The Fifth Elephant (21 page)

The door at the other end of the room rolled back. Another dwarf, cone-shaped in his robes, stamped out, stopped, glared around him, went back to the doorway again to shout some afterthoughts to whomever was beyond, and then made to head out of the room. He was brought up short when he almost walked into Vimes.

The dwarf tilted its head to look up at him. There was no real face there, just the suggestion of the glint of angry eyes between the leather flaps.

“Arnak-Morporak?”

“Yes.”

Vimes didn’t understand the words that followed, but the nasty tone was unmistakable. The important thing was to keep smiling. That was the diplomatic way.

“Why, thank you,” he said. “And may I say it—”

There was a grunt from the dwarf. He’d seen Cheery.

“Ha’ak!”
he shouted.

Vimes heard a gasp. There were other dwarfs clustered around the doorway. Then he glanced down at Cheery. Her eyes were shut. She was trembling.

“Who is this dwarf?” he said to Dee.

“This is Albrecht Albrechtson,” said the Ideas-taster.

“The runner-up?”

“Yes,” said Dee hoarsely.

“Then can you tell the creature that if he uses that word again in the presence of myself or any of my staff there will be, as we diplomats say, repercussions. Wrap that up in diplomacy and give it to him, will you?”

The corners of Vimes’s ears picked up a suggestion that not every dwarf listening was ignorant of the language. A couple of dwarfs were already heading purposefully toward them.

Dee babbled a stream of hysterical Dwarfish just as the other dwarfs caught up with the gaping Albrecht and led him quietly but firmly away, but not before one of them had whispered something to the Ideas-taster.

“The…er…the king wishes to see you,” he mumbled.

Vimes looked toward the doorway.

More dwarfs were hurrying through it now. Some of them were dressed in what Vimes thought of as “normal” dwarf clothing, others in the heavy black leathers of the deep-down clans. All of them glared at him as they went past.

Then there was just empty floor, all the way to the door.

“Do you come too?” he said.

“Not unless he asks for me,” said Dee. “I wish you luck, Your Monitorship.”

Beyond the door…was a room of bookshelves, stretching up, stretching away. Here and there a candle merely changed the density of the darkness. There were lots of them, though, punctuating the distance. Vimes wondered how
big
this room must be—

“In here is a record of every marriage, every birth, every death, every movement of a dwarf from one mine to another, the succession of the king of each mine, every dwarf’s progress through
k’zakra
, mining claims, the history of famous axes…and other matters of note,” said a voice behind him. “And perhaps most importantly, every decision made under dwarf law for fifteen hundred years is written down in this room, look you.”

Vimes turned. A dwarf, short even by dwarf standards, was standing behind him.

He seemed to be expecting a reply.

“Er…every decision?”

“Oh yes.”

“Er…were they all good?” said Vimes.

“The important thing is that they were all made,” said the king. “Thank you, young…dwarf, you may straighten up.”

Cheery was bowing.

“Sorry, should I be doing that?” said Vimes. “You’re…not the king, are you?”

“Not yet.”

“I…I’m…I’m sorry, I was expecting someone more…er…”

“Do go on.”

“…someone more…kingly.”

The Low King sighed.

“I meant…I mean, you look just like an ordinary dwarf,” said Vimes weakly.

This time the king smiled. He was slightly shorter than average for dwarfs, and dressed in the usual almost-uniform of leather and home-forged chain mail. He looked old, but dwarfs started looking old around the age of five years and were still looking old three hundred years later, and he had that musical cadence to his speech that Vimes associated with Llamedos. If he’d asked Vimes to pass the ketchup in Gimlet’s Whole Food Delicatessen, Vimes wouldn’t have given him a second look.

“This diplomacy business,” said the king, “are you getting the hang of it, do you think?”

“It doesn’t come easy, I must admit…er, Your Majesty.”

“I believe you have been, up until now, a watchman in Ankh-Morpork?”

“Er, yes.”

“And you had a famous ancestor, I believe, who was a regicide? Took an ax, he did, and cut the head off?”

Here it comes, thought Vimes.

“Yes, Stoneface Vimes,” he said, as levelly as possible. “I’ve always thought that word was a bit unfair, though. It was only one king. It wasn’t as if it was a
hobby.
”

“You don’t like kings,” said the dwarf.

