Guards! Guards! tds-8

by Terry Pratchett

  "Bit of a boodwah," said Nobby, with the air of a connoisseur.

  "Hang on, hang on a minute," said Vimes. "There was this dragon. It was right over us ..."

  The memory rose up and hit him like a zombie with a grudge.

  "You all right, Captain?"

  The talons, outspread, wide as a man's reach; the boom and thump of the wings, bigger than sails; the stink of chemicals, the gods alone knew what sort. . .

  It had been so close he could see the tiny scales on its legs and the red gleam in its eyes. They were more than just reptile eyes. They were eyes you could drown in.

  And the breath, so hot that it wasn't like fire at all, but something almost solid, not burning things but smashing them apart ...

  On the other hand, he was here and alive. His left side felt as though it had been hit with an iron bar, but he was quite definitely alive.

  "What happened?" he said.

  "It was young Carrot," said Nobby. "He grabbed you and the sergeant and jumped off the roof just before it got us."

  "My side hurts. It must have got me," said Vimes.

  "No, I reckon that was where you hit the privy roof," said Nobby. "And then you rolled off and hit the water butt."

  "What about Colon? Is he hurt?"

  "Not hurt. Not exactly hurt. He landed more sort of softly. Him being so heavy, he went through the roof. Talk about a short sharp shower of…"

  "And then what happened?"

  "Well, we sort of made you comfy, and then everyone went blundering about and shouting for the sergeant. Until they found out where he was, o'course, then they just stood where they were and shouted. And then this woman come running up yelling," said Nobby.

  "This is Lady Ramkin you're referring to?" said Vimes coldly. His ribs were aching really magnificently now.

  "Yeah. Big fat party," said Nobby, unmoved. "Cor, she can't half boss people about! 'Oh, the poor dear man, you must bring him up to my house this instant.' So we did. Best place, too. Everyone's running around down in the city like chickens with their heads cut off."

  "How much damage did it do?"

  "Well, after you were out of it the wizards hit it with fireballs. It didn't like that at all. Just seemed to make it stronger and angrier. Took out the University's entire Widdershins wing."

  "And…?"

  "That's about it, really. It flamed a few more things, and then it must of flown away in all the smoke."

  "Noone saw where it went?''

  "If they did, they ain't saying." Nobby sat back and leered. "Disgusting, really, her livin' in a room like this. She's got pots of money, sarge says, she's got no call livin' in ordinary rooms. What's the good of not wanting to be poor if the rich are allowed to go round livin' in ordinary rooms? Should be marble." He sniffed. "Anyway, she said I was to fetch her when you woke up. She's feeding her dragons now. Old little buggers, aren't they. It's amazing she's allowed to keep 'em."

  "What do you mean?"

  "You know. Tarred with the same brush, and that."

  When Nobby had shambled out Vimes took another look around the room. It did, indeed, lack the gold leaf and marble that Nobby felt was compulsory for people of a high station in life. All the furniture was old, and the pictures on the wall, though doubtless valuable, looked the sort of pictures that are hung on bedroom walls because people can't think of anywhere else to put them. There were also a few amateurish watercolours of dragons. All in all, it had the look about it of a room that is only ever occupied by one person, and has been absent-mindedly moulded around them over the years, like a suit of clothes with a ceiling.

  It was clearly the room of a woman, but one who had cheerfully and without any silly moping been getting on with her life while all that soppy romance stuff had been happening to other people somewhere else, and been jolly grateful that she had her health.

  Such clothing as was visible had been chosen for sensible hardwearing qualities, possibly by a previous generation by the look of it, rather than its use as light artillery in the war between the sexes. There were bottles and jars neatly arranged on the dressing table, but a certain severity of line suggested that their labels would say things like "Rub on nightly" rather than "Just a dab behind the ears". You could imagine that the occupant of this room had slept in it all her life and had been called "my little girl" by her father until she was forty.

  There was a big sensible blue dressing gown hanging behind the door. Vimes knew, without even looking, that it would have a rabbit on the pocket.

  In short, it was the room of a woman who never expected that a man would ever see the inside of it.

