The Fifth Elephant Read online

  “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.

  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?