Guards! Guards!

rubbed.”
    Vimes made surreptitiously vicious jerking motions to dislodge the old dragon. It blinked mournfully at him with rheumy eyes and rolled back the corner of its mouth, exposing a picket fence of soot-blackened teeth.
    “Just push him off if he’s a nuisance,” said Lady Ramkin cheerfully. “Now then, what was it you were asking?”
    “I was wondering how big swamp dragons grow?” said Vimes, trying to shift position. There was a faint growling noise.
    “You came all the way up here to ask me that? Well…I seem to recall Gayheart Talonthrust of Ankh stood fourteen thumbs high, toe to matlock,” mused Lady Ramkin.
    “Er…”
    “About three foot six inches,” she added kindly.
    “No bigger than that?” said Vimes hopefully. In his lap the old dragon began to snore gently.
    “Golly, no. He was a bit of a freak, actually. Mostly they don’t get much bigger than eight thumbs.”
    Captain Vimes’s lips moved in hurried calculation. “Two feet?” he ventured.
    “Well done. That’s the cobbs, of course. The hens are a bit smaller.”
    Captain Vimes wasn’t going to give in. “A cobb would be a male dragon?” he said.
    “Only after the age of two years,” said Lady Ramkin triumphantly. “Up to the age of eight months he’s a pewmet, then he’s a cock until fourteen months, and then he’s a snood—”
    Captain Vimes sat entranced, eating the horrible cake, britches gradually dissolving, as the stream of information flooded over him; how the males fought with flame but in the laying season only the hens 1 breathed fire, from the combustion of complex intestinal gases, to incubate the eggs which needed such a fierce temperature, while the males gathered firewood; a group of swamp dragons was a slump or an embarrassment ; a female was capable of laying up to three clutches of four eggs every year, most of which were trodden on by absent-minded males; and that dragons of both sexes were vaguely uninterested in one another, and indeed everything except firewood, except for about once every two months when they became as single-minded as a buzzsaw.
    He was helpless to prevent himself being taken out to the kennels at the back, outfitted from neck to ankle in leather armor faced with steel plates, and ushered into the long low building where the whistling had come from.
    The temperature was terrible, but not as bad as the cocktail of smells. He staggered aimlessly from one metal-lined pen to another, while pear-shaped, squeaking little horrors with red eyes were introduced as “Moonpenny Duchess Marchpaine, who’s gravid at the moment” and “Moonmist Talonthrust II, who was Best of Breed at Pseudopolis last year.” Jets of pale green flame played across his knees.
    Many of the stalls had rosettes and certificates pinned over them.
    “And this one, I’m afraid, is Goodboy Bindle Featherstone of Quirm,” said Lady Ramkin relentlessly.
    Vimes stared groggily over the charred barrier at the small creature curled up in the middle of the floor. It bore about the same resemblance to the rest of them as Nobby did to the average human being. Something in its ancestry had given it a pair of eyebrows that were about the same size as its stubby wings, which could never have supported it in the air. Its head was the wrong shape, like an anteater. It had nostrils like jet intakes. If it ever managed to get airborne the things would have the drag of twin parachutes.
    It was also turning on Captain Vimes the most silently intelligent look he’d ever had from any animal, including Corporal Nobbs.
    “It happens,” said Lady Ramkin sadly. “It’s all down to genes, you know.”
    “It is?” said Vimes. Somehow, the creature seemed to be concentrating all the power its siblings wasted in flame and noise into a stare like a thermic lance. He couldn’t help remembering how much he’d wanted a puppy when he was a little boy. Mind you, they’d been starving—anything with meat on it would have done.
    He heard the dragon lady say, “One tries to breed for a good flame, depth of scale, correct color and so on. One just has to put up with the occasional total whittle.”
    The little dragon turned on Vimes a gaze that would be guaranteed to win it the award for Dragon the Judges would Most Like to Take Home and Use as A Portable Gas Lighter.
    Total whittle, Vimes thought. He wasn’t sure of the precise meaning of the word, but he could hazard a shrewd guess. It sounded like whatever it was you had