Guards! Guards! - Terry Pratchett [101]
It suddenly seemed that no man in the entire world was so lonely and without friends.
“I see,” he said quietly. He scowled up at the inquisitive reptile. In fact it didn’t seem particularly belligerent. It was looking at him with something approaching interest.
“I don’t care!” he shouted, his voice echoing from wall to wall in the silence. “We defy you! If you kill me, you might as well kill all of us!”
There was some uneasy shuffling of feet among those sections of the crowd who didn’t feel that this was absolutely axiomatic.
“We can resist you, you know!” growled the man. “Can’t we, everyone. What was that slogan about being united, Sergeant?”
“Er,” said Colon, feeling his spine turn to ice.
“I warn you, dragon, the human spirit is—”
They never found out what it was, or at least what he thought it was, although possibly in the dark hours of a sleepless night some of them might have remembered the subsequent events and formed a pretty good and gut-churning insight, to whit, that one of the things sometimes forgotten about the human spirit is that while it is, in the right conditions, noble and brave and wonderful, it is also, when you get right down to it, only human.
The dragon flame caught him full on the chest. For a moment he was visible as a white-hot outline before the neat, black remains spiraled down into a little puddle of melting cobbles.
The flame vanished.
The crowd stood like statues, not knowing if it was staying put or running that would attract more attention.
The dragon stared down, curious to see what they were going to do next.
Colon felt that, as the only civic official present, it was up to him to take charge of the situation. He coughed.
“Right, then,” he said, trying to keep the squeak out of his voice. “If you would just move along there, ladies and gentlemen. Move along, now. Move along. Let’s be having you, please.”
He waved his arms in a vague gesture of authority as the people shuffled nervously away. Out of the corner of his eye he saw red flames behind the rooftops, and sparks spiraling in the sky.
“Haven’t you got any homes to go to?” he croaked.
The Librarian knuckled out into the Library of the here and now. Every hair on his body bristled with rage.
He pushed open the door and swung out into the stricken city.
Someone out there was about to find that their worst nightmare was a maddened Librarian.
With a badge.
The dragon swooped leisurely back and forth over the nighttime city, barely flapping its wings. It didn’t need to. The thermals were giving it the lift it needed.
There were fires all over Ankh-Morpork. So many bucket chains had formed between the river and various burning buildings that buckets were getting misdirected and hijacked. Not that you really needed a bucket to pick up the turbid waters of the river Ankh—a net was good enough.
Downstream, teams of smoke-stained people worked feverishly to close the huge, corroded gates under the Brass Bridge. They were Ankh-Morpork’s last defense against fire, since then the Ankh had no outlet and gradually, oozingly, filled the space between the walls. A man could suffocate under it.
The workers on the bridge were the ones who couldn’t or wouldn’t run. Many others were teeming through the gates of the city and heading out across the chilly, mist-wreathed plains.
But not for long. The dragon, looping and curving gracefully above the devastation, glided out over the walls. After a few seconds the guards saw actinic fire stab down through the mists. The tide of humanity flowed back, with the dragon hovering over it like a sheepdog. The fires of the stricken city glowed redly off the underside of its wings.
“Got any suggestions about what we do next, Sergeant?” said Nobby.
Colon didn’t reply. I wish Captain Vimes were here, he thought. He wouldn’t have known what to do either, but he’s got a much better vocabulary to be baffled in.
Some of the fires went out as the rising