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 grey 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 round 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, realising 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 realised 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 backwards 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, ploughed 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, second-hand 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.