Guards! Guards! (Discworld 8)

Vimes had completely forgotten die Watch House. “It must have been badly damaged,” he ventured.

“Totally destroyed,” said Lady Ramkin. “Just a patch of melted rock. So I'm letting you have a place in Pseudopolis Yard.”

“Sorry?”

“Oh, my father had property all over the city,” she said. “Quite useless to me, really. So I told my agent to give Sergeant Colon the keys to the old house in Pseudopolis Yard. It'll do it good to be aired.”

“But that area-I mean, there's real cobbles on the streets-the rent alone, I mean, Lord Vetinari won't-”

“Don't you worry about it,” she said, giving him a friendly pat. “Now, you really ought to get some sleep.”

Vimes lay in bed, his mind racing. Pseudopolis Yard was on the Ankh side of the river, in quite a high-rent district. The sight of Nobby or Sergeant Colon walking down the street in daylight would probably have the same effect on the area as the opening of a plague hospital.

He dozed, gliding in and out of a sleep where giant dragons pursued him waving jars of ointment . . .

And awoke to the sound of a mob.

...

Lady Ramkin drawing herself up haughtily was not a sight to forget, although you could try. It was like watching continental drift in reverse as various subcontinents and islands pulled themselves together to form one massive, angry protowoman.

The broken door of the dragon house swung on its hinges. The inmates, already as highly strung as a harp on amphetamines, were going mad. Little gouts of flame burst against the metal plates as they stampeded back and forth in their pens. “Hwhat,” she said, “is the meaning of this?” If a Ramkin had ever been given to introspection she'd have admitted that it wasn't a very original line.

But it was handy. It did the job. The reason that cliches become cliches is that they are the hammers and screwdrivers in the toolbox of communication.

The mob filled the broken doorway. Some of it was waving various sharp implements with the up-and-down motion proper to rioters.

ns was the theme. There were letters from the Cavern Club Exhibitions Committee and the Friendly Flamethrowers League. There were pamphlets and appeals from the Sunshine Sanctuary for Sick Dragons- “Poor little VINNY's fires were nearly Damped after Five years' Cruel Use as a Paint-Stripper, but now-” And there were requests for donations, and talks, and things that added up to a heart big enough for the whole world, or at least that part of it that had wings and breathed fire.

If you let your mind dwell on rooms like this, you could end up being oddly sad and full of a strange, diffuse compassion which would lead you to believe that it might be a good idea to wipe out the whole human race and start again with amoebas.

Beside the drift of paperwork was a book. Vimes twisted painfully and looked at the spine. It said: Diseases of the Dragon, by Sybil Deidre Olgivanna Ramkin.

He turned the stiff pages in horrified fascination. They opened into another world, a world of quite stupefying problems. Slab Throat. The Black Tups. Dry Lung. Storge. Staggers, Heaves, Weeps, Stones. It was amazing, he decided after reading a few pages, that a swamp dragon ever survived to see a second sunrise. Even walking across a room must be reckoned a biological triumph.

The painstakingly-drawn illustrations he looked away from hurriedly. You could only take so much innards.

There was a knock at the door.

“I say? Are you decent?” Lady Ramkin boomed cheerfully.

“Er-”

“I’ve brought you something jolly nourishing.”

Somehow Vimes imagined it would be soup. Instead it was a plate stacked high with bacon, fried potatoes and eggs. He could hear his arteries panic just by looking at it.

“I've made a bread pudding, too,” said Lady Ramkin, slightly sheepishly. “I don't normally cook much, just for myself. You know how it is, catering for one.”

Vimes thought about the meals at his lodgings. Somehow the meat was always grey, with mysterious tubes in it.

“Er,” he began, not used to addressing ladies from a recumbent position in their own beds. “Corporal Nobbs tells me-”

“And what a colourful little man Nobby is!” said Lady Ramkin.

Vimes wasn't certain he could cope with this.

“Colourful?” he said weakly.