The Fifth Elephant (Discworld 24)

"Yes indeed! Oh yes! Good joke!"

"Look at me laughing."

Vimes tossed the crossbow aside and swung a tube out from under his cloak. It was made of cardboard and a red cone protruded from one end.

"A stupid silly firework!" shouted Wolfgang, and charged.

"Could be," said Vimes.

He didn"t bother to aim. These things were never designed for accuracy or speed. He simply removed his cigar from his mouth and, as Wolfgang ran towards him, pressed it into the fuse hole.

The mortar jerked as the charge went off and its payload came tumbling out slowly and trailing smoke in a lazy spiral. It looked like the stupidest weapon since the toffee spear.

Wolfgang danced back and forth under it, grinning, and as it passed several feet over his head he leapt up gracefully and caught it in his mouth.

And then it exploded.

The flares were made to be seen twenty miles away. Even with his eyes tightly shut, Vimes saw the glare through his lids.

When the body had stopped rolling, Vimes looked around the square. People were watching from the coaches. The crowds were silent.

There were a lot of things he could say. "Son of a bitch!" would have been a good one. Or he could say, "Welcome to civilization!" He could have said, "Laugh this one off!" He might have said, "Fetch!"

But he didn"t, because if he had said any of those things then he"d have known that what he had just done was murder.

He turned away, tossed the empty mortar over his shoulder and muttered, "The hell with it."

At times like this teetotalism bit down hard.

Tantony was watching.

"Don"t say a word out of place," said Vimes, without altering his stride. "Just don"t."

"I thought... those things shot very fast..."

"I cut down the charge," said Vimes, tossing Detritus"s penknife in the air and catching it again. "I didn"t want to hurt anyone."

"I heard you warn him that you were armed. I heard him twice resist arrest. I heard everything. I heard everything you wanted me to hear."

"Yes."

"Of course, he might not have known that law."

"Oh, really? Well, I didn"t know it was legal in these parts to chase some poor sod across the country and maul him to death and, do you know, that didn"t stop anyone." Vimes shook his head. "And don"t give me that pained look. Oh, yes... now you can say I did it wrong, you can say I ought to have handled it differently. That sort of thing is easy to say afterwards. I"ll say it myself, maybe." In the middle of every night, he added to himself, after I"ve woken up seeing those mad eyes. "But you wanted him stopped as much as I did. Oh yes, you did. But you couldn"t, because you didn"t have the means, and I did, because I could. And you"ve got the luxury of judging me because you"re still alive. And that"s the truth of it, all wrapped up. Lucky one for you, eh?"

The crowds parted ahead of Vimes. He could hear whispers around him.

"On the other hand," said Tantony, distantly, as if he hadn"t heard what Vimes had just said, "you did only fire that thing to warn him..."

"Huh?"

"Clearlyyou were not to know that he would automatically try to catch the... explosive," said Tantony, and it seemed to Vimes that he was rehearsing the line. "The... dog-like qualities of a werewolf would hardly have occurred to a man from the big city."

Vimes held his gaze for a moment, and then patted him on the shoulder. "Hold on to that thought," he said.

A coach pulled to a halt beside him as he continued on his way. It slid to a stop so silently - not a jingle of harness, not a clop of horseshoe - that Vimes jumped sideways out of shock.

The horses were black, with black plumes on their heads. The coach was a hearse, the traditional long glass windows now filled with smoked black glass. There was no driver; the reins were simply loosely knotted on a brass railing.