Carrot saluted smartly. “Permission to volunteer, sir,” he said. “And I only get twenty dollars a month training pay and I don’t mind at all, sir.”

Sergeant Colon cleared his throat. Then he straightened the hang of his breastplate. It was one of those with astonishingly impressive pectoral muscles embossed upon it. His chest and stomach fitted into it in the same way that jelly fits into a mould.

What would Captain Vimes do now? Well, he’d have a drink. But if he didn’t have a drink, what would he do?

“What we need,” he said slowly, “is a Plan.”

That sounded good. That sentence alone sounded worth the pay. If you had a Plan, you were halfway there.

And already he thought he could hear the cheering of crowds. They were lining the streets, and they were throwing flowers, and he was being carried triumphantly through the grateful city.

The drawback was, he suspected, that he was being carried in an urn.

. . .

Lupine Wonse padded along the draughty corridors to the Patrician’s bedroom. It had never been a sumptuous apartment at best, and contained little more than a narrow bed and a few battered cupboards. It looked even worse now, with one wall gone. Sleepwalk at night now and you could step right into the vast cavern that was the Great Hall.

Even so, he shut the door behind him for a semblance of privacy. Then, cautiously and with many nervous glances at the great space beyond, he knelt down in the centre of the floor and pried up a board.

A long black robe was dragged into view. Then Wonse reached further down into the dusty space between the floors and rummaged around. He rummaged still further. Then he lay down and stuck both arms into the gap and flailed desperately.

A book sailed across the room and hit him in the back of the head.

“Looking for this, were you?” said Vimes.

He stepped out of the shadows.

Wonse was on his knees, his mouth opening and shutting.

What’s he going to say, Vimes thought. Is it going to be: I know what this looks like, or will it be: How did you get in here, or maybe it’ll be: Listen, I can explain everything. I wish I had a loaded dragon in my hands right now.

Wonse said, “Okay. Clever of you to guess.”

Of course, that was always an outside chance, Vimes added.

“Under the floorboards,” he said aloud. “First place anyone’d look. Rather foolish, that was.”

“I know. I suppose he didn’t think anyone would be searching,” said Wonse, standing up and brushing the dust off himself.

“I’m sorry?” said Vimes pleasantly.

“Vetinari. You know how he was for scheming and things. He was involved in most of the plots against himself, that was how he ran things. He enjoyed it. Obviously he called it up and couldn’t control it. Something even more cunning than he was.”

“So what were you doing?” said Vimes.

“I wondered if it might be possible to reverse the spell. Or maybe call up another dragon. They’d fight then.”

“A sort of balance of terror, you mean?” said Vimes.

“Could be worth a try,” said Wonse earnestly. He took a few steps closer. “Look, about your job, I know we were both a bit overwrought at the time, so of course if you want it back there’ll be no prob-“

“It must have been terrible,” said Vimes. “Imagine what must have gone through his mind. He called it up, and then found it wasn’t just some sort of tool but a real thing with a mind of its own. A mind just like his, but with all the brakes off. You know, I wouldn’t mind betting that at the start he really thought that what he was doing was all for the best. He must have been insane. Sooner or later, anyway.”

“Yes,” said Wonse hoarsely. “It must have been terrible.”

“Ye gods, but I’d like to get my hands on him! All those years I’ve known the man, and I’d never realised . . .”

Wonse said nothing.

“Run,” said Vimes softly.

“What?”

“Run. I want to see you run.”

“I don’t underst-“

“I saw someone run away, the night the dragon flamed that house. I remember thinking at the time that he moved in a funny way, sort of bounding along. And then the other day I saw you running away from the dragon. Could almost have been the same man, I thought. Skipping, almost. Like someone running to keep up. Any of them get out, Wonse?”

Wonse waved a hand in what he might have thought was a nonchalant way. “That’s just ridiculous, that’s not proof,” he said.

“I noticed you sleep in here now,” said Vimes. “I suppose the king likes to have you handy, does he?”

“You’ve got no proof at all,” whispered Wonse.

“Of course I haven’t. The way someone runs. The eager tone of voice. That’s all. But that doesn’t matter, does it? Because it wouldn’t matter even if I did have proof,” said Vimes. “There’s no-one to take it to. And you can’t give me my job back.”

“I can!” said Wonse. “I can, and you needn’t just be captain-“

“You can’t give me my job back,” repeated Vimes. “It was never yours to take away. I was never an officer of the city, or an officer of the king, or an officer of the Patrician. I was an officer of the law. It might have been corrupted and bent, but it was law, of a sort. There isn’t any law now except: ‘you’ll get burned alive if you don’t watch out’. Where’s the place in there for me?”

Wonse darted forward and grabbed him by the arm.

“But you can help me!” he said. “There may be a way to destroy the dragon, d’you see, or at least we can help people, channel things to mitigate the worst of it, somehow find a meeting point-“

Vimes’s blow caught Wonse on the cheek and spun him around.

“The dragon’s here, “he snapped. “You can’t channel it or persuade it or negotiate with it. There’s no truce with dragons. You brought it .here and we’re stuck with it, you bastard. “

Wonse lowered his hand from the bright white mark where the punch had connected.

“What are you going to do?” he said.

Vimes didn’t know. He’d thought of a dozen ways that the thing could go, but the only one that was really suitable was killing Wonse. And, face to face, he couldn’t do it.

“That’s the trouble with people like you,” said Wonse, getting up. “You’re always against anything attempted for the betterment of mankind, but you never have any proper plans of your own. Guards! Guards!”

He grinned maniacally at Vimes.

“Didn’t expect that, did you?” he said. “We’ve still got guards here, you know. Not so many, of course. Not many people want to come in.”

There were footsteps in the passage outside and four of the palace guards padded in, swords drawn.

“I wouldn’t put up a fight, if I were you,” Wonse went on. “They’re desperate and uneasy men. But very highly paid.”

Vimes said nothing. Wonse was a gloater. You always stood a chance with gloaters. The old Patrician had never been a gloater, you could say that for him. If he wanted you dead, you never even heard about it.

The thing to do with gloaters was play the game according to the rules.

“You’ll never get away with it,” he said.

“You’re right. You’re absolutely right. But never is a long time,” said Wonse. “None of us get away with anything for that long.”

“You shall have some time to reflect on this,” he said and nodded to the guards. “Throw him in the special dungeon. And then go about that other little task.”

“Er,” said the leader of the guards, and hesitated.

“What’s the matter, man?”

“You, er, want us to attack him?” said the guard miserably. Thick though the palace guard were, they were as aware as everyone else of the conventions, and when guards are summoned to deal with one man in overheated circumstances it’s not a good time for them. The bugger’s bound to be heroic, he was thinking. This guard was not looking forward to a future in which he was dead.

“Of course, you idiot!”

“But, er, there’s only one of him,” said the guard captain.

“And he’s smilin’,” said a man behind him.

“Prob’ly goin’ to swing on the chandeliers any minute,” said one of his colleagues. “And kick over the table, and that.”

“He’s not even armed!” shrieked Wonse.

“Worst kind, that,” said one of the guards, with deep stoicism. “They leap up, see, and grab one of the ornamental swords behind the shield over the fireplace.”

“Yeah,” said another, suspiciously. “And then they chucks a chair at you.”

“There’s no fireplace! There’s no sword! There’s only him! Now take him!” screamed Wonse.

A couple of guards grabbed Vimes tentatively by the shoulders.

“You’re not going to do anything heroic, are you?” whispered one of them.

“Wouldn’t know where to start,” he said.

“Oh. Right.”

As Vimes was hauled away he heard Wonse breaking into insane laughter. They always did, your gloaters.

But he was correct about one thing. Vimes didn’t have a plan. He hadn’t thought much about what was going to happen next. He’d been a fool, he told himself, to think that you just had a confrontation and that was the end of it.

He also wondered what the other task was.

The palace guards said nothing, but stared straight ahead and marched him down, across the ruined hall, and through the wreckage of another corridor to an ominous door. They opened it, threw him in, and marched away.

And no-one, absolutely no-one, noticed the thin, leaf-like thing that floated gently down from the shadows of the roof, tumbling over and over in the air like a sycamore seed, before landing in the tangled gewgaws of the hoard.

It was a peanut shell.

. . .

It was the silence that awoke Lady Ramkin. Her bedroom looked out over the dragon pens, and she was used to sleeping to the susurration of rustling scales, the occasional roar of a dragon flaming in its sleep, and the keening of the gravid females. Absence of any sound at all was like an alarm clock.

She had cried a bit before going to sleep, but not much, because it was no use being soppy and letting the side down. She lit the lamp, pulled on her rubber boots, grabbed the stick which might be all that stood between her and theoretical loss of virtue, and hurried down through the shadowy house. As she crossed the damp lawn to the kennels she was vaguely aware that something was happening down in the city, but dismissed it as not currently worth thinking about. Dragons were more important.

She pushed open the door.

Well, they were still there. The familiar stink of swamp dragons, half pond mud and half chemical explosion, gusted out into the night.

Each dragon was balancing on its hind legs in the centre of its pen, neck arched, staring with ferocious intensity at the roof.

“Oh,” she said. “Flying around up there again, is it? Showing off. Don’t you worry about it, children. Mummy’s here.”

She put the lamp on a high shelf and stamped along to Errol’s pen.

“Well now, my lad,” she began, and stopped.

Errol was stretched out on his side. A thin plume of grey smoke was drifting from his mouth, and his stomach expanded and contracted like a bellows. And his skin from the neck down was an almost pure white.

“I think if I ever rewrite Diseases you’ll get a whole chapter all to yourself,” she said quietly, and unbolted the gate of the pen. “Let’s see if that nasty temperature has gone down, shall we?”

She reached out to stroke his skin and gasped. She pulled the hand back hurriedly and watched the blisters form on her fingertips.

Errol was so cold he burned.

As she stared at him the small round marks that her warmth had melted filmed over with frozen air.

Lady Ramkin sat back on her haunches.

“Just what kind of dragon are you-?” she began.

There was the distant sound of a knock at the front door of the house. She hesitated for a moment, then blew out the lamp, crept heavily along the length of the kennels and pulled aside the scrap of sacking over the window.

The first light of dawn showed her the silhouette of a guardsman on her doorstep, the plumes of his helmet blowing in the breeze.

She bit her lip in panic, scuttled back to the door, fled across the lawn and dived into the house, taking the stairs three at a time.

“Stupid, stupid,” she muttered, realising the lamp was back downstairs. But no time for that. By the time she went and got it, Vimes might have gone away.

Working by feel and memory in the gloom she found her best wig and rammed it on her head. Somewhere among the ointments and dragon remedies on her dressing table was something called, as far as she could remember, Dew of the Night or some such unsuitable name, a present long ago from a thoughtless nephew. She tried several bottles before she found something that, by the smell of it, was probably the one. Even to a nose which had long ago shut down most of its sensory apparatus in the face of the overpoweringness of dragons, it seemed, well, more potent than she remembered. But apparently men liked that kind of thing. Or so she had read. Damn nonsense, really. She twitched the top hem of her suddenly far too sensible nightshirt into a position which, she hoped, revealed without actually exposing, and hurried back down the stairs.

She stopped in front of the door, took a deep breath, twisted the handle and realised even as she pulled the door open that she should have taken the rubber boots off-

“Why, Captain,” she said winsomely, “This is a who the hell are you?”

The head of the palace guard took several steps backwards and, because he was of peasant stock, made a few surreptitious signs to ward off evil spirits. They clearly didn’t work. When he opened his eyes again the thing was still there, still bristling with rage, still reeking of something sickly and fermented, still crowned with a skewed mass of curls, still looming behind a quivering bosom that made the roof of his mouth go dry-

He’d heard about these sort of things. Harpies, they were called. What had it done with Lady Ramkin?

The sight of the rubber boots had him confused, though. Legends about harpies were short on references to rubber boots.

“Out with it, fellow,” Lady Ramkin boomed, hitching up her nightie to a more respectable neckline. “Don’t just stand there opening and shutting your mouth. What d’you want?”

“Lady Sybil Ramkin?” said the guard, not in the polite way of someone seeking mere confirmation but in the incredulous tones of someone who found it very hard to believe the answer could be ‘yes’.

“Use your eyes, young man. Who d’you think I am?”

The guard pulled himself together.

“Only I’ve got a summons for Lady Sybil Ramkin,” he said uncertainly.

Her voice was withering. “What do you mean, a summons?”

“To attend upon the palace, you see.”

“I can’t imagine why that is necessary at this time in the morning,” she said, and made to slam the door. It wouldn’t shut, though, because of the sword point jammed into it at the last moment.

“If you don’t come,” said the guard, “I have been ordered to take steps.”

The door shot back and her face pressed against his, almost knocking him unconscious with the scent of rotting rose petals.

“If you think you’ll lay a hand on me-“ she began.

The guard’s glance darted sideways, just for a moment, to the dragon kennels. Sybil Ramkin’s face went pale.

“You wouldn’t!” she hissed.

He swallowed. Fearsome though she was, she was only human. She could only bite your head off metaphorically. There were, he told himself, far worse things than Lady Ramkin although, admittedly, they weren’t three inches from his nose at this point in time.

“Take steps,” he repeated, in a croak.

She straightened up, and eyed the row of guards behind him.

“I see,” she said coldly. “That’s the way, is it? Six of you to fetch one feeble woman. Very well. You will, of course, allow me to fetch a coat. It is somewhat chilly.”

She slammed the door.

The palace guards stamped their feet in the cold and tried not to look at one another. This obviously wasn’t the way you went around arresting people. They weren’t allowed to keep you waiting on the doorstep, this wasn’t the way the world was supposed to work. On the other hand, the only alternative was to go in there and drag her out, and it wasn’t one anyone could summon any enthusiasm for. Besides, the guard captain wasn’t sure he had enough men to drag Lady Ramkin anywhere. You’d need teams of thousands, with log rollers.

The door creaked open again, revealing only the musty darkness of the hall within.

“Right, men-“ said the captain, uneasily.

Lady Ramkin appeared. He got a brief, blurred vision of her bounding through the doorway, screaming, and it might well have been the last thing he remembered if a guard hadn’t had the presence of mind to trip her up as she hurtled down the steps. She plunged forward, cursing, ploughed into the overgrown lawn, hit her head on a crumbling statue of an antique Ramkin, and slid to a halt.

The double-handed broadsword she had been holding landed beside her, bolt upright, and vibrated to a standstill.

After a while one of the guards crept forward cautiously and tested the blade with his finger.

“Bloody hell,” he said, in a voice of mixed horror and respect. “And the dragon wants to eat her?”

“Fits the bill,” said the captain. “She’s got to be the highest-born lady in the city. I don’t know about maiden,” he added, “and right at this minute I’m not going to speculate. Someone go and fetch a cart.”

He fingered his ear, which had been nicked by the tip of the sword. He was not, by nature, an unkind man, but at this moment he was certain that he would prefer the thickness of a dragon’s hide between himself and Sybil Ramkin when she woke up.

“Weren’t we supposed to kill her pet dragons, sir?” said another guard. “I thought Mr Wonse said something about killing all the dragons.”