“I don’t meet many, sir. Not in Ankh-Morpork,” said Vimes, hoping that this would pass for a diplomatic answer. It seemed to satisfy the king.

“I went to Ankh-Morpork once, when I was a young dwarf,” he said, walking toward a long table piled high with scrolls.

“Er…really?”

“Lawn ornament, they called me. And…what was it…ah, yes…shortass. Some children threw stones at me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I expect you will tell me that sort of thing doesn’t happen anymore?”

“It doesn’t happen as much. But you always get idiots who don’t move with the times.”

The king gave Vimes a piercing glance.

“Indeed. The times…But now they are always Ankh-Morpork’s times, see?”

“I’m sorry?”

“When people say ‘we must move with the times’ they really mean ‘you must do it my way.’ That is what I’m tellin’ you. And there are
some
who would say that Ankh-Morpork is…a kind of vampire. It bites, and what it bites it turns into copies of itself. It sucks, too. It seems all our best go to Ankh-Morpork, where they live in squalor. You leave us dry.”

Vimes was at a loss. It was clear that the little figure now sitting at the long table was a lot brighter than he was, although right now he felt as dim as a penny candle in any case. It was also clear that the king hadn’t slept for quite some time. He decided to go for honesty.

“Can’t really answer that, sir,” he said, adopting a variant on his talking-to-Vetinari approach. “But…”

“Yes?”

“I’d wonder…you know, if I were a king…I’d wonder why people were happier living in squalor in Ankh-Morpork than staying back home…sir.”

“Ah. You’re telling me how I should think, now?”

“No, sir. Just how I think. But…there’s dwarf bars all over Ankh-Morpork, and they’ve got mining tools wired to the wall, and there’s dwarfs in ’em every night quaffing beer and singing sad songs about how they wish they were back in the mountains digging for gold. But if you said to them, fine, the gate’s open, off you go and send us a postcard, they’d say ‘Oh, well, yeah, I’d love to, but we’ve just got the new workshop finished…maybe
next
year we’ll go to Uberwald.’”

“They come back to the mountains to die,” said the king.

“They
live
in Ankh-Morpork.”

“Why is this, do you think?”

“I couldn’t say, sir. Because no one tells them how to, I suppose.”

“And now you want our gold and iron,” said the king. “Is there
nothing
we can keep?”

“Don’t know about that either, sir. I wasn’t trained for this job.”

The king muttered something under his breath. Then, much louder, he said: “I can offer you no favors, Your Excellency. These are difficult times, see.”

“But my real job is finding things out,” said Vimes, a little louder. “If there is anything that I could do to—”

The king thrust the papers at Vimes.

“Your letters of accreditation, Your Excellency. Their contents have been noted!”

And that shuts
me
up, Vimes thought.

“I would ask you one thing, though,” the king went on.

“Yes, sir?”

“
Really
thirty men and a dog?”

“No. There were only seven men. I killed one of them because I had to.”

“How did the others die?”

“Er…victims of circumstances, sir.”

“Well, then…your secret is safe with me. Good morning, Miss Littlebottom.”

Cheery looked stunned.

The king gave her a brief smile.

“Ah, the rights of the individual, a famous Ankh-Morpork invention, or so they say. But what rights are they, really, and whence do they come? Thank you, Dee, His Excellency was just leaving. You may send in the Copperhead delegation.”

As Vimes was ushered out he saw another party of dwarfs assembled in the anteroom. One or two of them nodded at him as they were herded in.

Dee turned back to Vimes.

“I hope you didn’t tire his majesty.”

“Someone else has already been doing that, by the look of it.”

“These are sleepless times,” said the Ideas-taster.

“Scone turned up yet?” said Vimes, innocently.

“Your Excellency, if you persist in this attitude a complaint will go to your Lord Vetinari!”

“He does so look forward to them. Was it this way out?”

It was the last word said until Vimes and his guards were back in the coach and the doors to daylight were opening ahead of them.

Out of the corner of his eye Vimes saw that Cheery was shaking.

“Certainly hits you, doesn’t it, the cold air after the warmth underground…” he ventured.

Cheery grinned in relief.

“Yes, it does,” she said.

