Guards! Guards! (21 page)

Vimes’s footsteps echoed wetly from the surrounding buildings as he picked his way across the plaza. The boy had stood
here
.

He peered through the mist shreds at the surrounding buildings, getting his bearings. So the dragon had been hovering—he paced forward—
here
.

“And,” said Vimes, “this is where it was killed.”

He fumbled in his pockets. There were all sorts of things in there—keys, bits of string, corks. His finger closed on a stub end of chalk.

He knelt down. Errol jumped off his shoulder and waddled away to inspect the detritus of the celebration. He always sniffed everything before he ate it, Vimes noticed. It was a bit of a puzzle why he bothered, because he always ate it anyway.

Its head had been about, let’s see,
here
.

He walked backward, dragging the chalk over the stones, progressing slowly over the damp, empty square like an ancient worshipper treading a maze. Here a wing, curving away toward a tail which stretched out to
here
, change hands, now head for the other wing…

When he finished he walked to the center of the outline and ran his hands over the stones. He realized he was half-expecting them to be warm.

Surely there should be something. Some, oh, he didn’t know, some grease or something, some crispy fried dragon lumps.

Errol started eating a broken bottle with every sign of enjoyment.

“You know what I think?” said Vimes. “I think it went somewhere.”

Thunder rolled again.

“All right, all right,” muttered Vimes. “It was just a thought. It wasn’t that dramatic.”

Errol stopped in mid-crunch.

Very slowly, as though it was mounted on very smooth, well-oiled bearings, the dragon’s head turned to face upward.

What it was staring at intently was a patch of empty air. There wasn’t much else you could say about it.

Vimes shivered under his cape. This was daft.

“Look, don’t muck about,” he said. “There’s nothing there.”

Errol started to tremble.

“It’s just the rain,” said Vimes. “Go on, finish your bottle.
Nice
bottle.”

A thin, worried keening noise broke from the dragon’s mouth.

“I’ll show you,” said Vimes. He cast around and spotted one of Throat’s sausages, cast aside by a hungry reveller who had decided he was never going to be
that
hungry. He picked it up.

“Look,” he said, and threw it upward.

He felt sure, watching its trajectory, that it ought to have fallen back to the ground. It shouldn’t have fallen
away
, as if he’d dropped it neatly into a tunnel in the sky. And the tunnel shouldn’t have been looking back at him.

Vivid purple lightning lashed from the empty air and struck the houses on the near side of the plaza, skittering across the walls for several yards before winking out with a suddenness that almost denied that it had ever happened at all.

Then it erupted again, this time hitting the rimward wall. The light broke where it hit into a network of searching tendrils spreading across the stones.

The third attempt went upward, forming an actinic column that eventually rose fifty or sixty feet in the air, appeared to stabilize, and started to spin slowly.

Vimes felt that a comment was called for. He said: “Arrgh.”

As the light revolved it sent out thin zigzag streamers that jittered away across the rooftops, sometimes dipping, sometimes doubling back.
Searching
.

Errol ran up Vimes’s back in a flurry of claws and fastened himself firmly on his shoulder. The excruciating agony recalled to Vimes that there was something he should be doing. Was it time to scream again? He tried another “Arrgh.” No, probably not.

The air started to smell like burning tin.

Lady Ramkin’s coach rattled into the plaza making a noise like a roulette wheel and pounded straight for Vimes, stopping in a skid that sent it juddering around in a semi-circle and forced the horses either to face the other way or plait their legs. A furious vision in padded leather, gauntlets, tiara and thirty yards of damp pink tulle leaned down toward him and screamed: “Come on, you bloody idiot!”

One glove caught him under his unresisting shoulder and hauled him bodily onto the box.

“And stop screaming!” the phantom ordered, focusing generations of natural authority into four syllables. Another shout spurred the horses from a bewildered standing start to a full gallop.

The coach bounced away over the flagstones. An exploratory tendril of flickering light brushed the reins for a moment and then lost interest.

“I suppose you haven’t got any idea what’s happening?” shouted Vimes, against the crackling of the spinning fire.

“Not the foggiest!”

The crawling lines spread like a web over the city, growing fainter with distance. Vimes imagined them creeping through windows and sneaking under doors.

“It looks as though it’s searching for something!” he shouted.

“Then getting away before it finds it is a first-class idea, don’t you think?”

A tongue of fire hit the dark Tower of Art, slid blindly down its ivy-grown flanks, and disappeared through the dome of Unseen University’s Library.

The other lines blinked out.

Lady Ramkin brought the coach to a halt at the far side of the square.