“That was just a threat we were supposed to make,” said the captain.

The guard’s brow furrowed. “You sure, sir? I thought-“

The captain had had enough of this. Screaming harpies and broadswords making a noise like tearing silk in the air beside him had severely ruined his capacity for seeing the other fellow’s point of view.

“Oh, you thought, did you?” he growled. “A thinker, are you? Do you think you’d be suitable for another posting, then? City guard, maybe? They’re full of thinkers, they are.”

There was an uncomfortable titter from the rest of the guards.

“If you’d thought, “ added the captain sarcastically, “you’d have thought that the king is hardly going to want other dragons dead, is he? They’re probably distant relatives or something. I mean, it wouldn’t want us to go around killing its own kind, would it?”

“Well, sir, people do, sir,” said the guard sulkily.

“Ah, well,” said the captain. “That’s different.” He tapped the side of his helmet meaningfully. “That’s ‘cos we’re intelligent.”

. . .

Vimes landed in damp straw and also in pitch darkness, although after a while his eyes became accustomed to the gloom and he could make out the walls of the dungeon.

It hadn’t been built for gracious living. It was basically just a space containing all the pillars and arches that supported the palace. At the far end a small grille high on the wall let in a mere suspicion of grubby, second-hand light.

There was another square hole in the floor. It was also barred. The bars were quite rusty, though. It occurred to Vimes that he could probably work them loose eventually, and then all he would have to do was slim down enough to go through a nine-inch hole.

What the dungeon did not contain was any rats, scorpions, cockroaches or snakes. It had once contained snakes, it was true, because Vimes’s sandals crunched on small, long white skeletons.

He crept cautiously along one damp wall, wondering where the rhythmic scraping sound was coming from. He rounded a squat pillar, and found out.

The Patrician was shaving, squinting into a scrap of mirror propped against the pillar to catch the light. No, Vimes realised, not propped. Supported, in fact. By a rat. It was a large rat, with red eyes.

The Patrician nodded to him without apparent surprise.

“Oh,” he said. “Vimes, isn’t it? I heard you were on the way down. Jolly good. You had better tell the kitchen staff-“ and here Vimes realised that the man was speaking to the rat-“that there will be two for lunch. Would you like a beer, Vimes?”

“What?” said Vimes.

“I imagine you would. Pot luck, though, I am afraid. Skrp’s people are bright enough, but they seem to have a bit of a blind spot when it comes to labels on bottles.”

Lord Vetinari patted his face with a towel and dropped it on the floor. A grey shape darted from the shadows and dragged it away down the floor grille.

Then he said, “Very well, Skrp. You may go.” The rat twitched its whiskers at him, leaned the mirror against the wall, and trotted off.

“You’re waited on by rats?” said Vimes.

“They help out, you know. They’re not really very efficient, I’m afraid. It’s their paws.”

“But, but, but,” said Vimes. “I mean, how?”

“I suspect Skrp’s people have tunnels that extend into the University,” Lord Vetinari went on. “Although I think they were probably pretty bright to start with.”

At least Vimes understood that bit. It was well known that thaumic radiations affected animals living around the Unseen University campus, sometimes prodding them towards minute analogues of human civilisation and even mutating some of them into entirely new and specialised species, such as the .303 bookworm and the wallfish. And, as the man said, rats were quite bright to start with. “But they’re helping you?” said Vimes. “Mutual. It’s mutual. Payment for services rendered, you might say,” said the Patrician, sitting down on what Vimes couldn’t help noticing was a small velvet cushion. On a low shelf, so as to be handy, were a notepad and a neat row of books. “How can you help rats, sir?” he said weakly. “Advice. I advise them, you know.” The Patrician leaned back. “That’s the trouble with people like Wonse,” he said. “They never know when to stop. Rats, snakes and scorpions. It was sheer bedlam in here when I came. The rats were getting the worst of it, too.”

And Vimes thought he was beginning to get the drift. “You mean you sort of trained them?” he said. “Advised. Advised. I suppose it’s a knack,” said Lord Vetinari modestly.

Vimes wondered how it was done. Did the rats side with the scorpions against the snakes and then, when the snakes were beaten, invite the scorpions to a celebratory slap-up meal and eat them? Or were individual scorpions hired with large amounts of, oh, whatever it-was scorpions ate, to sidle up to selected leading snakes at night and sting them?

He remembered hearing once about a man who, locked up in a cell for years, trained little birds and created a sort of freedom. And he thought of ancient sailors, shorn of the sea by old age and infirmity, who spent their days making big ships in little bottles.

Then he thought of the Patrician, robbed of his city, sitting cross-legged on the grey floor in the dim dungeon and recreating it around him, encouraging in miniature all the little rivalries, power struggles and factions. He thought of him as a sombre, brooding statue amid paving stones alive with slinking shadows and sudden, political death. It had probably been easier than ruling Ankh, which had larger vermin who didn’t have to use both hands to carry a knife.

There was a clink over by the drain. Half a dozen rats appeared, dragging something wrapped in a cloth. They rathandled it past the grille and, with great effort, hauled it to the Patrician’s feet. He leaned down and undid the knot.

“We seem to have cheese, chicken legs, celery, a piece of rather stale bread and a nice bottle, oh, a nice bottle apparently of Merckle and Stingbat’s Very Famous Brown Sauce. Beer, I said, Skrp.” The leading rat twitched its nose at him. “Sorry about this, Vimes. They can’t read, you see. They don’t seem to get the hang of the concept. But they’re very good at listening. They bring me all the news.”

“I see you’re very comfortable here,” said Vimes weakly.

“Never build a dungeon you wouldn’t be happy to spend the night in yourself,” said the Patrician, laying out the food on the cloth. “The world would be a happier place if more people remembered that.”

“We all thought you had built secret tunnels and suchlike,” said Vimes.

“Can’t imagine why,” said the Patrician. “One would have to keep on running. So inefficient. Whereas here I am at the hub of things. I hope you understand that, Vimes. Never trust any ruler who puts his faith in tunnels and bunkers and escape routes. The chances are that his heart isn’t in the job.”

“Oh.”

He’s in a dungeon in his own palace with a raving lunatic in charge upstairs, and a dragon burning the city, and he thinks he’s got the world where he wants it. It must be something about high office. The altitude sends people mad.

“You, er, you don’t mind if I have a look around, > do you?” he said.

“Feel free,” said the Patrician.

Vimes paced the length of the dungeon and checked the door. It was heavily barred and bolted, and the lock was massive.

Then he tapped the walls in what might possibly be hollow places. There was no doubt that it was a well-built dungeon. It was the kind of dungeon you’d feel good about having dangerous criminals put in. Of course, in those circumstances you’d prefer there to be no trapdoors, hidden tunnels or secret ways of escape.

These weren’t those circumstances. It was amazing what several feet of solid stone did to your sense of perspective.

“Do guards come in here?” he demanded.

“Hardly ever,” said the Patrician, waving a chicken leg. “They don’t bother about feeding me, you see. The idea is that one should moulder. In fact,” he said, “up ‘til recently I used to go to the door and groan a bit every now and then, just to keep them happy.”

“They’re bound to come in and check, though?” said Vimes hopefully.

“Oh, I don’t think we should tolerate that,” said the Patrician.

“How are you going to prevent them?”

Lord Vetinari gave him a pained look.

“My dear Vimes,” he said, “I thought you were an observant man. Did you look at the door?”

“Of course I did,” said Vimes, and added, “sir. It’s bloody massive.”

“Perhaps you should have another look?”

Vimes gaped at him, and then stamped across the floor and glared at the door. It was one of the popular dread portal variety, all bars and bolts and iron spikes and massive hinges. No matter how long he looked at it, it didn’t become any less massive. The lock was one of those dwarfish-made buggers that it’d take years to pick. All in all, if you had to have a symbol for something totally immovable, that door was your man. The Patrician appeared alongside him in heart-stopping silence.

“You see,” he said, “it’s always the case, is it not, that should a city be overtaken by violent civil unrest the current ruler is thrown into the dungeons? To a certain type of mind that is so much more satisfying than mere execution.”

“Well, okay, but I don’t see-“ Vimes began. “And you look at this door and what you see is a really strong cell door, yes?”

“Of course. You’ve only got to look at the bolts and-“

“You know, I’m really rather pleased,” said Lord Vetinari quietly.

Vimes stared at the door until his eyebrows ached. And then, just as random patterns in cloud suddenly, without changing in any way, become a horse’s head or a sailing ship, he saw what he’d been looking at all along.

A sense of terrifying admiration overcame him. He wondered what it was like in the Patrician’s mind. All cold and shiny, he thought, all blued steel and icicles and little wheels clicking along like a huge clock. The kind of mind that would carefully consider its own downfall and turn it to advantage.

It was a perfectly normal dungeon door, but it all depended on your sense of perspective.

In this dungeon the Patrician could hold off the world.

All that was on the outside was the lock.

All the bolts and bars were on the inside.

. . .

The rank clambered awkwardly across the damp rooftops as the morning mist was boiled off by the sun. Not that there would be any clear air today-sticky swathes of smoke and stale steam wreathed the city and filled the air with the sad smell of dampened cinders.

“What is this place?” said Carrot, helping the others along a greasy walkway.

Sergeant Colon looked around at the forest of chimneys.

“We’re just above Jimkin Bearhugger’s whisky distillery,” he said. “On a direct line, see, between the palace and the plaza. It’s bound to fly over here.”

Nobby looked wistfully over the side of the building.

“I bin in there once,” he said. “Checked the door one dark night and it just came open in my hand.”

“Eventually, I expect,” said Colon sourly.

“Well, I had to go in, din’t I, to check there was no miscreanting going on. Amazing place in there. All pipes and stuff. And the smell!”

“ ‘Every bottle matured for up to seven minutes’,” quoted Colon. “ ‘Ha’ a drop afore ye go’, it says on the label. Damn right, too. I had a drop once, and I went all day.”

He knelt down and unwrapped the long sacking package he had been manhandling, with extreme difficulty, during the climb. This revealed a longbow of ancient design and a quiver of arrows.

He picked up the bow slowly, reverentially, and ran his pudgy fingers along it.

“You know,” he said quietly, “I was damn good with this, when I were a lad. The captain should of let me have a go the other night.”

“You keep on telling us,” said Nobby unsympathetically.

“Well, I used to win prizes.” The sergeant unwound a new bowstring, looped it around one end of the bow, stood up, pressed down, grunted a bit . . .

“Er. Carrot?” he said, slightly out of breath.

“Yes, Sarge?”

“You any good at stringing bows?”

Carrot grasped the bow, compressed it easily, and slipped the other end of the string into place.

“That’s a good start, Sarge,” said Nobby.

“Don’t you be sarcastic with me, Nobby! It ain’t strength, it’s keenness of eye and steadiness of hand what counts. Now you pass me an arrow. Not that one!”

Nobby’s fingers froze in the act of grasping a shaft.

“That’s my lucky arrow!” spluttered Colon. “None of you is to touch my lucky arrow!”

“Looks just like any other bloody arrow to me, Sarge,” said Nobby mildly.

“That’s the one I shall use for the actual wossname, the coup de grass,” said Colon. “Never let me down, my lucky arrow didn’t. Hit whatever I shot at. Hardly even had to aim. If that dragon’s got any voonerables, that arrow’ll find ‘em.”

He selected an identical-looking but presumably less lucky arrow and nocked it. Then he looked around the rooftops with a speculative eye.

“Better get my hand in,” he muttered. “Of course, once you learn you never forget, it’s like riding a- riding a-riding something you never forget being able to ride.”

He pulled the bowstring back to his ear, and grunted.

“Right,” he wheezed, as his arm trembled with the tension like a branch in a gale. “See the roof of the Assassins’ Guild over there?” They peered through the grubby air.

“Right, then,” said Colon. “And do you see the weathervane on it? Do you see it?”

Carrot glanced at the arrowhead. It was weaving back and forth in a series of figure-eights.

“It’s a long way off, Sarge,” said Nobby doubtfully.

“Never you mind me, you keep your eyes on the weathervane,” groaned the sergeant.

They nodded. The weathervane was in the shape of a creeping man with a big cloak; his outstretched dagger was always turned to stab the wind. At this distance, though, it was tiny.

“Okay,” panted Colon. “Now, d’you see the man’s eye?”

“Oh, come on, “ said Nobby.

“Shutup, shutup, shutup!” groaned Colon. “Do you see it, I said!”

“I think I can see it, Sarge,” said Carrot loyally.

“Right. Right,” said the sergeant, swaying backwards and forwards with effort. “Right. Good lad. Okay. Now keep an eye on it, right?”

He grunted, and loosed the arrow.

Several things happened so fast that they will have to be recounted in stop-motion prose. Probably the first was the bowstring slapping into the soft inner part of Colon’s wrist, causing him to scream and drop the bow. This had no effect on the path of the arrow, which was already flying straight and true towards a gargoyle on the rooftop just across the road. It hit it on the ear, bounced, ricocheted off a wall six feet away, and headed back towards Colon apparently at a slightly increased speed, going past his ear with a silky humming noise.

It vanished in the direction of the city walls.

After a while Nobby coughed and gave Carrot a look of innocent inquiry.

“About how big,” he said, “is a dragon’s voonerables, roughly?”

“Oh, it can be a tiny spot,” said Carrot helpfully.

“I was sort of afraid of that,” said Nobby. He wandered to the edge of the roof, and pointed downwards. “There’s a pond just here,” he said. “They use it for cooling water in the stills. I reckon it’s pretty deep, so after the sergeant has shot at the dragon we can jump in it. What d’you say?”

“Oh, but we don’t need to do that,” said Carrot. “Because the sergeant’s lucky arrow would of hit the spot and the dragon’ll be dead, so we won’t have anything to worry about.”

“Granted, granted,” said Nobby hurriedly, looking at Colon’s scowling face. “But just in case, you know, if by a million-to-one chance he misses-I’m not saying he will, mark you, you just have to think of all eventualities-if, by incredible bad luck, he doesn’t quite manage to hit the voonerable dead on, then your dragon is going to lose his rag, right, and it’s probably a good idea to not be here. It’s a long shot, I know. Call me a worry-wart if you like. That’s all I’m saying.”

Sergeant Colon adjusted his armour haughtily.

“When you really need them the most,” he said, “million-to-one chances always crop up. Well-known fact.”

“The sergeant is right, Nobby,” said Carrot virtuously. “You know that when there’s just one chance which might just work-well, it works. Otherwise there’d be no-“ he lowered his voice-“I mean, it stands to reason, if last desperate chances didn’t work, there’d be no . . . well, the gods wouldn’t let it be any other way. They wouldn’t.”

As one man, the three of them turned and looked through the murky air towards the hub of the Disc-world, thousands of miles away. Now the air was grey with old smoke and mist shreds, but on a clear day it was possible to see Cori Celesti, home of the gods. Site of the home of the gods, anyway. They lived in Dunmanifestin, the stuccoed Valhalla, where the gods faced eternity with the kind of minds that were at a loss to know what to do to pass a wet afternoon. They played games with the fates of men, it was said. Exactly what game they thought they were playing at the moment was anyone’s guess.

