The Fifth Elephant (Discworld 24)

"Really, sir?"

"Look here, see?" Vimes pointed to three loose screws, neatly lined up. "They were trying to take the box apart carefully. It must have slipped."

"But what"s the point?" said Carrot. "It"s just a replica, sir! Even if you could find a buyer, it"s not worth more than a few dollars."

"If it"s a good one you could swap it with the real thing," said Vimes.

"Well, yes, I suppose you could try," said Carrot. "There would be a bit of a problem, though."

"What is it?"

"Dwarfs aren"t stupid, sir. The replica has got a big cross carved into the underside. And it"s only made of plaster in any case."

"Oh."

"But it was a good idea, sir," Carrot said encouragingly. "You weren"t to know."

"I wonder if the thieves knew."

"Even if they didn"t, they wouldn"t have a hope of getting away with it, sir."

"The real Scone is very well guarded," said Cheery. "It"s very rare that most dwarfs get a chance to see it."

"And other people would notice if you had a great lump of rock up your jumper," said Vimes, more or less to himself. "So, this was a stupid crime. But it doesn"t feel stupid. I mean, why go to all this trouble? The lock on that door is a joke. You could kick it right out of the woodwork. If I was going to pinch this thing, I could be in here and out again before the glass had stopped tinkling. What would be the point of being quiet at this time of night?"

The dwarf had been rummaging under a nearby display cabinet. She drew her hand out. Drying blood glistened on the blade of a screwdriver.

"See?" said Vimes. "Something slipped, and someone cut their hand. What"s the point of all this, Carrot? Cat"s piss and sulphur and screwdrivers... I hate it when you get too many clues. It makes it so damn hard to solve anything."

He threw the screwdriver down. By sheer luck it hit the floorboards tip first and stood there shuddering.

"I"m going home," he said. "We"ll find out what this is all about when it starts to smell."

Vimes spent the following morning trying to learn about two foreign countries. One of them turned out to be called Ankh-Morpork.

Uberwald was easy. It was five or six times bigger than the whole of the Sto Plains, and stretched all the way up to the Hub. It was so thickly forested, so creased by little mountain ranges and beset by rivers, that it was largely unmapped. It was mostly unexplored, too. The people who lived there had other things on their minds, and the people from outside who came to explore went into the forests and never came out again. And for centuries no one had bothered about the place. You couldn"t sell things to people hidden by too many trees.

It was probably the coach road that had changed everything, a few years back, when they drove it all the way through to Genua. A road is built to follow. Mountain people had always gravitated to the plains, and in recent years Uberwald folk had joined them. The news got back home: there"s money to be made in Ankh-Morpork, bring the kids. You don"t need to bring the garlic, though, because all the vampires work down at the kosher butchers". And if you"re pushed in Ankh-Morpork, you"re allowed to push back. No one cares enough about you to want to kill you.

Vimes could just about tell the difference between the Uberwald dwarfs and the ones from Copperhead, who were shorter, noisier and rather more at home among humans. The Uberwald dwarfs were quiet, tended to scuttle around corners, and often didn"t speak Morporkian. In some of the alleys off Treacle Mine Road you could believe you were in another country. But they were what every copper desires in a citizen. They were no trouble. They mostly had jobs working for one another, they paid their taxes rather more readily than humans did, although to be honest there were small piles of mouse droppings that yielded more money than most Ankh-Morpork citizens, and generally any problems they had they sorted out amongst themselves. If such people ever come to the attention of the police, it"s usually only as a chalk outline.

It turned out, though, that within the community, behind the grubby facades of all those tenements and workshops in Cable Street and Whalebone Lane, there were vendettas and feuds that, had their origins in two adjoining mine shafts five hundred miles away and a thousand years ago. There were pubs you only drank in if you were from a particular mountain. There were streets you didn"t walk down if your clan mined a particular lode. The way you wore your helmet, the way you parted your beard spoke complicated volumes to other dwarfs. They didn"t even hand a piece of paper to Vimes.

"Then there"s the way you krazak your G"ardrgh," said Corporal Littlebottom.

"I won"t even ask," said Vimes.

"I"m afraid I can"t explain in any case," said Cheery.

"Have I got a Gaadrerghuh?" said Vimes.

Cheery winced at the mispronunciation. "Yes, sir. Everyone has. But only a dwarf can krazak his properly," she said. "Or hers," she added.

Vimes sighed and looked down at the pages of scrawl in his notebook under the heading "Uberwald". He wasn"t strictly aware of it, but he treated even geography as if he was investigating a crime ("Did you see who carved out the valley? Would you recognize that glacier if you saw it again?").

"I"m going to make a lot of mistakes, Cheery," he said.

"I shouldn"t worry about that, sir. Humans always do. But most dwarfs can spot if you"re trying not to make them."