“What does it want the Library for?” she said, frowning.

“Maybe it wants to look something up?”

“Don’t be silly,” she said breezily. “There’s just a lot of books in there. What would a flash of lightning want to read?”

“Something very short?”

“I really think you could try to be a bit more help.”

The line of light exploded into an arc between the Library’s dome and the center of the plaza and hung in the air, a band of brilliance several feet across.

Then, in a sudden rush, it became a sphere of fire which grew swiftly to encompass almost all the plaza, vanished suddenly, and left the night full of ringing, violet shadows.

And the plaza full of dragon.

Who would have thought it? So much power, so close at hand. The dragon could feel the magic flowing into it, renewing it from second to second, in defiance of all boring physical laws. This wasn’t the poor fare it had been given before. This was the right stuff. There was no end to what it could do, with power like this.

But first it had to pay its respects to certain people…

It sniffed the dawn air. It was searching for the stink of minds.

Noble dragons don’t have friends. The nearest they can get to the idea is an enemy who is still alive.

The air became very still, so still that you could almost hear the slow fall of dust. The Librarian swung on his knuckles between the endless bookshelves. The dome of the Library was still overhead but then, it always was.

It seemed quite logical to the Librarian that, since there were aisles where the shelves were on the outside then there should be other aisles in the space between the books themselves, created out of quantum ripples by the sheer weight of words. There were certainly some odd sounds coming from the other side of some shelving, and the Librarian knew that if he gently pulled out a book or two he would be peeking into different libraries under different skies.

Books bend space and time. One reason the owners of those aforesaid little rambling, poky secondhand bookshops always seem slightly unearthly is that many of them really
are
, having strayed into this world after taking a wrong turning in their own bookshops in worlds where it is considered commendable business practice to wear carpet slippers all the time and open your shop only when you feel like it. You stray into L-space at your peril.

Very senior librarians, however, once they have proved themselves worthy by performing some valiant act of librarianship, are accepted into a secret order and are taught the raw arts of survival beyond the Shelves We Know. The Librarian was highly skilled in all of them, but what he was attempting now wouldn’t just get him thrown out of the Order but probably out of life itself.

All libraries everywhere are connected in L-space. All libraries. Everywhere. And the Librarian, navigating by booksign carved on shelves by past explorers, navigating by smell, navigating even by the siren whisperings of nostalgia, was heading purposely for one very special one.

There was one consolation. If he got it wrong, he’d never know it.

Somehow the dragon was worse on the ground. In the air it was an elemental thing, graceful even when it was trying to burn you to your boots. On the ground it was just a damn great animal.

Its huge head reared against the gray of dawn, turning slowly.

Lady Ramkin and Vimes peered cautiously from behind a watertrough. Vimes had his hand clamped over Errol’s muzzle. The little dragon was whimpering like a kicked puppy, and fighting to get away.

“It’s a magnificent brute,” said Lady Ramkin, in what she probably thought was a whisper.

“I do wish you wouldn’t keep saying that,” said Vimes.

There was a scraping noise as the dragon dragged itself over the stones.

“I
knew
it wasn’t killed,” growled Vimes. “There were no bits. It was too neat. It was sent somewhere by some sort of magic, I bet. Look at it. It’s bloody impossible! It needs magic to keep it alive!”

“What do you mean?” said Lady Ramkin, not tearing her gaze from its armored flanks.

What did he mean? What
did
he mean? He thought fast.

“It’s just not physically possible, that’s what I mean,” he said. “Nothing that heavy should be able to fly, or breathe fire like that. I told you.”

“But it looks real enough. I mean, you’d expect a magical creature to be, well, gauzy.”

“Oh, it’s real. It’s real all right,” said Vimes bitterly. “But supposing it needs magic like we need, like we need…sunlight? Or food.”

“It’s a thaumivore, you mean?”

“I just think it eats magic, that’s all,” said Vimes, who had not had a classical education. “I mean, all these little swamp dragons, always on the point of extinction, suppose one day back in prehistoric times some of them found out how to use magic?”

“There used to be a lot of natural magic around once,” said Lady Ramkin thoughtfully.

“There you are, then. After all, creatures use the air and the sea. I mean, if there’s a natural resource around, something’s going to use it, aren’t they? Then it wouldn’t matter about bad digestion and weight and wing size and so on, because the magic would take care of it. Wow!”

But you’d need a
lot
, he thought. He wasn’t certain how much magic you’d need to change the world enough to let tons of armored carcass flit around the sky like a swallow, but he’d bet it was lots.

All those thefts. Someone’d been feeding the dragon.