But of course there were rules. Everyone knew there were rules. They just had to hope like Hell that the gods knew the rules, too.

“It’s got to work,” mumbled Colon. “I’ll be using my lucky arrow ‘n all. You’re right. Last hopeless chances have got to work. Nothing makes any sense otherwise. You might as well not be alive.”

Nobby looked down at the pond again. After a moment’s hesitation Colon joined him. They had the speculative faces of men who had seen many things, and knew that while you could of course depend on heroes, and kings, and ultimately on gods, you could really depend on gravity and deep water.

“Not that we’ll need it,” said Colon virtuously.

“Not with your lucky arrow,” said Nobby.

‘ “That’s right. But, just out of interest, how far down is it, d’you think?” said Colon.

“About thirty feet, I’d say. Give or take.”

“Thirty feet.” Colon nodded slowly. “That’s what I’d reckon. And it’s deep, is it?”

“Very deep, I’ve heard.”

“I’ll take your word for it. It looks pretty mucky. I’d hate to have to jump in it.”

Carrot slapped him cheerfully on the back, nearly pushing him over, and said, “What’s up, Sarge? Do you want to live for ever?”

“Dunno. Ask me again in five hundred years.”

“It’s a good job we’ve got your lucky arrow, then!” said Carrot.

“Hmm?” said Colon, who seemed to be in a miserable daydream world of his own.

“I mean, it’s a good job we’ve got a last desperate million-to-one chance to rely on, or we’d really be in trouble!” “Oh, yes,” said Nobby sadly. “Lucky old us.”

The Patrician lay back. A couple of rats dragged a cushion under his head.

“Things are rather bad outside, I gather,” he said.

“Yes,” said Vimes bitterly. “You’re right. You’re the safest man in the city.”

He wedged another knife in a crack in the stones and tested his weight carefully, while Lord Vetinari looked on with interest. He’d managed to get six feet off the floor and up to a level with the grille.

Now he started to hack at the mortar around the bars.

. . .

The Patrician watched him for a while, and then took a book off the little shelf beside him. Since the rats couldn’t read the library he’d been able to assemble was a little baroque, but he was not a man to ignore fresh knowledge. He found his bookmark in the pages of Lacemaking Through the Ages, and read a few pages.

After a while he found it necessary to brush a few crumbs of mortar off the book, and looked up.

“Are you achieving success?” he inquired politely.

Vimes gritted his teeth and hacked away. Outside the little grille was a grubby courtyard, barely lighter than the cell. There was a midden in one corner, but currently it looked very attractive. More attractive than the dungeon, at any rate. An honest midden was preferable to the way Ankh-Morpork was going these days. It was probably allegorical, or something.

He stabbed, stabbed, stabbed. The knife blade twanged and shook in his hand.

. . .

The Librarian scratched his armpits thoughtfully. He was facing problems of his own.

He had come here full of rage against book thieves and that rage still burned. But the seditious thought had occurred to him that, although crimes against books were the worst kind of crimes, revenge ought, perhaps, to be postponed.

It occurred to him that, while of course what humans chose to do to one another was all one to him, there were certain activities that should be curtailed in case the perpetrators got over-confident and started doing things like that to books, too.

The Librarian stared at his badge again, and gave it a gentle nibble in the optimistic hope that it had become edible. No doubt about it, he had a Duty to the captain.

The captain had always been kind to him. And the captain had a badge, too.

Yes.

There were times when an ape had to do what a man had to do . . .

The orangutan threw a complex salute and swung away into the darkness.

. . .

The sun rose higher, rolling through the mists and stale smoke like a lost balloon.

The rank sat in the shade of a chimney stack, waiting and killing time in their various ways. Nobby was thoughtfully probing the contents of a nostril, Carrot was writing a letter home, and Sergeant Colon was worrying.

After a while he shifted his weight uneasily and said, “I’ve fought of a problem,”

“Wassat, Sarge?” said Carrot.

Sergeant Colon looked wretched. “Weeell, what if it’s not a million-to-one chance?” he said.

Nobby stared at him.

“What d’you mean?” he said. “Well, all right, last desperate million-to-one chances always work, right, no problem, but. . . well, it’s pretty wossname, specific. I mean, isn’t it?” “You tell me,” said Nobby. “What if it’s just a thousand-to-one chance?” said Colon agonisedly. “What?”

“Anyone ever heard of a thousand-to-one shot coming up?”

Carrot looked up. “Don’t be daft, Sergeant,” he said. “No-one ever saw a thousand-to-one chance come up. The odds against it are-“ his lips moved- “millions to one.” “Yeah. Millions,” agreed Nobby. “So it’d only work if it’s your actual million-to-one chance,” said the sergeant. “I suppose that’s right,” said Nobby. “So 999,943-to-one, for example-“ Colon began. Carrot shook his head. “Wouldn’t have a hope. No-one ever said, ‘It’s a 999,943-to-one chance but it might just work.’ “

They stared out across the city in the silence of ferocious mental calculation.

“We could have a real problem here,” said Colon eventually.

Carrot started to scribble furiously. When questioned, he explained at length about how you found the surface area of a dragon and then tried to estimate the chances of an arrow hitting any one spot. “Aimed, mind,” said Sergeant Colon. “I aim. “ Nobby coughed.

“In that case it’s got to be a lot less than a million-to-one chance,” said Carrot. “It could be a hundred-to-one. If the dragon’s flying slowly and it’s a big spot, it could be practically a certainty.” Colon’s lips shaped themselves around the phrase,

It’s a certainty but it might just work. He shook his head. “Nah,” he said.

“So what we’ve got to do, then,” said Nobby slowly, “is adjust the odds . . .”

. . .

Now there was a shallow hole in the mortar near the middle bar. It wasn’t much, Vimes knew, but it was a start.

“You don’t require assistance, by any chance?” said the Patrician.

“No.”

“As you wish.”

The mortar was half-rotted, but the bars had been driven deep into the rock. Under their crusting of rust there was still plenty of iron. It was a long job, but it was something to do and required a blessed absence of thought. They couldn’t take it away from him. It was a good, clean challenge; you knew if you went on chipping away, you’d win through eventually.

It was the “eventually” that was the problem. Eventually Great A ‘Tuin would reach the end of the universe. Eventually the stars would go out. Eventually Nobby might have a bath, although that would probably involve a radical rethinking of the nature of Time.

He hacked at the mortar anyway, and then stopped as something small and pale fell down outside, quite slowly.

“Peanut shell?” he said.

The Librarian’s face, surrounded by the inner-tube jowls of the Librarian’s head, appeared upside down in the barred opening, and gave him a grin that wasn’t any less terrible for being the wrong way up.

“Oook?”

The orangutan flopped down off the wall, grabbed a couple of bars, and pulled. Muscles shunted back and forward across its barrel chest in a complex pavane of effort. The mouthful of yellow teeth gaped in silent concentration.

There were a couple of dull “thungs” as the bars gave up and broke free. The ape flung them aside and reached into the gaping hole. Then the longest arms of the Law grabbed the astonished Vimes under his shoulders and pulled him through in one movement.

. . .

The rank surveyed their handiwork.

“Right,” said Nobby. “Now, what are the chances of a man standing on one leg with his hat on backwards and a handkerchief in his mouth hitting a dragon’s voonerables? “

“Mmph,” said Colon.

“It’s pretty long odds,” said Carrot. “I reckon the hanky is a bit over the top, though.”

Colon spat it out. “Make up your minds,” he said. “Me leg’s going to sleep.”

. . .

Vimes picked himself up off the greasy cobbles and stared at the Librarian. He was experiencing something which had come as a shock to many people, usually in much more unpleasant circumstances such as a brawl started in the Mended Drum when the ape wanted a bit of peace and quiet to enjoy a reflective pint, which was this: the Librarian might look like a stuffed rubber sack, but what it was stuffed with was muscle.

“That was amazing,” was all he could find to say. He looked down at the twisted bars, and felt his mind darken. He grabbed the bent metal. “You don’t happen to know where Wonse is, do you?” he added.

“Eeek!” The Librarian thrust a tattered piece of parchment under his nose. “Eeek!”

Vimes read the words.

It hathe pleased . . . whereas . . . at the stroke of noone . . . a maiden pure, yet high born . . . compact between ruler and ruled . . .

“In my city!” he growled. “In my bloody city!”

He grabbed the Librarian by two handfuls of chest hair and pulled him up to eye height.

“What time is it?” he shouted.

“Oook!”

A long red-haired arm unfolded itself upwards. Vimes’s gaze followed the pointing finger. The sun definitely had the look of a heavenly body that was nearly at the crest of its orbit and looking forward to a long, lazy coasting towards the blankets of dusk . . .

“I’m not bloody well going to have it, understand?” Vimes shouted, shaking the ape back and forth.

“Oook,” the Librarian pointed out, patiently.

“What? Oh. Sorry.” Vimes lowered the ape, who wisely didn’t make an issue of it because a man angry enough to lift 300lbs of orangutan without noticing is a man with too much on his mind.

Now he was staring around the courtyard.

“Any way out of here?” he said. “Without climbing the walls, I mean.”

He didn’t wait for an answer but loped around the walls until he reached a narrow, grubby door, and kicked it open. It hadn’t been locked anyway, but he kicked it just the same. The Librarian trailed along behind, swinging on his knuckles.

The kitchen on the other side of the door was almost deserted, the staff having finally lost their nerve and decided that all prudent chefs refrained from working in an establishment where there was a mouth bigger than they were. A couple of palace guards were eating a cold lunch.

“Now,” said Vimes, as they half-rose, “I don’t want to have to-“

They didn’t seem to want to listen. One of them reached for a crossbow.

“Oh, the hell with it.” Vimes grabbed a butcher’s knife from a block beside it and threw it.

There is an art in throwing knives and, even then, you need the right kind of knife. Otherwise it does just what this one did, which is miss completely.

The guard with the bow leaned sideways, righted himself, and found that a purple fingernail was gently blocking the firing mechanism. He looked around. The Librarian hit him right on top of his helmet.

The other guard shrank back, waving his hands frantically.

“Nonono!” he said. “It’s a misunderstanding! What was it you said you didn’t want to have to do? Nice monkey!”

“Oh, dear,” said Vimes. “Wrong!”

He ignored the terrified screaming and rummaged through the debris of the kitchen until he came up with a cleaver. He’d never felt really at home with swords, but a cleaver was a different matter. A cleaver had weight. It had purpose. A sword might have a certain nobility about it, unless it was the one belonging for example to Nobby, which relied on rust to hold it together, but what a cleaver had was a tremendous ability to cut things up.

He left the biology lesson-that no monkey was capable of bouncing someone up and down by their ankles-found a likely door, and hurried through it. This took him outside again, into the big cobbled area that surrounded the palace. Now he could get his bearings, now he could . . .

There was a boom in the air above him. A gale blew downwards, knocking him over.

The King of Ankh-Morpork, wings outspread, glided across the sky and settled for a moment on the palace gateway, talons gouging long scars in the stone as it caught its balance. The sun glittered off its arched back as it stretched its neck, roared a lazy billow of flames, and sprang into the air again.

Vimes made an animal-a mammalian animal-noise in the back of his throat, and ran out into the empty streets.

. . .

Silence filled the ancestral home of the Ramkins. The front door swung back and forth on its hinges, letting in the common, badly-brought up breeze which wandered through the deserted rooms, gawping and looking for dust on the top of the furniture. It wound up the stairs and banged through the door of Sybil Ramkin’s bedroom, rattling the bottles on the dressing table and riffling through the pages of Diseases of the Dragon.

A really fast reader could have learned the symptoms of everything from Abated Heels to Zigzag Throat.

And down below, in the low, warm and foul-smelling shed that housed the swamp dragons, it seemed that Errol had got them all. Now he sat in the centre of his pen, swaying and moaning softly. White smoke rolled slowly from his ears and drifted towards the floor. From somewhere inside his swollen stomach came complex explosive hydraulic noises, as though desperate teams of gnomes were trying to drive a culvert through a cliff in a thunderstorm.

His nostrils flared, turning more or less of their own volition.

The other dragons craned over the pen walls, watching him cautiously.

There was another distant gastric roar. Errol shifted painfully.

The dragons exchanged glances. Then, one by one, they lay down carefully on the floor and put their paws over their eyes.

. . .

Nobby put his head on one side. “It looks promising,” he said critically. “We might be nearly there. I reckon the chances of a man with soot on his face, his tongue sticking out, standing on one leg and singing The Hedgehog Song ever hitting a dragon’s voonerables would be . . . what’d you say, Carrot?”

“A million to one, I reckon,” said Carrot virtuously.

Colon glared at them.

“Listen, lads,” he said, “you’re not winding me up, are you?”

Carrot looked down at the plaza below them.

“Oh, bloody hell,” he said softly.

“Wassat?” said Colon urgently, looking around.

“They’re chaining a woman to a rock!”

The rank stared over the parapet. The huge and silent crowd that lined the plaza stared too, at a white figure struggling between half a dozen palace guards.

“Wonder where they got the rock from?” said Colon. “We’re on loam here, you know.”

“Fine strapping wench, whoever she is,” said Nobby approvingly, as one of the guards wheeled off bow-legged and collapsed. “That’s one lad who won’t know what to do with his evenin’s for a few weeks. Got a mean right knee, so she has.”

“Anyone we know?” said Colon.

Carrot squinted.

“It’s Lady Ramkin!” he said, his mouth dropping open.

“Never!”

“He’s right. In a nightie,” said Nobby.

“The buggers!” Colon snatched up his bow and fumbled for an arrow. “I’ll give ‘em voonerables! Well-spoken lady like her, it’s a disgrace!”

“Er,” said Carrot, who had glanced over his shoulder. “Sergeant?”

“This is what it comes to!” muttered Colon. “Decent women can’t walk down the street without being eaten! Right, you bastards, you’re . . . you’re geography-“

“ Sergeant!” Carrot repeated urgently.

“It’s history, not geography,” said Nobby. “That’s what you’re supposed to say. History. ‘You’re history!’ you say.”

“Well, whatever,” snapped Colon. “Let’s see how-“

“Sergeant!”

Nobby was looking behind them, too.

“Oh, shit,” he said.

“Can’t miss,” muttered Colon, taking aim.

“Sergeant!”

“Shut up, you two, I can’t concentrate when you keep shout-“

“Sergeant, it’s coming!”

. . .

The dragon accelerated.

The drunken rooftops of Ankh-Morpork blurred as it passed over, wings sneering at the air. Its neck stretched out straight ahead, the pilot flames of its nostrils streamed behind it, the sound of its flight panned across the sky.

. . .

Colon’s hands shook. The dragon seemed to be aiming at his throat, and it was moving too fast, far too fast. . .

“This is it!” said Carrot. He glanced towards the Hub, in case any gods had forgotten what they were there for, and added, speaking slowly and distinctly, “It’s a million-to-one-chance, but it might just work!”

“Fire the bloody thing!” screamed Nobby.

