Errol balanced on his flame. He seemed to be thinking.
Then he nonchalantly kicked his back legs out as though hovering on your own stomach gases was something dragons had mastered over millions of years, somersaulted, and fled. For a moment he was visible as a silver streak, and then he was out over the city walls and gone.
A groan followed him. It came from ten thousand throats.
Vimes threw up his hands.
“Don't you worry, guv,” said Nobby quickly. “He's-he's probably gone to, to have a drink. Or something. Maybe it's the end of round one. Or something.”
“I mean, he ate our kettle and everything,” said Colon uncertainly. “He wouldn't just run away after eating a kettle. Stands to reason. Anyone who could eat a kettle wouldn't run away from anything. ”
“And my armour polish,” said Carrot. “It was nearly a whole dollar for the tin.”
“There you are then,” said Colon. “It's like I said.”
“Look,” said Vimes, as patiently as he could manage. “He's a nice dragon, I liked him as much as you, a very nice little chap, but he's just done the sensible thing, for gods' sake, he's not going to get burned to bits just to save us. Life just doesn't work like that. You might as well face it.”
Overhead the great dragon strutted through the air and flamed a nearby tower. It had won.
“I've never seen that before,” said Lady Ramkin. “Dragons normally fight to the death.”
“At last they've bred one who's sensible,” said Vimes morosely. “Let's be honest: the chances of a dragon the size of Errol beating something that big are a million-to-one”
There was one of those silences you get after one clear bright note has been struck and the world pauses.
The rank looked at one another.
“Million-to-one?” asked Carrot nonchalantly.
“Definitely,” said Vimes. “Million-to-one.”
The rank looked at one another again.
“Million-to-one,” said Colon.
“Million-to-one,” agreed Nobby.
“That's right,” said Carrot. “Million-to-one.”
There was another high-toned silence. The members of the rank were wondering who was going to be the first to say it.
Sergeant Colon took a deep breath.
“But it might just work,” he said.
“What are you talking about?” snapped Vimes. “There's no-”
Nobby nudged him urgently in the ribs and pointed out across the plains.
There was a column of black smoke out there. Vimes squinted. Running ahead of the smoke, speeding over the cabbage fields and closing fast, was a silvery bullet.
The great dragon had seen it too. It flamed defiance and climbed for extra height, mashing the air with its enormous wings.
Now Errol's flame was visible, so hot as to be almost blue. The landscape rolled away underneath him at an impossible speed, and he was accelerating.
Ahead of him the king extended its claws. It was almost grinning.
Errol's going to hit it, Vimes thought. Gods help us all, it'll be a fireball.
Something odd was happening out in the fields. A little way behind Errol the ground appeared to be ploughing itself up, throwing cabbage stalks into the air. A hedgerow erupted in a shower of sawdust . . .
Errol passed silently over the city walls, nose up, wings folded down to tiny flaps, his body honed to a mere cone with a flame at one end. His opponent blew out a tongue of fire; Vimes watched Errol, with a barely noticeable flip of a wing stub, roll easily out of its path. And then he was gone, speeding out towards the sea in the same eerie silence.
“He miss-” Nobby began.
The air ruptured. An endless thunderclap of noise dragged across the city, smashing tiles, toppling chimneys. In mid-air, the king was picked up, flattened out and spun like a top in the sonic wash. Vimes, his hands over his own ears, saw the creature flame desperately as it turned and became the centre of a spiral of crazy fire.
Magic crackled along its wings. It screamed like a distressed foghorn. Then, shaking its head dazedly, it began to glide in a wide circle.
Vimes groaned. It had survived something that tore masonry apart. What did you have to do to beat it? You can't fight it, he thought. You can't burn it, you can't smash it. There's nothing you can do to it.
The dragon landed. It wasn't a perfect landing. A perfect landing wouldn't have demolished a row of cottages. It was slow, and it seemed to go on for a long time and rip up a considerable stretch of city.
Wings flapping aimlessly, neck waving and spraying random flame, it ploughed on through a debris of beams and thatch. Several fires started up along the trail of destruction.
Finally it came to rest at the end of the furrow, almost invisible under a heap of former architecture.
The silence that it left was broken only by the shouts of someone trying to organise yet another bucket chain from the river to douse the fires.
Then people started to move.
From the air Ankh-Morpork must have looked like a disturbed anthill, with streams of dark figures flowing towards the wreck of the dragon.
Most of them had some kind of weapon.
Many of them had spears.
Some of them had swords.
All of them had one aim in mind.
“You know what?” said Vimes aloud. “This is going to be the world's first democratically killed dragon. One man, one stab.”
“Then you've got to stop them. You can't let them kill it!” said Lady Ramkin.
Vimes blinked at her.
“Pardon?” he said.
“It's wounded!”
“Lady, that was the intention, wasn't it? Anyway, it's only stunned,” said Vimes.
“I mean you can't let them kill it like this,” said Lady Ramkin insistently. “Poor thing!”