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.
His nostrils flared, turning more or less of their own volition.
The other dragons craned over the pen walls, watching him cautiously.
There was another distant gastric roar. Errol shifted painfully.
The dragons exchanged glances. Then, one by one, they lay down carefully on the floor and put their paws over their eyes.
Nobby put his head on one side. 'It looks promising,' he said critically. 'We might be nearly there. I reckon the chances of a man with soot on his face, his tongue sticking out, standing on one leg and singing The Hedgehog Song ever hitting a dragon's voonerables would be ... what'd you say, Carrot?'
'A million to one, I reckon,' said Carrot virtuously.
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