Guards! Guards!

organize yet another bucket chain from the river to douse the fires.
    Then people started to move.
    From the air Ankh-Morpork must have looked like a disturbed anthill, with streams of dark figures flowing toward the wreck of the dragon.
    Most of them had some kind of weapon.
    Many of them had spears.
    Some of them had swords.
    All of them had one aim in mind.
    “You know what?” said Vimes aloud. “This is going to be the world’s first democratically killed dragon. One man, one stab.”
    “Then you’ve got to stop them. You can’t let them kill it!” said Lady Ramkin.
    Vimes blinked at her.
    “Pardon?” he said.
    “It’s wounded!”
    “Lady, that was the intention, wasn’t it? Anyway, it’s only stunned,” said Vimes.
    “I mean you can’t let them kill it like this ,” said Lady Ramkin insistently. “Poor thing!”
    “What do you want to do, then?” demanded Vimes, his temper unravelling. “Give it a strengthening dose of tar oil and a nice comfy basket in front of the stove?”
    “It’s butchery!”
    “Suits me fine!”
    “But it’s a dragon! It’s just doing what a dragon does! It never would have come here if people had left it alone!”
    Vimes thought: it was about to eat her, and she can still think like this. He hesitated. Perhaps that did give you the right to an opinion…
    Sergeant Colon sidled up as they glared, white-faced, at one another, and hopped desperately from one squelching foot to the other.
    “You better come at once, Captain,” he said. “It’s going to be bloody murder!”
    Vimes waved a hand at him. “As far as I’m concerned,” he mumbled, avoiding Sybil Ramkin’s glare, “it’s got it coming to it.”
    “It’s not that,” said Colon. “It’s Carrot. He’s arrested the dragon.”
    Vimes paused.
    “What do you mean, arrested ?” he said. “You don’t mean what I think you mean, do you?”
    “Could be, sir,” said Colon uncertainly. “Could be. He was up on the rubble like a shot, sir, grabbed it by a wing and said ‘You’re nicked , chummy,’ sir. Couldn’t believe it, sir. Sir, the thing is…”
    “Well?”
    The sergeant hopped from one foot to the other. “You know you said prisoners weren’t to be molested, sir…”

    It was quite a large and heavy roof timber and it scythed quite slowly through the air, but when it hit people they rolled backward and stayed hit.
    “Now look ,” said Carrot, hauling it in and pushing back his helmet, “I don’t want to have to tell anyone again, right?”
    Vimes shouldered his way through the dense crowd, staring at the bulky figure atop the mound of rubble and dragon. Carrot turned slowly, the roof beam held like a staff. His gaze was like a lighthouse beam. Where it fell, the crowd lowered their weapons and looked merely sullen and uncomfortable. “I must warn you,” Carrot went on, “that interfering with an officer in the execution of his duty is a serious offense. And I shall come down like a ton of bricks on the very next person who throws a stone.”
    A stone bounced off the back of his helmet. There was a barrage of jeers.
    “Let us at it!”
    “That’s right!”
    “We don’t want guards ordering us about!”
    “Quis custodiet custard?”
    “Yeah? Right!”
    Vimes pulled the sergeant toward him. “Go and organize some rope. Lots of rope. As thick as possible. I suppose we can—oh, tie its wings together, maybe, and bind up its mouth so it can’t flame.”
    Colon peered at him.
    “Are you serious, sir? We’re really going to arrest it?”
    “Do it!”
    It’s been arrested, he thought, as he pushed his way forward. Personally I would have preferred it to drop in the sea, but it’s been arrested and now we’ve got to deal with it or let it go free.
    He felt his own feelings about the bloody thing evaporate in the face of the mob. What could you do with it? Give it a fair trial, he thought, and then execute it. Not kill it. That’s what heroes do out in the wilderness. You can’t think like that in cities. Or rather, you can , but if you’re going to then you might as well burn the whole place down right now and start again. You ought to do it…well, by the book.
    That’s it. We tried everything else. Now we might as well try and do it by the book.
    Anyway, he added mentally, that’s a city guard up there. We’ve got to stick together. Nobody else will have anything to do with us.
    A burly figure in front of him drew back an arm with a halfbrick in it.
    “Throw