“Picking my spot, lad, picking my spot,” quavered Colon. “Don’t you worry, lads, I told you this is my lucky arrow. First-class arrow, this arrow, had it since I was a lad, you’d be amazed at the things I shot at with this, don’t you worry.”

He paused, as the nightmare bore down on him on wings of terror.

“Er, Carrot?” he said meekly.

“Yes, Sarge?”

“Did your old grandad ever say what a voonerable spot looks like?”

And then the dragon wasn’t approaching any more, it was there, passing a few feet overhead, a streaming mosaic of scales and noise, filling the entire sky.

Colon fired.

They watched the arrow rise straight and true.

. . .

Vimes half-ran, half-staggered over the damp cobbles, out of breath and out of time.

It can’t be like this, he thought wildly. The hero always cuts it fine, but he always get there just in the nick of time. Only the nick of time was probably five minutes ago.

And I’m not a hero. I’m out of condition, and I need a drink, and I get a handful of dollars a month without plumes allowance. That’s not hero’s pay. Heroes get kingdoms and princesses, and they take regular exercise, and when they smile the light glints off their teeth, ting. The bastards.

Sweat stung his eyes. The rush of adrenaline that had carried him out of the palace had spent itself, and was now exacting its inevitable toll.

He stumbled to a halt, and grabbed a wall to keep him upright while he gasped for air. And thus he saw the figures on the rooftop.

Oh, no! he thought. They’re not heroes either! What do they think they’re playing at?

. . .

It was a million-to-one chance. And who was to say that, somewhere in the millions of other possible universes, it might not have worked?

That was the sort of thing the gods really liked. But Chance, who sometimes can overrule even the gods, has 999,999 casting votes.

In this universe, for example, the arrow bounced off a scale and clattered away into oblivion.

Colon stared as the dragon’s pointed tail passed overhead.

“It . . . missed . . .”he mouthed.

“But it couldn’t of missed!” He stared red-eyed at the other two. “It was a sodding last desperate million-to-one chance!”

The dragon twisted its wings, swung its huge bulk around on a pivot of air, and bore down on the roof.

Carrot grabbed Nobby around the waist and laid a hand on Colon’s shoulder.

The sergeant was weeping with rage and frustration.

“Million-to-bloody-one last desperate bloody chance!”

“Sarge-“

The dragon flamed.

It was a beautifully controlled line of plasma. It went through the roof like butter.

It cut through stairways.

It crackled into ancient timbers and made them twist like paper. It sliced into pipes.

It punched through floor after floor like the fist of an angry god and, eventually, reached the big copper vat containing a thousand gallons of freshly-made mature whisky-type spirit.

It burned into that, too.

Fortunately, the chances of anyone surviving the ensuing explosion were exactly a million-to-one.

. . .

The fireball rose like a-well, a rose. A huge orange rose, streaked with yellow. It took the roof with it and wrapped it around the astonished dragon, lifting it high into the air in a boiling cloud of broken timber and bits of piping.

The crowd watched in bemusement as the superhot blast flung it into the sky and barely noticed Vimes as he pushed his way, wheezing and crying, through the press of bodies.

He shouldered past a row of palace guards and shambled as fast as he could across the flagstones. No-one was paying him much attention at the moment.

He stopped.

It wasn’t a rock, because Ankh-Morpork was on loam. It was just some huge remnant of mortared masonry, probably thousands of years old, from somewhere in the city foundations. Ankh-Morpork was so old now that what it was built on, by and large, was Ankh-Morpork.

It had been dragged into the centre of the plaza, and Lady Sybil Ramkin had been chained to it. She appeared to be wearing a nightie and huge rubber boots. By the look of her she had been in a fight, and Vimes felt a momentary pang of sympathy for whoever else had been involved. She gave him a look of pure fury.

“You!”

“You!”

He waved the cleaver vaguely.

“But why you-?” he began.

“Captain Vimes,” she said sharply, “you will oblige me by not waving that thing about and you will start putting it to its proper use!”

Vimes wasn’t listening.

“Thirty dollars a month!” he muttered. “That’s what they died for! Thirty dollars! And I docked some from Nobby. I had to, didn’t I? I mean, that man could make a melon go rusty!”

“Captain Vimes!”

He focused on the cleaver.

“Oh,” he said. “Yes. Right!”

It was a good steel cleaver, and the chains were elderly and rather rusty iron. He hacked away, raising sparks from the masonry.

The crowd watched in silence, but several palace guards hurried towards him.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” said one of them, who didn’t have much imagination.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Vimes growled, looking up.

They stared at him.

“What?”

Vimes took another hack at the chains. Several loops tinkled to the ground.

“Right, you’ve asked for-“ one of the guards began. Vimes’s elbow caught him under his rib cage; before he collapsed, Vimes’s foot kicked savagely at the other one’s kneecaps, bringing his chin down ready for another stab with the other elbow.

“Right,” said Vimes absently. He rubbed the elbow. It was sheer agony.

He moved the cleaver to his other hand and hammered at the chains again, aware at the back of his mind that more guards were hurrying up, but with that special kind of run that guards had. He knew it well. It was the run that said, there’s a dozen of us, let someone else get there first. It said, he looks ready to kill, no-one’s paying me to get killed, maybe if I run slowly enough he’ll get away . . .

No point in spoiling a good day by catching someone.

Lady Ramkin shook herself free. A ragged cheer went up and started to grow in volume. Even in their current state of mind, the people of Ankh-Morpork always appreciated a performance.

She grabbed a handful of chain and wrapped it around one pudgy fist.

“Some of those guards don’t know how to treat-“ she began.

“No time, no time,” said Vimes, grabbing her arm. It was like trying to drag a mountain.

The cheering stopped, abruptly.

There was a sound behind Vimes. It was not, particularly, a loud noise. It just had a peculiarly nasty carrying quality. It was the click of four sets of talons hitting the flagstones at the same time.

Vimes looked around and up.

Soot clung to the dragon’s hide. A few pieces of charred wood had lodged here and there, and were still smouldering. The magnificent bronze scales were streaked with black.

It lowered its head until Vimes was a few feet away from its eyes, and tried to focus on him.

Probably not worth running, Vimes told himself. It’s not as if I’ve got the energy anyway.

He felt Lady Ramkin’s hand engulf his.

“Jolly well done,” she said. “It nearly worked.”

. . .

Charred and blazing wreckage rained down around the distillery. The pond was a swamp of debris, covered with a coating of ash. Out of it, dripping slime, rose Sergeant Colon.

He clawed his way to the bank and pulled himself up, like some sea-dwelling lifeform that was anxious to get the whole evolution thing over with in one go.

Nobby was already there, spread out like a frog, leaking water.

“Is that you, Nobby?” said Sergeant Colon anxiously.

“It’s me, Sergeant.”

“I glad about that, Nobby,” said Colon fervently.

“I wish it wasn’t me, Sergeant.”

Colon tipped the water out of his helmet, and then paused.

“What about young Carrot?” he said.

Nobby pushed himself upon his elbows, groggily.

“Dunno,” he said. “One minute we were on the roof, next minute we were jumping.”

They both looked at the ashen waters of the pond.

“I suppose,” said Colon slowly, “he can swim?”

“Dunno. He never said. Not much to swim in, up in the mountains. When you come to think about it,” said Nobby.

“But perhaps there were limpid blue pools and deep mountain streams,” said the sergeant hopefully. “And icy tarns in hidden valleys and that. Not to mention subterranean lakes. He’d be bound to have learned. In and out of the water all day, I expect.”

They stared at the greasy grey surface.

“It was probably that Protective,” said Nobby. “P’raps it filled with water and dragged him down.”

Colon nodded gloomily.

“I’ll hold your helmet,” said Nobby, after a while.

“But I’m your superior officer!”

“Yes,” said Nobby reasonably, “but if you get stuck down there, you’re going to want your best man up here, ready to rescue you, aren’t you?”

“That’s . . . reasonable,” said Colon eventually. “That’s a good point.”

“Right, then.”

“Drawback is, though . . .”

“What?”

“. . .1 can’t swim,” Colon said.

“How did you get out of that, then?”

Colon shrugged. “I’m a natural floater.”

Their eyes, once again, turned to the dankness of the pond. Then Colon stared at Nobby. Then Nobby, very slowly, unbuckled his helmet.

“There isn’t someone still in there, is there?” said Carrot, behind them.

They looked around. He hoicked some mud out of an ear. Behind him the remains of the brewery smouldered.

“I thought I’d better nip out quickly, see what was going on,” he said brightly, pointing to a gate leading out of the yard. It was hanging by one hinge.

“Oh,” said Nobby weakly. “Jolly good.”

“There’s an alley out there,” said Carrot.

“No dragons in it, are there?” said Colon suspiciously.

“No dragons, no humans. There’s no-one around,” said Carrot impatiently. He drew his sword. “Come on!” he said.

“Where to?” said Nobby. He’d pulled a damp butt from behind his ear and was looking at it with an expression of deepest sorrow. It was obviously too far gone. He tried to light it anyway.

“We want to fight the dragon, don’t we?” said Carrot.

Colon shifted uncomfortably. “Yes, but aren’t we allowed to go home for a change of clothes first?”

“And a nice warm drink?” said Nobby.

“And a meal,” said Colon. “A nice plate of-“

“You should be ashamed of yourselves,” said Carrot. “There’s a lady in distress and a dragon to fight and all you can think of is food and drink!”

“Oh, I’m not just thinking about food and drink,” said Colon.

“We could be all that stands between the city and total destruction!”

“Yes, but-“ Nobby began.

Carrot drew his sword and waved it over his head.

“Captain Vimes would have gone!” he said. “All for one!”

He glared at them, and rushed out of the yard.

Colon gave Nobby a sheepish look.

“Young people today,” he said.

“All for one what?” said Nobby.

The sergeant sighed. “Come on, then.”

“Oh, all right.”

They staggered out into the alley. It was empty.

“Where’d he go?” said Nobby.

Carrot stepped out of the shadows, grinning all over his face.

“Knew I could rely on you,” he said. “Follow me!”

“Something odd about that boy,” said Colon, as they limped after him. “He always manages to persuade us to follow him, have you noticed?”

“All for one what?” said Nobby.

“Something about the voice, I reckon.”

“Yes, but all for one what?”

. . .

The Patrician sighed and, carefully marking his place, laid aside his book. To judge from the noise there seemed to be an awful lot of excitement going on out there. It was highly unlikely any palace guards would be around, which was just as well. The guards were highly-trained men and it would be a shame to waste them.

He would need them later on.

He padded over to the wall and pushed a small block that looked exactly like all the other small blocks. No other small block, however, would have caused a section of flagstone to grind ponderously aside.

There was a carefully chosen assortment of stuff in there-iron rations, spare clothes, several small chests of precious metals and jewels, tools. And there was a key. Never build a dungeon you couldn’t get out of.

The Patrician took the key and strolled over to the door. As the wards of the lock slid back in their well-oiled grooves he wondered, again, whether he should have told Vimes about the key. But the man seemed to have got so much satisfaction out of breaking out. It would probably have been positively bad for him to have told him about the key. Anyway, it would have spoiled his view of the world. He needed Vimes and his view of the world.

Lord Vetinari swung the door open and, silently, strode out into the ruins of his palace.

They trembled as, for the second time in a couple of minutes, the city rocked.

. . .

The dragon kennels exploded. The windows blew out. The door left the wall ahead of a great billow of black smoke and sailed into the air, tumbling slowly, to plough into the rhododendrons.

Something very energetic and hot was happening in that building. More smoke poured out, thick and oily and solid. One of the walls folded in on itself, and then another one toppled sluggishly on to the lawn.

Swamp dragons shot determinedly out of the wreckage like champagne corks, wings whirring frantically.

Still the smoke unrolled. But there was something in there, some point of fierce white light that was gently rising.

It disappeared from view as it passed a stricken window, and then, with a piece of roof tile still spinning on the top of his head, Errol climbed above his own smoke and ascended into the skies of Ankh-Morpork.

The sunlight glinted off his silver scales as he hovered about a hundred feet up, turning slowly, balancing nicely on his own flame . . .

Vimes, awaiting death on the plaza, realised that his mouth was hanging open. He shut it again.

There was absolutely no sound in the city now but the noise of Errol’s ascent.

They can rearrange their own plumbing, Vimes told himself bemusedly. To suit circumstances. He’s made it work in reverse. But his thingys, his genes . . . surely he must have been halfway to it anyway. No wonder the little bugger has got such stubby wings. His body must have known he wasn’t going to need them, except to steer.

Good grief. I’m watching the first ever dragon to flame backwards.

He risked a glance immediately above him. The great dragon was frozen, its enormous bloodshot eyes concentrating on the tiny creature.

With a challenging roar of flame and a pummelling of air the King of Ankh-Morpork rose, all thought of mere humans forgotten.

Vimes turned sharply to Lady Ramkin.

“How do they fight?” he said urgently. “How do dragons fight?”

“I-that is, well, they just flap at each other and blow flame,” she said. “Swamp dragons, that is. I mean, who’s ever seen a noble dragon fight?” She patted her nightie. “I must take some notes, I’ve got my memo book somewhere . . .”

“In your nightshirt?”

“It’s amazing how ideas come to one in bed, I’ve always said.”

Flames roared into the space where Errol had been, but he wasn’t there. The king tried to spin in mid-air. The little dragon circled in an easy series of smoke rings, weaving a cat’s cradle in the sky with the huge adversary gyrating helplessly in the middle. More flames, hotter and longer, stabbed at him and missed.

The crowd watched in breathless silence.

“ ‘allo, Captain,” said an ingratiating voice.

Vimes looked down. A small and stagnant pond disguised as Nobby grinned sheepishly up at him.

“I thought you were dead!” he said.

“We’re not,” said Nobby.

“Oh. Good.” There didn’t seem much else to say.

“What do you reckon on the fight, then?”

Vimes looked back up. Smoke trails spiralled across the city.

“I’m afraid it’s not going to work,” said Lady Ramkin. “Oh. Hallo, Nobby.”

“Afternoon, ma’am,” said Nobby, touching what he thought was his forelock.

“What d’you mean, it’s not going to work?” said Vimes. “Look at him go! It hasn’t hit him yet!”

“Yes, but his flame has touched it several times. It doesn’t seem to have any effect. It’s not hot enough, I think. Oh, he’s dodging well. But he’s got to be lucky every time. It has only got to be lucky once.”

The meaning of this sank in.

“You mean,” said Vimes, “all this is just-just show? He’s just doing it to impress?”

“ ‘S’not his fault,” said Colon, materialising behind them. “It’s like dogs, innit? Doesn’t really dawn on the poor little bugger that he’s up against a big one. He’s just ready for a scrap.”

Both dragons appeared to realise that the fight was the well-known Klatchian standoff. With another smoke ring and a billow of white flame they parted and retreated a few hundred yards.

The king hovered, flapping its wings quickly. Height. That was the thing. When dragon fought dragon, height was always the thing . . .

Errol balanced on his flame. He seemed to be thinking.

Then he nonchalantly kicked his back legs out as though hovering on your own stomach gases was something dragons had mastered over millions of years, somersaulted, and fled. For a moment he was visible as a silver streak, and then he was out over the city walls and gone.

