There was another movement in the rubble. Another figure pulled itself upright and leaned dazedly against a broken spar.

It was Lupine Wonse, under a coating of soot.

Vimes watched him look up into a pair of nostrils the size of drain-covers.

Wonse broke into a run. Vimes wondered what it felt like, running away from something like that, ex­pecting any minute your backbone to reach, very briefly, a temperature somewhere beyond the vaporisa­tion point of iron. He could guess.

Wonse made it halfway across the square before the dragon darted forward with surprising agility for such a bulk and snatched him up. The talon swept on up­ward until the struggling figure was being held a few feet from the dragon's face.

It appeared to examine him for some time, turning him this way and that. Then, moving on its three free legs and flapping its wings occasionally to help with its balance, it trotted away across the plaza and headed towards the what once had been the Patrician's pal­ace. To what once had been the king's palace, too.

It ignored the frightened spectators silently pressing themselves against the walls. The arched gateway was shouldered aside with depressing ease. The doors themselves, tall and iron-bound and solid, lasted a sur­prising ten seconds before collapsing into a heap of glowing ash.

The dragon stepped through.

Lady Ramkin turned in astonishment. Vimes had started to laugh.

There was a manic edge to it and there were tears in his eyes, but it was still laughter. He laughed and laughed until he slid gently down the edge of the foun­tain, his legs splaying out in front of him.

"Hooray, hooray, hooray!" he giggled, almost choking.

"What on earth d'you mean?" Lady Ramkin de­manded.

"Put out more flags! Blow the cymbals, roast the tocsin! We've crowned it! We've got a king after all! What ho!"

"Have you been drinking?" she snapped.

"Not yet!" sniggered Vimes. "Not yet! But I will be!"

He laughed on, knowing that when he stopped black depression was going to drop on him like a lead souf­fle. But he could see the future stretching out ahead of them . . .

... after all, it was definitely noble. And it didn't carry money, and it couldn't answer back. It could certainly do something for the inner cities, too. Like torching them to the bedrock.

We'll really do it, he thought. That's the Ankh-Morpork way. If you can't beat it or corrupt it, you pretend it was your idea in the first place.

Vivat Draco.

He became aware that the small child had wandered up again. It waved its flag gently at him and said, "Can I shout hurrah again now?"

"Why not?" said Vimes. "Everyone else will."

From the palace came the muffled sounds of com­plicated destruction . . .

Errol pulled a broomstick across the floor with his mouth and, whimpering with effort, hauled it upright. After a lot more whimpering and several false starts he managed to winkle the end of it between the wall and the big jar of lamp oil.

He paused for a moment, breathing like a bellows, and pushed.

The jar resisted for a moment, rocked back and forth once or twice, and then fell over and smashed on the flagstones. Crude, very badly-refined oil spread out in a black puddle.

Errol's huge nostrils twitched. Somewhere in the back of his brain unfamiliar synapses clicked like telegraph keys. Great balks of information flooded down the thick nerve cord to his nose, carrying in­explicable information about triple bonds, alkalines and geometric isomerism. However, almost all of it missed the small part of Errol's brain that was used for being Errol.

All he knew was that he was suddenly very, very thirsty.

Something major was happening in the palace. There was the occasional crash of a floor or thump of a fall­ing ceiling ...

In his rat-filled dungeon, behind a door with more locks than a major canal network, the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork lay back and grinned in the darkness.

Outside, bonfires flared in the dusk.

Ankh-Morpork was celebrating. No one was quite sure why, but they'd worked themselves up for a cel­ebration tonight, barrels had been broached, oxen had been put on spits, one paper hat and celebratory mug had been issued per child, and it seemed a shame to waste all that effort. Anyway, it had been a very inter­esting day, and the people of Ankh-Morpork set great store by entertainment.

"The way I see it," said one of the revellers, half­way through a huge greasy lump of half-raw meat, "a dragon as king mightn't be a bad idea. When you think it through, is what I mean."

"It definitely looked very gracious," said the woman to his right, as if testing the idea. "Sort of, well, sleek. Nice and smart. Not scruffy. Takes a bit of a pride in itself.'' She glared at some of the younger revellers further down the table. "The trouble with people today is they don't take pride in themselves."

"And there's foreign policy, of course," said a third, helping himself to a rib. "When you come to think about it."

"What d'you mean?"

"Diplomacy," said the rib-eater, flatly.

They thought about it. And then you could see them turning the idea around and thinking about it the other way, in a polite effort to see what the hell he was getting at.

"Dunno," said the monarchical expert slowly. "I mean, your actual dragon, it's got these, basically, two sort of ways of negotiation. Hasn't it? I mean, it's ei­ther roasting you alive, or it isn't. Correct me if I'm wrong," he added.