Guards! Guards! (31 page)

“What’s the matter, man?”

“You, er, want us to attack him?” said the guard miserably. Thick though the palace guard were, they were as aware as everyone else of the conventions, and when guards are summoned to deal with one man in overheated circumstances it’s not a good time for them. The bugger’s bound to be heroic, he was thinking. This guard was not looking forward to a future in which he was dead.

“Of course, you idiot!”

“But, er, there’s only one of him,” said the guard captain.

“And he’s smilin’,” said a man behind him.

“Prob’ly goin’ to swing on the chandeliers any minute,” said one of his colleagues. “And kick over the table, and that.”

“He’s not even armed!” shrieked Wonse.

“Worst kind, that,” said one of the guards, with deep stoicism. “They leap up, see, and grab one of the ornamental swords behind the shield over the fireplace.”

“Yeah,” said another, suspiciously. “And then they chucks a chair at you.”

“There’s no fireplace! There’s no sword! There’s only him! Now
take
him!” screamed Wonse.

A couple of guards grabbed Vimes tentatively by the shoulders.

“You’re not going to do anything heroic, are you?” whispered one of them.

“Wouldn’t know where to start,” he said.

“Oh. Right.”

As Vimes was hauled away he heard Wonse breaking into insane laughter. They always did, your gloaters.

But he was correct about one thing. Vimes didn’t have a plan. He hadn’t thought much about what was going to happen next. He’d been a fool, he told himself, to think that you just had a confrontation and that was the end of it.

He also wondered what the other task was.

The palace guards said nothing, but stared straight ahead and marched him down, across the ruined hall, and through the wreckage of another corridor to an ominous door. They opened it, threw him in, and marched away.

And no one, absolutely no one, noticed the thin, leaf-like thing that floated gently down from the shadows of the roof, tumbling over and over in the air like a sycamore seed, before landing in the tangled gewgaws of the hoard.

It was a peanut shell.

It was the silence that awoke Lady Ramkin. Her bedroom looked out over the dragon pens, and she was used to sleeping to the susurration of rustling scales, the occasional roar of a dragon flaming in its sleep, and the keening of the gravid females. Absence of any sound at all was like an alarm clock.

She had cried a bit before going to sleep, but not much, because it was no use being soppy and letting the side down. She lit the lamp, pulled on her rubber boots, grabbed the stick which might be all that stood between her and theoretical loss of virtue, and hurried down through the shadowy house. As she crossed the damp lawn to the kennels she was vaguely aware that something was happening down in the city, but dismissed it as not currently worth thinking about. Dragons were more important.

She pushed open the door.

Well, they were still there. The familiar stink of swamp dragons, half pond mud and half chemical explosion, gusted out into the night.

Each dragon was balancing on its hind legs in the center of its pen, neck arched, staring with ferocious intensity at the roof.

“Oh,” she said. “Flying around up there again, is it? Showing off. Don’t you worry about it, children. Mummy’s here.”

She put the lamp on a high shelf and stamped along to Errol’s pen.

“Well now, my lad,” she began, and stopped.

Errol was stretched out on his side. A thin plume of gray smoke was drifting from his mouth, and his stomach expanded and contracted like a bellows. And his skin from the neck down was an almost pure white.

“I think if I ever rewrite
Diseases
you’ll get a whole chapter all to yourself,” she said quietly, and unbolted the gate of the pen. “Let’s see if that nasty temperature has gone down, shall we?”

She reached out to stroke his skin and gasped. She pulled the hand back hurriedly and watched the blisters form on her fingertips.

Errol was so cold he burned.

As she stared at him the small around marks that her warmth had melted filmed over with frozen air.

Lady Ramkin sat back on her haunches.

“Just what kind of dragon
are
you—?” she began.

There was the distant sound of a knock at the front door of the house. She hesitated for a moment, then blew out the lamp, crept heavily along the length of the kennels and pulled aside the scrap of sacking over the window.

The first light of dawn showed her the silhouette of a guardsman on her doorstep, the plumes of his helmet blowing in the breeze.

She bit her lip in panic, scuttled back to the door, fled across the lawn and dived into the house, taking the stairs three at a time.

“Stupid, stupid,” she muttered, realizing the lamp was back downstairs. But no time for that. By the time she went and got it, Vimes might have gone away.

Working by feel and memory in the gloom she found her best wig and rammed it on her head. Somewhere among the ointments and dragon remedies on her dressing table was something called, as far as she could remember,
Dew of the Night
or some such unsuitable name, a present long ago from a thoughtless nephew. She tried several bottles before she found something that, by the smell of it, was probably the one. Even to a nose which had long ago shut down most of its sensory apparatus in the face of the overpoweringness of dragons, it seemed, well, more
potent
than she remembered. But apparently men liked that kind of thing. Or so she had read. Damn nonsense, really. She twitched the top hem of her suddenly far too sensible nightshirt into a position which, she hoped, revealed without actually exposing, and hurried back down the stairs.

