The Fifth Elephant (26 page)

“Where’s the money?” said Vimes.

“No money, sir. They say Rhys must renounce all claim to be Low King.”

“There are no other conditions,” said Dee. “The note turned up on my desk. But
everyone
puts paperwork on my desk these days.”

“Who are the Sons of Agi Hammerthief?” said Vimes, looking at Dee. “And why didn’t you tell me about this before?”

“We don’t know. It is just a made-up name. Some…malcontents, we assume. And I was told
you
would ask
me
questions.”

“But this isn’t a real crime anymore, is it?” said Vimes. “This is politics. Why can’t the king just renounce all claim, get the Scone back, and then say he had his fingers crossed? If it’s done under duress—”

“We take our ceremonies seriously, Your Excellency. If Rhys renounces the throne, he cannot change his mind the next day. If he allows the Scone to be destroyed, then the kingship has no legitimacy and there will—”

“—be trouble,” said Vimes. And it’ll spread to Ankh-Morpork, he added to himself. At the moment it’s only riots.

“Who’ll become king if he abdicates?”

“Albrecht Albrechtson, as everyone knows.”

“And that will be trouble, too,” said Vimes. “Civil war, from what I hear.”

“The king says,” said Dee quietly, “that he intends to step down nevertheless. Better any king than chaos. Dwarfs do not like chaos.”

“It’s going to be chaos either way, though,” said Vimes.

“There have been rebellions against kings before. Dwarfdom survives. The crown continues. The lore abides. The Stone remains. There is…a sanity to come back to.”

Oh, my gods, thought Vimes. Thousands of dwarfs die but that’s all right if a lump of rock survives. “I’m not a policeman here. What can I do?”

“This hasn’t happened!” shrieked Dee, his nerve cracking. “But everyone knows foreigners from Ankh-Morpork do not mind their own business!”

“Ah…you mean…given that you don’t want people to know about this…it would look bad if you appeared to be too excited…but you can’t be blamed if a stupid flatfoot pokes his nose into things…?”

Dee waved his hands in the air. “This wasn’t my idea!”

“Look, the security you have got here would disgrace a child’s piggy bank. I can think of two or three ways of getting the Scone out of here. What about the secret passage into this room?”

“I know of no secret passage into this room!”

“Oh,
good
. At least we’ve ruled out
something
. Go and wait by the boat. Corporal Littlebottom and I have to talk about some things.”

Dee left reluctantly. Vimes waited until the dwarf was visible in the glow of the candles beyond the weighing bridge.

“What a mess,” he said. “Locked-room mysteries are even worse when they leave the room unlocked.”

“You’re thinking that Dozy might have worn bags of sand under his robes, aren’t you, sir,” said Cheery.

No, thought Vimes. I wasn’t. But now I know how a dwarf would solve this.

“Possibly,” he said aloud. “Grubby white sand can’t be uncommon. You’d add a bit of sand every day, yes? Just enough not to trigger the scales. Finally you’ve got…how much does the Scone weigh?”

“About sixteen pounds, sir.”

“All right. Dump the sand on the floor, shove the Scone under your robes, and…it might just work.”

“Risky, sir.”

“But no one thinks anyone is really going to
try
to steal the Scone. Would you try to tell me that four guards sitting in that little guardhouse on a twelve-hour shift will be alert
all
the time? That’s enough for a hand of poker!”

“I suppose they rely on the fact that they’d know when a boat came up, sir.”

“Right. Big mistake. And you know what? I
bet
that when a boat’s just gone down, that’s the time they’re least alert. Cheery, if a human could get in here, they could get into the Scone room. They’d have to be nimble and a good swimmer, but they could do it.”

“The guards on the gates were pretty keen, sir.”

“Well,
yes
. Guards always are, just after a theft. Smart as foxes and sharp as knives, just in case anyone wonders if it was
them
who dropped off to sleep at the wrong time. I’m a
copper
, Cheery. I know how dull guarding can be. Especially when you know that no one is ever going to steal what you’re guarding.”

He scuffed the sand with his boot.

