The Fifth Elephant

hole with every rib, both arms flat on the floor beyond.
    A bit of Ankh-Morpork sense of humor hissed between his teeth.
    He scrabbled his way onto the cave floor and got his breath back. Then he took the one-shot out of his pocket, fired it into the floor, tossed it into the hole—it clattered and echoed for some time—and moved on, keeping his face toward the cold air.

    This wasn’t a tunnel anymore. It was the bottom of a shaft. But the green glow lit up something heaped in the middle.
    Vimes picked up a handful of snow and, when he looked up, a flake melted on his face.
    He grinned in the dark. The beetle light just caught the edge of the spiral stairs fixed to the rock.
    “Stairs” turned out to be a generous description. When the shaft had been cut, the dwarfs had made holes in the stone and hammered thick balks of timber into them. He tried one or two. They seemed sturdy enough. With care, he’d be able to scramble…
    He was a long way up before one snapped. He flung out his hands and caught the next one, his grip slipping on the wet wood. The glow beetle disappeared downward and Vimes, swinging back and forth from his precarious handhold, watched the circle of dim green light dwindle to a dot, and vanish.
    Then the realization crept over him that there was no way he would be able to pull himself up. His fingers were numb, but the rest of his entire life consisted of the amount of time they could maintain a grip on the clammy step above him.
    Call it a minute, perhaps.
    There were a lot of things that could profitably be done in a minute, but most of them couldn’t be done with no hands while hanging in darkness over a long drop.
    He lost his grip. A moment later he smacked into the spiral of logs one turn below, which parted company with the wall.
    Man and timber fell one more turn. Vimes landed with a rib-bending thump across one step, while those around it gave way. Rocking gently on the one tough log, he listened to the thuds and booms as the fallen timber continued to the bottom of the shaft.
    “———!” Vimes had intended to swear, but the fall had knocked the breath out of him.
    He hung like a folded pair of old trousers.
    It had been a long time since he’d slept. Whatever he’d been doing on the slab, it hadn’t been sleep. Normal sleep didn’t leave your mouth feeling as though glue had been poured into it.
    And only this morning the new ambassador for Ankh-Morpork had strolled out to present his credentials. Only this evening Ankh-Morpork’s commander of police had set out to solve a simple little theft. And now he was dangling halfway up a freezing shaft, with a few inches of old and unreliable wood between him and a brief trip to the next world.
    All he could hope for was that his whole life wasn’t going to pass before his eyes. There were some bits of it he didn’t want to remember.
    “Ah…Sir Samuel. Bad luck. You were doing so well.”
    He opened his eyes.
    A faint purple light just above him illuminated the form of the Lady Margolotta. She was sitting on empty space.
    “Can I give you a lift?” she said.
    Vimes shook his head, muzzily.
    “If it makes you feel any better, I really don’t like doing this,” said the vampire. “It’s so… expected of one. Oh dear. That rotten old log doesn’t look very—”
    The log snapped. Vimes landed spread-eagled on the turn below, but only for a moment. Several stairs broke and dropped him a further flight. This time, he caught hold of one and was, once again, dangling.
    Lady Margolotta descended regally.
    Far below, the broken wood boomed.
    “Now, in theory this might be an almost survivable way of getting back down,” said the vampire. “Unfortunately, I fear that the descending logs have smashed many of the ones below.”
    Vimes shifted. His handhold seemed secure. It might just be possible to pull himself up…
    “I knew you were behind this,” he muttered, trying to will some life into his shoulder muscles.
    “No, you didn’t. You knew that the Scone wasn’t stolen, though.”
    Vimes stared at the serenely floating shape.
    “The dwarfs wouldn’t think that—” he began. The log under him gave the little nasty movement that announces to any luckless passengers that it is about to land.
    Lady Margolotta drifted closer.
    “I know you hate vampires,” she said. “It’s quite usual, for your personality type. It’s the…penetrative aspect. But if I vas you, right now, I’d ask myself…do I hate them