Guards! Guards!

ahead, the pilot flames of its nostrils streamed behind it, the sound of its flight panned across the sky.

    Colon’s hands shook. The dragon seemed to be aiming at his throat, and it was moving too fast, far too fast…
    “This is it!” said Carrot. He glanced toward the Hub, in case any gods had forgotten what they were there for, and added, speaking slowly and distinctly, “It’s a million-to-one-chance, but it might just work!”
    “Fire the bloody thing!” screamed Nobby.
    “Picking my spot, lad, picking my spot,” quavered Colon. “Don’t you worry, lads, I told you this is my lucky arrow. First-class arrow, this arrow, had it since I was a lad, you’d be amazed at the things I shot at with this, don’t you worry.”
    He paused, as the nightmare bore down on him on wings of terror.
    “Er, Carrot?” he said meekly.
    “Yes, Sarge?”
    “Did your old grandad ever say what a voonerable spot looks like?”
    And then the dragon wasn’t approaching anymore, it was there, passing a few feet overhead, a streaming mosaic of scales and noise, filling the entire sky.
    Colon fired.
    They watched the arrow rise straight and true.

    Vimes half-ran, half-staggered over the damp cobbles, out of breath and out of time.
    It can’t be like this, he thought wildly. The hero always cuts it fine, but he always gets there just in the nick of time. Only the nick of time was probably five minutes ago.
    And I’m not a hero. I’m out of condition, and I need a drink, and I get a handful of dollars a month without plumes allowance. That’s not hero’s pay. Heroes get kingdoms and princesses, and they take regular exercise, and when they smile the light glints off their teeth, ting . The bastards.
    Sweat stung his eyes. The rush of adrenalin that had carried him out of the palace had spent itself, and was now exacting its inevitable toll.
    He stumbled to a halt, and grabbed a wall to keep him upright while he gasped for air. And thus he saw the figures on the rooftop.
    Oh, no! he thought. They’re not heroes either! What do they think they’re playing at?

    It was a million-to-one chance. And who was to say that, somewhere in the millions of other possible universes, it might not have worked?
    That was the sort of thing the gods really liked. But Chance, who sometimes can overrule even the gods, has 999,999 casting votes.
    In this universe, for example, the arrow bounced off a scale and clattered away into oblivion.
    Colon stared as the dragon’s pointed tail passed overhead.
    “It…missed…” he mouthed.
    “But it couldn’t of missed!” He stared red-eyed at the other two. “It was a sodding last desperate million-to-one chance!”
    The dragon twisted its wings, swung its huge bulk around on a pivot of air, and bore down on the roof.
    Carrot grabbed Nobby around the waist and laid a hand on Colon’s shoulder.
    The sergeant was weeping with rage and frustration.
    “Million-to-bloody-one last desperate bloody chance!”
    “Sarge—”
    The dragon flamed.
    It was a beautifully controlled line of plasma. It went through the roof like butter.
    It cut through stairways.
    It crackled into ancient timbers and made them twist like paper. It sliced into pipes.
    It punched through floor after floor like the fist of an angry god and, eventually, reached the big copper vat containing a thousand gallons of freshly-made mature whiskey-type spirit.
    It burned into that, too.
    Fortunately, the chances of anyone surviving the ensuing explosion were exactly a million-to-one.

    The fireball rose like a—well, a rose. A huge orange rose, streaked with yellow. It took the roof with it and wrapped it around the astonished dragon, lifting it high into the air in a boiling cloud of broken timber and bits of piping.
    The crowd watched in bemusement as the superhot blast flung it into the sky and barely noticed Vimes as he pushed his way, wheezing and crying, through the press of bodies.
    He shouldered past a row of palace guards and shambled as fast as he could across the flagstones. No one was paying him much attention at the moment.
    He stopped.
    It wasn’t a rock, because Ankh-Morpork was on loam. It was just some huge remnant of mortared masonry, probably thousands of years old, from somewhere in the city foundations. Ankh-Morpork was so old now that what it was built on, by and large, was Ankh-Morpork.
    It had been dragged into the center of the plaza, and Lady Sybil Ramkin had been chained to it. She appeared to be