Guards! Guards! (26 page)

It flew with head and neck fully extended, as if the great body was being towed like a barge. The people on the street yelled and fought one another for the safety of doorways. It paid them no attention.

It should have come roaring, but the only sounds were the creaking of wings and the snapping of banners.

It
should
have come roaring. Not like this, not slowly and deliberately, giving terror time to mature. It should have come threatening. Not promising.

It should have come roaring, not flying gently to the accompaniment of the zip and zing of merry bunting.

Vimes pulled open the other drawer of his desk and glared at the paperwork, such as there was of it. There wasn’t really much in there that he could call his own. A scrap of sugar bag reminded him that he now owed the Tea Kitty six pence.

Odd. He wasn’t angry yet. He would be later on, of course. By evening he’d be furious. Drunk and furious. But not yet. Not yet. It hadn’t really sunk in, and he knew he was just going through the motions as a preventative against thinking.

Errol stirred sluggishly in his box, raised his head and whined.

“What’s the matter, boy?” said Vimes, reaching down. “Upset stomach?”

The little dragon’s skin was moving as though heavy industry was being carried on inside. Nothing in
Diseases of the Dragon
said anything about
this
. From the swollen stomach came sounds like a distant and complicated war in an earthquake zone.

That surely wasn’t right. Sybil Ramkin said you had to pay great attention to a dragon’s diet, since even a minor stomach upset would decorate the walls and ceiling with pathetic bits of scaly skin. But in the past few days…well, there had been cold pizzas, and the ash from Nobby’s horrible dog-ends, and all-in-all Errol had eaten more or less what he liked. Which was just about everything, to judge by the room. Not to mention the contents of the bottom drawer.

“We really haven’t looked after you very well, have we?” said Vimes. “Treated you like a dog, really.” He wondered what effect squeaky rubber hippos had on the digestion.

Vimes became slowly aware that the distant cheering had turned to screams.

He stared vaguely at Errol, and then smiled an incredibly evil smile and stood up.

There were sounds of panic and the mob on the run.

He placed his battered helmet on his head and gave it a jaunty tap. Then, humming a mad little tune, he sauntered out of the building.

Errol remained quite still for a while and then, with extreme difficulty, half-crawled and half-rolled out of his box. Strange messages were coming from the massive part of his brain that controlled his digestive system. It was demanding certain things that he couldn’t put a name to. Fortunately it was able to describe them in minute detail to the complex receptors in his enormous nostrils. They flared, subjecting the air of the room to an intimate examination. His head turned, triangulating.

He pulled himself across the floor and began to eat, with every sign of enjoyment, Carrot’s tin of armor polish.

People streamed past Vimes as he strolled up the Street of Small Gods. Smoke rose into the air from the Plaza of Broken Moons.

The dragon squatted in the middle of it, on what remained of the coronation dais. It had a self-satisfied expression.

There was no sign of the throne, or of its occupant, although it was possible that complicated forensic examination of the small pile of charcoal in the wrecked and smoldering woodwork might offer some clue.

Vimes caught hold of an ornamental fountain to steady himself as the crowds stampeded by. Every street out of the plaza was packed with struggling bodies. Not noisy ones, Vimes noticed. People weren’t wasting their breath with screaming anymore. There was just this solid, deadly determination to be somewhere else.

The dragon spread its wings and flapped them luxuriously. The people at the rear of the crowd took this as a signal to climb up the backs of the people in front of them and run for safety from head to head.

Within a few seconds the square was empty of all save the stupid and the terminally bewildered. Even the badly trampled were making a spirited crawl for the nearest exit.

Vimes looked around him. There seemed to be a lot of fallen flags, some of which were being eaten by an elderly goat which couldn’t believe its luck. He could distantly see Cut-me-own-Throat on his hands and knees, trying to restore the contents of his tray.

By Vimes’s side a small child waved a flag hesitantly and shouted “Hurrah.”

Then everything went quiet.

Vimes bent down.

“I think you should be going home,” he said.

The child squinted up at him.

“Are you a Watch man?” it said.

“No,” said Vimes. “And yes.”

