The kennels were a ruin. An assortment of battered wooden boxes were lying around under an oilcloth awning. From their depths a few sad swamp dragons whiffled a greeting at him.
A couple of women were moving purposefully among the boxes. Ladies, rather. They were far too untidy to be mere women. No ordinary women would have dreamed of looking so scruffy; you needed the complete self-confidence that comes with knowing who your great-great-great-great-grandfather was before you could wear clothes like that. But they were, Vimes noticed, incredibly good clothes, or had been once; clothes bought by one's parents, but so expensive and of such good quality that they never wore out and were handed down, like old china and silverware and gout.
Dragon breeders, he thought. You can tell. There's something about them. It's the way they wear their silk scarves, old tweed coats and granddad's riding boots. And the smell, of course.
A small wiry woman with a face like old saddle leather caught sight of him.
'Ah,' she said, 'you'll be the gallant captain.' She tucked an errant strand of white hair back under a headscarf and extended a veiny brown hand. 'Brenda Rodley. That's Rosie Devant-Molei. She runs the Sunshine Sanctuary, you know.' The other woman, who had the build of someone who could pick up carthorses hi one hand and shoe them with the other, gave him a friendly grin.
'Samuel Vimes,' said Vimes weakly.
'My father was a Sam,' said Brenda vaguely. 'You can always trust a Sam, he said.' She shooed a dragon back into its box. 'We're just helping Sybil. Old friends, you know. The collection's all to blazes, of course. They're all over the city, the little devils. I dare say they'll come back when they're hungry, though. What a bloodline, eh?'
'I'm sorry?'
'Sybil reckons he was a sport, but I say we should be able to breed back into the line in three or four generations. I'm famed for my stud, you know,' she said. 'That'd be something, though. A whole new type of dragon.'
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