She stopped in front of the door, took a deep breath, twisted the handle and realized even as she pulled the door open that she should have taken the rubber boots off—

“Why, Captain,” she said winsomely, “this
is
a
who the hell are you?
”

The head of the palace guard took several steps backward and, because he was of peasant stock, made a few surreptitious signs to ward off evil spirits. They clearly didn’t work. When he opened his eyes again the thing was still there, still bristling with rage, still reeking of something sickly and fermented, still crowned with a skewed mass of curls, still looming behind a quivering bosom that made the roof of his mouth go dry—

He’d heard about these sort of things. Harpies, they were called. What had it done with Lady Ramkin?

The sight of the rubber boots had him confused, though. Legends about harpies were short on references to rubber boots.

“Out with it, fellow,” Lady Ramkin boomed, hitching up her nightie to a more respectable neckline. “Don’t just stand there opening and shutting your mouth. What d’you want?”

“Lady Sybil Ramkin?” said the guard, not in the polite way of someone seeking mere confirmation but in the incredulous tones of someone who found it very hard to believe the answer could be “yes.”

“Use your eyes, young man. Who d’you think I am?”

The guard pulled himself together.

“Only I’ve got a summons for Lady Sybil Ramkin,” he said uncertainly.

Her voice was withering. “What do you mean, a summons?”

“To attend upon the palace, you see.”

“I can’t imagine why that is necessary at this time in the morning,” she said, and made to slam the door. It wouldn’t shut, though, because of the sword point jammed into it at the last moment.

“If you
don’t
come,” said the guard, “I have been ordered to take steps.”

The door shot back and her face pressed against his, almost knocking him unconscious with the scent of rotting rose petals.

“If you think you’ll lay a hand on me—” she began.

The guard’s glance darted sideways, just for a moment, to the dragon kennels. Sybil Ramkin’s face went pale.

“You wouldn’t!” she hissed.

He swallowed. Fearsome though she was, she was only human. She could only bite your head off metaphorically. There were, he told himself, far worse things than Lady Ramkin although, admittedly, they weren’t three inches from his nose at this point in time.

“Take steps,” he repeated, in a croak.

She straightened up, and eyed the row of guards behind him.

“I see,” she said coldly. “That’s the way, is it? Six of you to fetch one feeble woman. Very well. You will, of course, allow me to fetch a coat. It is somewhat chilly.”

She slammed the door.

The palace guards stamped their feet in the cold and tried not to look at one another. This obviously wasn’t the way you went around arresting people. They weren’t
allowed
to keep you waiting on the doorstep, this wasn’t the way the world was supposed to work. On the other hand, the only alternative was to go in there and drag her out, and it wasn’t one anyone could summon any enthusiasm for. Besides, the guard captain wasn’t sure he had enough men to drag Lady Ramkin anywhere. You’d need teams of thousands, with log rollers.

The door creaked open again, revealing only the musty darkness of the hall within.

“Right, men—” said the captain, uneasily.

Lady Ramkin appeared. He got a brief, blurred vision of her bounding through the doorway, screaming, and it might well have been the last thing he remembered if a guard hadn’t had the presence of mind to trip her up as she hurtled down the steps. She plunged forward, cursing, plowed into the overgrown lawn, hit her head on a crumbling statue of an antique Ramkin, and slid to a halt.

The double-handed broadsword she had been holding landed beside her, bolt upright, and vibrated to a standstill.

After a while one of the guards crept forward cautiously and tested the blade with his finger.

“Bloody hell,” he said, in a voice of mixed horror and respect. “And the dragon wants to eat
her
?”

“Fits the bill,” said the captain. “She’s got to be the highest-born lady in the city. I don’t know about maiden,” he added, “and right at this minute I’m not going to speculate. Someone go and fetch a cart.”

He fingered his ear, which had been nicked by the tip of the sword. He was not, by nature, an unkind man, but at this moment he was certain that he would prefer the thickness of a dragon’s hide between himself and Sybil Ramkin when she woke up.

“Weren’t we supposed to kill her pet dragons, sir?” said another guard. “I thought Mr. Wonse said something about killing all the dragons.”

“That was just a threat we were supposed to make,” said the captain.

The guard’s brow furrowed. “You sure, sir? I thought—”

The captain had had enough of this. Screaming harpies and broadswords making a noise like tearing silk in the air beside him had severely ruined his capacity for seeing the other fellow’s point of view.