“What happened to the king, Watch man?”

“Er. I think he’s gone off for a rest,” said Vimes.

“My auntie said I shouldn’t talk to Watch men,” said the child.

“Do you think it might be a good idea to go home and tell her how obedient you’ve been, then?” said Vimes.

“My auntie said, if I was naughty, she’d put me on the roof and call the dragon,” said the child, conversationally. “My auntie said it eats you all up starting with the legs, so’s you can see what’s happening.”

“Why don’t you go home and tell your auntie she’s acting in the best traditions of Ankh-Morpork child-rearing?” said Vimes. “Go on. Run along.”

“It crunches up all your bones,” said the child happily. “And when it gets to your head, it—”

“Look, it’s up there!” shouted Vimes. “The great big dragon that crunches you up! Now go
home
!”

The child looked up at the thing perched on the crippled dais.

“I haven’t seen it crunch anyone yet,” it complained.

“Push off or you’ll feel the back of my hand,” said Vimes.

This seemed to fit the bill. The child nodded understandingly.

“Right. Can I shout hurrah again?”

“If you like,” said Vimes.

“Hurrah.”

So much for community policing, Vimes thought. He peered out from behind the fountain again.

A voice immediately above him rumbled, “Say what you like, I still swear it’s a magnificent specimen.”

Vimes’s gaze traveled upward until it crested the edge of the fountain’s top bowl.

“Have you noticed,” said Sybil Ramkin, hauling herself upright by a piece of eroded statuary and dropping down in front of him, “how every time we meet, a dragon turns up?” She gave him an arch smile. “It’s a bit like having your own tune. Or something.”

“It’s just sitting there,” said Vimes hurriedly. “Just looking around. As if it’s waiting for something to happen.”

The dragon blinked with Jurassic patience.

The roads off the square were packed with people. That’s the Ankh-Morpork instinct, Vimes thought. Run away, and then stop and see if anything interesting is going to happen to other people.

There was a movement in the wreckage near the dragon’s front talon, and the High Priest of Blind Io staggered to his feet, dust and splinters cascading from his robes. He was still holding the ersatz crown in one hand.

Vimes watched the old man look upward into a couple of glowing red eyes a few feet away.

“Can dragons read minds?” whispered Vimes.

“I’m sure mine understand every word I say,” hissed Lady Ramkin. “Oh, no! The silly old fool is giving it the crown!”

“But isn’t that a smart move?” said Vimes. “Dragons like gold. It’s like throwing a stick for a dog, isn’t it?”

“Oh dear,” said Sybil Ramkin. “It might not, you know. Dragons have such sensitive mouths.”

The great dragon blinked at the tiny circle of gold. Then, with extreme delicacy, it extended one meter-long claw and hooked the thing out of the priest’s trembling fingers.

“What d’you mean, sensitive?” said Vimes, watching the claw travel slowly toward the long, horse-like face.

“A really incredible sense of taste. They’re so, well, chemically orientated.”

“You mean it can probably
taste
gold?” whispered Vimes, watching the crown being carefully licked.

“Oh, certainly. And smell it.”

Vimes wondered what the chances were of the crown being made of gold. Not high, he decided. Gold foil over copper, perhaps. Enough to fool human beings. And then he wondered what someone’s reaction would be if they were offered sugar which turned out, once you’d put three spoonfuls in your coffee, to be salt.

The dragon removed the claw from its mouth in one graceful movement and caught the high priest, who was just sneaking away, a blow which knocked him high into the air. When he was screaming at the top of the arc the great mouth came around and—“Gosh!” said Lady Ramkin.

There was a groan from the watchers.

“The
temperature
of the thing!” said Vimes. “I mean, nothing left! Just a wisp of smoke!”

There was another movement in the rubble. Another figure pulled itself upright and leaned dazedly against a broken spar.

It was Lupine Wonse, under a coating of soot.

Vimes watched him look up into a pair of nostrils the size of drain-covers.

Wonse broke into a run. Vimes wondered what it felt like, running away from something like that, expecting any minute your backbone to reach, very briefly, a temperature somewhere beyond the vaporization point of iron. He could guess.

