The Fifth Elephant (Discworld 24)

"I want a weapon! There"s got to be something in the tower I can use!"

"Sir, you can use my sword! And there"s the... hunting spears."

"You know what you can do with the hunting spears!"

Vimes kicked the door at the base of the tower. Fresh snow had blown in, smoothing the edges of wolf and human tracks.

He felt drunk. Bits of his brain were going on and off. His eyeballs felt as though they were lined with towelling. His legs seemed only vaguely under his control.

Surely the signallers must"ve had something?

Even the sacks and barrels had gone. Well, there were plenty of peasants in the hills, and winter was coming on, and the men who"d been here certainly had no further use for the food. Even Vimes wouldn"t call that theft.

He climbed up to the next floor. The thrifty people of the forest had been up here, too. But they hadn"t taken the bloodstains off the floor, or Inigo"s little round hat which inexplicably was wedged into the wooden wall.

He pulled it out and saw where the thin felt on the brim had been pushed back to reveal the razor-sharp edge.

An assassin"s hat, he thought. And then, no, not an assassin"s hat. He remembered the street fights he"d seen when he was a kid, among the hard-drinking men who thought that even bareknuckle fighting was posh. Some of them would sew a razorblade into the brim of their cap, for a bit of help in a melee. This was the hat of a man who was always looking for that extra edge.

It hadn"t worked here.

He dropped it on the floor and his eye caught, in the gloom, the box of mortars. Even that had been ransacked, but the tubes had simply been scattered across the floor. The gods alone knew what the scavengers thought they were.

He put them back in their box. Inigo was right about them, at least. A weapon so inaccurate that it probably couldn"t hit a barn wall from inside the barn was no good as a weapon. But other things had been scattered around, too. The men who"d been living rough here had left a few personal items. Pictures had been thumbtacked to the wall. There was a diary, a pipe, someone"s shaving gear. Boxes had been tipped out on the floor...

"We"d better be getting on, sir," said Carrot from the ladder.

They"d been killed. They"d been sent racing off into the dark with monsters at their heels, and then some blank-faced peasants who"d done nothing to help had come in here and picked over the little things they"d left behind.

Damn it! Vimes growled and swept everything into a box and dragged it over to the ladder.

"We"ll drop this lot off at the embassy," he said. "I"m not leaving anything here for scavengers. Don"t think about arguing with me."

"Wouldn"t dream of it, sir. Wouldn"t. dream of it."

Vimes paused. "Carrot? That wolf and Angua..." He stopped. How the hell did you continue a sentence like that?

"They"re old friends, sir."

"They are?".

There was nothing but the usual completely open honesty anywhere in Carrot"s expression.

"Oh... we... that"s good, then," Vimes finished.

A minute later they were on their way again. Angua was running as a wolf far ahead of the sleigh, alongside Gavin. Gaspode had curled up under the blankets.

And here I am again, thought Vimes, racing the sunset. Heavens know why. I"m in the company of a werewolf and a wolf that looks worse, and sitting in a sleigh drawn by wolves which I can"t steer. Try looking that one up in the manual.

He dozed among the blankets, half-open eyes watching the disc of the sun flickering between pine trees.

How could you steal the Scone from its cave?

He"d said there were dozens of ways and there were, but they were all risky. They all depended too much on luck and sleepy guards. And this didn"t feel like a crime that was going to rely on luck. It had to work.

The Scone wasn"t important. It was important that the dwarfs ended in disarray - no king, violent arguments and fighting in the dark. And it would stay dark in Uberwald, too. And it seemed to be important that the King was blamed. After all, he was the one who"d lost the Scone.

Whatever the plan was, it had to be done quickly. Well, the clacks would have been useful. What had Wolfgang said? "Those clever men in Ankh-Morpork"? Not dwarfs, but men.