Wonse broke into a run. Vimes wondered what it felt like, running away from something like that, expecting any minute your backbone to reach, very briefly, a temperature somewhere beyond the vaporisation point of iron. He could guess.
Wonse made it halfway across the square before the dragon darted forward with surprising agility for such a bulk and snatched him up. The talon swept on upward until the struggling figure was being held a few feet from the dragon's face.
It appeared to examine him for some time, turning him this way and that. Then, moving on its three free legs and flapping its wings occasionally to help with its balance, it trotted away across the plaza and headed towards the-what once had been the Patrician's palace. To what once had been the king's palace, too.
It ignored the frightened spectators silently pressing themselves against the walls. The arched gateway was shouldered aside with depressing ease. The doors themselves, tall and iron-bound and solid, lasted a surprising ten seconds before collapsing into a heap of glowing ash.
The dragon stepped through.
Lady Ramkin turned in astonishment. Vimes had started to laugh.
There was a manic edge to it and there were tears in his eyes, but it was still laughter. He laughed and laughed until he slid gently down the edge of the fountain, his legs splaying out in front of him.
“Hooray, hooray, hooray!” he giggled, almost choking.
“What on earth d'you mean?” Lady Ramkin demanded.
“Put out more flags! Blow the cymbals, roast the tocsin! We've crowned it! We've got a king after all! What ho!”
“Have you been drinking?” she snapped.
“Not yet!” sniggered Vimes. “Not yet! But I will be!”
He laughed on, knowing that when he stopped black depression was going to drop on him like a lead souffle. But he could see the future stretching out ahead of them . . .
. . . after all, it was definitely noble. And it didn't carry money, and it couldn't answer back. It could certainly do something for the inner cities, too. Like torching them to the bedrock.
We'll really do it, he thought. That's the Ankh-Morpork way. If you can't beat it or corrupt it, you pretend it was your idea in the first place.
Vivat Draco.
He became aware that the small child had wandered up again. It waved its flag gently at him and said, “Can I shout hurrah again now?”
“Why not?” said Vimes. “Everyone else will.”
From the palace came the muffled sounds of complicated destruction . . .
...
Errol pulled a broomstick across the floor with his mouth and, whimpering with effort, hauled it upright. After a lot more whimpering and several false starts he managed to winkle the end of it between the wall and the big jar of lamp oil.
He paused for a moment, breathing like a bellows, and pushed.
The jar resisted for a moment, rocked back and forth once or twice, and then fell over and smashed on the flagstones. Crude, very badly-refined oil spread out in a black puddle.
Errol's huge nostrils twitched. Somewhere in the back of his brain unfamiliar synapses clicked like telegraph keys. Great balks of information flooded down the thick nerve cord to his nose, carrying inexplicable information about triple bonds, alkanes and geometric isomerism. However, almost all of it missed the small part of Errol's brain that was used for being Errol.
All he knew was that he was suddenly very, very thirsty.
...
Something major was happening in the palace. There was the occasional crash of a floor or thump of a falling ceiling . . .
In his rat-filled dungeon, behind a door with more locks than a major canal network, the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork lay back and grinned in the darkness.
...
Outside, bonfires flared in the dusk.