A groan followed him. It came from ten thousand throats.

Vimes threw up his hands.

“Don’t you worry, guv,” said Nobby quickly. “He’s-he’s probably gone to, to have a drink. Or something. Maybe it’s the end of round one. Or something.”

“I mean, he ate our kettle and everything,” said Colon uncertainly. “He wouldn’t just run away after eating a kettle. Stands to reason. Anyone who could eat a kettle wouldn’t run away from anything. “

“And my armour polish,” said Carrot. “It was nearly a whole dollar for the tin.”

“There you are then,” said Colon. “It’s like I said.”

“Look,” said Vimes, as patiently as he could manage. “He’s a nice dragon, I liked him as much as you, a very nice little chap, but he’s just done the sensible thing, for gods’ sake, he’s not going to get burned to bits just to save us. Life just doesn’t work like that. You might as well face it.”

Overhead the great dragon strutted through the air and flamed a nearby tower. It had won.

“I’ve never seen that before,” said Lady Ramkin. “Dragons normally fight to the death.”

“At last they’ve bred one who’s sensible,” said Vimes morosely. “Let’s be honest: the chances of a dragon the size of Errol beating something that big are a million-to-one”

There was one of those silences you get after one clear bright note has been struck and the world pauses.

The rank looked at one another.

“Million-to-one?” asked Carrot nonchalantly.

“Definitely,” said Vimes. “Million-to-one.”

The rank looked at one another again.

“Million-to-one,” said Colon.

“Million-to-one,” agreed Nobby.

“That’s right,” said Carrot. “Million-to-one.”

There was another high-toned silence. The members of the rank were wondering who was going to be the first to say it.

Sergeant Colon took a deep breath.

“But it might just work,” he said.

“What are you talking about?” snapped Vimes. “There’s no-“

Nobby nudged him urgently in the ribs and pointed out across the plains.

There was a column of black smoke out there. Vimes squinted. Running ahead of the smoke, speeding over the cabbage fields and closing fast, was a silvery bullet.

The great dragon had seen it too. It flamed defiance and climbed for extra height, mashing the air with its enormous wings.

Now Errol’s flame was visible, so hot as to be almost blue. The landscape rolled away underneath him at an impossible speed, and he was accelerating.

Ahead of him the king extended its claws. It was almost grinning.

Errol’s going to hit it, Vimes thought. Gods help us all, it’ll be a fireball.

Something odd was happening out in the fields. A little way behind Errol the ground appeared to be ploughing itself up, throwing cabbage stalks into the air. A hedgerow erupted in a shower of sawdust . . .

Errol passed silently over the city walls, nose up, wings folded down to tiny flaps, his body honed to a mere cone with a flame at one end. His opponent blew out a tongue of fire; Vimes watched Errol, with a barely noticeable flip of a wing stub, roll easily out of its path. And then he was gone, speeding out towards the sea in the same eerie silence.

“He miss-“ Nobby began.

The air ruptured. An endless thunderclap of noise dragged across the city, smashing tiles, toppling chimneys. In mid-air, the king was picked up, flattened out and spun like a top in the sonic wash. Vimes, his hands over his own ears, saw the creature flame desperately as it turned and became the centre of a spiral of crazy fire.

Magic crackled along its wings. It screamed like a distressed foghorn. Then, shaking its head dazedly, it began to glide in a wide circle.

Vimes groaned. It had survived something that tore masonry apart. What did you have to do to beat it? You can’t fight it, he thought. You can’t burn it, you can’t smash it. There’s nothing you can do to it.

The dragon landed. It wasn’t a perfect landing. A perfect landing wouldn’t have demolished a row of cottages. It was slow, and it seemed to go on for a long time and rip up a considerable stretch of city.

Wings flapping aimlessly, neck waving and spraying random flame, it ploughed on through a debris of beams and thatch. Several fires started up along the trail of destruction.

Finally it came to rest at the end of the furrow, almost invisible under a heap of former architecture.

The silence that it left was broken only by the shouts of someone trying to organise yet another bucket chain from the river to douse the fires.

Then people started to move.

From the air Ankh-Morpork must have looked like a disturbed anthill, with streams of dark figures flowing towards the wreck of the dragon.

Most of them had some kind of weapon.

Many of them had spears.

Some of them had swords.

All of them had one aim in mind.

“You know what?” said Vimes aloud. “This is going to be the world’s first democratically killed dragon. One man, one stab.”

“Then you’ve got to stop them. You can’t let them kill it!” said Lady Ramkin.

Vimes blinked at her.

“Pardon?” he said.

“It’s wounded!”

“Lady, that was the intention, wasn’t it? Anyway, it’s only stunned,” said Vimes.

“I mean you can’t let them kill it like this,” said Lady Ramkin insistently. “Poor thing!”

“What do you want to do, then?” demanded Vimes, his temper unravelling. “Give it a strengthening dose of tar oil and a nice comfy basket in front of the stove?”

“It’s butchery!”

“Suits me fine!”

“But it’s a dragon! It’s just doing what a dragon does! It never would have come here if people had left it alone!”

Vimes thought: it was about to eat her, and she can still think like this. He hesitated. Perhaps that did give you the right to an opinion . . .

Sergeant Colon sidled up as they glared, white-faced, at one another, and hopped desperately from one squelching foot to the other.

“You better come at once, Captain,” he said. “It’s going to be bloody murder!”

Vimes waved a hand at him. “As far as I’m concerned,” he mumbled, avoiding Sybil Ramkin’s glare, “it’s got it coming to it.”

“It’s not that,” said Colon. “It’s Carrot. He’s arrested the dragon.”

Vimes paused.

“What do you mean, arrested?” he said. “You don’t mean what I think you mean, do you?”

“Could be sir,” said Colon uncertainly. “Could be. He was up on the rubble like a shot, sir, grabbed it by a wing and said ‘You’re nicked, chummy’, sir. Couldn’t believe it, sir. Sir, the thing is . . .”

“Well?”

The sergeant hopped from one foot to the other. “You know you said prisoners weren’t to be molested, sir . . .”

. . .

It was quite a large and heavy roof timber and it scythed quite slowly through the air, but when it hit people they rolled backwards and stayed hit.

“Now look,” said Carrot, hauling it in and pushing back his helmet, “I don’t want to have to tell anyone again, right?”

Vimes shouldered his way through the dense crowd, staring at the bulky figure atop the mound of rubble and dragon. Carrot turned slowly, the roof beam held like a staff. His gaze was like a lighthouse beam. Where it fell, the crowd lowered their weapons and looked merely sullen and uncomfortable.

“I must warn you,” Carrot went on, “that interfering with an officer in the execution of his duty is a serious offence. And I shall come down like a ton of bricks on the very next person who throws a stone.”

A stone bounced off the back of his helmet. There was a barrage of jeers.

“Let us at it!”

“That’s right!”

“We don’t want guards ordering us about!”

“Quis custodiet custard?”

“Yeah? Right!”

Vimes pulled the sergeant towards him. “Go and organise some rope. Lots of rope. As thick as possible. I suppose we can-oh, tie its wings together, maybe, and bind up its mouth so it can’t flame.”

Colon peered at him.

“Are you serious, sir? We’re really going to arrest it?”

“Doit!”

It’s been arrested, he thought, as he pushed his way forward. Personally I would have preferred it to drop in the sea, but it’s been arrested and now we’ve got to deal with it or let it go free.

He felt his own feelings about the bloody thing evaporate in the face of the mob. What could you do with it? Give it a fair trial, he thought, and then execute it. Not kill it. That’s what heroes do out in the wilderness. You can’t think like that in cities. Or rather, you can, but if you’re going to then you might as well burn the whole place down right now and start again. You ought to do it . . . well, by the book.

That’s it. We tried everything else. Now we might as well try and do it by the book.

Anyway, he added mentally, that’s a city guard up there. We’ve got to stick together. Nobody else will have anything to do with us.

A burly figure in front of him drew back an arm with a halfbrick in it.

“Throw that brick and you’re a dead man,” said Vimes, and then ducked and pushed his way through the press of people while the would-be thrower looked around in amazement.

Carrot half-raised his club in a threatening gesture as Vimes climbed up the rubble pile.

“Oh, hallo, Captain Vimes,” he said, lowering it, “I have to report I have arrested this-“

“Yes, I can see,” said Vimes. “Did you have any suggestions about what we do next?”

“Oh, yes, sir. I have to read it its rights, sir,” said Carrot.

“I mean apart from that.”

“Not really, sir.”

Vimes looked at those parts of the dragon still visible under the rubble. How could you kill one of these? You’d have to spend a day at it.

A lump of rock ricocheted off his breastplate.

“Who did that?”

The voice lashed out like a whip.

The crowd went quiet.

Sybil Ramkin scrambled up on the wreckage, eyes afire, and glared furiously at the mob.

“I said,” she said, “who did that? If the person who did it does not own up I shall be extremely angry! Shame on you all!”

She had their full attention. Several people holding stones and things let them drop quietly to the ground.

The breeze flapped the remnants of her nightshirt as her Ladyship took up a new haranguing position.

“Here is the gallant Captain Vimes-“

“Oh gods,” said Vimes in a small voice, and pulled his helmet down over his eyes.

“-and his dauntless men, who have taken the trouble to come here today, to save your-“

Vimes gripped Carrot’s arm and manoeuvred him down the far side of the heap.

“You all right, Captain?” said the lance-constable. “You’ve gone all red.”

“Don’t you start,” snapped Vimes. “It’s bad enough getting all those leers from Nobby and the sergeant.”

To his astonishment Carrot patted him companion-ably on the shoulder.

“I know how it is,” he said sympathetically. “I had this girl back home, her name was Minty, and her father-“

“Look, for the last time, there is absolutely nothing between-“ Vimes began.

There was a rattle beside them. A small avalanche of plaster and thatch rolled down. The rubble heaved, and opened one eye. One big black pupil floating in a bloodshot glow tried to focus on them.

“We must be mad,” said Vimes.

“Oh, no, sir,” said Carrot. “There’s plenty of precedents. In 1135 a hen was arrested for crowing on Soul Cake Thursday. And during the regime of Psy-choneurotic Lord Snapcase a colony of bats was executed for persistent curfew violations. That was in 1401. August, I think. Great days for the law, they were,” said Carrot dreamily. “In 1321, you know, a small cloud was prosecuted for covering the sun during the climax of Frenzied Earl Hargath’s investiture ceremony.”

“I hope Colon gets a move on with-“ Vimes stopped. He had to know. “How?” he said. “What can you do to a cloud?”

“The Earl sentenced it to be stoned to death,” said Carrot. “Apparently thirty-one people were killed.” He pulled out his notebook and glared at the dragon.

“Can it hear us, do you think?” he said.

“I suppose so.”

“Well, then.” Carrot cleared his throat and turned back to the stunned reptile. “It is my duty to warn you that you are to be reported for consideration of prosecution on some or all of the following counts, to whit: One, (One) i, that on or about 18^th Grune last, in a place known as Sweetheart Lane, the Shades, you did unlawfully vent flame in a manner likely to cause grievous bodily harm, in contravention of Clause Seven of the Industrial Processes Act, 1508; AND THAT, One, (One) ii, that on or about 18^th Grune last, in a place known as Sweetheart Lane, the Shades, you caused or did cause to cause the death of six persons unknown-“

Vimes wondered how long the rubble would hold the creature down. Several weeks would be necessary, if the length of the charge sheet was anything to go by.

The crowd went silent. Even Sybil Ramkin was standing in astonishment.

“What’s the matter?” said Vimes to the upturned faces. “Haven’t you ever seen a dragon being arrested before?

“-Sixteen (Three) ii, on the night of Grune 24^th last, you did flame or cause to flame those premises known as the Old Watch House, Ankh-Morpork, valued at two hundred dollars; AND THAT, Sixteen (Three) iii, on the night of Grune 24^th last, upon being apprehended by an officer of the Watch in the execution of his duty-“

“I think we should hurry up,” whispered Vimes. “It’s getting rather restive. Is all this necessary?”

“Well, I believe one can summarise,” said Carrot. “In exceptional circumstances, according to Bregg’s Rules for-“

“It may come as a surprise, but these are exceptional circumstances, Carrot,” said Vimes. “And they’re going to be really astonishingly exceptional if Colon doesn’t hurry up with that rope.”

More rubble moved as the dragon strained to get up. There was a thump as a heavy beam was shouldered aside. The crowd began to run for it.

It was at this point that Enrol came back over the rooftops in a series of minor explosions, leaving a trail of smoke rings. Dipping low, he buzzed the crowd and sent the front rank stumbling backwards.

He was also wailing like a foghorn.

Vimes grabbed Carrot and stumbled down the heap as the king started to scrabble desperately to get free.

“He’s come back for the kill!” he shouted. “It probably took him all this time just to slow down!”

Now Errol was hovering over the fallen dragon, and hooting shrilly enough to bust bottles.

The great dragon stuck its head up in a cascade of plaster dust. It opened its mouth but, instead of the lance of white fire that Vimes tensed himself to expect, it merely made a noise like a kitten. Admittedly a kitten shouting into a tin bath at the bottom of a cave, but still a kitten.

Broken spars fell aside when the huge creature got unsteadily to its feet. The great wings opened, showering the surrounding streets with dust and bits of thatch. Some of it clanged off the helmet of Sergeant Colon, hurrying back with what looked like a small washing line coiled over his arm.

“You’re letting it get up!” Vimes shouted, pushing the sergeant to safety. “You’re not supposed to let it get up, Errol! Don’t let it get up!”

Lady Ramkin frowned. “That’s not right,” she said. “They never usually fight like that. The winner usually kills the loser.”

“Right on!” shouted Nobby.

“And then half the time he explodes with the excitement in any case.”

“Look, it’s me!” Vimes yelled, as Errol hovered unconcernedly over the scene. “I bought you the fluffy ball! The one with the bell in it! You can’t do this to us!”

“No, wait a minute,” said Lady Ramkin, laying a hand on his arm. “I’m not sure we haven’t got hold of the wrong end of the stick here-“

The great dragon leapt into the air and brought its wings down with a whump that flattened a few more buildings. The huge head swung around, the bleary eyes caught sight of Vimes.

There seemed to be some thought going on inside them.

Errol arced across the sky and hovered protectively in front of the captain, facing the thing down. For a moment it looked as though he might be turned into a small flying charcoal biscuit, and then the dragon lowered its gaze in a slightly embarrassed way and started to rise.

It climbed in a wide spiral, gathering speed as it did so. Errol went with it, orbiting the huge body like a tug around a liner.

“It’s-it’s as though he’s fussing over it,” said Vimes.

“Add up the bastard!” shouted Nobby enthusiastically.

“Total, Nobby,” said Colon. “You mean ‘total’.”

Vimes felt Lady Ramkin’s gaze on the back of his neck. He looked at her expression.

Realisation dawned. “Oh,” he said.

Lady Ramkin nodded.

“Really?” said Vimes.

