The Fifth Elephant (31 page)

“But I landed on that cart. I didn’t die!”

B
UT YOU
MIGHT
HAVE
.

“But I thought we all had some kind of hourglass thing that said
when
we going to die?”

Now the roar was almost physical. Vimes redoubled his grip on the boat.

O
H YES
. Y
OU DO
, said Death.

“But we might not?”

N
O
. Y
OU WILL
. T
HERE IS NO DOUBT ABOUT THAT
.

“But you said—”

Y
ES, IT IS A BIT HARD TO UNDERSTAND, ISN’T IT
? A
PPARENTLY THERE’ S THIS THING CALLED THE
T
ROUSERS OF
T
IME, WHICH IS QUITE ODD, BECAUSE
T
IME CERTAINLY DOESN’T
—

The boat went over the waterfall.

Vimes had a thunderous sensation of pounding, thudding water, followed by the echoing ringing in his ears as he hit the pool below. He fought his way to what passed for the surface and felt the current take him, slam him into a rock and then roll him away in the white water.

He flailed blindly and caught another rock, his body swinging around into a pool of comparative calm. As he fought for breath he saw a gray shape leaping from stone to stone and then another dose of hell was unleashed as it landed, snarling, beside him.

He grabbed it desperately and hung on as it struggled to bite him. Then a paw flailed to gain purchase on the slippery stone and then, in sudden difficulties, responding automatically…it
Changed…

It was as if the wolf shape became small and a man shape became bigger, in the same space, at the same time, with a moment of horrible distortion as the two forms passed through one another.

And then there was that moment he’d noticed before, a second of confusion—

It was just long enough to ram the man’s head against the rock with every ounce of strength he could scrape together. Vimes thought he heard a crack.

He pushed himself back out into the current and let it carry him on, while he simply struggled to stay near the surface. There was blood in the water.

He’d never killed someone with his bare hands before. Truth to tell, he’d never deliberately killed at all. There had been deaths, because when people are rolling down a roof and trying to strangle one another, it’s sheer luck who is on top when they hit the ground. But that was
different.
He went to bed every night believing that.

His teeth were chattering and the bright sun made his eyes ache, but he felt…good.

He wanted to beat his chest and scream, in fact.

They’d been trying to
kill
him!

Make them stay wolves, said a little inner voice. The more time they spent on four legs, the less bright they’d become.

A deeper voice, red and raw, from much, much further inside, said: Kill ’em all!

The rage was boiling up now, fighting against the chill.

His feet touched bottom.

The river was broadening here, into something wide enough to be called a lake. A wide ledge of ice had crept out from the bank, covered here and there with blown snow. Fog drifted across it, fog with a sulfurous smell.

There were still cliffs on the far side of the river. One solitary werewolf, companion to the one now drifting on the current, was watching him from the nearest bank.

Clouds were sliding across the sun and snow was falling again, in large, raggedy flakes.

Vimes waded to the rim of ice and tried to pull himself up out of the water, but it creaked ominously under his weight and cracks zigzagged across its surface.

The wolf came closer, moving with caution. Vimes made another desperate attempt; a slab of ice came free and tipped up, and he disappeared under the water.

The creature waited a few moments and then inched farther out over the ice, growling as fine cracks spread out like stars under its paws.

A shadow moved in the shallow water below it. There was an explosion of water and breath as Vimes broke through the ice under the werewolf, grabbed it around the waist, and fell back.

A claw ripped along Vimes’s side, but he gripped as hard as he could with arms and legs as they rolled under the ice. It was a desperate test of lung capacity, he knew. But
he
wasn’t the one who’d just had the air squeezed out of him. He held on, while the water clanged in his ears and the thing scrabbled and scratched at him and then, when there was nothing else left but to let go or drown, he punched his way up to the air.

Nothing lashed at him. He cracked his way through the ice to the bank, dropped on his hands and knees, and threw up.

Howling started, all around the mountains.

Vimes looked up. Blood was coursing down his arms. The air stank of rotten eggs.