  The bedside table was piled high with papers. Feeling guilty, but doing it anyway, Vimes squinted at them.

  Dragons was the theme. There were letters from the Cavern Club Exhibitions Committee and the Friendly Flamethrowers League. There were pamphlets and appeals from the Sunshine Sanctuary for Sick Dragons— "Poor little WINNY's fires were nearly Damped after Five years' Cruel Use as a Paint-Stripper, but now…" And there were requests for donations, and talks, and things that added up to a heart big enough for the whole world, or at least that part of it that had wings and breathed fire.

  If you let your mind dwell on rooms like this, you could end up being oddly sad and full of a strange, diffuse compassion which would lead you to believe that it might be a good idea to wipe out the whole human race and start again with amoebas.

  Beside the drift of paperwork was a book. Vimes twisted painfully and looked at the spine. It said: Diseases of the Dragon, by Sybil Deidre Olgivanna Ramkin.

  He turned the stiff pages in horrified fascination. They opened into another world, a world of quite stupefying problems. Slab Throat. The Black Tups. Dry Lung. Storge. Staggers, Heaves, Weeps, Stones. It was amazing, he decided after reading a few pages, that a swamp dragon ever survived to see a second sunrise. Even walking across a room must be reckoned a biological triumph.

  The painstakingly-drawn illustrations he looked away from hurriedly. You could only take so much innards.

  There was a knock at the door.

  "I say? Are you decent?" Lady Ramkin boomed cheerfully.

  "Er-"

  "I’ve brought you something jolly nourishing."

  Somehow Vimes imagined it would be soup. Instead it was a plate stacked high with bacon, fried potatoes and eggs. He could hear his arteries panic just by looking at it.

  "I've made a bread pudding, too," said Lady Ramkin, slightly sheepishly. "I don't normally cook much, just for myself. You know how it is, catering for one."

  Vimes thought about the meals at his lodgings. Somehow the meat was always grey, with mysterious tubes in it.

  "Er," he began, not used to addressing ladies from a recumbent position in their own beds. "Corporal Nobbs tells me…"

  "And what a colourful little man Nobby is!" said Lady Ramkin.

  Vimes wasn't certain he could cope with this.

  "Colourful?" he said weakly.

  "A real character. We've been getting along famously."

  "You have?"

  "Oh, yes. What a great fund of anecdotes he has."

  "Oh, yes. He's got that all right." It always amazed Vimes how Nobby got along with practically everyone. It must, he'd decided, have something to do with the common denominator. In the entire world of mathematics there could be no denominator as common as Nobby.

  "Er," he said, and then found he couldn't leave this strange new byway, "you don't find his language a bit, er, ripe?"

  "Salty," corrected Lady Ramkin cheerfully. "You should have heard my father when he was annoyed. Anyway, we found we've got a lot in common. It's an amazing coincidence, but my grandfather once had his grandfather whipped for malicious lingering."

  That must make them practically family, Vimes thought. Another stab of pain from his stricken side made him wince.

  "You've got some very bad bruising and probably a cracked rib or two," she said. "If you roll over I'll put some more of this on.'' Lady Ramk
in flourished a jar of yellow ointment.

  Panic crossed Vimes's face. Instinctively, he raised the sheets up around his neck.

  "Don't play silly buggers, man," she said. "I shan't see anything I haven't seen before. One backside is pretty much like another. It's just that the ones I see generally have tails on. Now roll over and up with the nightshirt. It belonged to my grandfather, you know.''

  There was no resisting that tone of voice. Vimes thought about demanding that Nobby be brought in as a chaperon, and then decided that would be even worse.

  The cream burned like ice.

  "What is it?"

  "All kinds of stuff. It'll reduce the bruising and promote the growth of healthy scale."

  "What?"

  "Sorry. Probably not scale. Don't look so worried. I'm almost positive about that. Okay, all done." She gave him a slap on the rump.

  "Madam, I am Captain of the Night Watch," said Vimes, knowing it was a bloody daft thing to say even as he said it.

  "Half naked in a lady's bed, too," said Lady Ramkin, unmoved. "Now sit up and eat your tea. We've got to get you good and strong."