“Yes,” she said. “I really ought to have thought of it before. It was such a hot flame, of course. And they’re always so much more territorial than the males.”

“Why don’t you fight the bastard!” shouted Nobby, at the dwindling dragons.

“Bitch, Nobby,” said Vimes quietly. “Not bastard. Bitch.”

“Why don’t you fi-what?”

“It’s a member of the female gender,” explained Lady Ramkin.

“What?”

“We meant that if you tried your favourite kick, Nobby, it wouldn’t work,” said Vimes.

“It’s a girl,” translated Lady Ramkin.

“But it’s sodding enormous!” said Nobby.

Vimes coughed urgently. Nobby’s rodent eyes slid sideways to Sybil Ramkin, who blushed like a sunset.

“A fine figure of a dragon, I mean,” he said quickly.

“Er. Wide, egg-bearing hips,” said Sergeant Colon anxiously.

“Statueskew,” Nobby added fervently.

“Shut up,” said Vimes. He brushed the dust off the remains of his uniform, adjusted the hang of his breastplate, and set his helmet on squarely. He patted it firmly. This wasn’t where it ended, he knew that. This was where it all got started.

“You men come with me. Come on, hurry! While everyone’s still watching them,” he added.

“But what about the king?” said Carrot. “Or queen? Or whatever it is now?”

Vimes stared at the rapidly shrinking shapes. “I really don’t know,” he said. “That’s up to Errol, I suppose. We’ve got other things to do.” . Colon saluted, still fighting for breath. “Where we going, sir?” he managed.

“To the palace. Any of you still got a sword?”

“You can use mine, Captain,” said Carrot. He handed it over.

“Right,” said Vimes quietly. He glared at them. “Let’s go.”

. . .

The rank trailed behind Vimes through the stricken streets.

He started to walk faster. The rank started to trot to keep up. Vimes began to trot to keep ahead.

The rank broke into a canter.

Then, as if on an unspoken word of command, they broke into a run.

Then into a gallop.

People scurried away as they rattled past. Carrot’s enormous sandals hammered on the cobbles. Sparks flew up from the scads of Nobby’s boots. Colon ran quietly for such a fat man, as fat men often do, face locked in a scowl of concentration.

They pounded along the Street of Cunning Artificers, turned into Hogsback Alley, emerged into the Street of Small Gods and thundered towards the palace. Vimes kept barely in the lead, mind currently empty of everything except the need to run and run.

At least, nearly everything. But his head buzzed and resonated manically with those of all city guards everywhere, all the pavement-pounding meatheads in the multiverse who had ever, just occasionally, tried to do what was Right.

Far ahead of them a handful of palace guards drew their swords, took a second look, thought better of it, darted back inside the wall and started to close the gates. They clanged together as Vimes arrived.

He hesitated, panting for breath, and looked at the massive things. The ones that the dragon had burned had been replaced by gates even more forbidding. From behind them came the sound of bolts sliding back.

This was no time for half measures. He was a captain, godsdammit. An officer. Things like this didn’t present a problem for an officer. Officers had a tried and tested way of solving problems like this. It was called a sergeant.

“Sergeant Colon!” he snapped, his mind still buzzing with universal policemanhood, “shoot the lock off!”

The sergeant hesitated. “What, sir? With a bow and arrow, sir?”

“I mean-“ Vimes hesitated. “I mean, open these gates!”

“Sir!” Colon saluted. He glared at the gates for a moment. “Right!” he barked. “Lance-constable Carrot, one stepa forwarda, take! Lance-constable Carrot, inna youra owna timer! Open these gatesa!”

“Yes, sir!”

Carrot stepped forward, saluted, folded an enormous hand into a fist and rapped gently on the woodwork.

“Open up,” he said, “in the name of the Law!”

There was some whispering on the other side of the gates, and eventually a small hatch halfway up the door slid open a fraction and a voice said, “Why?”

“Because if you don’t it will be Impeding an Officer of the Watch in the Execution of his Duty, which is punishable by a fine of not less than thirty dollars, one month’s imprisonment, or being remanded in custody for social inquiry reports and half an hour with a red-hot poker,” said Carrot.

There was some more muffled whispering, the sound of bolts being drawn, and then the gates opened about halfway.

There was no-one visible on the other side.

Vimes put a finger to his lips. He motioned Carrot towards one gate and dragged Nobby and Colon to the other.

“Push,” he whispered. They pushed, hard. There was a sudden eruption of pained cursing from behind the woodwork.

“Run!” shouted Colon.

“No!” shouted Vimes. He walked around the gate. Four semi-crushed palace guards glowered at him.

“No,” he said. “No more running. I want these men arrested.”

“You wouldn’t dare,” said one of the men. Vimes peered at him.

“Clarence, isn’t it?” he said. “With a C. Well, Clarence with a C, watch my lips. Either you can be charged with Aiding and Abetting or-“ he leaned closer, and glanced meaningfully at Carrot-“with an axe.”

“Swivel on that one, doggybag!” added Nobby, jumping from one foot to the other in vicious excitement.

Clarence’s little piggy eyes glared at the looming bulk that was Carrot, and then at Vimes’s face. There was absolutely no mercy there. He appeared to reach a reluctant decision.

“Jolly good,” said Vimes. “Lock them in the gatehouse, Sergeant.”

Colon drew his bow and squared his shoulders. “You heard the Man,” he rasped. “One false move and you’re . . . you’re-“ he took a desperate stab at it-“you’re Home Economics!”

“Yeah! Slam ‘em up in the banger!” shouted Nobby. If worms could turn, Nobby was revolving at generating speeds. “Doucheballs!” he sneered, at their retreating backs.

“Aiding and Abetting what, Captain?” said Carrot, as the weaponless guards trooped away. “You have to aid and abet something.”

“I think in this case it will just be generalised abetting,” said Vimes. “Persistent and reckless abetment.”

“Yeah,” said Nobby. “Can’t stand abettors. Slime-breaths!”

Colon handed Captain Vimes the guardhouse key. “It’s not very secure in there, Captain,” he said. “They’ll be able to break out eventually.”

“I hope so,” said Vimes, “because the very first drain we come to, you’re going to drop the key down it. Everyone here? Right. Follow me.”

. . .

Lupine Wonse scurried along the ruined corridors of the palace, The Summoning of Dragons under one arm,

the glittering royal sword grasped uncertainly in one hand.

He halted, panting, in a doorway.

Not a lot of his mind was currently in a state sane enough to have proper thoughts, but the small part that was still in business kept insisting that it couldn’t have seen what it had seen or heard what it had heard.

Someone was following him.

And he’d seen Vetinari walking through the palace. He knew the man was securely put away. The lock was completely unpickable. He remembered the Patrician being absolutely insistent that it be an unpickable lock when it was installed.

There was movement in the shadows at the end of the passage. Wonse gibbered a bit, fumbled with the doorhandle beside him, darted in, slammed the door and leaned against it, fighting for breath.

He opened his eyes.

He was in the old private audience room. The Patrician was sitting in his old seat, one leg crossed on the other, watching him with mild interest.

“Ah, Wonse,” he said.

Wonse jumped, scrabbled at the doorhandle, leapt into the corridor and ran for it until he reached the main staircase, rising now through the ruins of the central palace like a forlorn corkscrew. Stairs-height-high ground-defence. He ran up them three at a time.

All he needed was a few minutes of peace. Then he’d show them.

The upper floors were more full of shadows. What they were short on was structural strength. Pillars and walls had been torn out by the dragon as it built its cave. Rooms gaped pathetically on the edge of the abyss. Dangling shreds of wall-hanging and carpet flapped in the wind from the smashed windows. The floor sprang and wobbled like a trampoline as Wonse scurried across it. He struggled to the nearest door.

“That was commendably fast,” said the Patrician.

Wonse slammed the door in his face and ran, squeaking, down a corridor.

Sanity took a brief hold. He paused by a statue. There was no sound, no hurrying footsteps, no whirr of hidden doors. He gave the statue a suspicious look and prodded it with the sword.

When it failed to move he opened the nearest door and slammed it behind him, found a chair and wedged it under the handle. This was one of the upper state rooms, bare now of most of its furnishings, and lacking its fourth wall. Where it should have been was just the gulf of the cavern.

The Patrician stepped out of the shadows.

“Now you have got it out of your system-“ he said.

Wonse spun around, sword raised.

“You don’t really exist,” he said. “You’re a-a ghost, or something.”

“I believe this is not the case,” said the Patrician.

“You can’t stop me! I’ve got some magic stuff left, I’ve got the book!” Wonse took a brown leather bag out of his pocket. “I’ll bring back another one! You’ll see!”

“I urge you not to,” said Lord Vetinari mildly.

“Oh, you think you’re so clever, so in-control, so swave, just because I’ve got a sword and you haven’t! Well, I’ve got more than that, I’ll have you know,” said Wonse triumphantly. “Yes! I’ve got the palace guards on my side! They follow me, not you! No-one likes you, you know. No-one ever liked you.”

He swung the sword so that its needle point was a foot from the Patrician’s thin chest.

“So it’s back to the cells for you,” he said. “And this time I’ll make sure you stay there. Guards! Guards!”

There was the clatter of running feet outside. The door rattled, the chair shook. There was a moment’s silence, and then door and chair erupted in splinters.

“Take him away!” screamed Wonse. “Fetch more scorpions! Put him in . . . you’re not the-“

“Put the sword down,” said Vimes, while behind him Carrot picked bits of door out of his fist.

“Yeah,” said Nobby, peering around the captain. “Up against the wall and spread ‘em, motherbreath!”

“Eh? What’s he supposed to spread?” whispered Sergeant Colon anxiously.

Nobby shrugged. “Dunno,” he said. “Everything, I reckon. Safest way.”

Wonse stared at the rank in disbelief.

“Ah, Vimes,” said the Patrician. “You will-“

“Shut up,” said Vimes calmly. “Lance-constable Carrot?”

“Sir!”

“Read the prisoner his rights.”

“Yes, sir.” Carrot produced his notebook, licked his thumb, flicked through the pages.

“Lupine Wonse,” he said, “AKA Lupin Squiggle Sec’y PP-“

“Wha?” said Wonse.

“-currently domiciled in the domicile known as The Palace, Ankh-Morpork, it is my duty to inform you that you have been arrested and will be charged with-“ Carrot gave Vimes an agonised look-“a number of offences of murder by means of a blunt instrument, to whit, a dragon, and many further offences of generalised abetting, to be more specifically ascertained later. You have the right to remain silent. You have the right not to be summarily thrown into a piranha tank. You have the right to trial by ordeal. You have the-“

“This is madness,” said the Patrician calmly.

“I thought I told you to shut up!” snapped Vimes, spinning around and shaking a finger under the Patrician’s nose.

“Tell me, Sarge,” whispered Nobby, “do you think we’re going to like it in the scorpion pit?”

“-say anything, er, but anything you do say will be written down, er, here, in my notebook, and, er, may be used in evidence-“

Carrot’s voice trailed into silence.

“Well, if this pantomime gives you any pleasure, Vimes,” said the Patrician eventually, “take him down to the cells. I’ll deal with him in the morning.”

Wonse made no signal. There was no scream or cry. He just rushed at the Patrician, sword raised.

Options flickered across Vimes’s mind. In the lead came the suggestion that standing back would be a good plan, let Wonse do it, disarm him afterwards, let the city clean itself up. Yes. A good plan.

And it was therefore a total mystery to him why he chose to dart forward, bringing Carrot’s sword up in a half-baked attempt at blocking the stroke . . .

Perhaps it was something to do with doing it by the book.

There was a clang. Not a particularly loud one. He felt something bright and silver whirr past his ear and strike the wall.

Wonse’s mouth fell open. He dropped the remnant of his sword and backed away, clutching The Summoning.

“You’ll be sorry,” he hissed. “You’ll all be very sorry!”

He started to mumble under his breath.

Vimes felt himself trembling. He was pretty certain he knew what had zinged past his head, and the mere thought was making his hands sweat. He’d come to the palace ready to kill and there’d been this minute, just this minute, when for once the world had seemed to be operating properly and he was in charge of it and now, now all he wanted was a drink. And a nice week’s sleep.

“Oh, give up!” he said. “Are you going to come quietly?”

The mumbling went on. The air began to feel hot and dry.

Vimes shrugged. “That’s it, then,” he said, and turned away. “Throw the book at him, Carrot.”

“Right, sir.”

Vimes remembered too late.

Dwarfs have trouble with metaphors.

They also have a very good aim.

The Laws and Ordinances of Ankh and Morpork caught the secretary on the forehead. He blinked, staggered, and stepped backwards.

It was the longest step he ever took. For one thing, it lasted the rest of his life.

After several seconds they heard him hit, five storeys below.

After several more seconds their faces appeared over the edge of the ravaged floor.

“What a way to go,” said Sergeant Colon.

“That’s a fact,” said Nobby, reaching up to his ear for a dog-end.

“Killed by a wossname. A metaphor.”

“Dunno,” said Nobby. “Looks like the ground to me. Got a light, Sarge?”

“That was right, wasn’t it, sir?” said Carrot anxiously. “You said to-“

“Yes, yes,” said Vimes. “Don’t worry.” He reached down with a shaking hand, picked up the bag Wonse had been holding, and tipped out a pile of stones. Every one had a hole in it. Why? he thought.

A metallic noise behind him made him look around. The Patrician was holding the remains of the royal sword. As the captain watched, the man wrenched the other half of the sword out of the far wall. It was a clean break.

“Captain Vimes,” he said.

“Sir?”

“That sword, if you please?”

Vimes handed it over. He couldn’t, right now, think of anything else to do. He was probably due for a scorpion pit of his very own as it was.

Lord Vetinari examined the rusty blade carefully.

“How long have you had this, Captain?” he said mildly.

“Isn’t mine, sir. Belongs to Lance-constable Carrot, sir.”

“Lance-?”

“Me, sir, your graciousness,” said Carrot, saluting.

“Ah.”

The Patrician turned the blade over and over slowly, staring at it as if fascinated. Vimes felt the air thicken, as though history was clustering around this point, but for the life of him he couldn’t think why. This was one of those points where the Trousers of Time bifurcated themselves, and if you weren’t careful you’d go down the wrong leg-

. . .

Wonse arose in a world of shades, icy confusion pouring into his mind. But all he could think of at the moment was the tall cowled figure standing over him.

“I thought you were all dead,” he mumbled. It was strangely quiet and the colours around him seemed washed-out, muted. Something was very wrong. “Is that you, Brother Doorkeeper?” he ventured.

The figure reached out.

METAPHORICALLY, it said.

. . .

-and the Patrician handed the sword to Carrot.

“Very well done, young man,” he said. “Captain Vimes, I suggest you give your men the rest of the day off.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Vimes. “Okay, lads. You heard his lordship.”

“But not you, Captain. We must have a little talk.”

“Yes, sir?” said Vimes innocently.

The rank scurried out, giving Vimes sympathetic and sorrowful glances.

The Patrician walked to the edge of the floor and looked down.

“Poor Wonse,” he said.

“Yes, sir.” Vimes stared at the wall.

“I would have preferred him alive, you know.”

