Guards! Guards! (Discworld 8)

“This is Lady Ramkin you're referring to?” said Vimes coldly. His ribs were aching really magnificently now.

“Yeah. Big fat party,” said Nobby, unmoved. “Cor, she can't half boss people about! 'Oh, the poor dear man, you must bring him up to my house this instant.' So we did. Best place, too. Everyone's running around down in the city like chickens with their heads cut off.”

“How much damage did it do?”

“Well, after you were out of it the wizards hit it with fireballs. It didn't like that at all. Just seemed to make it stronger and angrier. Took out the University's entire Widdershins wing.”

“And-?”

“That's about it, really. It flamed a few more things, and then it must of flown away in all the smoke.”

' 'No-one saw where it went?''

“If they did, they ain't saying.” Nobby sat back and leered. “Disgusting, really, her livin' in a room like this. She's got pots of money, sarge says, she's got no call livin' in ordinary rooms. What's the good of not wanting to be poor if the rich are allowed to go round livin' in ordinary rooms? Should be marble.” He sniffed. “Anyway, she said I was to fetch her when you woke up. She's feeding her dragons now. Old little buggers, aren't they. It's amazing she's allowed to keep 'em.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know. Tarred with the same brush, and that.”

When Nobby had shambled out Vimes took another look around the room. It did, indeed, lack the gold leaf and marble that Nobby felt was compulsory for people of a high station in life. All the furniture was old, and the pictures on the wall, though doubtless valuable, looked the sort of pictures that are hung on bedroom walls because people can't think of anywhere else to put them. There were also a few amateurish watercolours of dragons. All in all, it had the look about it of a room that is only ever occupied by one person, and has been absent-mindedly moulded around them over the years, like a suit of clothes with a ceiling.

It was clearly the room of a woman, but one who had cheerfully and without any silly moping been getting on with her life while all that soppy romance stuff had been happening to other people somewhere else, and been jolly grateful that she had her health.

Such clothing as was visible had been chosen for sensible hardwearing qualities, possibly by a previous generation by the look of it, rather than its use as light artillery in the war between the sexes. There were bottles and jars neatly arranged on the dressing table, but a certain severity of line suggested that their labels would say things like “Rub on nightly” rather than “Just a dab behind the ears”. You could imagine that the occupant of this room had slept in it all her life and had been called “my little girl” by her father until she was forty.

There was a big sensible blue dressing gown hanging behind the door. Vimes knew, without even looking, that it would have a rabbit on the pocket.

In short, it was the room of a woman who never expected that a man would ever see the inside of it.

The bedside table was piled high with papers. Feeling guilty, but doing it anyway, Vimes squinted at them.

Dragons 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.