Wonse made it halfway across the square before the dragon darted forward with surprising agility for such a bulk and snatched him up. The talon swept on upward until the struggling figure was being held a few feet from the dragon’s face.

It appeared to examine him for some time, turning him this way and that. Then, moving on its three free legs and flapping its wings occasionally to help with its balance, it trotted away across the plaza and headed toward the—what once had
been
the Patrician’s palace. To what once had been the king’s palace, too.

It ignored the frightened spectators silently pressing themselves against the walls. The arched gateway was shouldered aside with depressing ease. The doors themselves, tall and iron-bound and solid, lasted a surprising ten seconds before collapsing into a heap of glowing ash.

The dragon stepped through.

Lady Ramkin turned in astonishment. Vimes had started to laugh.

There was a manic edge to it and there were tears in his eyes, but it was still laughter. He laughed and laughed until he slid gently down the edge of the fountain, his legs splaying out in front of him.

“Hooray, hooray, hooray!” he giggled, almost choking.

“What on earth d’you mean?” Lady Ramkin demanded.

“Put out more flags! Blow the cymbals, roast the tocsin! We’ve crowned it! We’ve got a king after all! What ho!”

“Have you been drinking?” she snapped.

“Not yet!” sniggered Vimes. “Not yet! But I will be!”

He laughed on, knowing that when he stopped black depression was going to drop on him like a lead soufflé. But he could see the future stretching out ahead of them…

…after all, it was definitely
noble
. And it didn’t carry money, and it couldn’t answer back. It could certainly do something for the inner cities, too. Like torching them to the bedrock.

We’ll really do it, he thought. That’s the Ankh-Morpork way. If you can’t beat it or corrupt it, you pretend it was your idea in the first place.

Vivat Draco
.

He became aware that the small child had wandered up again. It waved its flag gently at him and said, “Can I shout hurrah again now?”

“Why not?” said Vimes. “Everyone else will.”

From the palace came the muffled sounds of complicated destruction…

Errol pulled a broomstick across the floor with his mouth and, whimpering with effort, hauled it upright. After a lot more whimpering and several false starts he managed to winkle the end of it between the wall and the big jar of lamp oil.

He paused for a moment, breathing like a bellows, and pushed.

The jar resisted for a moment, rocked back and forth once or twice, and then fell over and smashed on the flagstones. Crude, very badly-refined oil spread out in a black puddle.

Errol’s huge nostrils twitched. Somewhere in the back of his brain unfamiliar synapses clicked like telegraph keys. Great balks of information flooded down the thick nerve cord to his nose, carrying inexplicable information about triple bonds, alkanes and geometric isomerism. However, almost all of it missed the small part of Errol’s brain that was used for being Errol.

All he knew was that he was suddenly very, very thirsty.

Something major was happening in the palace. There was the occasional crash of a floor or thump of a falling ceiling…

In his rat-filled dungeon, behind a door with more locks than a major canal network, the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork lay back and grinned in the darkness.

Outside, bonfires flared in the dusk.

Ankh-Morpork was celebrating. No one was quite sure why, but they’d worked themselves up for a celebration tonight, barrels had been broached, oxen had been put on spits, one paper hat and celebratory mug had been issued per child, and it seemed a shame to waste all that effort. Anyway, it had been a very interesting day, and the people of Ankh-Morpork set great store by entertainment.

“The way I see it,” said one of the revellers, halfway through a huge greasy lump of half-raw meat, “a dragon as king mightn’t be a bad idea. When you think it through, is what I mean.”

“It definitely looked very gracious,” said the woman to his right, as if testing the idea. “Sort of, well, sleek. Nice and smart. Not scruffy. Takes a bit of a pride in itself.” She glared at some of the younger revellers further down the table. “The trouble with people today is they don’t take pride in themselves.”

“And there’s foreign policy, of course,” said a third, helping himself to a rib. “When you come to think about it.”

“What d’you mean?”

“Diplomacy,” said the rib-eater, flatly.

They thought about it. And then you could see them turning the idea around and thinking about it the other way, in a polite effort to see what the hell he was getting at.