Guards! Guards!, page 17
A puzzler, that. Lady Ramkin said that when a swamp dragon exploded there was dragon everywhere. And this one had been a damn great thing. Admittedly its insides must have been an alchemical nightmare, but the citizens of Ankh-Morpork should still have been spending the night shovelling dragon off the streets. No-one seemed to have bothered about this. The purple smoke was quite impressive, though.
———
Errol finished off the coke and started on the fire irons. So far this evening he had eaten three cobblestones, a doorknob, something unidentifiable he’d found in the gutter and, to general astonishment, three of Cut-me-own Throat’s sausages made of genuine pork organs. The crunching of the poker going down mingled with the patter of rain on the windows.
———
Vimes stared at the paper again and then wrote:
Itym: How can Kinges come of noethinge?
He hadn’t even seen the lad close to. He looked personable enough, not exactly a great thinker, but definitely the kind of profile you wouldn’t mind seeing on your small change. Mind you, after killing the dragon he could have been a cross-eyed goblin for all that it mattered. The mob had borne him in triumph to the Patrician’s palace.
Lord Vetinari had been locked up in his own dungeons. He hadn’t put up much fight, apparently. Just smiled at everyone and went quietly.
What a happy coincidence for the city that, just when it needed a champion to kill the dragon, a king came forth.
Vimes turned this thought over for a while. Then he turned it back to front. He picked up the quill and wrote:
Itym: What a happy chance it be, for a lad that would be Kinge, that there be a Draggon to sloe to prove beyond doubt his honey fiddes.
It was a lot better than birthmarks and swords, that was for sure. He twiddled the quill for a while, and then doodled:
Itym: The draggon was not a Mechanical devise, yette surety no wizzard has the power to create a beaste of that mag. magg. maggnyt. Size.
Itym: Whye, in the Pinche, could it not Flame?
Itym: Where did it come from?
Itym: Where did it goe?
The rain pounded harder on the window. The sounds of celebration became distinctly damp, and then faded completely. There was a murmur of thunder.
Vimes underlined goe several times. After further consideration he added two more question marks:??
After staring at the effect for some time he rolled the paper into a ball and threw it into the fireplace, where it was fielded and swallowed by Errol.
There had been a crime. Senses Vimes didn’t know he possessed, ancient policeman’s senses, prickled the 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 nobblyess 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 organise 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 sulphur. 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 favoured 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 understand.
“Oh, I see,” he said eventually. “It’s a sort of humorous play on words, is it?”
“You know,” said Colon wistfully, peering into the thickening mists rolling in off the Ankh, “s’at times like this I wish old—”
“You’re not to say it,” said Nobby, swaying a little. “You agreed, we wouldn’t say nothing, it’s no good talking about it.”
“It was his favourite song,” said Colon sadly. “He was a good light tenor.”
“Now, Sarge—”
“He was a righteous man, our Gaskin,” said Colon.
“We couldn’t of helped it,” said Nobby sulkily.
“We could have,” said Colon. “We could have run faster.”
“What happened, then?” said Carrot.
“He died,” said Nobby, “in the hexecution of his duty.”
“I told him,” said Colon, taking a swig at the bottle they had brought along to see them through the night, “I told him. Slow down, I said. You’ll do yourself a mischief, I said. I don’t know what got into him, running ahead like that.”
“I blame the Thieves’ Guild,” said Nobby. “Allowing people like that on the streets—”
“There was this bloke we saw done a robbery one night,” said Colon miserably. “Right in front of us! And Captain Vimes, he said Come On, and we run, only the point is you shouldn’t run too fast, see. Else you might catch them. Leads to all sorts of problems, catching people—”
“They don’t like it,” said Nobby. There was a mutter of thunder, and a flurry of rain.
“They don’t like it,” agreed Colon. “But Gaskin went and forgot, he ran on, went around the corner and, well, this bloke had a couple of mates waiting—”
“It was his heart really,” said Nobby.
“Well. Anyway. And there he was,” said Colon. “Captain Vimes was very upset about it. You shouldn’t run fast in the Watch, lad,” he said solemnly. “You can be a fast guard or you can be an old guard, but you can’t be a fast old guard. Poor old Gaskin.”
“It didn’t ought to be like that,” said Carrot.
Colon took a pull at the bottle.
“Well, it is,” he said. Rain bounced on his helmet and trickled down his face.
“But it didn’t ought to be,” said Carrot flatly.
“But it is,” said Colon.
———
Someone else in the city was also ill at ease. He was the Librarian.
Sergeant Colon had given him a badge. The Librarian turned it round and round in his big gentle hands, nibbling at it.
It wasn’t that the city suddenly had a king. Orangs are traditionalists, and you couldn’t get more traditional than a king. But they also liked things neat, and things weren’t neat. Or, rather, they were too neat. Truth and reality were never as neat as this. Sudden heirs to ancient thrones didn’t grow on trees, and he should know.
Besides, no-one was looking for his book. That was human priorities for you.
The book was the key to it. He was sure of that. Well, there was one way to find out what was in the book. It was a perilous way, but the Librarian ambled along perilous ways all day.
In the silence of the sleeping library he opened his desk and removed from its deepest recesses a small lantern carefully built to prevent any naked flame being exposed. You couldn’t be too careful with all this paper around…
He also took a bag of peanuts and, after some thought, a large ball of string. He bit off a short length of the string and used it to tie the badge around his neck, like a talisman. Then he tied one end of the ball to the desk and, after a moment’s contemplation, knuckled off between the bookshelves, paying out the string behind him.
Knowledge equals power…
The string was important. After a while the Librarian stopped. He concentrated all his powers of librarianship.
