Guards! Guards! (Discworld 8)

“Rubbish,” said her ladyship. “I'm just training him up because shoulder-sitters fetch twice the price.”

Vimes murmured that he had occasionally seen society ladies with small, colourful dragons on their shoulders, and thought it looked very, er, nice.

“Oh, it sounds nice,” she said. “I'll grant you. Then they realise it means sootburns, frizzled hair and crap all down their back. Those talons dig in, too. And then they think the thing's getting too big and smelly and next thing you know it's either down to the Mor-pork Sunshine Sanctuary for Lost Dragons or the old heave-ho into the river with a rope round your neck, poor little buggers.” She sat down, arranging a skirt that could have made sails for a small fleet. “Now then. Captain Vimes, was it?”

Vimes was at a loss. Ramkins long-dead stared down at him from ornate frames high on the shadowy walls. Between, around and under the portraits were the weapons they'd presumably used, and had used well and often by the look of them. Suits of armour stood in dented ranks along the walls. Quite a number, he couldn't help noticing, had large holes in them. The ceiling was a faded riot of moth-eaten banners. You did not need forensic examination to understand that Lady Ramkin's ancestors had never shirked a fight.

It was amazing that she was capable of doing something so unwarlike as having a cup of tea.

“My forebears,” she said, following his hypnotised gaze. “You know, not one Ramkin in the last thousand years has died in his bed.”

“Yes, ma'am?”

“Source of family pride, that.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Quite a few of them have died in other people's, of course.”

Captain Vimes's teacup rattled in its saucer. “Yes, ma'am,” he said.

“Captain is such a dashing title, I've always thought.” She gave him a bright, brittle smile. “I mean, colonels and so on are always so stuffy, majors are pompous, but one always feels somehow that there is something delightfully dangerous about a captain. What was it you had to show me?”

Vimes gripped his parcel like a chastity belt.

“I wondered,” he faltered, “how big swamp . . . er . . .”He stopped. Something dreadful was happening to his lower regions.

Lady Ramkin followed his gaze. “Oh, take no notice of bun,” she said cheerfully. “Hit him with a cushion if he's a bother.”

A small elderly dragon had crawled out from under his chair and placed its jowly muzzle in Vimes's lap. It stared up at him soulfully with big brown eyes and gently dribbled something quite corrosive, by the feel of it, over his knees. And it stank like the ring around an acid bath.

“That's Dewdrop Mabelline Talonthrust the First,” said her ladyship. “Champion and sire of champions. No fire left now, poor soppy old thing. He likes his belly rubbed.”

Vimes made surreptitiously vicious jerking motions to dislodge the old dragon. It blinked mournfully at him with rheumy eyes and rolled back the corner of its mouth, exposing a picket fence of soot-blackened teeth.

“Just push him off if he's a nuisance,” said Lady Ramkin cheerfully. “Now then, what was it you were asking?”

' 'I was wondering how big swamp dragons grow?'' said Vimes, trying to shift position. There was a faint growling noise.

“You came all the way up here to ask me that? Well ... I seem to recall Gayheart Talonthrust of Ankh stood fourteen thumbs high, toe to matiock,” mused Lady Ramkin.

“Er . . .”

“About three foot six inches,” she added kindly.

“No bigger than that?” said Vimes hopefully. In his lap the old dragon began to snore gently.

“Golly, no. He was a bit of a freak, actually. Mostly they don't get much bigger than eight thumbs.”

Captain Vimes's lips moved in hurried calculation. “Two feet?” he ventured.

“Well done. That's the cobbs, of course. The hens are a bit smaller.”

Captain Vimes wasn't going to give in. “A cobb would be a male dragon?” he said.

“Only after the age of two years,” said Lady Ramkin triumphantly. “Up to the age of eight months he's a pewmet, then he's a cock until fourteen months, and then he's a snood-”

Captain Vimes sat entranced, eating the horrible cake, britches gradually dissolving, as the stream of information flooded over him; how the males fought with flame but in the laying season only the hens* breathed fire, from the combustion of complex intestinal gases, to incubate the eggs which needed such a fierce temperature, while the males gathered firewood; a group of swamp dragons was a slump or an embarrassment; a female was capable of laying up to three clutches of four eggs every year, most of which were trodden on by absent-minded males; and that dragons