Guards! Guards! (33 page)

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 agonizedly.

“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 re-thinking 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 “things” as the bars gave up and broke free. The ape flung them aside and reached into the gaping hole. Then the longest arm 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 backward 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 rulèd…

“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 upward. 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 toward 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
downward
, 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 center of his pen, swaying and moaning softly. White smoke rolled slowly from his ears and drifted toward 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.