  Vimes's eyes filled with panic.

  "Why?" he said.

  Lady Ramkin reached into the pocket of her grubby jacket.

  "I made some notes last night," she said. "About the dragon."

  "Oh, the dragon." Vimes relaxed a bit. Right now the dragon seemed a much safer prospect.

  "And I did a bit of working out, too. I'll tell you this: it's a very odd beast. It shouldn't be able to get airborne."

  "You're right there."

  "If it's built like swamp dragons, it should weigh about twenty tons. Twenty tons! It's impossible. It's all down to weight and wingspan ratios, you see."

  "I saw it drop off the tower like a swallow."

  "I know. It should have torn its wings off and left a bloody great hole in the ground," said Lady Ramkin firmly. "You can't muck about with aerodynamics. You can't just scale up from small to big and leave it at that, you see. It's all a matter of muscle power and lifting surfaces."

  "I knew there was something wrong," said Vimes, brightening up. "And the flame, too. Nothing goes around with that kind of heat inside it. How do swamp dragons manage it?"

  "Oh, that's just chemicals," said Lady Ramkin dismissively. "They just distill something flammable from whatever they’ve eaten and ignite the flame just as it comes out of the ducts. They never actually have fire inside them, unless they get a case of blowback."

  "What happens then?"

  "You're scraping dragon off the scenery," said Lady Ramkin cheerfully. "I'm afraid they're not very well-designed creatures, dragons."

  Vimes listened.

  They would never have survived at all except that their home swamps were isolated and short of predators. Not that a dragon made good eating, anyway-once you'd taken away the leathery skin and the enormous flight muscles, what was left must have been like biting into a badly-run chemical factory. No wonder dragons were always ill. They relied on permanent stomach trouble for supplies of fuel. Most of their brain power was taken up with controlling the complexities of then— digestion, which could distill flame-producing fuels from the most unlikely ingredients. They could even rearrange their internal plumbing overnight to deal with difficult processes. They lived on a chemical knife-edge the whole time. One misplaced hiccup and they were geography.

  And when it came to choosing nesting sites, the females had all the common sense and mothering instinct of a brick.

  Vimes wondered why people had been so worried about dragons in the olden days. If there was one in a cave near you, all you had to do was wait until it self-ignited, blew itself up, or died of acute indigestion.

  "You've really studied them, haven't you," he said.

  "Someone ought to."

  "But what about the big ones?"

  "Golly, yes. They're a great mystery, you know," she said, her expression becoming extremely serious.

  "Yes, you said."

  "There are legends, you know. It seems as though one species of dragon started to get bigger and bigger and then . . . just vanished."

  "Died out, you mean?"

  "No . . . they turned up, sometimes. From somewhere. Full of vim and vigour. And then, one day, they stopped coming at all." She gave Vimes a triumphant look. "I think they found somewhere where they could really be. "

  "Really be what?"

  "Dragons. Where they could really fulfil their potential. Some other dimension or something. Where the gravity isn't so strong, or something."

  "I thought when I saw it," said Vimes, "I thought, you can't have something that flies and has scales like that."

  They looked at each other.

  "We've got to find it in its lair," said Lady Ramkin.

  "No bloody flying newt sets fire to my city," said Vimes.

  "Just think of the contribution to dragon lore," said Lady Ramkin.

  "Listen, if anyone ever sets fire to this city, it's going to be me. "

  "It's an amazing opportunity. There's so many questions ..."

  "You're right there." A phrase of Carrot's crossed Vimes's mind. "It can help us with our enquiries," he suggested.

  "But in the morning," said Lady Ramkin firmly.

  Vimes's look of bitter determination faded.

  "I shall sleep downstairs, in the kitchen," said Lady Ramkin cheerfully. "I usually have a camp bed made up down there when it's egg-laying time. Some of the females always need assistance. Don't you worry about me."

  "You're being very helpful," Vimes muttered.

  "I've sent Nobby down to the city to help the others set up your headquarters," said Lady Ramkin.

  Vimes had completely forgotten the Watch House. "It must have been badly damaged," he ventured.

