Guards! Guards!

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, realizing 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 realized 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 backward 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