The Fifth Elephant (Discworld 24)

"And without the thing, all the bets are off," said Vimes. "There will be a war. Explosions underground."

There was a tinny little sound as he took out his watch and opened it. "My word, it"s midnight," he said.

"Follow me," Dee muttered.

"Am I being taken to see something?" said Vimes.

"No, your excellency. You are being taken to see where something is not."

"Ah. Then I want to bring Corporal Littlebottom."

"That? Absolutely not! That would be a desecration of - "

"No, it wouldn"t," said Vimes. "And the reason is, she won"t come with us because we"re not going, are we? You"re certainly not taking the representative of a potentially hostile power into your confidence and revealing that your house of cards is missing a card on the bottom layer, are you? Of course not. We are not having this conversation. For the next hour or so we"ll be nibbling titbits in this room. I haven"t even just said this, and you didn"t hear me. But Corporal Littlebottom is the best scene-of-crime officer I"ve got, and so I want her to come along with us."

"You"ve made your point, your excellency. Graphically, as always. Fetch her, then."

Vimes found Cheery standing back to back, or at least back to knees, with Detritus. They were surrounded by a ring of the curious. Whenever Detritus raised his hand to sip his drink the nearby dwarfs jumped back hurriedly.

"Where are we going, sir?"

"Nowhere."

"Ah. That sort of place."

"But things are looking up," said Vimes. "Dee has discovered a new pronoun, even if he does spit it."

"Sam!" said Lady Sybil, advancing through the throng, "they"re going to perform Bloodaxe and Ironhammer! Isn"t that wonderful?"

"Er..."

"It"s an opera, sir," Cheery whispered. "Part of the Koboldean Cycle. It"s history. Every dwarf knows it by heart. It"s about how we got laws, and kings... and the Scone, sir."

"I sang the part of Ironhammer when we did it at finishing school," said Lady Sybil. "Not the full five-week version, of course. It"ll be marvellous to see it done here. It"s really one of the great romances of history."

"Romances?" said Vimes. "Like... a love story?"Yes. Of course."

"Bloodaxe and Ironhammer were both... er... weren"t both..." Vimes began.

"They were both dwarfs, sir," said Cheery.

"Ah. Of course." Vimes gave up. All dwarfs were dwarfs. If you tried to understand their world from a human point of view it all went wrong. "Do, er, enjoy it, dear. I"ve got to... The King wants me to... I"ll just be somewhere else for a while. Politics..."

He hurried away, with Cheery trailing behind him.

Dee led the way through dark tunnels. When the opera began it was a whisper far away, like the sea in an ancient shell.

Eventually they stopped at the edge of a canal, its waters lapping at the darkness. A small boat was tethered there, with a waiting guard. Dee urged them into it.

"It is important that you understand what you are seeing, your grace," said Dee.

"Practically nothing," said Vimes. "And I thought I had good night vision."

There was a clink in the gloom, and then a lamp was lit. The guard was punting the boat under an arch and into a small lake. Apart from the tunnel entrance, the walls rose up sheer.

"Are we at the bottom of a well?" said Vimes.

"That is quite a good way of describing it." Dee fished under his seat. He produced a curved metal horn and blew one note which echoed up the rock walls.