“Sir?”

“Misguided, yes, but a useful man. His head could have been of further use to me.”

“Yes, sir.”

“The rest, of course, we could have thrown away.”

“Yes, sir.”

“That was a joke, Vimes.”

“Yes, sir.”

“The chap never grasped the idea of secret passages, mind you.”

“No, sir.”

“That young fellow. Carrot, you called him?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Keen fellow. Likes it in the Watch?”

“Yes, sir. Right at home, sir.”

“You saved my life.”

“Sir?”

“Come with me.”

He stalked away through the ruined palace, Vimes trailing behind, until he reached the Oblong Office. It was quite tidy. It had escaped most of the devastation with nothing more than a layer of dust. The Patrician sat down, and suddenly it was as if he’d never left. Vimes wondered if he ever had.

He picked up a sheaf of papers and brushed the plaster off them.

“Sad,” he said. “Lupine was such a tidy-minded man.”

“Yes, sir.”

The Patrician steepled his hands and looked at Vimes over the top of them.

“Let me give you some advice, Captain,” he said.

“Yes, sir?”

“It may help you make some sense of the world.”

“Sir.”

“I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are the good people and the bad people,” said the man. “You’re wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides. “

He waved his thin hand towards the city and walked over to the window.

“A great rolling sea of evil,” he said, almost pro-prietorially. “Shallower in some places, of course, but deeper, oh, so much deeper in others. But people like you put together little rafts of rules and vaguely good intentions and say, this is the opposite, this will triumph in the end. Amazing!” He slapped Vimes good-naturedly on the back.

“Down there,” he said, “are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any iniquity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathesomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don’t say no. I’m sorry if this offends you,” he added, patting the captain’s shoulder, “but you fellows really need us.”

“Yes, sir?” said Vimes quietly.

“Oh, yes. We’re the only ones who know how to make things work. You see, the only thing the good people are good at is overthrowing the bad people. And you’re good at that, I’ll grant you. But the trouble is that it’s the only thing you’re good at. One day it’s the ringing of the bells and the casting down of the evil tyrant, and the next it’s everyone sitting around complaining that ever since the tyrant was overthrown no-one’s been taking out the trash. Because the bad people know how to plan. It’s part of the specification,

you might say. Every evil tyrant has a plan to rule the world. The good people don’t seem to have the knack.”

“Maybe. But you’re wrong about the rest!” said Vimes. “It’s just because people are afraid, and alone-“ He paused. It sounded pretty hollow, even to him.

He shrugged. “They’re just people,” he said. “They’re just doing what people do. Sir.”

Lord Vetinari gave him a friendly smile.

“Of course, of course,” he said. “You have to believe that, I appreciate. Otherwise you’d go quite mad. Otherwise you’d think you’re standing on a feather-thin bridge over the vaults of Hell. Otherwise existence would be a dark agony and the only hope would be that there is no life after death. I quite understand.” He looked at his desk, and sighed, “And now,” he said, “there is such a lot to do. I’m afraid poor Wonse was a good servant but an inefficient master. So you may go. Have a good night’s sleep. Oh, and do bring your men in tomorrow. The city must show its gratitude.”

“It must what?” said Vimes.

The Patrician looked at a scroll. Already his voice was back to the distant tones of one who organises and plans and controls.

“Its gratitude,” he said. “After every triumphant victory there must be heroes. It is essential. Then everyone will know that everything has been done properly.”

He glanced at Vimes over the top of the scroll.

“It’s all part of the natural order of things,” he said.

After a while he made a few pencil annotations to the paper in front of him and looked up.

“I said,” he said, “that you may go.”

Vimes paused at the door.

“Do you believe all that, sir?” he said. “About the endless evil and the sheer blackness?”

“Indeed, indeed,” said the Patrician, turning over the page. “It is the only logical conclusion.”

“But you get out of bed every morning, sir?”

“Hmm? Yes? What is your point?”

“I’d just like to know why, sir.”

“Oh, do go away, Vimes. There’s a good fellow.”

. . .

In the dark and draughty cave hacked from the heart of the palace the Librarian knuckled across the floor. He clambered over the remains of the sad hoard and looked down at the splayed body of Wonse.

Then he reached down, very gently, and prised The Summoning of Dragons from the stiffening fingers. He blew the dust off it. He brushed it tenderly, as if it was a frightened child.

He turned to climb down the heap, and stopped. He bent down again, and carefully pulled another book from among the glittering rubble. It wasn’t one of his, except in the wide sense that all books came under his domain. He turned a few pages carefully.

“Keep it,” said Vimes behind him. “Take it away. Put it somewhere.”

The orangutan nodded at the captain, and rattled down the heap. He tapped Vimes gently on the kneecap, opened The Summoning of Dragons, leafed through its ravaged pages until he found the one he’d been looking for, and silently passed the book up.

Vimes squinted at the crabbed writing.

Yet draggons are notte liken unicornes, I willen. They dwellyth in some Realm defined bye thee Fancie of the Wille and, thus, it myte bee thate whomsoever calleth upon them, and giveth them theyre patheway unto thys worlde, calleth theyre Owne dragon of the Mind.

Yette, I trow, the Pure in Harte maye stille call a Draggon of Power as a Forsefor Goode in thee worlde, and this one nighte the Grate Worke will commense. All hathe been prepared. I hath laboured most mytily to be a Worthie Vessle . . .

A realm of fancy, Vimes thought. That’s where they went, then. Into our imaginations. And when we call them back we shape them, like squeezing dough into pastry shapes. Only you don’t get gingerbread men, you get what you are. Your own darkness, given shape . . .

Vimes read it through again, and then looked at the following pages.

There weren’t many. The rest of the book was a charred mass.

Vimes handed it back to the ape.

“What kind of a man was de Malachite?” he said.

The Librarian gave this the consideration due from someone who knew the Dictionary of City Biography by heart. Then he shrugged.

“Particularly holy?” said Vimes.

The ape shook his head.

“Well, noticeably evil, then?-“

The ape shrugged, and shook his head again.

“If I were you, “ said Vimes, “I’d put that book somewhere very safe. And the book of the Law with it. They’re too bloody dangerous. “

“Oook.”

Vimes stretched. “And now,” he said, “let’s go and have a drink. “

“Oook. “

“But just a small one. “

“Oook.”

“And you ‘re paying.”

“Eeek. “

Vimes stopped and stared down at the big, mild face.

“Tell me,” he said. “I’ve always wanted to know . . . is it better, being an ape?”

The Librarian thought about it. “Oook,” he said.

“Oh. Really?” said Vimes.

. . .

It was the next day. The room was wall-to-wall with civic dignitaries. The Patrician sat on his severe chair, surrounded by the Council. Everyone present was wearing the shiny waxen grins of those bent on good works.

Lady Sybil Ramkin sat off to one side, wearing a few acres of black velvet. The Ramkin family jewels glittered on her fingers, neck and in the black curls of today’s wig. The total effect was striking, like a globe of the heavens.

Vimes marched the rank to the centre of the hall and stamped to a halt with his helmet under his arm, as per regulations. He’d been amazed to see that even Nobby had made an effort-the suspicion of shiny metal could be seen here and there on his breastplate. And Colon was wearing an expression of almost constipated importance. Carrot’s armour gleamed.

Colon ripped off a textbook salute for the first time in his life.

“All present and correct, sah!” he barked.

“Very good, Sergeant,” said Vimes coldly. He turned to the Patrician and raised an eyebrow politely.

Lord Vetinari gave a little wave of his hand.

“Stand easy, or whatever it is you chaps do,” he said. “I’m sure we needn’t wait on ceremony here. What do you say, Captain?”

“Just as you like, sir,” said Vimes.

“Now, men,” said the Patrician, leaning forward, “we have heard some remarkable accounts of your magnificent efforts in defence of the city . . .”

Vimes let his mind wander as the golden platitudes floated past. For a while he derived a certain amount of amusement from watching the faces of the Council. A whole sequence of expressions drifted across them as the Patrician spoke. It was, of course, vitally important that there be a ceremony like this. Then the whole thing could be neat and settled. And forgotten. Just another chapter in the long and exciting history of eckcetra, eckcetra. Ankh-Morpork was good at starting new chapters.

His trawling gaze fell on Lady Ramkin. She winked. Vimes’s eyes swivelled front again, his expression suddenly as wooden as a plank.

“. . . token of our gratitude,” the Patrician finished, sitting back.

Vimes realised that everyone was looking at him.

“Pardon?” he said.

“I said, we have been trying to think of some suitable recompense, Captain Vimes. Various public-spirited citizens-“ the Patrician’s eyes took in the Council and Lady Ramkin-“and, of course, myself, feel that an appropriate reward is due.”

Vimes still looked blank.

“Reward?” he said.

“It is customary for such heroic endeavour,” said the Patrician, a little testily.

Vimes faced forward again. “Really haven’t thought about it, sir,” he said. “Can’t speak for the men, of course.”

There was an awkward pause. Out of the corner of his eye Vimes was aware of Nobby nudging the sergeant in the ribs. Eventually Colon stumbled forward and ripped off another salute. “Permission to speak, sir,” he muttered.

The Patrician nodded graciously.

The sergeant coughed. He removed his helmet and pulled out a scrap of paper.

“Er,” he said. “The thing is, saving your honour’s presence, we think, you know, what with saving the city and everything, or sort of, or, what I mean is . . . we just had a go you see, man on the spot and that sort of thing . . . the thing is, we reckon we’re entitled. If you catch my drift.”

The assembled company nodded. This was exactly how it should be.

“Do go on,” said the Patrician.

“So we, like, put our heads together,” said the sergeant. “A bit of a cheek, I know . . .”

“Please carry on, Sergeant,” said the Patrician. “You needn’t keep stopping. We are well aware of the magnitude of the matter.”

“Right, sir. Well, sir. First, it’s the wages.”

“The wages?” said Lord Vetinari. He stared at Vimes, who stared at nothing.

The sergeant raised his head. His expression was the determined expression of a man who is going to see it through.

“Yes, sir,” he said. “Thirty dollars a month. It’s not right. We think-“ he licked his lips and glanced behind him at the other two, who were making vague encouraging motions-“we think a basic rate of, er, thirty-five dollars? A month?” He stared at the Patrician’s stony expression. “With increments as per rank? We thought five dollars.”

He licked his lips again, unnerved by the Patrician’s expression. “We won’t go below four,” he said. “And that’s flat. Sorry, your Highness, but there it is.”

The Patrician glanced again at Vimes’s impassive face, then looked back at the rank.

“That’s if?”he said.

Nobby whispered in Colon’s ear and then darted back. The sweating sergeant gripped his helmet as though it was the only real thing in the world.

“There was another thing, your reverence,” he said.

“Ah.” The Patrician smiled knowingly.

“There’s the kettle. It wasn’t much good anyway, and then Errol et it. It was nearly two dollars.” He swallowed. “We could do with a new kettle, if it’s all the same, your lordship.”

The Patrician leaned forward, gripping the arms of his chair.

“I want to be clear about this,” he said coldly. “Are we to believe that you are asking for a petty wage increase and a domestic utensil?”

Carrot whispered in Colon’s other ear.

Colon turned two bulging, watery-rimmed eyes to the dignitaries. The rim of his helmet was passing through his fingers like a mill wheel.

“Well,” he began, “sometimes, we thought, you know, when we has our dinner break, or when it’s quite, like, at the end of a watch as it may be, and we want to relax a bit, you know, wind down . . .” His voice trailed away.

“Yes?”

Colon took a deep breath.

“I suppose a dartboard would be out of the question-?”

The thunderous silence that followed was broken by an erratic snorting.

Vimes’s helmet dropped out of his shaking hand. His breastplate wobbled as the suppressed laughter of the years burst out in great uncontrollable eruptions. He turned his face to the row of councillors and laughed and laughed until the tears came.

Laughed at the way they got up, all confusion and outraged dignity.

Laughed at the Patrician’s carefully immobile expression.

Laughed for the world and the saving of souls.

Laughed and laughed, and laughed until the tears came.

Nobby craned up to reach Colon’s ear.

“I told you,” he hissed. “I said they’d never wear it. I knew a dartboard’d be pushing our luck. You’ve upset ‘em all now.”

. . .

Dear Mother and Father [wrote Carrot] You will never guess, I have been in the Watch only a few weeks and, already I am to be a full Constable. Captain Vimes said, the Patrician himself said I was to be One, and that also he hoped I should have a long and successful career in the Watch as well and, he would follow it with special interest. Also my wages are to go up by ten dollars and we had a special bonus of twenty dollars that Captain Vimes paid for out of his own pocket,

Sgt Colon said. Please find money enclosed. I am keeping a little bit by though because I went to see Reet and Mrs Palm said all the girls had been following my career with Great Interest as well and I am to come to dinner on my night off. Sgt Colon has been telling me about how to start courting, which is very interesting and not at all complicated it appears. I arrested a dragon but it got away. I hope Mr Varneshi is well.

I am as happy as anyone can be in the whole world.

Your son, Carrot.

. . .

Vimes knocked on the door.

An effort had been made to spruce up the Ramkin mansion, he noticed. The encroaching shrubbery had been pitilessly hacked back. An elderly workman atop a ladder was nailing the stucco back on the walls while another, with a spade, was rather arbitrarily defining the line where the lawn ended and the old flower beds had begun.

Vimes stuck his helmet under his arm, smoothed back his hair, and knocked. He’d considered asking Sergeant Colon to accompany him, but had brushed the idea aside quickly. He couldn’t have tolerated the sniggering. Anyway, what was there to be afraid of? He’d stared into the jaws of death three times; four, if you included telling Lord Vetinari to shut up.

To his amazement the door was eventually opened by a butler so elderly that he might have been resurrected by the knocking.

“Yerss?” he said.

“Captain Vimes, City Watch,” said Vimes.

The man looked him up and down.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “Her ladyship did say. I believe her ladyship is with her dragons,” he said. “If you like to wait in ‘ere, I will-“

“I know the way,” said Vimes, and set off around the overgrown path.

The kennels were a ruin. An assortment of battered wooden boxes were lying around under an oilcloth awning. From their depths a few sad swamp dragons whiffled a greeting at him.

A couple of women were moving purposefully among the boxes. Ladies, rather. They were far too untidy to be mere women. No ordinary women would have dreamed of looking so scruffy; you needed the complete self-confidence that comes with knowing who your great-great-great-great-grandfather was before you could wear clothes like that. But they were, Vimes noticed, incredibly good clothes, or had been once; clothes bought by one’s parents, but so expensive and of such good quality that they never wore out and were handed down, like old china and silverware and gout.

Dragon breeders, he thought. You can tell. There’s something about them. It’s the way they wear their silk scarves, old tweed coats and granddad’s riding boots. And the smell, of course.

A small wiry woman with a face like old saddle leather caught sight of him.

“Ah,” she said, “you’ll be the gallant captain.” She tucked an errant strand of white hair back under a headscarf and extended a veiny brown hand. “Brenda Rodley. That’s Rosie Devant-Molei. She runs the Sunshine Sanctuary, you know.” The other woman, who had the build of someone who could pick up carthorses hi one hand and shoe them with the other, gave him a friendly grin.