And there, high on a hill a mile or so off, was the clacks tower.

…with its stone walls and door that could be bolted…

He stumbled forward.

The snow underfoot was already giving way to coarse grass and moss. The air was hotter now, but it was the clammy heat of a fever. And then he looked around, and realized where he was.

There was bare dirt and rock in front of him, but here and there parts of it were moving and going
blup
.

Everywhere he looked, there were fat geysers. Rings of ancient, congealed, yellow fat, so old and rancid that even Sam Vimes wouldn’t dip his toast in it unless he was really hungry, encircled sizzling little pools. There were even black floating bits, which on a second glance turned out to be insects that were slow learners in a hot fat situation.

Vimes recalled something Igor had said. Sometimes, dwarfs working the high strata, where the fat had congealed into a kind of tallow millennia ago, dwarfs occasionally found strange ancient animals, perfectly preserved but fried to a crisp.

Probably…Vimes found himself laughing, out of sheer exhaustion…probably battered to death.

Mwahahaa.

The snow was heavy now, making the fat pools spit.

He sagged to his knees. He ached all over. It wasn’t just that his brain was writing checks that his body couldn’t cash. It had gone beyond that. Now his feet were borrowing money that his legs hadn’t got, and his back muscles were looking for loose change under the sofa cushions.

And still nothing was coming up behind him. Surely they must’ve crossed the river by now?

Then he saw one. He could have sworn it hadn’t been there a moment ago. Another one trotted out from behind a nearby snowdrift.

They sat watching him.

“Come on, then!” Vimes yelled. “What are you waiting for?”

The pools of fat hissed and bubbled around Vimes. It was warm here, though. If they weren’t going to move, then neither was he.

He focused on a tree on the edge of the fat geysers. It looked barely alive, with greasy splashes on the end of the longer branches, but it also looked climbable. He concentrated on it, tried to estimate the distance and whatever speed he might be capable of.

The werewolves turned to look at it, too.

Another one had entered the clearing at a different point. There were three watching him now.

They weren’t going to run until he ran, he realized. Otherwise it wouldn’t be
fun.

He shrugged, turned away from the tree…and then turned back and ran. By the time he was halfway there he was afraid his heart was going to climb up his throat, but he ran on, jumped awkwardly, caught a low branch, slipped, struggled gasping to his feet, grabbed the branch again and managed to pull himself up, expecting at every second the first tiny puncture as teeth broke his skin…

He rocked on the greasy wood. The werewolves hadn’t moved, but they were watching him with interest.

“You
bastards
,” Vimes growled.

They got up and picked their way carefully toward the tree, without hurrying. Vimes climbed a little farther up the tree.

“Ankh-Morpork! Mister Civilized! Where are your weapons now, Ankh-Morpork?”

It was Wolfgang’s voice. Vimes peered around the snowdrifts, which were already filling up with violet shadows as the afternoon died.

“I got two of you!” he shouted.

“Yes, they will have big headaches later on! We are
werewolves
, Ankh-Morpork! Quite hard to stop!”

“You said that you—”

“Your Mister Sleeps could run much faster than you, Ankh-Morpork!”

“Fast enough?”

“No! And the man with the little black hat could
fight
better than you, too!”

“Well enough?”

“No!” shouted Wolfgang cheerfully.

Vimes growled. Even Assassins didn’t deserve that kind of death.

“It’ll be sunset soon!” he shouted.

“Yes! I lied about the sunset!”

“Well, wake me up at dawn, then. I could do with the sleep!”

“You will freeze to death, Civilized Man!”

“Good!” Vimes looked around at the other trees. Even if he could jump to one, they were all conifers, painful to land in and easy to fall out of.

“Ah, this must be the famous Ankh-Morpork sense of humor, yes?”

“No, that was just irony,” Vimes shouted, still looking for an arboreal escape route. “You’ll know when we’ve got onto the famous Ankh-Morpork sense of humor when I start talking about breasts and farting!”

So what were his options? Well, he could stay in the tree, and die, or run for it, and die. Of the two, dying in one piece seemed better.

