Guards! Guards!

hairs on his neck and told him there had been a crime. It was probably such an odd crime that it didn’t figure anywhere in Carrot’s book, but it had been committed all right. A handful of high-temperature murders was only the start of it. He’d find it, and give it a name.
    Then he stood up, took his leather rain cape from its hook behind the door, and stepped out into the naked city.

    This is where the dragons went.
    They lie…
    Not dead, not asleep. Not waiting, because waiting implies expectation. Possibly the word we’re looking for here is…
    … angry .
    It could remember the feel of real air under its wings, and the sheer pleasure of the flame. There had been empty skies above and an interesting world below, full of strange running creatures. Existence had a different texture there. A better texture.
    And just when it was beginning to enjoy it, it had been crippled, stopped from flaming and whipped back, like some hairy canine mammal.
    The world had been taken away from it.
    In the reptilian synapses of the dragon’s mind the suggestion was kindled that, just possibly, it could get the world back. It had been summoned, and disdainfully banished again. But perhaps there was a trail, a scent, a thread which would lead it to the sky…
    Perhaps there was a pathway of thought itself…
    It recalled a mind. The peevish voice, so full of its own diminutive importance, a mind almost like that of a dragon, but on a tiny, tiny scale.
    Aha .
    It stretched its wings.

    Lady Ramkin made herself a cup of cocoa and listened to the rain gurgling in the pipes outside.
    She slipped off the hated dancing shoes, which even she was prepared to concede were like a pair of pink canoes. But nobbyless obligay , as the funny little sergeant would say, and as the last representative of one of Ankh-Morpork’s oldest families she’d had to go to the victory ball to show willing.
    Lord Vetinari seldom had balls. There was a popular song about it, in fact. But now it was going to be balls all the way.
    She couldn’t stand balls. For sheer enjoyment it wasn’t a patch on mucking out dragons. You knew where you were, mucking out dragons. You didn’t get hot and pink and have to eat silly things on sticks, or wear a dress that made you look like a cloud full of cherubs. Little dragons didn’t give a damn what you looked like so long as there was a feeding bowl in your hands.
    Funny, really. She’d always thought it took weeks, months , to organize a ball. Invitations, decorations, sausages on poles, ghastly chickeny mixture to force into those little pastry cases. But it had all been done in a matter of hours, as if someone had been expecting it. One of the miracles of catering, obviously. She’d even danced with the, for want of a better word, new king, who had said some polite words to her although they had been rather muffled.
    And a coronation tomorrow. You’d have thought it’d take months to sort out.
    She was still musing on that as she mixed the dragons’ late night feed of rock oil and peat, spiked with flowers of sulfur. She didn’t bother to change out of the ballgown but slipped the heavy apron over the top, donned the gloves and helmet, pulled the visor down over her face and ran, clutching the feed buckets, through the driving rain to the shed.
    She knew it as soon as she opened the door. Normally the arrival of food would be greeted with hoots and whistles and brief bursts of flame.
    The dragons, each in its pen, were sitting up in attentive silence and staring up through the roof.
    It was somehow scary. She clanged the buckets together.
    “No need to be afraid, nasty big dragon all gone!” she said brightly. “Get stuck in to this, you people!”
    One or two of them gave her a brief glance, and then went back to their—
    What? They didn’t seem to be frightened. Just very, very attentive. It was like a vigil. They were waiting for something to happen.
    The thunder muttered again.
    A couple of minutes later she was on her way down into the damp city.

    There are some songs which are never sung sober. “Nellie Dean” is one. So is any song beginning “As I was a walking…” In the area around Ankh-Morpork the favored air is “A Wizard’s Staff Has A Knob On The End.”
    The rank were drunk. At least, two out of three of the rank were drunk. Carrot had been persuaded to try a shandy and hadn’t liked it much. He didn’t know all the words, either, and many of the ones he did know he didn’t