He looked at the bulk of the Unseen University Library of magic books, the greatest accumulation of distilled magical power on the Discworld.

And now the dragon had learned how to feed itself.

He became terribly aware that Lady Ramkin had moved, and saw to his horror that she was striding toward the dragon, chin stuck out like an anvil.

“What the hell are you doing?” he whispered loudly.

“If it’s descended from the swamp dragons then
I
can probably control it,” she called back. “You have to look them in the eye and use a no-nonsense tone of voice. They can’t resist a stern human voice. They don’t have the willpower, you know. They’re just big softies.”

To his shame, Vimes realized that his legs were going to have nothing to do with any mad dash to drag her back. His pride didn’t like that, but his body pointed out that it wasn’t his pride that stood a very reasonable chance of being thinly laminated to the nearest building. Through ears burning with embarrassment he heard her say: “Bad boy!”

The echoes of that stern injunction rang out across the plaza.

Oh gods, he thought, is that how you train a dragon? Point them at the melted patch on the floor and threaten to rub their nose in it?

He risked a peep over the horsetrough.

The dragon’s head was swinging around slowly, like a crane jib. It had some difficulty focusing on her, right below it. Vimes could see the great red eyes narrow as the creature tried to squint down the length of its own nose. It looked puzzled. He wasn’t surprised.

“Sit!” bellowed Lady Ramkin, in a tone so undisobeyable that even Vimes felt his legs involuntarily sag. “Good boy! I think I may have a lump of coke somewhere—” She patted her pockets.

Eye contact. That was the important thing. She really, Vimes thought, shouldn’t have looked down even for a moment.

The dragon raised one talon in a leisurely fashion and pinned her to the ground.

As Vimes half-rose in horror Errol escaped from his grip and cleared the trough in one leap. He bounced across the plaza in a series of wing-whirring arcs, mouth gaping, emitting wheezing burps, trying to flame.

He was answered with a tongue of blue-white fire that melted a streak of bubbling rock several yards long but failed to strike the challenger. It was hard to pick him out of the air because, quite clearly, even Errol didn’t know where he was going to be, or what way up he was going to be when he got there. His only hope at this point lay in movement, and he vaulted and spun between the increasingly furious bursts of fire like a scared but determined random particle.

The great dragon reared up with the sound of a dozen anchor chains being thrown into a corner, and tried to bat the tormenter out of the air.

Vimes’s legs gave in at that point and decided that they might allow themselves to be heroic legs for a while. He scurried across the intervening space, sword at the ready for what good it might do, grabbed Lady Ramkin by an arm and a handful of bedraggled ballgown, and swung her onto his shoulder.

He got several yards before the essential bad judgment of this move dawned on him.

He went “Gngh.” His vertebrae and knees were trying to fuse into one lump. Purple spots flashed on and off in front of his eyes. On top of it all, something unfamiliar but apparently made of whalebone was poking sharply into the back of his neck.

He managed a few more steps by sheer momentum, knowing that when he stopped he was going to be utterly crushed. The Ramkins hadn’t bred for beauty, they’d bred for healthy solidity and big bones, and they’d got very good at it over the centuries.

A gout of livid dragonfire crackled into the flagstones a few feet away.

Afterward he wondered if he’d only imagined leaping several inches into the air and covering the rest of the distance to the horsetrough at a respectable run. Perhaps, in extremis, everyone learned the kind of instant movement that was second nature to Nobby. Anyway, the horsetrough was behind him and Lady Ramkin was in his arms, or at least was pinning his arms to the ground. He managed to free them and tried to massage a bit of life back. What did you do next? She didn’t seem to be injured. He recalled something about loosening a person’s clothing, but in Lady Ramkin’s case that might be dangerous without special tools.

She solved the immediate problem by grabbing the edge of the trough and hauling herself upright.

“Right,”
she said, “it’s the slipper for you—” Her eyes focused on Vimes for the first time.

“What the hell’s going on—” she began again, and then caught the scene over his shoulder.

“Oh
sod
,” she said. “Pardon my Klatchian.”

Errol was running out of energy. The stubby wings were indeed incapable of real flight, and he was remaining airborne solely by flapping madly, like a chicken. The great talons swished through the air. One of them caught one of the plaza’s fountains, and demolished it.

The next one swatted Errol neatly.

He shot over Vimes’s head in a straight rising line, hit a roof behind him, and slid down it.

“You’ve got to catch him!” shouted Lady Ramkin. “You must! It’s vital!”

Vimes stared at her, and then dived forward as Errol’s pear-shaped body slithered over the edge of the roof and dropped. He was surprisingly heavy.