Power equals energy…
People were stupid, sometimes. They thought the Library was a dangerous place because of all the magical books, which was true enough, but what made it really one of the most dangerous places there could ever be was the simple fact that it was a library.
Energy equals matter…
He swung into an avenue of shelving that was apparently a few feet long and walked along it briskly for half an hour.
Matter equals mass.
And mass distorts space. It distorts it into polyfractal L-space.
So, while the Dewey system has its fine points, when you’re setting out to look something up in the multidimensional folds of L-space what you really need is a ball of string.
———
Now the rain was trying hard. It glistened off the flagstones in the Plaza of Broken Moons, littered here and there with torn bunting, flags, broken bottles and the occasional regurgitated supper. There was still plenty of thunder about, and a green, fresh smell in the air. A few shreds of mist from the Ankh hovered over the stones. It would be dawn soon.
Vimes’s footsteps echoed wetly from the surrounding buildings as he picked his way across the plaza. The boy had stood here.
He peered through the mist shreds at the surrounding buildings, getting his bearings. So the dragon had been hovering—he paced forward—here.
“And,” said Vimes, “this is where it was killed.”
He fumbled in his pockets. There were all sorts of things in there—keys, bits of string, corks. His finger closed on a stub end of chalk.
He knelt down. Errol jumped off his shoulder and waddled away to inspect the detritus of the celebration. He always sniffed everything before he ate it, Vimes noticed. It was a bit of a puzzle why he bothered, because he always ate it anyway.
Its head had been about, let’s see, here.
He walked backwards, dragging the chalk over the stones, progressing slowly over the damp, empty square like an ancient worshipper treading a maze. Here a wing, curving away towards a tail which stretched out to here, change hands, now head for the other wing…
When he finished he walked to the centre of the outline and ran his hands over the stones. He realised he was half-expecting them to be warm.
Surely there should be something. Some, oh, he didn’t know, some grease or something, some crispy fried dragon lumps. Errol started eating a broken bottle with every sign of enjoyment. “You know what I think?” said Vimes. “I think it went somewhere.”
Thunder rolled again.
“All right, all right,” muttered Vimes. “It was just a thought. It wasn’t that dramatic.”
Errol stopped in mid-crunch.
Very slowly, as though it was mounted on very smooth, well-oiled bearings, the dragon’s head turned to face upwards.
What it was staring at intently was a patch of empty air. There wasn’t much else you could say about it.
Vimes shivered under his cape. This was daft.
“Look, don’t muck about,” he said, “there’s nothing there.”
Errol started to tremble.
“It’s just the rain,” said Vimes. “Go on, finish your bottle. Nice bottle.”
A thin, worried keening noise broke from the dragon’s mouth.
“I’ll show you,” said Vimes. He cast around and spotted one of Throat’s sausages, cast aside by a hungry reveller who had decided he was never going to be that hungry. He picked it up.
“Look,” he said, and threw it upwards.
He felt sure, watching its trajectory, that it ought to have fallen back to the ground. It shouldn’t have fallen away, as if he’d dropped it neatly into a tunnel in the sky. And the tunnel shouldn’t have been looking back at him.
Vivid purple lightning lashed from the empty air and struck the houses on the near side of the plaza, skittering across the walls for several yards before sinking out with a suddenness that almost denied that it had ever happened at all.
Then it erupted again, this time hitting the rimward wall. The light broke where it hit into a network of searching tendrils spreading across the stones.
The third attempt went upwards, forming an actinic column that eventually rose fifty or sixty feet in the air, appeared to stabilise, and started to spin slowly.
Vimes felt that a comment was called for. He said: “Arrgh.”
As the light revolved it sent out thin zigzag streamers that jittered away across the rooftops, sometimes dipping, sometimes doubling back. Searching.
Errol ran up Vimes’s back in a flurry of claws and fastened himself firmly on his shoulder. The excruciating agony recalled to Vimes that there was something he should be doing. Was it time to scream again? He tried another “Arrgh”. No, probably not.
The air started to smell like burning tin.
Lady Ramkin’s coach rattled into the plaza making a noise like a roulette wheel and pounded straight for Vimes, stopping in a skid that sent it juddering around in a semicircle and forced the horses either to face the other way or plait their legs. A furious vision in padded leather, gauntlets, tiara and thirty yards of damp pink tulle leaned down towards him and screamed: “Come on, you bloody idiot!”
One glove caught him under his unresisting shoulder and hauled him bodily on to the box.
“And stop screaming!” the phantom ordered, focusing generations of natural authority into four syllables. Another shout spurred the horses from a bewildered standing start to a full gallop.
The coach bounced away over the flagstones. An exploratory tendril of flickering light brushed the reins for a moment and then lost interest.
“I suppose you haven’t got any idea what’s happening?” shouted Vimes, against the crackling of the spinning fire.
“Not the foggiest!”
The crawling lines spread like a web over the city, growing fainter with distance. Vimes imagined them creeping through windows and sneaking under doors.
“It looks as though it’s searching for something!” he shouted.
“Then getting away before it finds it is a first-class idea, don’t you think?”
A tongue of fire hit the dark Tower of Art, slid blindly down its ivy-grown flanks, and disappeared through the dome of Unseen University’s Library.
The other lines blinked out.
Lady Ramkin brought the coach to a halt at the far side of the square.
“What does it want the Library for?” she said, frowning.
“Maybe it wants to look something up?”
“Don’t be silly,” she said breezily. “There’s just a lot of books in there. What would a flash of lightning want to read?”
“Something very short?”
“I really think you could try to be a bit more help.”
The line of light exploded into an arc between the Library’s dome and the centre of the plaza and hung in the air, a band of brilliance several feet across.