“They were looking hard at every cart that went in or out this morning. But that was because the Scone had
been
stolen. It’s at times like this you get very official, very efficient and very pointless activity. Don’t try to tell me that last week they opened every barrel and prodded every load of hay. Even the stuff coming
in
? Can you see Dee? Is he looking at me?”

Cheery peered around Vimes.

“No, sir.”

“Good.”

Vimes walked over to the tunnel, pressed his back against a wall, took a deep breath, and walked his legs up the opposite wall. Then he eased his way out over the plates of the weigh-bridge, inched along with feet and shoulder blades and, wincing at every protest from his knees, eventually dropped down. He strolled over to Dee, who was talking to the guards.

“How did—”

“Never mind,” said Vimes. “Let’s just say I’m longer than a dwarf, shall we?”

“Have you solved it?”

“No. But I have an idea.”

“Really? Already?” said Dee. “And what is that?”

“I’m still working it out,” said Vimes. “But it’s lucky the king told you to ask me, Dee. One thing I
have
found out is that no dwarf will give you the right answer.”

The opera was just ending as Vimes slipped into the seat beside Sybil.

“Have I missed anything?” he said.

“It’s very good. Where
have
you been?”

“You wouldn’t believe me.”

He stared, unseeing, at the stage. A couple of dwarfs were engaged in a very careful mock battle.

All right, then. If it was politics it was…well, politics. There was nothing he could do about politics. So…think about it as a crime…

What was the
simple
solution? Best to start with the first rule of policing: Suspect the victim. Vimes wasn’t quite sure who the victim was here, though. So…suspect the witness. That was
another
good rule. That meant the late Dozy. He
could
have walked out with the Scone days before he “discovered” the loss. He could have done just about anything. The way the thing was guarded was a joke. Nobby and Colon could have done it better.
Much
better, he corrected himself, because they had devious little minds and that was what made them coppers…the guards on the Scone were honorable dwarfs, the
last
people you wanted to entrust with anything. You wanted sneaky people for a job like this.

But…it made no
sense
. He’d be the prime suspect. Vimes wasn’t well up on dwarf law, but he suspected that there was not a huge friendly future in store for a prime suspect, especially if no other solution was forthcoming.

Maybe he’d snapped after sixty years of changing candles? That didn’t sound right. Anyone who could put up with a job like that for ten years would probably run in their groove for the rest of eternity. Anyway, Dozy had now gone to the great big gold mine in the sky or deep underground or whatever it was dwarfs believed in. He wasn’t going to be answering any questions.

He
could
solve this, Vimes told himself. Everything he needed was there, if only he asked the right questions and thought the right way.

But his Vimesish instincts were trying to tell him something else.

This was
a
crime—if holding a piece of property to ransom
was
technically a crime—but it wasn’t
the
crime.

There was another crime here. He knew it in the same way that a fisherman spots the shoal by the ripple on the water.

The fight on stage continued. It was slowed by the need to stop after every gingerly exchanged ax blow for a song, probably about gold.

“Er…what’s this all about?” he said.

“It’s nearly over,” whispered Sybil. “They’ve only performed the bit concerning the baking of the Scone, really, but at least they’ve included the Ransom Aria. Ironhammer escapes from prison with the help of Skalt, steals the Truth that Agi has hidden, conceals it by baking it into the Scone, and persuades the guards around Bloodaxe’s camp to let him pass. The dwarfs believe that Truth was once a, a
thing
…a sort of ultimate rare metal, really…and the last bit of it is inside the Scone. And the guards can’t resist, because of the sheer power of it. The song is about how love, like truth, will always reveal itself, just as the grain of Truth inside the Scone makes the whole thing true. It is actually one of the finest pieces of music in the world. Gold is hardly mentioned at all.”

Vimes stared. He got lost in any song more complex than the sort with titles like “Where Has All the Custard Gone (Jelly’s Just Not the Same).”

“Bloodaxe and Ironhammer,” he muttered, aware that dwarfs around them were giving him annoyed looks, “which one was—”

“Cheery told you. They were both dwarfs,” said Sybil, sharply.

“Ah,” said Vimes glumly.