  "Totally destroyed," said Lady Ramkin. "Just a patch of melted rock. So I'm letting you have a place in Pseudopolis Yard."

  "Sorry?"

  "Oh, my father had property all over the city," she said. "Quite useless to me, really. So I told my agent to give Sergeant Colon the keys to the old house in Pseudopolis Yard. It'll do it good to be aired."

  "But that area — I mean, there's real cobbles on the streets — the rent alone, I mean, Lord Vetinari won't-"

  "Don't you worry about it," she said, giving him a friendly pat. "Now, you really ought to get some sleep."

  Vimes lay in bed, his mind racing. Pseudopolis Yard was on the Ankh side of the river, in quite a high-rent district. The sight of Nobby or Sergeant Colon walking down the street in daylight would probably have the same effect on the area as the opening of a plague hospital.

  He dozed, gliding in and out of a sleep where giant dragons pursued him waving jars of ointment . . .

  And awoke to the sound of a mob.

  ...

  Lady Ramkin drawing herself up haughtily was not a sight to forget, although you could try. It was like watching continental drift in reverse as various subcontinents and islands pulled themselves together to form one massive, angry protowoman.

  The broken door of the dragon house swung on its hinges. The inmates, already as highly strung as a harp on amphetamines, were going mad. Little gouts of flame burst against the metal plates as they stampeded back and forth in their pens. "What," she said, "is the meaning of this?" If a Ramkin had ever been given to introspection she'd have admitted that it wasn't a very original line.

  But it was handy. It did the job. The reason that cliches become cliches is that they are the hammers and screwdrivers in the toolbox of communication.

  The mob filled the broken doorway. Some of it was waving various sharp implements with the up-and-down motion proper to rioters.

  "Worl," said the leader, "it's the dragon, innit?"

  There was a chorus of muttered agreement.

  "Hwhat about it?" said Lady Ramkin.

  "Worl. It's been burning the city. They don't fly far. You got dragons here. Could be one of them, couldn't it?"

  "Yeah."
/>
  "S'right."

  "QED. "[15]

  "So what we're going to do is, we're going to put 'em down."

  "S'right."

  "Yeah."

  "Pro bono publico. "

  Lady Ramkin's bosom rose and fell like an empire. She reached out and grabbed the dunging fork from its hook on the wall.

  "One step nearer, I warn you, and you'll be sorry," she said.

  The leader looked beyond her to the frantic dragons.

  "Yeah?" he said, nastily. "And what'll you do, eh?"

  Her mouth opened and shut once or twice. "I shall summon the Watch!" she said at last.

  The threat did not have the effect she had expected. Lady Ramkin had never paid much attention to those bits of the city that didn't have scales on.

  "Well, that's too bad," said the leader. "That's really worrying, you know that? Makes me go all weak at the knees, that does."

  He extracted a lengthy cleaver from his belt. ' 'And now you just stand aside, lady, because-"

  A streak of green fire blasted out of the back of the shed, passed a foot over the heads of the mob, and burned a charred rosette in the woodwork over the door.

  Then came a voice that was a honeyed purr of sheer deadly menace.

  "This is Lord Mountjoy Quickfang Winterforth IV, the hottest dragon in the city. It could burn your head clean off. "

  Captain Vimes limped forward from the shadows.

  A small and extremely frightened golden dragon was clamped firmly under one arm. His other hand held it by the tail.

  The rioters watched it, hypnotised.

  "Now I know what you're thinking," Vimes went on, softly. "You're wondering, after all this excitement, has it got enough flame left? And, y'know, I ain't so sure myself ..."

  He leaned forward, sighting between the dragon's ears, and his voice buzzed like a knife blade:

  "What you've got to ask yourself is: Am I feeling lucky?"

  They swayed backwards as he advanced.

  "Well?" he said. "Are you feeling lucky?"

  For a few moments the only sound was Lord Mount-joy Quickfang Winterforth IV's stomach rumbling ominously as fuel sloshed into his flame chambers.

  "Now look, er," said the leader, his eyes fixed hypnotically on the dragon's head, "there's no call for anything like that…"