“Seemed quite a decent sort,” said Vimes. “What was that he muttered when I said I hadn’t been trained?”

“He said ‘Who has?,’ sir.”

“It sounded like it. All that arguing…it’s not a case of sitting on the throne and saying ‘do this, do that,’ then.”

“Dwarfs are very argumentative, sir. Of course, many wouldn’t agree. But none of the big dwarf clans are happy about this. You know how it is—the Copperheads didn’t want Albrecht, and the Shmaltzburgers wouldn’t support anyone called Glodson, the Ankh-Morpork dwarfs were split both ways, and Rhys comes from a little coal-mining clan near Llamedos that isn’t important enough to be on anyone’s side…”

“You mean he didn’t get to be king because everyone liked him but because no one disliked him enough?”

“That’s right, sir.”

Vimes glanced at the crumpled letter that the king had thrust into his hand.

By daylight he could see the faint scribble on one corner. There were just two words.

MIDNIGHT, SEE
?

Humming to himself, he tore the piece of paper off and rolled it into a ball.

“And now for the damn vampire,” he said.

“Don’t worry, sir,” said Cheery. “What’s the worst she can do? Bite your head off?”

Vimes grunted. “Thank you for that, Corporal. Tell me…those robes some of the dwarfs were wearing…I know they wear them on the surface so they’re not polluted by the nasty sunlight, but why wear them down there?”

“It’s traditional, sir. Er…they were worn by the…well, it’s what you’d call the knockermen, sir.”

“What did they do?”

“Well, you know about firedamp? It’s a gas you get in mines sometimes. It explodes.”

Vimes saw the images in his mind as Cheery explained…

The miners would clear the area, if they were lucky. And the knockerman would go in, wearing layer after layer of chain mail and leather, carrying his sack of wicker globes stuffed with rags and oil. And his long pole. And his slingshot.

Down in the mines, all alone, he’d hear the knockers…Agi Hammerthief and all the other things that made noises, deep under the earth. There could be no light, because light would mean sudden, roaring death. The knockerman would feel his way through the utter dark, far below the surface.

There was a type of cricket that lived in the mines. It chirruped loudly in the presence of firedamp. The knockerman would have one in a box, tied to his hat.

When it sang, a knockerman who was either very confident or extremely suicidal would step back, light the torch on the end of his pole, and thrust it ahead of him. The more careful knockerman would step back rather more, and slingshot a ball of burning rags into the unseen death. Either way, he’d trust in his thick leather clothes to protect him from the worst of the blast.

It was an honorable trade but, at least to start with, it didn’t run in families. They didn’t
have
families. Who’d marry a knockerman? They were dead dwarfs walking. But sometimes a young dwarf would ask to become one; his family would be proud, wave him goodbye, and then speak of him as if he were dead, because that made it easier.

Sometimes, though, knockermen came back. And the ones that survived went on to survive again, because surviving is a matter of practice. And sometimes they would talk a little of what they heard, all alone in the deep mines…the tap-tapping of dead dwarfs trying to get back into the world, the distant laughter of Agi Hammerthief, the heartbeat of the turtle that carried the world.

Knockermen became kings.

Vimes, listening with his mouth open, wondered why the hell it was that dwarfs believed that they had no religion and no priests. Being a dwarf
was
a religion. People went into the dark for the good of the clan, and heard things, and were changed, and came back to tell…

And then, fifty years ago, a dwarf tinkering in Ankh-Morpork had found that if you put a simple fine mesh over your lantern flame it’d burn blue in the presence of the gas but wouldn’t explode. It was a discovery of immense value to the good of dwarfkind and, as so often happens with such discoveries, almost immediately led to a war.

“And afterward there were two kinds of dwarfs,” said Cheery sadly. “There’s the Copperheads, who all use the lamp and the patent gas exploder, and the Shmaltzburgers, who stick to the old ways. Of course we’re all
dwarfs
,” she said, “but relations are rather…restrained.”

“I bet they are.”

“Oh, no, all dwarfs recognize the need for the Low King, it’s just that…”

“…they don’t quite see why knockermen are still so powerful?”

“It’s all very sad,” said Cheery. “Did I tell you my brother Snorey went off to be a knockerman?”

“I don’t think so.”