“Oh, you
thought
, did you?” he growled. “A thinker, are you? Do you think you’d be suitable for another posting, then?
City
guard, maybe? They’re full of thinkers, they are.”

There was an uncomfortable titter from the rest of the guards.

“If you’d
thought
,” added the captain sarcastically, “you’d have thought that the king is hardly going to want other dragons dead, is he? They’re probably distant relatives or something. I mean, it wouldn’t want us to go around killing its own kind, would it?”

“Well, sir,
people
do, sir,” said the guard sulkily.

“Ah, well,” said the captain. “That’s different.” He tapped the side of his helmet meaningfully. “That’s ’cos we’re intelligent.”

Vimes landed in damp straw and also in pitch darkness, although after a while his eyes became accustomed to the gloom and he could make out the walls of the dungeon.

It hadn’t been built for gracious living. It was basically just a space containing all the pillars and arches that supported the palace. At the far end a small grille high on the wall let in a mere suspicion of grubby, secondhand light.

There was another square hole in the floor. It was also barred. The bars were quite rusty, though. It occurred to Vimes that he could probably work them loose eventually, and then all he would have to do was slim down enough to go through a nine-inch hole.

What the dungeon did
not
contain was any rats, scorpions, cockroaches or snakes. It had
once
contained snakes, it was true, because Vimes’s sandals crunched on small, long white skeletons.

He crept cautiously along one damp wall, wondering where the rhythmic scraping sound was coming from. He rounded a squat pillar, and found out.

The Patrician was shaving, squinting into a scrap of mirror propped against the pillar to catch the light. No, Vimes realized, not propped. Supported, in fact. By a rat. It was a large rat, with red eyes.

The Patrician nodded to him without apparent surprise.

“Oh,” he said. “Vimes, isn’t it? I heard you were on the way down. Jolly good. You had better tell the kitchen staff—” and here Vimes realized that the man was speaking to the rat—“that there will be two for lunch. Would you like a beer, Vimes?”

“What?” said Vimes.

“I imagine you would. Pot luck, though, I am afraid. Skrp’s people are bright enough, but they seem to have a bit of a blind spot when it comes to labels on bottles.”

Lord Vetinari patted his face with a towel and dropped it on the floor. A gray shape darted from the shadows and dragged it away down the floor grille.

Then he said, “Very well, Skrp. You may go.” The rat twitched its whiskers at him, leaned the mirror against the wall, and trotted off.

“You’re waited on by
rats
?” said Vimes.

“They help out, you know. They’re not really very efficient, I’m afraid. It’s their paws.”

“But, but, but,” said Vimes. “I mean, how?”

“I suspect Skrp’s people have tunnels that extend into the University,” Lord Vetinari went on. “Although I think they were probably pretty bright to start with.”

At least Vimes understood that bit. It was well known that thaumic radiations affected animals living around the Unseen University campus, sometimes prodding them toward minute analogues of human civilization and even mutating some of them into entirely new and specialized species, such as the .303 bookworm and the wallfish. And, as the man said, rats were quite bright to start with.

“But they’re helping you?” said Vimes.

“Mutual. It’s mutual. Payment for services rendered, you might say,” said the Patrician, sitting down on what Vimes couldn’t help noticing was a small velvet cushion. On a low shelf, so as to be handy, were a notepad and a neat row of books.

“How can you help rats, sir?” he said weakly.

“Advice. I advise them, you know.” The Patrician leaned back. “That’s the trouble with people like Wonse,” he said. “They never know when to stop. Rats, snakes
and
scorpions. It was sheer bedlam in here when I came. The rats were getting the worst of it, too.”

And Vimes thought he was beginning to get the drift.

“You mean you sort of trained them?” he said.

“Advised. Advised. I suppose it’s a knack,” said Lord Vetinari modestly.

Vimes wondered how it was done. Did the rats side with the scorpions against the snakes and then, when the snakes were beaten, invite the scorpions to a celebratory slap-up meal and eat them? Or were individual scorpions hired with large amounts of, oh, whatever it was scorpions ate, to sidle up to selected leading snakes at night and sting them?

He remembered hearing once about a man who, locked up in a cell for years, trained little birds and created a sort of freedom. And he thought of ancient sailors, shorn of the sea by old age and infirmity, who spent their days making big ships in little bottles.

Then he thought of the Patrician, robbed of his city, sitting cross-legged on the gray floor in the dim dungeon and recreating it around him, encouraging in miniature all the little rivalries, power struggles and factions. He thought of him as a somber, brooding statue amid paving stones alive with slinking shadows and sudden, political death. It had probably been easier than ruling Ankh, which had larger vermin who didn’t have to use both hands to carry a knife.