Sweat stung his eyes. The rush of adrenaline that had carried him out of the palace had spent itself, and was now exacting its inevitable toll.

He stumbled to a halt, and grabbed a wall to keep him upright while he gasped for air. And thus he saw the figures on the rooftop.

Oh, no! he thought. They're not heroes either! What do they think they're playing at?

It was a million-to-one chance. And who was to say that, somewhere in the millions of other possible uni­verses, it might not have worked?

That was the sort of thing the gods really liked. But Chance, who sometimes can overrule even the gods, has 999,999 casting votes.

In this universe, for example, the arrow bounced off a scale and clattered away into oblivion.

Colon stared as the dragon's pointed tail passed overhead.

"It . . . missed . . ."he mouthed.

"But it couldn't of missed!" He stared red-eyed at the other two. "It was a sodding last desperate million-to-one chance!"

The dragon twisted its wings, swung its huge bulk around on a pivot of air, and bore down on the roof.

Carrot grabbed Nobby around the waist and laid a hand on Colon's shoulder.

The sergeant was weeping with rage and frustration.

"Million-to-bloody-one last desperate bloody chance!"

"Sarge…"

The dragon flamed.

It was a beautifully controlled line of plasma. It went through the roof like butter.

It cut through stairways.

It crackled into ancient timbers and made them twist like paper. It sliced into pipes.

It punched through floor after floor like the fist of an angry god and, eventually, reached the big copper vat containing a thousand gallons of freshly-made ma­ture whisky-type spirit.

It burned into that, too.

Fortunately, the chances of anyone surviving the en­suing explosion were exactly a million-to-one.

The fireball rose like a-well, a rose. A huge orange rose, streaked with yellow. It took the roof with it and wrapped it around the astonished dragon, lifting it high into the air in a boiling cloud of broken timber and bits of piping.

The crowd watched in bemusement as the superhot blast flung it into the sky and barely noticed Vimes as he pushed his way, wheezing and crying, through the press of bodies.

He shouldered past a row of palace guards and shambled as fast as he could across the flagstones. No one was paying him much attention at the moment.

He stopped.

It wasn't a rock, because Ankh-Morpork was on loam. It was just some huge remnant of mortared ma­sonry, probably thousands of years old, from some­where in the city foundations. Ankh-Morpork was so old now that what it was built on, by and large, was Ankh-Morpork.

It had been dragged into the centre of the plaza, and Lady Sybil Ramkin had been chained to it. She ap­peared to be wearing a nightie and huge rubber boots. By the look of her she had been in a fight, and Vimes felt a momentary pang of sympathy for whoever else had been involved. She gave him a look of pure fury.

"You!"

"You!"

He waved the cleaver vaguely.

"But why you…?" he began.

"Captain Vimes," she said sharply, "you will oblige me by not waving that thing about and you will start putting it to its proper use!"

Vimes wasn't listening.

"Thirty dollars a month!" he muttered. "That's what they died for! Thirty dollars! And I docked some from Nobby. I had to, didn't I? I mean, that man could make a melon go rusty!"

"Captain Vimes!"

He focused on the cleaver.

"Oh," he said. "Yes. Right!"

It was a good steel cleaver, and the chains were elderly and rather rusty iron. He hacked away, raising sparks from the masonry.

The crowd watched in silence, but several palace guards hurried towards him.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?" said one of them, who didn't have much imagination.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?" Vimes growled, looking up.

They stared at him.

"What?"

Vimes took another hack at the chains. Several loops tinkled to the ground.

"Right, you've asked for…" one of the guards be­gan. Vimes's elbow caught him under his rib cage; before he collapsed, Vimes's foot kicked savagely at the other one's kneecaps, bringing his chin down ready for another stab with the other elbow.

"Right," said Vimes absently. He rubbed the el­bow. It was sheer agony.

He moved the cleaver to his other hand and ham­mered at the chains again, aware at the back of his mind that more guards were hurrying up, but with that special kind of run that guards had. He knew it well. It was the run that said, there's a dozen of us, let someone else get there first. It said, he looks ready to kill, no one's paying me to get killed, maybe if I run slowly enough he'll get away . . .

No point in spoiling a good day by catching some­one.

Lady Ramkin shook herself free. A ragged cheer went up and started to grow in volume. Even in their current state of mind, the people of Ankh-Morpork always appreciated a performance.

She grabbed a handful of chain and wrapped it around one pudgy fist.

"Some of those guards don't know how to treat…" she began.

"No time, no time," said Vimes, grabbing her arm. It was like trying to drag a mountain.

The cheering stopped, abruptly.

There was a sound behind Vimes. It was not, par­ticularly, a loud noise. It just had a peculiarly nasty carrying quality. It was the click of four sets of talons hitting the flagstones at the same time.