He was always a little out of his depth in these matters. There were men, and there were women. He was clear on that. Sam Vimes was an uncomplicated man when it came to what poets called “the lists of love.”
*
In some parts of the Shades, he knew, people adopted a more pick-and-mix approach. Vimes looked upon this as he looked upon a distant country; he’d never been there, and it wasn’t his problem. It just amazed him what people got up to when they had time on their hands.

He just found it hard to imagine a world without a map. It wasn’t that the dwarfs ignored sex, it really didn’t seem
important
to them. If humans thought the same way, his job would be a lot simpler.

There seemed to be a deathbed scene now. It was a little hard for Vimes, with his shaky command of Ankh-Morpork street Dwarfish, to follow what was going on. Someone was dying, and someone else was very sorry about it. Both the main singers had beards you could hide a chicken in. They weren’t bothering to act, apart from infrequently waving an arm in the direction of the other singer.

But there were sobs all around him, and occasionally the trumpeting of a blown nose. Even Sybil’s lower lip was trembling.

It’s just a song, he wanted to say. It’s not
real
. Crime and streets and chases…
they’re
real. A song won’t get you out of a tight corner. Try waving a large bun at an armed guard in Ankh-Morpork and see how far it gets you…

He shouldered his way through the throng after the performance, which from the humans present had received the usual warm reception that such things always got from people who hadn’t really understood what was going on but rather felt that they should have.

Dee was talking to a black-clad, heavily built young man who looked vaguely familiar to Vimes. Vimes must have looked familiar to him as well, because he gave him a nod just short of offensiveness.

“Ah, Your Grace Vimes,” he said. “And did you enjoy the opera?”

“Especially the bit about the gold,” said Vimes. “And you are—?”

The man clicked his heels. “Wolf von Uberwald!”

Something went
bing
in Vimes’s head. And his eyes picked up details—the slight lengthening of the incisors, the way the blond hair was so thick around the collar—

“Angua’s brother?” he said.

“Yes, Your Grace.”

“Wolf the wolf, eh?”

“Thank you, Your Grace,” said Wolf solemnly, “That is very funny. Indeed, yes! It is quite some time since I heard that one! Your Ankh-Morpork sense of humor!”

“But you’re wearing silver on your…uniform. Those…insignias. Wolf heads biting the lightning…”

Wolf shrugged. “Ah, the kind of thing a policeman would notice. But they are nickel!”

“I don’t recognize the regiment.”

“We are more of a…movement,” said Wolf.

The stance was Angua’s, too. It was the poised, fight-or-flight look, as if the whole body was a spring eager to unwind and “flight” wasn’t an option. People in the presence of Angua when she was in a bad mood tended to turn up their collars without quite knowing why. But the eyes were different. They weren’t like Angua’s. They weren’t even like the eyes of a wolf.

No animal had eyes like that, but Vimes saw them occasionally in some of Ankh-Morpork’s less salubrious drinking establishments, where if you were lucky you’d get out the door before the drink turned you blind.

Colon called that sort of person a “bottle covey,” Nobby preferred “soddin’ nutter” but whatever the name Vimes recognized a head-butting, eye-gouging, down-and-dirty bastard when he saw one. In a fight you’d have no alternative but to lay him out or cut him down, because otherwise he’d do his very best to kill you. Most bar fighters wouldn’t usually go that far, because killing a copper was known to be bad news for the murderer and anyone else who knew him, but your true nutter wouldn’t worry about that because, while he was fighting, his brain was somewhere else.

Wolf smiled.

“There is a problem, Your Grace?”

“What? No. Just…thinking. I feel I’ve met you before…?”

“You called on my father this morning.”

“Ah, yes.”

“We don’t always Change for…visitors, Your Grace,” said Wolf. There was an orange light in his eyes now. Up until then, Vimes had thought that “glowing eyes” was just a figure of speech.

“If you’ll excuse me, I do need to talk to the Ideas-taster for a moment,” said Vimes. “Politics.”

Dee followed him into a quiet spot.

“Yes?”

“Did Dozy go to the Scone Cave at the same time every day?”

“I believe so. It depended on his other duties.”

“So he
didn’t
go in at the same time every day. Right. When does the guard change?”

“At each three o’clock.”