Guards! Guards!

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 center 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 gray 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 around 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