Guards! Guards!

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