Guards! Guards!

was how you got to be a power in the land, he thought. You never cared a toss about whatever anyone else thought and you were never, ever, uncertain about anything.
    He padded back to the house. A door was open. It led into a large but dark and musty hall. Up in the gloom the heads of dead animals haunted the walls. The Ramkins seemed to have endangered more species than an ice age.
    Vimes wandered aimlessly through another mahogany archway.
    It was a dining room, containing the kind of table where the people at the other end are in a different time zone. One end had been colonized by silver candlesticks.
    It was laid for two. A battery of cutlery flanked each plate. Antique wineglasses sparkled in the candlelight.
    A terrible premonition took hold of Vimes at the same moment as a gust of Captivation , the most expensive perfume available anywhere in Ankh-Morpork blew past him.
    “Ah, Captain. So nice of you to come.”
    Vimes turned around slowly, without his feet appearing to move.
    Lady Ramkin stood there, magnificently.
    Vimes was vaguely aware of a brilliant blue dress that sparkled in the candlelight, a mass of hair the color of chestnuts, a slightly anxious face that suggested that a whole battalion of skilled painters and decorators had only just dismantled their scaffolding and gone home, and a faint creaking that said underneath it all mere corsetry was being subjected to the kind of tensions more usually found in the heart of large stars.
    “I, er,” he said. “If you, er. If you’d said, er. I’d, er. Dress more suitable, er. Extremely, er. Very. Er.”
    She bore down upon him like a glittering siege engine.
    In a sort of dream he allowed himself to be ushered to a seat. He must have eaten, because servants appeared out of nowhere with things stuffed with other things, and came back later and took the plates away. The butler reanimated occasionally to fill glass after glass with strange wines. The heat from the candles was enough to cook by. And all the time Lady Ramkin talked in a bright and brittle way—about the size of the house, the responsibilities of a huge estate, the feeling that it was time to take One’s Position in Society More Seriously, while the setting sun filled the room with red and Vimes’s head began to spin.
    Society, he managed to think, didn’t know what was going to hit it. Dragons weren’t mentioned once, although after a while something under the table put its head on Vimes’s knee and dribbled.
    Vimes found it impossible to contribute to the conversation. He felt outflanked, beleaguered. He made one sally, hoping maybe to reach high ground from which to flee into exile.
    “Where do you think they’ve gone?” he said.
    “Where what?” said Lady Ramkin, temporarily halted.
    “The dragons. You know. Errol and his wi–female.”
    “Oh, somewhere isolated and rocky, I should imagine,” said Lady Ramkin. “Favorite country for dragons.”
    “But it— she’s a magical animal,” said Vimes. “What’ll happen when the magic goes away?”
    Lady Ramkin gave him a shy smile.
    “Most people seem to manage,” she said.
    She reached across the table and touched his hand.
    “Your men think you need looking after,” she said meekly.
    “Oh. Do they?” said Vimes.
    “Sergeant Colon said he thought we’d get along like a maison en Flambé .”
    “Oh. Did he?”
    “And he said something else,” she said. “What was it, now? Oh, yes: ‘It’s a million to one chance,’” said Lady Ramkin, “I think he said, ‘but it might just work.’”
    She smiled at him.
    And then it arose and struck Vimes that, in her own special category, she was quite beautiful; this was the category of all the women, in his entire life, who had ever thought he was worth smiling at. She couldn’t do worse, but then, he couldn’t do better. So maybe it balanced out. She wasn’t getting any younger but then, who was? And she had style and money and common-sense and self-assurance and all the things that he didn’t, and she had opened her heart, and if you let her she could engulf you; the woman was a city.
    And eventually, under siege, you did what Ankh-Morpork had always done—unbar the gates, let the conquerors in, and make them your own.
    How did you start? She seemed to be expecting something.
    He shrugged, and picked up his wine glass and sought for a phrase. One crept into his wildly resonating mind.
    “Here’s looking at you, kid,” he said.

    The gongs of various