Guards! Guards! (Discworld 8)

Errol was running out of energy. The stubby wings were indeed incapable of real flight, and he was remaining airborne solely by flapping madly, like a chicken. The great talons swished through the air. One of them caught one of the plaza's fountains, and demolished it.

The next one swatted Errol neatly.

He shot over Vimes's head in a straight rising line, hit a roof behind him, and slid down it.

“You've got to catch him!” shouted Lady Vimes. “You must! It's vital!”

Vimes stared at her, and then dived forward as Errol's pear-shaped body slithered over the edge of the roof and dropped. He was surprisingly heavy.

“Thank goodness,” said Lady Ramkin, struggling to her feet.' 'They explode so easily, you know. It could have been very dangerous."

They remembered the other dragon. It wasn't the exploding sort. It was the killing-people kind. They turned, slowly.

The creature loomed over them, sniffed and then, as if they were of no importance at all, turned away. It sprang ponderously into the air and, with one slow flap of its wings, began to scull leisurely away down the plaza and up and into the mists that were rolling over the city.

Vimes was currently more concerned with the smaller dragon in his hands. Its stomach was rumbling alarmingly. He wished he'd paid more attention to the book on dragons. Was a stomach noise like this a sign they were about to explode, or was the point you had to watch out for the point when the rumbling stopped?

“We've got to follow it!” said Lady Ramkin. “What happened to the carriage?”

Vimes waved a hand vaguely in the direction that, as far as he could tell, the horses had take in their panic.

Enrol sneezed a cloud of warm gas that smelled worse than something walled up in a cellar, pawed the air weakly, licked Vimes's face with a tongue like a hot cheese-grater, struggled out of his arms and trotted away.

“ Where's he off to?” boomed Lady Ramkin, emerging from the mists dragging the horses behind her. They didn't want to come, their hooves were scraping up sparks, but they were fighting a losing battle.

“He's still trying to challenge it!” said Vines. “You'd think he'd give in, wouldn't you?”

“They fight like blazes,” said Lady Ramkin, as he climbed on to the coach. “It's a matter of making your opponent explode, you see.”

“I thought, in Nature, the defeated animal just rolls on its back hi submission and that's the end of it,” said Vimes, as they clattered after the disappearing swamp dragon.

“Wouldn't work with dragons,” said Lady Ramkin. “Some daft creature rolls on its back, you disembowel it. That's how they look at it. Almost human, really.”

...

The clouds were clustered thickly over Ankh-Morpork. Above them, the slow golden sunlight of the Disc-world unrolled.

The dragon sparkled in the dawn as it trod the air joyously, doing impossible turns and rolls for the sheer delight of it. Then it remembered the business of the day.

They'd had the presumption to summon it ...

Below it, the rank wandered from side to side up the Street of Small Gods. Despite the thick fog it was beginning to get busy.

“What d'you call them things, like thin stairs?” said Sergeant Colon.

“Ladders,” said Carrot.

“Lot of 'em about,” said Nobby. He mooched over to the nearest one, and kicked it.

“Oi!” A figure struggled down, half buried in a string of flags.

“What's going on?” said Nobby.

The flag bearer looked him up and down.

“Who wants to know, tiddler?” he said.

“Excuse me, we do,” said Carrot, looming out of the fog like an iceberg. The man gave a sickly grin.