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.