Guards! Guards!

work. On the other hand, the only alternative was to go in there and drag her out, and it wasn’t one anyone could summon any enthusiasm for. Besides, the guard captain wasn’t sure he had enough men to drag Lady Ramkin anywhere. You’d need teams of thousands, with log rollers.
    The door creaked open again, revealing only the musty darkness of the hall within.
    “Right, men—” said the captain, uneasily.
    Lady Ramkin appeared. He got a brief, blurred vision of her bounding through the doorway, screaming, and it might well have been the last thing he remembered if a guard hadn’t had the presence of mind to trip her up as she hurtled down the steps. She plunged forward, cursing, plowed into the overgrown lawn, hit her head on a crumbling statue of an antique Ramkin, and slid to a halt.
    The double-handed broadsword she had been holding landed beside her, bolt upright, and vibrated to a standstill.
    After a while one of the guards crept forward cautiously and tested the blade with his finger.
    “Bloody hell,” he said, in a voice of mixed horror and respect. “And the dragon wants to eat her ?”
    “Fits the bill,” said the captain. “She’s got to be the highest-born lady in the city. I don’t know about maiden,” he added, “and right at this minute I’m not going to speculate. Someone go and fetch a cart.”
    He fingered his ear, which had been nicked by the tip of the sword. He was not, by nature, an unkind man, but at this moment he was certain that he would prefer the thickness of a dragon’s hide between himself and Sybil Ramkin when she woke up.
    “Weren’t we supposed to kill her pet dragons, sir?” said another guard. “I thought Mr. Wonse said something about killing all the dragons.”
    “That was just a threat we were supposed to make,” said the captain.
    The guard’s brow furrowed. “You sure, sir? I thought—”
    The captain had had enough of this. Screaming harpies and broadswords making a noise like tearing silk in the air beside him had severely ruined his capacity for seeing the other fellow’s point of view.
    “Oh, you thought , did you?” he growled. “A thinker, are you? Do you think you’d be suitable for another posting, then? City guard, maybe? They’re full of thinkers, they are.”
    There was an uncomfortable titter from the rest of the guards.
    “If you’d thought ,” added the captain sarcastically, “you’d have thought that the king is hardly going to want other dragons dead, is he? They’re probably distant relatives or something. I mean, it wouldn’t want us to go around killing its own kind, would it?”
    “Well, sir, people do, sir,” said the guard sulkily.
    “Ah, well,” said the captain. “That’s different.” He tapped the side of his helmet meaningfully. “That’s ’cos we’re intelligent.”

    Vimes landed in damp straw and also in pitch darkness, although after a while his eyes became accustomed to the gloom and he could make out the walls of the dungeon.
    It hadn’t been built for gracious living. It was basically just a space containing all the pillars and arches that supported the palace. At the far end a small grille high on the wall let in a mere suspicion of grubby, secondhand light.
    There was another square hole in the floor. It was also barred. The bars were quite rusty, though. It occurred to Vimes that he could probably work them loose eventually, and then all he would have to do was slim down enough to go through a nine-inch hole.
    What the dungeon did not contain was any rats, scorpions, cockroaches or snakes. It had once contained snakes, it was true, because Vimes’s sandals crunched on small, long white skeletons.
    He crept cautiously along one damp wall, wondering where the rhythmic scraping sound was coming from. He rounded a squat pillar, and found out.
    The Patrician was shaving, squinting into a scrap of mirror propped against the pillar to catch the light. No, Vimes realized, not propped. Supported, in fact. By a rat. It was a large rat, with red eyes.
    The Patrician nodded to him without apparent surprise.
    “Oh,” he said. “Vimes, isn’t it? I heard you were on the way down. Jolly good. You had better tell the kitchen staff—” and here Vimes realized that the man was speaking to the rat—“that there will be two for lunch. Would you like a beer, Vimes?”
    “What?” said Vimes.
    “I imagine you would. Pot luck, though, I am afraid. Skrp’s people are bright enough, but they seem to