The Fifth Elephant

'This one?' he said.

'Yes,' said his wife. 'It's hard to notice until you measure the rooms, but that wall really is rather thick —'

Vimes ran his hands along the panelling, looking for anything that might go 'click'. Then he stood back.

'Give me your crossbow, sergeant.'

'Here we are, sir.'

Vimes staggered under its weight but managed to get it pointed at the wall.

'Is this wise, Sam?' said Sybil.

Vimes stood back to take aim, and the floorboard moved under his heel. A panel in the wall swung gently.

'You scared der hell out of it, sir,' said Detritus loyally.

Vimes carefully handed the crossbow back and tried to look as though he'd meant things to happen this way.

He'd expected a secret passage. But this was a tiny workroom. There were jars on shelves labelled 'New Suet Strata, Area 21', 'Grade A Fat, the Big Hole'. There were lumps of crumbling rock, with neat cardboard tags attached to them saying things like 'Level #3, Shaft 9, Double-Pick Mine'.

There was a set of drawers. One of them was full of make-up, including a selection of moustaches.

Wordlessly, Vimes opened one of a stack of notebooks. The first pages had a pencil-drawn streetmap of Bonk, with red lines threading through it.

'Good grief, look at this,' he breathed, flicking onwards. 'Maps. Drawings. There's pages of stuff about the assaying of fat deposits. Huh, says here 'The new suets, while initially promising, are now suspected of having high levels of BCBs and are likely to be soon exhausted.' And here it says 'A werewolf putsch is clearly planned in the chaos following the loss of the Scone... K. reports that many of the younger werewolves now follow W., who has changed the nature of the game...' This stuff... this stuff is spying. I wondered how Vetinari always seems to know so much!'

'Did you think it came to him in dreams, dear?'

'But there's loads of details here... notes about people, lots of figures about dwarf mining production, political rumours... I didn't know we did this sort of thing!'

'You use spies all the time, dear,' said Sybil.

'I do not!'

'Well, what about people like Foul Ole Ron and No Way Jose and Cumbling Michael?'

'That is not spying, that is not spying! That's just 'information received'. We couldn't do the job if we didn't know what's happening on the street!'

'Well, perhaps Havelock just thinks in terms of... a bigger street, dear.'

'There's loads more of this muck. Look. Sketches, more bits of ore... What the hell's this?'

It was oblong, and about the size of a cigarette packet. There was a round glass disc on one face, and a couple of levers on one side.

Vimes pushed one of them. A tiny hatch opened and the smallest head that he'd ever seen that could speak said, ' 's?'

'I know dat!' said Detritus. 'Days a nano-imp! Dey cost over a hundred dollars! Dey're really small!'

'No one's bloody fed me for a fortnight!' the imp squeaked.

'It's an iconograph small enough to fit in a pocket,' said Vimes. 'Something for a spy... It's as bad as Inigo's damn one-shot crossbow. And look...'

Steps led downwards. He took them carefully and swung open the little door at the end.

Wet heat slapped into him.

'Pass me down a candle, will you, dear?' he said. And by its light he looked out into a long dank tunnel. Crusted pipes, leaking steam at every joint, lined the far wall.

'A way in and out where no one will see him, too,' he said. 'What a dirty world we live in...'

The clouds had covered the sky and the wind was whipping thick snowflakes around the tower when Inigo finished setting up the red mortar on the platform below the big square shutters.

He lit a couple of matches but the wind streamed them out before he could even cup his hands around them.

'Damn. Mhm, mmm.'

He slid down the ladder and into the warmth of the tower. It'd be better to spend the night here, he thought, as he rummaged in drawers. The night didn't hold many terrors for him, but this storm had the feel of another big snow and the mountain roads would soon be treacherous.

Finally an idea struck him, and he opened the door of the stove and pulled out a smouldering log with the tongs.

It burst into flame when he carried it out at the top of the tower, and he directed it into the touch hole at the base of the tube.

The mortar fired with a 'phut' that was lost in the wind. The flare itself tumbled invisibly up into the snow and then, a few seconds later, exploded a hundred feet overhead, casting a brief red glare over the forests.

Inigo had just got back into the room when there was a knock at the door, down on the ground.

He paused. There was a window and hatch at this level; the designers of the tower had at least known that it would be a good idea to be able to look down and see who was a-knocking.

There was no one there.

When he'd climbed back into the room the knock came again.

He hadn't locked the door after Vimes went. A bit late to regret that now, he realized. But Inigo Skimmer had trained in an academy that made the School of Hard Knocks look like a sandpit.

He lit a candle and crept down the ladder in the darkness, shadows fleeing and dancing among the stacks of provisions.

With the candle set down on a box, he pulled the one-shot crossbow from inside his coat and, with an effort, cocked it against the wall. Then he flexed his left arm and felt the palm dagger ease itself into position.

He clicked his heels in a certain way and sensed the tiny blades slide out from the toes.

And Inigo settled down to wait.

Behind him something blew the candle out.

As he turned, and the crossbow's one bolt whirred into darkness, and the palm dagger scythed at nothing, it occurred to Inigo Skimmer that you could knock on either side of a door.

They really were very clever...

'Mhm, m—'

Cheery twirled, or at least attempted to. It was not a movement that came naturally to dwarfs.

'You look very... nice,' said Lady Sybil. 'It goes all the way to the ground, too. I don't think anyone could possibly complain.'

Unless they were remotely fashion conscious, she had to admit. The problem was that the... well, she had to think of them as the new dwarf women, hadn't quite settled on a look.

Lady Sybil herself usually wore ballgowns of a light blue, a colour often chosen by ladies of a certain age and girth to combine the maximum of quiet style with the minimum of visibility. But dwarf girls had heard about sequins. They seemed to have decided in their bones that if they were going to overturn thousands of years of subterranean tradition they weren't going to go through all that for no damn twinset and pearls.

'And red is good,' said Lady Sybil sincerely. 'Red is a very nice colour. It's a nice red dress. Er. And the feathers. Er. The bag to carry your axe, er—'

'Not glittery enough?' said Cheery.

'No! No... if I was going to carry a large axe on my back to a diplomatic function I think I'd want it glittery too. Er. It is such a very large axe, of course,' she finished lamely.

'You think perhaps a smaller one might be better? For evening wear?'

'That would be a start, yes.'

'Perhaps with a few rubies set in the handle?'