The Fifth Elephant

posh. Have you got anything to wear apart from your uniform, Sergeant?”
    “No, sir.”
    “Well, go and see Igor. There’s a good man with a needle if I ever saw one. How about you, Cheery?”
    “I do, er, have a gown,” said Cheery, looking down shyly.
    “You do?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Oh. Well. Good. I’m putting the two of you on the embassy staff, too. Cheery, you’re…you’re Military Attaché.”
    “Oh,” said Detritus, disappointed.
    “And, Detritus, you’re Cultural Attaché.”
    The troll brightened up considerably. “You will not regret dis, sir!”
    “I’m sure I won’t,” said Vimes. “Right now, I’d like you to come with me.”
    “Is dis a cultural matter, sir?”
    “Broadly. Perhaps.”
    Vimes led the troll and Sybil up the stairs and into the office, where he stopped in front of a wall.
    “This one?” he said.
    “Yes,” said his wife. “It’s hard to notice until you measure the rooms, but that wall really is rather thick—”
    Vimes ran his hands along the paneling, looking for anything that might go click . Then he stood back.
    “Give me your crossbow, Sergeant.”
    “Here we are, sir.”
    Vimes staggered under its weight, but managed to get it pointed at the wall.
    “Is this wise, Sam?” said Sybil.
    Vimes stood back to take aim, and the floorboard moved under his heel. A panel in the wall swung gently.
    “You scared der hell out of it, sir,” said Detritus loyally.
    Vimes carefully handed the crossbow back, and tried to look as though he’d meant things to happen this way.
    He’d expected a secret passage. But this was a tiny workroom. There were jars on shelves, with labels… NEW SUET STRATA, AREA 21, GRADE A FAT, THE BIG HOLE . There were lumps of crumbling rock, with neat cardboard tags attached to them saying things like LEVEL #3, SHAFT 9, DOUBLE-PICK MINE .
    There was a set of drawers. One of them was full of makeup, including a selection of mustaches.
    Wordlessly, Vimes opened one of a stack of notebooks. The first pages had a pencil drawn street map of Bonk, with red lines threading through it.
    “Good grief, look at this,” he breathed, flicking onward. “Maps. Drawings. There’s pages of stuff about the assaying of fat deposits. Huh, says here ‘…the new suets, while initially promising, are now suspected of having high levels of BCBs and are likely to be soon exhausted.’ And here it says ‘A werewolf putsch is clearly planned in the chaos following the loss of the Scone’…‘K. reports that many of the younger werewolves now follow W., who has changed the nature of the Game’…This stuff…this stuff is spying . I wondered how Vetinari always seems to know so much!”
    “Did you think it came to him in dreams, dear?”
    “But there’s loads of details here…notes about people, lots of figures about dwarf mining production, political rumors…I didn’t know we did this sort of thing!”
    “You use spies all the time, dear,” said Sybil.
    “I do not!”
    “Well, what about people like Foul Ole Ron and No Way José and Cumbling Michael?”
    “That is not spying, that is not spying! That’s just ‘information received.’ We couldn’t do the job if we didn’t know what’s happening on the street!”
    “Well…perhaps Havelock just thinks in terms of…a bigger street, dear.”
    “There’s loads more of this muck, look. Sketches, more bits of ore…what the hell’s this?”
    It was oblong, and about the size of a cigarette packet. There was a round glass disk on one face, and a couple of levers on one side.
    Vimes pushed one of them. A tiny hatch opened on one side, and the smallest head that he’d ever seen that could speak said “’s?”
    “I know dat!” said Detritus. “Dat’s a nano-imp! Dey cost over a hundred dollars! Dey’re really small !”
    “No one’s bloody fed me for a fortnight!” the imp squeaked.
    “It’s an iconograph small enough to fit in a pocket ,” said Vimes. “Something for a spy…it’s as bad as Inigo’s damn one-shot crossbow. And look…”
    Steps led downward. He took them carefully, and swung open the little door at the end.
    Wet heat slapped into him.
    “Pass me down a candle, will you, dear?” he said. And by its light he looked out into a long dank tunnel. Crusted pipes, leaking steam at every joint, lined the far wall.
    “A way in and out where no one will see him, too,” he said. “What a dirty world we live in…”

    The clouds had covered the sky and the wind