Guards! Guards! (Discworld 8)

“You!”

“You!”

He waved the cleaver vaguely.

“But why you-?” he began.

“Captain Vimes,” she said sharply, “you will oblige me by not waving that thing about and you will start putting it to its proper use!”

Vimes wasn't listening.

“Thirty dollars a month!” he muttered. “That's what they died for! Thirty dollars! And I docked some from Nobby. I had to, didn't I? I mean, that man could make a melon go rusty!”

“Captain Vimes!”

He focused on the cleaver.

“Oh,” he said. “Yes. Right!”

It was a good steel cleaver, and the chains were elderly and rather rusty iron. He hacked away, raising sparks from the masonry.

The crowd watched in silence, but several palace guards hurried towards him.

“What the hell do you think you're doing?” said one of them, who didn't have much imagination.

“What the hell do you think you're doing?” Vimes growled, looking up.

They stared at him.

“What?”

Vimes took another hack at the chains. Several loops tinkled to the ground.

“Right, you've asked for-” one of the guards began. Vimes's elbow caught him under his rib cage; before he collapsed, Vimes's foot kicked savagely at the other one's kneecaps, bringing his chin down ready for another stab with the other elbow.

“Right,” said Vimes absently. He rubbed the elbow. It was sheer agony.

He moved the cleaver to his other hand and hammered at the chains again, aware at the back of his mind that more guards were hurrying up, but with that special kind of run that guards had. He knew it well. It was the run that said, there's a dozen of us, let someone else get there first. It said, he looks ready to kill, no-one's paying me to get killed, maybe if I run slowly enough he'll get away . . .

No point in spoiling a good day by catching someone.

Lady Ramkin shook herself free. A ragged cheer went up and started to grow in volume. Even in their current state of mind, the people of Ankh-Morpork always appreciated a performance.

ft the biology lesson-that no monkey was capable of bouncing someone up and down by their ankles-found a likely door, and hurried through it. This took him outside again, into the big cobbled area that surrounded the palace. Now he could get his bearings, now he could . . .

There was a boom in the air above him. A gale blew downwards, knocking him over.

The King of Ankh-Morpork, wings outspread, glided across the sky and settled for a moment on the palace gateway, talons gouging long scars in the stone as it caught its balance. The sun glittered off its arched back as it stretched its neck, roared a lazy billow of flames, and sprang into the air again.

Vimes made an animal-a mammalian animal-noise in the back of his throat, and ran out into the empty streets.

...

Silence filled the ancestral home of the Ramkins. The front door swung back and forth on its hinges, letting in the common, badly-brought up breeze which wandered through the deserted rooms, gawping and looking for dust on the top of the furniture. It wound up the stairs and banged through the door of Sybil Ramkin's bedroom, rattling the bottles on the dressing table and riffling through the pages of Diseases of the Dragon.

A really fast reader could have learned the symptoms of everything from Abated Heels to Zigzag Throat.

And down below, in the low, warm and foul-smelling shed that housed the swamp dragons, it seemed that Errol had got them all. Now he sat in the centre of his pen, swaying and moaning softly. White smoke rolled slowly from his ears and drifted towards the floor. From somewhere inside his swollen stomach came complex explosive hydraulic noises, as though desperate teams of gnomes were trying to drive a culvert through a cliff in a thunderstorm.