“Samuel Vimes,” said Vimes weakly.

“My father was a Sam,” said Brenda vaguely. “You can always trust a Sam, he said.” She shooed a dragon back into its box. “We’re just helping Sybil. Old friends, you know. The collection’s all to blazes, of course. They’re all over the city, the little devils. I dare say they’ll come back when they’re hungry, though. What a bloodline, eh?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Sybil reckons he was a sport, but I say we should be able to breed back into the line in three or four generations. I’m famed for my stud, you know,” she said. “That’d be something, though. A whole new type of dragon.”

Vimes thought of supersonic contrails criss-crossing the sky.

“Er,” he said. “Yes.”

“Well, we must get on.”

“Er, isn’t Lady Ramkin around?” said Vimes. “I got this message that it was essential, she said, for me to come here.”

“She’s indoors somewhere,” said Miss Rodley. “Said she had something important to see to. Oh, do be careful with that one, Rose, you silly gel!”

“More important than dragons?” said Vimes.

“Yes. Can’t think what’s come over her.” Brenda Rodley fished in the pocket of an oversized waistcoat. “Nice to have met you, Captain. Always good to meet new members of the Fancy. Do drop in any time you’re passing, I’d be only too happy to show you around.” She extracted a grubby card and pressed it into his hand. “Must be off now, we’ve heard that some of them are trying to build nests on the University tower. Can’t have that. Must get ‘em down before it gets dark.”

Vimes squinted at the card as the women crunched off down the drive, carrying nets and ropes.

It said: Brenda, Lady Rodley. The Dower House, Quirm Castle, Quirm. What it meant, he realised, was that striding away down the path like an animated rummage stall was the dowager Duchess of Quirm, who owned more country than you could see from a very high mountain on a very clear day. Nobby would not have approved. There seemed to be a special land of poverty that only the very, very rich could possibly afford . . .

That was how you got to be a power in the land, he thought. You never cared a toss about whatever anyone else thought and you were never, ever, uncertain about anything.

He padded back to the house. A door was open. It led into a large but dark and musty hall. Up in the gloom the heads of dead animals haunted the walls. The Ramkins seemed to have endangered more species than an ice age.

Vimes wandered aimlessly through another mahogany archway.

It was a dining room, containing the kind of table where the people at the other end are in a different time zone. One end had been colonised by silver candlesticks.

It was laid for two. A battery of cutlery flanked each plate. Antique wineglasses sparkled in the candlelight.

A terrible premonition took hold of Vimes at the same moment as a gust of Captivation, the most expensive perfume available anywhere in Ankh-Morpork, blew past him.

“Ah, Captain. So nice of you to come.”

Vimes turned around slowly, without his feet appearing to move.

Lady Ramkin stood there, magnificently.

Vimes was vaguely aware of a brilliant blue dress that sparkled in the candlelight, a mass of hair the colour of chestnuts, a slightly anxious face that suggested that a whole battalion of skilled painters and decorators had only just dismantled their scaffolding and gone home, and a faint creaking that said underneath it all mere corsetry was being subjected to the kind of tensions more usually found in the heart of large stars.

“I, er,” he said. “If you, er. If you’d said, er. I’d, er. Dress more suitable, er. Extremely, er. Very. Er.”

She bore down upon him like a glittering siege engine.

In a sort of dream he allowed himself to be ushered to a seat. He must have eaten, because servants appeared out of nowhere with things stuffed with other things, and came back later and took the plates away. The butler reanimated occasionally to fill glass after glass with strange wines. The heat from the candles was enough to cook by. And all the time Lady Ramkin talked in a bright and brittle way-about the size of the house, the responsibilities of a huge estate, the feeling that it was time to take One’s Position in Society More Seriously, while the setting sun filled the room with red and Vimes’s head began to spin.

Society, he managed to think, didn’t know what was going to hit it. Dragons weren’t mentioned once, although after a while something under the table put its head on Vimes’s knee and dribbled.

Vimes found it impossible to contribute to the conversation. He felt outflanked, beleaguered. He made one sally, hoping maybe to reach high ground from which to flee into exile.

“Where do you think they’ve gone?” he said.

“Where what?” said Lady Ramkin, temporarily halted.

“The dragons. You know. Errol and his wi-female.”

“Oh, somewhere isolated and rocky, I should imagine,” said Lady Ramkin. “Favourite country for dragons.”

“But it-she’s a magical animal,” said Vimes. “What’ll happen when the magic goes away?”

Lady Ramkin gave him a shy smile.

“Most people seem to manage,” she said.

She reached across the table and touched his hand.

“Your men think you need looking after,” she said meekly.

“Oh. Do they?” said Vimes.

“Sergeant Colon said he thought we’d get along like a maison en Flambt. “

“Oh. Did he?”

“And he said something else,” she said. “What was it, now? Oh, yes: ‘It’s a million to one chance,’,” said Lady Ramkin,”I think he said, ‘but it might just work’.”

She smiled at him.

And then it arose and struck Vimes that, in her own special category, she was quite beautiful; this was the category of all the women, in his entire life, who had ever thought he was worth smiling at. She couldn’t do worse, but then, he couldn’t do better. So maybe it balanced out. She wasn’t getting any younger but then, who was? And she had style and money and common-sense and self-assurance and all the things that he didn’t, and she had opened her heart, and if you let her she could engulf you; the woman was a city.

And eventually, under siege, you did what Ankh-Morpork had always done-unbar the gates, let the conquerors in, and make them your own.

How did you start? She seemed to be expecting something.

He shrugged, and picked up his wine glass and sought for a phrase. One crept into his wildly resonating mind.

“Here’s looking at you, kid,” he said.

. . .

The gongs of various midnights banged out the old day.

(. . . and further towards the Hub, where the Ram-top Mountains joined the forbidding spires of the central massif, where strange hairy creatures roamed the eternal snows, where blizzards howled around the freezing peaks, the lights of a lone lamasery shone out over the high valleys. In the courtyard a couple of yellow-robed monks stacked the last case of small green bottles on to a sleigh, ready for the first leg of the incredibly difficult journey down to the distant plains. The box was labelled, in careful brush-strokes, “Mstr. C.M.O.T. Dibbler, Ankh-Morpork.”

“You know, Lobsang,” said one of them, “one cannot help wondering what it is he does with this stuff.”)

Corporal Nobbs and Sergeant Colon lounged in the shadows near the Mended Drum, but straightened up as Carrot came out bearing a tray. Detritus the troll stepped aside respectfully.

“Here we are, lads,” said Carrot. “Three pints. On the house.”

“Bloody hell, I never thought you’d do it,” said Colon, grasping a handle. “What did you say to him?”

“I just explained how it was the duty of all good citizens to help the guard at all times,” said Carrot innocently, “and I thanked him for his co-operation.”

“Yeah, and the rest,” said Nobby.

“No, that was all I said.”

“Then you must have a really convincing tone of voice.”

“Ah. Well, make the most of it, lads, while it lasts,” said Colon.

They drank thoughtfully. It was a moment of supreme peace, a few minutes snatched from the realities of real life. It was a brief bite of stolen fruit and enjoyed as such. No-one in the whole city seemed to be fighting or stabbing or making affray and, just for now, it was possible to believe that this wonderful state of affairs might continue.

And even if it didn’t, then there were memories to get them through. Of running, and people getting out of the way. Of the looks on the faces of the horrible palace guard. Of, when all the thieves and heroes and gods had failed, of being there. Of nearly doing things nearly right.

Nobby shoved the pot on a convenient window sill, stamped some life back into his feet and blew on his fingers. A brief fumble in the dark recesses of his ear produced a fragment of cigarette.

“What a time, eh?” said Colon contentedly, as the flare of a match illuminated the three of them.

The others nodded. Yesterday seemed like a lifetime ago, even now. But you could never forget something like that, no matter who else did, no matter what happened from now on.

“If I never see any bloody king it’ll be too soon,” said Nobby.

“I don’t reckon he was the right king, anyway,” said Carrot. “Talking of kings: anyone want a crisp?”

“There’s no right longs,” said Colon, but without much rancour. Ten dollars a month was going to make a big difference. Mrs Colon was acting very differently towards a man bringing home another ten dollars a month. Her notes on the kitchen table were a lot more friendly.

“No, but I mean, there’s nothing special about having an ancient sword,” said Carrot. “Or a birthmark. I mean, look at me. I’ve got a birthmark on my arm.”

“My brother’s got one, too,” said Colon. “Shaped like a boat.”

“Mine’s more like a crown thing,” said Carrot.

“Oho, that makes you a king, then,” grinned Nobby. “Stands to reason.”

“I don’t see why. My brother’s not an admiral,” said Colon reasonably.

“And I’ve got this sword,” said Carrot.

He drew it. Colon took it from his hand, and turned it over and over in the light from the flare over the Drum’s door. The blade was dull and short, and notched like a saw. It was well-made and there might have been an inscription on it once, but it had long ago been worn into indecipherability by sheer use.

“It’s a nice sword,” he said thoughtfully. “Well-balanced.”

“But not one for a king,” said Carrot. “Kings’ swords are big and shiny and magical and have jewels on and when you hold them up they catch the light, ting. “

“Ting, “ said Colon. “Yes. I suppose they have to, really.”

“I’m just saying you can’t go round giving people thrones just because of stuff like that,” said Carrot. “That’s what Captain Vimes said.”

“Nice job, mind,” said Nobby. “Good hours, kinging.”

“Hmm?” Colon had momentarily been lost in a little world of speculation. Real kings had shiny swords, obviously. Except, except, except maybe your real real king of, like, days of yore, he would have a sword that didn’t sparkle one bit but was bloody efficient at cutting things. Just a thought.

“I say kinging’s a good job,” Nobby repeated. “Short hours.”

“Yeah. Yeah. But not long days,” said Colon. He gave Carrot a thoughtful look.

“Ah. There’s that, of course.”

“Anyway, my father says being king’s too much like hard work,” said Carrot. “All the surveying and assaying and everything.” He drained his pint. “It’s not the kind of thing for the likes of us. Us-“ he looked proudly-“guards. You all right, Sergeant?”

“Hmm? What? Oh. Yes.” Colon shrugged. What about it, anyway? Maybe things turned out for the best. He finished the beer. “Best be off,” he said. “What time was it?”

“About twelve o’clock,” said Carrot.

“Anything else?”

Carrot gave it some thought.”And all’s well?” he said.

“Right. Just testing.”

“You know,” said Nobby, “the way you say it, lad, you could almost believe it was true.”

. . .

Let the eye of attention pull back . . .

This is the Disc, world and mirror of worlds, borne through space on the back of four giant elephants who stand on the back of Great A’Tuin the Sky Turtle. Around the Rim of this world the ocean pours off endlessly into the night. At its Hub rises the ten-mile spike of the Cori Celesti, on whose glittering summit the gods play games with the fates of men . . .

. . . if you know what the rules are, and who are the players.

On the far edge of the Disc the sun was rising. The light of the morning began to flow across the patchwork of seas and continents, but it did so slowly, because light is tardy and slightly heavy in the presence of a magical field.

On the dark crescent, where the old light of sunset had barely drained from the deepest valleys, two specks, one big, one small, flew out of the shadow, skimmed low across the swells of the Rim ocean, and struck out determinedly over the totally unfathomable, star-dotted depths of space.

Perhaps the magic would last. Perhaps it wouldn’t. But then, what does?

[1] All this was untrue. The truth is that even big collections of ordinary books distort space, as can readily be proved by anyone who has been around a really old-fashioned secondhand bookshop, one of those that look as though they were designed by M. Escher on a bad day and has more staircases than storeys and those rows of shelves which end in little doors that are surely too small for a full-sized human to enter. The relevant equation is: Knowledge = power = energy = matter = mass; a good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.

[2] A figgin is defined in the Dictionary of Eye-Watering Words as ‘a small short-crust pasty containing raisins’. The Dictionary would have been invaluable for the Supreme Grand Master when he thought up the Society’s oaths, since it also includes welchet (‘a type of waistcoat worn by certain clock-makers’), gaskin (‘a shy, grey-brown bird of the coot family’), and moules (‘a game of skill and dexterity, involving tortoises’).

[3] The pronoun is used by dwarfs to indicate both sexes. All dwarfs have beards and wear up to twelve layers of clothing. Gender is more or less optional.

[4] i.e., about 55.

[5] Lit. dezka-knik, ‘mine supervisor’.

[6] One of the remarkable innovations introduced by the Patrician was to make the Thieves’ Guild responsible for theft, with annual budgets, forward planning and, above all, rigid job protection. Thus, in return for an agreed average level of crime per annum, the thieves themselves saw to it that unauthorised crime was met with the full force of Injustice, which was generally a stick with nails in it.

[7] Lit: “Good day! Good day! What is all of this that is going on here (in this place)?”

[8] Listen, sunshine [lit: ‘the stare of the great hot eye in the sky whose fiery gaze penetrates the mouth of the cavern’] I don’t want to have to give anyone a smacking, so if you play B’tduz+ with me, I’ll play B’tduz with you. Okay?”++

+)A popular dwarfish game which consists of standing a few feet apart and throwing large rocks at one another’s head.

++) Lit: “All correctly beamed and propped?”

[9] Evening, all. “ (Lit: ‘Felicitations to all present at the closing of the day.’)

[10] Like a bouncer, but trolls use more force.

[11] And mime artists. It was a strange aversion, but there you are. Anyone in baggy trousers and a white face who tried to ply their art anywhere within Ankh’s crumbling walls would very quickly find themselves in a scorpion pit, on one wall of which was painted the advice: Learn The Words.

[12] While being bang alongside the idea of necessary cruelty, of course.

[13] The Guild of Fire Fighters had been outlawed by the Patrician the previous year after many complaints. The point was that, if you bought a contract from the Guild, your house would be protected against fire. Unfortunately, the general Ankh-Morpork ethos quickly came to the fore and fire fighters would tend to go to prospective clients’ houses in groups, making loud comments like “Very inflammable looking place, this” and “Probably go up like a firework with just one carelessly-dropped match, know what I mean?”

[14] A species of geranium.

[15] Some rioters can be quite well-educated.

[16] The phrase “Set a thief to catch a thief had by this time (after strong representations from the Thieves’ Guild) replaced a much older and quintessentially Ankh-Morporkian proverb, which was “Set a deep hole with spring-loaded sides, tripwires, whirling knife blades driven by water power, broken glass and scorpions, to catch a thief.”

[17] Tridlins: A short and unnecessary religious observance performed daily by the Holy Balancing Dervishes of Otherz, according to the Dictionary of Eye-Watering Words.

[18] The three rules of the Librarians of Time and Space are: 1) Silence; 2) Books must be returned no later than the last date shown; and 3) Do not interfere with the nature of causality.

[19] A number of religions in Ankh-Morpork still practised human sacrifice, except that they didn’t really need to practise any more because they had got so good at it. City law said that only condemned criminals should be used, but that was all right because in most of the religions refusing to volunteer for sacrifice was an offence punishable by death.