The Fifth Elephant (Discworld 24)

"Igor"s a dab hand with a needle, sir."

Afterwards, a thoughtful Sam Vimes stepped out into the coach yard. An Igor was already loading the luggage.

"Er, which one are you?" said Vimes.

"Igor, marthter."

"Ah. Right. And, er, are you happy here, Igor? We could do with a... man of your talents in the Watch, and no mistake."

Igor looked down from the top of the coach: "In Ankh-Morpork, marthter? My word. Everyone wantth to go to Ankh-Morpork, marthter. It"th a very tempting offer. But I know where my duty lieth, your exthellenthy. I mutht get the plathe ready for the next exthellenthy."

"Oh, surely - "

"However, fortuitouthly my nephew Igor ith looking for a pothition, marthter. He thould do well in Ankh-Morpork. He"th rather too modern for Uberwald, that"th for thure!"

"Good lad, is he?"

"Hith heart"th in the right plathe. I know that for thertain, thur."

"Er, good. Well, get a message to him, then. We"re leaving as soon as we can."

"He will be tho exthited, thur! I"ve heard that in Ankh-Morpork bodieth jutht lie around in the thtreetth for anyone to take away!"

"It"s not quite as bad as that, Igor."

"Ithn"t it? Oh well, you can"t have everything. I"ll tell him directly." Igor lurched off in a sort of high-speed totter.

I wonder why they all walk like that, thought Vimes. They must have one leg shorter than the other. Either that or they"re not good at choosing boots.

He sat down on the steps to the house and fished out a cigar. So that was it, then. Bloody

politics again. It was always bloody politics, or bloody diplomatics. Bloody lies in smart clothing. Once you got off the streets criminals just flowed through your fingers. The King and Lady Margolotta and Vetinari... they always looked at some sort of big picture. Vimes knew he was, and always would be, a little picture man. Dee was useful, so she"d probably get, oh, a few days breaking bread or whatever it was they gave you here for being naughty. After all, all she"d destroyed was a fake, wasn"t it?

Was it?

But she"d thought she was committing a much bigger crime. That ought to mean something, in Sam Vimes"s personal gallery of little pictures.

And the Baroness was as guilty as hell. People had died. As for Wolfgang... well, some people were just built guilty. It was as simple as that. Anything they did became a crime, simply because it was them doing it.

He blew out a stream of smoke.

People like that shouldn"t be allowed to simply die their way out of things.

But... he hadn"t, had he?

The wolves had gone a long way down the river, Sybil had said, on both banks. There wasn"t a sniff of him. Further down was a mass of rapids and another fall. What couldn"t kill him would certainly make him wish it could.

If he"d gone downstream. But upstream there was nothing but wild water, too, right up to the town.

No, he couldn"t... surely no one could swim up a waterfall...

A chilly little feeling began at the back of Vimes"s neck. But any sensible person would get right out of the country, wouldn"t they? The wolves were looking for him, Tantony wouldn"t remember him fondly and if Vimes judged the King correctly then the dwarfs would have some dark little revenge in store, too.

The trouble was that, if you formed a picture in your mind of a sensible person, and tried to superimpose it on a picture of Wolfgang, you couldn"t get them to meet anywhere.

There was an old saying, wasn"t there: as a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly. Well, that got Wolfgang coming and going.

Vimes stood up and turned around carefully. There was no one there. Sounds came in from the street gateway - people laughing, the sound of a harness, the clank of a shovel clearing up last night"s snow.