Guards! Guards! (Discworld 8)

“Oh, come on!” said Sergeant Colon.

“No, seriously. What's the alternative?”

“A human being, for a start!”

“Please yourself,” said the little man primly. “But I reckon one person a month is pretty good compared to some rulers we've had. Anyone remember Nersh the Lunatic? Or Giggling Lord Smince and his Laugh-A-Minute Dungeon?”

There was a certain amount of mumbling of the “he's got a point” variety.

“But they got overthrown!” said Colon.

“No they didn't. They were assassinated.”

“Same thing,” said Colon. "I mean, no-one's going to assassinate the dragon. It'd take more than a dark night and a sharp knife to see it off, I know that.''

I can see what the captain means, he thought. No wonder he always has a drink after he thinks about things. We always beat ourselves before we even start. Give any Ankh-Morpork man a big stick and he'll end up clubbing himself to death.

“Look here, you mealy-mouthed little twerp,” said the first speaker, picking up the little one by his collar and curling his free hand into a fist, “I happen to have three daughters, and I happen to not want any of them et, thank you very much.”

“Yes, and the people united . . . will . . . never .. .be ...”

Colon's voice faltered. He realised that the rest of the crowd were all staring upward.

The bugger, he thought, as rationality began to drain away. It must have flannel feet.

The dragon shifted its position on the ridge of the nearest house, flapped its wings once or twice, yawned, and then stretched its neck down into the street.

The man blessed with daughters stood, with his fist upraised, in the centre of a rapidly expanding circle of bare cobbles. The little man wriggled out of his frozen grasp and darted into the shadows.

It suddenly seemed that no man in the entire world was so lonely and without friends.

“I see,” he said quietly. He scowled up at the inquisitive reptile. In fact it didn't seem particularly belligerent. It was looking at him with something approaching interest.

“I don't care!” he shouted, his voice echoing from wall to wall in the silence. “We defy you! If you kill me, you might as well kill all of us!”

There was some uneasy shuffling of feet amongst those sections of the crowd who didn't feel that this was absolutely axiomatic.

“We can resist you, you know!” growled the man. “Can't we, everyone. What was that slogan about being united, Sergeant?”

“Er,” said Colon, feeling his spine turn to ice.

“I warn you, dragon, the human spirit is-”

They never found out what it was, or at least what he thought it was, although possibly in the dark hours of a sleepless night some of them might have remembered the subsequent events and formed a pretty good and gut-churning insight, to whit, that one of the things sometimes forgotten about the human spirit is that while it is, in the right conditions, noble and brave and wonderful, it is also, when you get right down to it, only human.

The dragon flame caught him full on the chest. For a moment he was visible as a white-hot outline before the neat, black remains spiralled down into a little puddle of melting cobbles.

The flame vanished.

The crowd stood like statues, not knowing if it was staying put or running that would attract more attention.

The dragon stared down, curious to see what they were going to do next.

Colon felt that, as the only civic official present, it was up to him to take charge of the situation. He coughed.

“Right, then,” he said, trying to keep the squeak out of his voice. “If you would just move along there, ladies and gentlemen. Move along, now. Move along. Let's be having you, please.”

He waved his arms in a vague gesture of authority as the people shuffled nervously away. Out of the corner of his eye he saw red flames behind the rooftops, and sparks spiralling in the sky.