piece of paper to Vimes.

  “Then there’s the way you krazak your G’ardrgh,” said Corporal Littlebottom.

  “I won’t even ask,” said Vimes.

  “I’m afraid I can’t explain in any case,” said Cheery.

  “Have I got a Gaadrerghuh?” said Vimes. Cheery winced at the mispronunciation.

  “Yes, sir. Everyone has. But only a dwarf can krazak his properly,” she said. “Or hers,” she added.

  Vimes sighed, and looked down at the pages of scrawl in his notebook, under the heading: UBERWALD. He wasn’t strictly aware of it, but he treated even geography as if he was investigating a crime (Did you see who carved out the valley? Would you recognize that glacier if you saw it again?).

  “I’m going to make a lot of mistakes, Cheery,” he said.

  “I shouldn’t worry about that, sir. Humans always do. But most dwarfs can spot if you’re trying not to make them.”

  “Are you sure you don’t mind coming?”

  “Got to face it sooner or later, sir.”

  Vimes shook his head sadly.

  “I don’t get it, Cheery. There’s all this fuss about a female dwarf trying to act like, like—”

  “A lady, sir?”

  “Right, and yet no one says anything about Carrot being called a dwarf, but he’s a human—”

  “No, sir. Like he says, he’s a dwarf. He was adopted by dwarfs, he’s performed the Y’grad, he observes the j’kargra insofar as that’s possible in a city. He’s a dwarf.”

  “He’s six foot high!”

  “He’s a tall dwarf, sir. We don’t mind if he wants to be a human as well. Not even the drudak’ak would have a problem with that.”

  “I’m running out of cough drops here, Cheery. What was that?”

  “Look, sir, most of the dwarfs here are…well, I suppose you’d call them liberal, sir. They’re mainly from the mountains behind Copperhead, you know? They get along with humans. Some of them even acknowledge that…they’ve got daughters, sir. But some of the more…old-fashioned…Uberwald dwarfs haven’t gotten out so much. They still act as if B’hrian Bloodaxe were still alive. That’s why we call them drudak’ak.”

  Vimes had a go, but he knew that to really speak Dwarfish you needed a lifetime’s study and, if at all possible, a serious throat infection.

  “…‘above ground’…‘they negatively’…” he faltered.

  “‘They do not get out i
n the fresh air enough,’” Cheery supplied.

  “Ah, right. And everyone thought the new king was going to be one of these?”

  “They say Albrecht’s never seen sunlight in his life. His clan never goes above ground in daylight. Everyone was certain it’d be him.”

  And as it turned out it wasn’t, thought Vimes. Some of the Uberwald dwarfs hadn’t supported him. And the world had moved on. There were plenty of dwarfs around now who had been born in Ankh-Morpork. Their kids went around with their helmets on back to front and spoke Dwarfish only at home. Many of them wouldn’t know a pick-ax if you hit them with it.* They weren’t about to be told how to run their lives by an old dwarf sitting on a stale bun under some distant mountain.

  He tapped his pencil on his notebook thoughtfully. And because of this, he thought, dwarfs are punching one another on my streets.

  “I’ve seen more of those dwarf sedan chair things around lately,” he said. “You know, the ones carried by a couple of trolls. They have thick leather curtains…”

  “Drudak’ak,” said Cheery. “Very…traditional dwarfs. If they have to go out in daylight, they don’t look at it.”

  “I don’t recall them a year ago…”

  Cheery shrugged. “There’s lots of dwarfs here now, sir. The drudak’ak feel they’re among dwarfs now. They don’t have to deal with humans for anything.”

  “They don’t like us?”

  “They won’t even talk to a human. They’re fairly choosy about talking to most dwarfs, to tell you the truth.”

  “That is daft!” said Vimes. “How do they get food? You can’t live on fungi! How do they trade ore, dam streams, get wood for shoring up their shafts?”

  “Well, either other dwarfs are paid to do it, or humans are employed,” said Cheery. “They can afford it. They’re very good miners. Well…they own very good mines, in any case.”

  “Sounds to me they’re a bunch of…” Vimes stopped himself. He was aware that a wise man should always respect the folkways of others, to use Carrot’s happy phrase, but Vimes often had difficulty with this idea. For one thing, there were people in the world whose folkways consisted of gutting other people like clams and this was not a procedure that commanded, in Vimes, any kind of respect at all.