“Thank goodness,” said Lady Ramkin, struggling to her feet. “They explode so easily, you know. It could have been very dangerous.”

They remembered the other dragon. It wasn’t the exploding sort. It was the killing-people kind. They turned, slowly.

The creature loomed over them, sniffed and then, as if they were of no importance at all, turned away. It sprang ponderously into the air and, with one slow flap of its wings, began to scull leisurely away down the plaza and up and into the mists that were rolling over the city.

Vimes was currently more concerned with the smaller dragon in his hands. Its stomach was rumbling alarmingly. He wished he’d paid more attention to the book on dragons. Was a stomach noise like this a sign they were about to explode, or was the point you had to watch out for the point when the rumbling stopped?

“We’ve got to follow it!” said Lady Ramkin. “What happened to the carriage?”

Vimes waved a hand vaguely in the direction that, as far as he could tell, the horses had taken in their panic.

Errol sneezed a cloud of warm gas that smelled worse than something walled up in a cellar, pawed the air weakly, licked Vimes’s face with a tongue like a hot cheese-grater, struggled out of his arms and trotted away.

“Where’s he off to?” boomed Lady Ramkin, emerging from the mists dragging the horses behind her. They didn’t want to come, their hooves were scraping up sparks, but they were fighting a losing battle.

“He’s still trying to challenge it!” said Vimes. “You’d think he’d give in, wouldn’t you?”

“They fight like blazes,” said Lady Ramkin, as he climbed onto the coach. “It’s a matter of making your opponent explode, you see.”

“I thought, in Nature, the defeated animal just rolls on its back in submission and that’s an end of it,” said Vimes, as they clattered after the disappearing swamp dragon.

“Wouldn’t work with dragons,” said Lady Ramkin. “Some daft creature rolls on its back, you disembowel it. That’s how they look at it. Almost human, really.”

The clouds were clustered thickly over Ankh-Morpork. Above them, the slow golden sunlight of the Discworld unrolled.

The dragon sparkled in the dawn as it trod the air joyously, doing impossible turns and rolls for the sheer delight of it. Then it remembered the business of the day.

They’d had the
presumption
to summon it…

Below it, the rank wandered from side to side up the Street of Small Gods. Despite the thick fog it was beginning to get busy.

“What d’you call them things, like thin stairs?” said Sergeant Colon.

“Ladders,” said Carrot.

“Lot of ’em about,” said Nobby. He mooched over to the nearest one, and kicked it.

“Oi!” A figure struggled down, half buried in a string of flags.

“What’s going on?” said Nobby.

The flag bearer looked him up and down.

“Who wants to know, tiddler?” he said.

“Excuse me, we do,” said Carrot, looming out of the fog like an iceberg. The man gave a sickly grin.

“Well, it’s the coronation, isn’t it,” he said. “Got to get the streets ready for the coronation. Got to have the flags up. Got to get the old bunting out, haven’t we?”

Nobby gave the dripping finery a jaundiced look. “Doesn’t look that old to me,” he said. “It looks new. What’re them fat saggy things on that shield?”

“Those are the royal hippos of Ankh,” said the man proudly. “Reminders of our noble heritage.”

“How long have we had a noble heritage, then?” said Nobby.

“Since yesterday, of course.”

“You can’t have a heritage in a day,” said Carrot. “It has to last a long time.”

“If we haven’t got one,” said Sergeant Colon, “I bet we’ll soon have had one. My wife left me a note about it. All these years, and she turns out to be a monarchist.” He kicked the pavement viciously. “Huh!” he said. “A man knocks his pipes out for thirty years to put a bit of meat on the table, but all she’s talking about is some boy who gets to be king for five minutes’ work. Know what was for my tea last night? Beef dripping sandwiches!”

This did not have the expected response from the two bachelors.

“Cor!” said Nobby.

“
Real
beef dripping?” said Carrot. “The kind with the little crunchy bits on top? And shiny blobs of fat?”

“Can’t remember when I last addressed the crust on a bowl of dripping,” mused Nobby, in a gastronomic heaven. “With just a bit of salt and pepper, you’ve got a meal fit for a k—”

“Don’t even say it,” warned Colon.

“The best bit is when you stick the knife in and crack the fat and all the browny gold stuff bubbles up,” said Carrot dreamily. “A moment like that is worth a ki—”

“Shutup! Shutup!” shouted Colon. “You’re just—
what the hell was that?”

They felt the sudden downdraft, saw the mist above them roll into coils that broke against the house walls. A blast of colder air swept along the street, and was gone.