Guards! Guards!

valuable, looked the sort of pictures that are hung on bedroom walls because people can’t think of anywhere else to put them. There were also a few amateurish watercolors of dragons. All in all, it had the look about it of a room that is only ever occupied by one person, and has been absentmindedly molded around them over the years, like a suit of clothes with a ceiling.
    It was clearly the room of a woman, but one who had cheerfully and without any silly moping been getting on with her life while all that soppy romance stuff had been happening to other people somewhere else, and been jolly grateful that she had her health.
    Such clothing as was visible had been chosen for sensible hardwearing qualities, possibly by a previous generation by the look of it, rather than its use as light artillery in the war between the sexes. There were bottles and jars neatly arranged on the dressing table, but a certain severity of line suggested that their labels would say things like “Rub on nightly” rather than “Just a dab behind the ears.” You could imagine that the occupant of this room had slept in it all her life and had been called “my little girl” by her father until she was forty.
    There was a big sensible blue dressing gown hanging behind the door. Vimes knew, without even looking, that it would have a rabbit on the pocket.
    In short, it was the room of a woman who never expected that a man would ever see the inside of it.
    The bedside table was piled high with papers. Feeling guilty, but doing it anyway, Vimes squinted at them.
    Dragons was the theme. There were letters from the Cavern Club Exhibitions Committee and the Friendly Flamethrowers League. There were pamphlets and appeals from the Sunshine Sanctuary for Sick Dragons—“Poor little VINNY’s fires were nearly Damped after Five years’ Cruel Use as a Paint-Stripper, but now—” And there were requests for donations, and talks, and things that added up to a heart big enough for the whole world, or at least that part of it that had wings and breathed fire.
    If you let your mind dwell on rooms like this, you could end up being oddly sad and full of a strange, diffuse compassion which would lead you to believe that it might be a good idea to wipe out the whole human race and start again with amoebas.
    Beside the drift of paperwork was a book. Vimes twisted painfully and looked at the spine. It said: Diseases of the Dragon , by Sybil Deidre Olgivanna Ramkin.
    He turned the stiff pages in horrified fascination. They opened into another world, a world of quite stupefying problems. Slab Throat. The Black Tups. Dry Lung. Storge. Staggers, Heaves, Weeps, Stones. It was amazing, he decided after reading a few pages, that a swamp dragon ever survived to see a second sunrise. Even walking across a room must be reckoned a biological triumph.
    The painstakingly-drawn illustrations he looked away from hurriedly. You could only take so much innards.
    There was a knock at the door.
    “I say? Are you decent?” Lady Ramkin boomed cheerfully.
    “Er—”
    “I’ve brought you something jolly nourishing.”
    Somehow Vimes imagined it would be soup. Instead it was a plate stacked high with bacon, fried potatoes and eggs. He could hear his arteries panic just by looking at it.
    “I’ve made a bread pudding, too,” said Lady Ramkin, slightly sheepishly. “I don’t normally cook much, just for myself. You know how it is, catering for one.”
    Vimes thought about the meals at his lodgings. Somehow the meat was always gray, with mysterious tubes in it.
    “Er,” he began, not used to addressing ladies from a recumbent position in their own beds. “Corporal Nobbs tells me—”
    “And what a colorful little man Nobby is!” said Lady Ramkin.
    Vimes wasn’t certain he could cope with this.
    “Colorful?” he said weakly.
    “A real character. We’ve been getting along famously.”
    “You have?”
    “Oh, yes. What a great fund of anecdotes he has.”
    “Oh, yes. He’s got that all right.” It always amazed Vimes how Nobby got along with practically everyone. It must, he’d decided, have something to do with the common denominator. In the entire world of mathematics there could be no denominator as common as Nobby.
    “Er,” he said, and then found he couldn’t leave this strange new byway, “you don’t find his language a bit, er, ripe?”
    “Salty,” corrected Lady Ramkin cheerfully. “You should have heard my father when he was annoyed. Anyway,