Guards! Guards! (Discworld 8)

...

It was the silence that awoke Lady Ramkin. Her bedroom looked out over the dragon pens, and she was used to sleeping to the susurration of rustling scales, the occasional roar of a dragon flaming in its sleep, and the keening of the gravid females. Absence of any sound at all was like an alarm clock.

She had cried a bit before going to sleep, but not much, because it was no use being soppy and letting the side down. She lit the lamp, pulled on her rubber boots, grabbed the stick which might be all that stood between her and theoretical loss of virtue, and hurried down through the shadowy house. As she crossed the damp lawn to the kennels she was vaguely aware that something was happening down in the city, but dismissed it as not currently worth thinking about. Dragons were more important.

She pushed open the door.

Well, they were still there. The familiar stink of swamp dragons, half pond mud and half chemical explosion, gusted out into the night.

Each dragon was balancing on its hind legs in the centre of its pen, neck arched, staring with ferocious intensity at the roof.

“Oh,” she said. “Flying around up there again, is it? Showing off. Don't you worry about it, children. Mummy's here.”

She put the lamp on a high shelf and stamped along to Errol's pen.

“Well now, my lad,” she began, and stopped.

Errol was stretched out on his side. A thin plume of grey smoke was drifting from his mouth, and his stomach expanded and contracted like a bellows. And his skin from the neck down was an almost pure white.

“I think if I ever rewrite Diseases you'll get a whole chapter all to yourself,” she said quietly, and unbolted the gate of the pen. “Let's see if that nasty temperature has gone down, shall we?”

She reached out to stroke his skin and gasped. She pulled the hand back hurriedly and watched the blisters form on her fingertips.

Errol was so cold he burned.

As she stared at him the small round marks that her warmth had melted filmed over with frozen air.

Lady Ramkin sat back on her haunches.

“Just what kind of dragon are you-?” she began.

There was the distant sound of a knock at the front door of the house. She hesitated for a moment, then blew out the lamp, crept heavily along the length of the kennels and pulled aside the scrap of sacking over the window.

The first light of dawn showed her the silhouette of a guardsman on her doorstep, the plumes of his helmet blowing in the breeze.

She bit her lip in panic, scuttled back to the door, fled across the lawn and dived into the house, taking the stairs three at a time.

“Stupid, stupid,” she muttered, realising the lamp was back downstairs. But no time for that. By the time she went and got it, Vimes might have gone away.

Working by feel and memory in the gloom she found her best wig and rammed it on her head. Somewhere among the ointments and dragon remedies on her dressing table was something called, as far as she could remember, Dew of the Night or some such unsuitable name, a present long ago from a thoughtless nephew. She tried several bottles before she found something that, by the smell of it, was probably the one. Even to a nose which had long ago shut down most of its sensory apparatus in the face of the overpoweringness of dragons, it seemed, well, more potent than she remembered. But apparently men liked that kind of thing. Or so she had read. Damn nonsense, really. She twitched the top hem of her suddenly far too sensible nightshirt into a position which, she hoped, revealed without actually exposing, and hurried back down the stairs.

She stopped in front of the door, took a deep breath, twisted the handle and realised even as she pulled the door open that she should have taken the rubber boots off-

“Why, Captain,” she said winsomely, “This is a who the hell are you?”

The head of the palace guard took several steps backwards and, because he was of peasant stock, made a few surreptitious signs to ward off evil spirits. They clearly didn't work. When he opened his eyes again the thing was still there, still bristling with rage, still reeking of something sickly and fermented, still crowned with a skewed mass of curls, still looming behind a quivering bosom that made the roof of his mouth go dry-

He'd heard about these sort of things. Harpies, they were called. What had it done with Lady Ramkin?

The sight of the rubber boots had him confused, though. Legends about harpies were short on references to rubber boots.

“Out with it, fellow,” Lady Ramkin boomed, hitching up her nightie to a more respectable neckline. “Don't just stand there opening and shutting your mouth. What d'you want?”

“Lady Sybil Ramkin?” said the guard, not in the polite way of someone seeking mere confirmation but in the incredulous tones of someone who found it very hard to believe the answer could be 'yes'.

“Use your eyes, young man. Who d'you think I am?”

The guard pulled himself together.