Y
OU’RE DOING VERY WELL FOR A MAN OF YOUR AGE
.

Death was sitting on a higher branch of the tree.

“Are you following me, or what?”

A
RE YOU FAMILIAR WITH THE PHRASE
‘D
EATH WAS HIS CONSTANT COMPANION
’?

“But I don’t usually
see
you!”

P
OSSIBLY YOU ARE IN A STATE OF HEIGHTENED AWARENESS CAUSED BY LACK OF FOOD, SLEEP AND BLOOD
?

“Are you going to help me?”

W
ELL…YES
.

“When?”

E
R…WHEN THE PAIN IS TOO MUCH TO BEAR
. Death hesitated, and then went on, E
VEN AS
I
SAY IT
I
REALIZE THAT THIS ISN’T THE ANSWER YOU WERE LOOKING FOR, HOWEVER
.

The sun was near the horizon now, getting big and red.

Racing the sun…that was another Uberwald sport, wasn’t it? Be home safe before the sun sets.

Half a mile or more, through deep snow in rising ground…

Someone was climbing up the tree. He felt it shake. He looked down. In the cold blue gloom, a naked man was quietly pulling himself from branch to branch.

Vimes was enraged. They weren’t supposed to do this!

There was a grunt from below as the climber slipped and recovered on the greasy wood.

H
OW ARE YOU FEELING, IN YOURSELF
?

“Shut
up
! Even if you
are
a hallucination!”

There must be
something
about werewolves he could use…

You have a second’s grace when they were changing shape, but they knew he knew that…

No weapons. That’s what he’d noticed in the castle. You
always
got weapons in castles. Spears, battleaxes, ridiculous suits of armor, huge old swords…Even the vampire had a few rapiers on the walls. That was because, sometimes, even vampires had to use a weapon.

Werewolves didn’t. Even Angua hesitated before reaching for a sword. To a werewolf, a physical weapon would always be the
second
choice.

Vimes locked his legs together and swung around the branch as the werewolf came up. He caught it a blow on the ear and, as it looked up, managed another blow right on the nose.

It gave him a ringing slap and that would have ended it, except that it also pulled itself a little farther up the tree and brought itself in the range of the Vimes Elbow.

It justified the capital letter. It had triumphed in a number of street fights. Vimes had learned early on in his career that the graveyards were full of people who’d read the Marquis of Fantailler. The whole
idea
of fighting was to stop the other bloke hitting you as soon as possible. It wasn’t to earn
marks.
Vimes had often fought in circumstances where being able to use the hands freely was a luxury, but it was amazing how a well-placed elbow could make a point, possibly assisted by a knee.

He drove it into the werewolf’s throat, and was rewarded with a horrible noise. Then he grabbed a handful of hair and pulled, let go and slammed the palm of his hand into its face in a mad attempt to prevent it having a second to think. He couldn’t allow that—he could see the size of the man’s muscles.

The werewolf reacted, instead.

There was that sudden moment of morphological inexactitude. A nose turned into a muzzle while Vimes’s fist was en route, but when the wolf opened its mouth to lunge at him two things occurred to it.

One was that it was high in a tree, not a tenable position for a shape designed for fast-paced living on the ground. The other was gravity.

“Down there it’s the lore,” Vimes panted, as its paws scrabbled for purchase on the greasy branch, “But up here it’s
me
.”

He reached up, grabbed the branch above him, and kicked down with his feet.

There was a yelp, and another yelp as the wolf slid and hit the next branch down.

About halfway toward the ground it tried to change back again, combining in one falling shape all the qualities of something not good at staying in trees with something not good at landing on the ground.

“Gotcha!” screamed Vimes.

In the forest all around, a howling went up.

The branch he was clinging to…snapped. For a moment he hung by the gloomy trousers of Uncle Vanya, caught on a snag, and then their ancient fabric ripped off him and he dropped.

His progress was a little faster, since the falling werewolf had removed a lot of branches on the way down, but the landing was softer because the werewolf was just getting to its feet.