“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.
Ankh-Morpork was celebrating. No-one was quite sure why, but they'd worked themselves up for a celebration tonight, barrels had been broached, oxen had been put on spits, one paper hat and celebratory mug had been issued per child, and it seemed a shame to waste all that effort. Anyway, it had been a very interesting day, and the people of Ankh-Morpork set great store by entertainment.
“The way I see it,” said one of the revellers, halfway through a huge greasy lump of half-raw meat, “a dragon as king mightn't be a bad idea. When you think it through, is what I mean.”
“It definitely looked very gracious,” said the woman to his right, as if testing the idea. “Sort of, well, sleek. Nice and smart. Not scruffy. Takes a bit of a pride in itself.'' She glared at some of the younger revellers further down the table. ”The trouble with people today is they don't take pride in themselves."
“And there's foreign policy, of course,” said a third, helping himself to a rib. “When you come to think about it.”
“What d'you mean?”
“Diplomacy,” said the rib-eater, flatly.
They thought about it. And then you could see them turning the idea around and thinking about it the other way, in a polite effort to see what the hell he was getting at.