The Fifth Elephant (Discworld 24)

The Low King was on a small throne under one of the chandeliers. There was a metal canopy over it, already encrusted with marvellous stalactites of wax.

Around him, watching the crowd, were four dwarfs, tall for dwarfs, and looking rather menacing in their dark glasses. Each one was holding an axe. They spent all their time staring hard at people.

The King was talking to the Genuan ambassador. Vimes looked sideways at Cheery and Detritus. Suddenly, bringing them here wasn"t such a good idea. In his official robes the King looked a lot more... distant, and a lot harder to please.

Hang on, he told himself. They are Ankh-Morpork citizens. They"re not doing anything wrong. And then he argued: they"re not doing anything wrong in Ankh-Morpork.

The line moved along. Their party was almost in the presence. The armed dwarfs were all watching Detritus now, and holding their axes in a slightly less relaxed way. Detritus appeared not to notice.

"Dis place is even more cult"ral than the op"ra house," he said, gazing around respectfully. "Dem chandeliers must weigh a ton."

He reached up and rubbed his head, and then inspected his fingers.

Vimes glanced up. Something warm, like a buttered raindrop, hit his cheek. As he brushed it away he saw the shadows move...

Things happened with treacle slowness. He saw it as if he was watching himself from a little way away. He saw himself push Cheery and Sybil roughly, heard himself shout something, and watched himself dive towards the King, snatching the dwarf up as an axe clanged into his backplate.

Then he was rolling, with the angry dwarf in his arms, and the chandelier was halfway through its fall, candle flames streaming, and there was Detritus, raising his hands with a calculating look on his face...

There was a moment of stillness and silence as the troll caught the descending mountain of light. And then physics returned, in an exploding cloud of dwarfs, debris, molten wax and tumbling, flaring candles.

Vimes woke up in darkness. He blinked and touched his eyes to make sure that they were open.

Then he sat up and his head thumped against stone, and then there was light, vicious yellow and purple lights, filling his life very suddenly. He lay back until they went away.

He took a personal itinerary. His cloak, helmet, sword and armour had all gone. He was left in his shirt and breeches, and while this place was not freezing it had a clamminess that was already working its way through to his bones.

Right...

He wasn"t sure how long it took him to get a feel for the cell, but a feel it was. He moved by inches, waving his arms ahead of him like a man practising a very slow martial art against the darkness.

Even then the senses became unreliable in the total black. He followed the wall carefully, followed another wall, followed a wall which yielded, under his fingertips, the outline of a small door with a handle, and found the wall which had the stone slab against it on which he"d awoken.

What made this all the harder was having to do it with his head sunk against his chest. Vimes wasn"t a very tall man. If he had been, he"d probably have cracked his skull when he woke up.

Without any other aids to rely on, he walked the length of the walls using his copper"s pace. He knew exactly how long it took him, swinging his legs easily, to walk across the Brass Bridge back home. A little bit of muzzy mental arithmetic was needed, but eventually he decided that the room was ten feet square.

One thing that Vimes did not do was shout "Help! Help!" He was in a cell. Someone had put him in a cell. It was reasonable to assume, therefore, that whoever had done this wasn"t interested in his opinions.

He groped his way to the stone slab again and lay down. As he did so something rattled.

His patted his pockets and brought out what felt and sounded very much like a box of matches. There were only three left.

So... resources: the clothes he stood up in and a few matches. Now to work out what the hell was going on.

He remembered seeing the chandelier. He thought he remembered seeing Detritus actually catch the thing. And there had been a lot of screaming and shouting and running around, while in his arms the King had sworn at Vimes as only a dwarf could swear. Then someone had hit him.

There was also an ache across his back where an axe had been turned aside by his armour. He felt a twitch of national pride at that thought. Ankh-Morpork armour had stood up to the blow! Admittedly it was probably made in

Ankh-Morpork by dwarfs from Uberwald, using steel smelted from Uberwald iron, but it damn well was Ankh-Morpork armour, just the same.

There was a pillow on the slab, made in Uberwald. As Vimes turned his head the pillow went, very faintly, clink. This was a sound he didn"t associate with feathers.

In the darkness he picked up the sack and, after resorting to his teeth, managed to rip a hole in the heavy material.

If what he drew out had ever been part of a bird, it wasn"t one Vimes would like to meet. It felt very much like Inigo"s one-shot. A finger inserted very gingerly into the end told Vimes that it was loaded, too.

Just one shot, he remembered. But it was one people didn"t know you had... On the other hand, the Tooth Fairy probably wasn"t responsible for putting it in the pillow, unless she"d been having to face some particularly difficult children lately.