Terry Pratchett - Guards! Guards!

Vimes stuck his helmet under his arm, smoothed back his hair, and knocked. He'd considered asking Sergeant Colon to accompany him, but had brushed the idea aside quickly. He couldn't have tolerated the sniggering. Anyway, what was there to be afraid of? He'd stared into the jaws of death three times; four, if you included telling Lord Vetinari to shut up.

To his amazement the door was eventually opened by a butler so elderly that he might have been resur­rected by the knocking.

"Yerss?" he said.

"Captain Vimes, City Watch," said Vimes.

The man looked him up and down.

"Oh, yes," he said. "Her ladyship did say. I believe her ladyship is with her dragons," he said. "If you like to wait in 'ere, I will…"

"I know the way," said Vimes, and set off around the overgrown path.

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."

Vimes thought of supersonic contrails criss-crossing the sky.

"Er," he said. "Yes."

"Well, we must get on."

"Er, isn't Lady Ramkin around?" said Vimes. "I got this message that it was essential, she said, for me to come here."

"She's indoors somewhere," said Miss Rodley. "Said she had something important to see to. Oh, do be careful with that one, Rose, you silly gel!"

"More important than dragons?" said Vimes.

"Yes. Can't think what's come over her." Brenda Rodley fished in the pocket of an oversized waistcoat. "Nice to have met you, Captain. Always good to meet new members of the Fancy. Do drop in any time you're passing, I'd be only too happy to show you around." She extracted a grubby card and pressed it into his hand. "Must be off now, we've heard that some of them are trying to build nests on the University tower. Can't have that. Must get 'em down before it gets dark."

Vimes squinted at the card as the women crunched off down the drive, carrying nets and ropes.

It said: Brenda, Lady Rodley. The Dower House, Quirm Castle, Quirm. What it meant, he realized, was that strid­ing away down the path like an animated rummage stall was the dowager Duchess of Quirm, who owned more country than you could see from a very high mountain on a very clear day. Nobby would not have approved. There seemed to be a special land of poverty that only the very, very rich could possibly afford . . .

That was how you got to be a power in the land, he thought. You never cared a toss about whatever anyone else thought and you were never, ever, uncertain about anything.

He padded back to the house. A door was open. It led into a large but dark and musty hall. Up in the gloom the heads of dead animals haunted the walls. The Ramkins seemed to have endangered more spe­cies than an ice age.

Vimes wandered aimlessly through another mahog­any archway.

It was a dining room, containing the kind of table where the people at the other end are in a different time zone. One end had been colonised by silver can­dlesticks.

It was laid for two. A battery of cutlery flanked each plate. Antique wineglasses sparkled in the candlelight.

A terrible premonition took hold of Vimes at the same moment as a gust of Captivation, the most expensive perfume available anywhere in Ankh-Morpork, blew past him.

"Ah, Captain. So nice of you to come."

Vimes turned around slowly, without his feet ap­pearing to move.

Lady Ramkin stood there, magnificently.

Vimes was vaguely aware of a brilliant blue dress that sparkled in the candlelight, a mass of hair the colour of chestnuts, a slightly anxious face that suggested that a whole battalion of skilled painters and decorators had only just dismantled their scaffolding and gone home, and a faint creaking that said underneath it all mere corsetry was being subjected to the kind of tensions more usually found in the heart of large stars.

"I, er," he said. "If you, er. If you'd said, er. I'd, er. Dress more suitable, er. Extremely, er. Very. Er."

She bore down upon him like a glittering siege en­gine.

In a sort of dream he allowed himself to be ushered to a seat. He must have eaten, because servants ap­peared out of nowhere with things stuffed with other things, and came back later and took the plates away. The butler reanimated occasionally to fill glass after glass with strange wines. The heat from the candles was enough to cook by. And all the time Lady Ramkin talked in a bright and brittle way - about the size of the house, the responsibilities of a huge estate, the feeling that it was time to take One's Position in So­ciety More Seriously, while the setting sun filled the room with red and Vimes's head began to spin.

Society, he managed to think, didn't know what was going to hit it. Dragons weren't mentioned once, al­though after a while something under the table put its head on Vimes's knee and dribbled.

Vimes found it impossible to contribute to the con­versation. He felt outflanked, beleaguered. He made one sally, hoping maybe to reach high ground from which to flee into exile.

"Where do you think they've gone?" he said.

"Where what?" said Lady Ramkin, temporarily halted.

"The dragons. You know. Errol and his wi - female."

"Oh, somewhere isolated and rocky, I should imag­ine," said Lady Ramkin. "Favourite country for drag­ons."

"But it - she's a magical animal," said Vimes. "What'll happen when the magic goes away?"

Lady Ramkin gave him a shy smile.

"Most people seem to manage," she said.

She reached across the table and touched his hand.

"Your men think you need looking after," she said meekly.

"Oh. Do they?" said Vimes.

"Sergeant Colon said he thought we'd get along like a maison en Flame. "

"Oh. Did he?"

"And he said something else," she said. "What was it, now? Oh, yes: 'It's a million to one chance,'," said Lady Ramkin,' 'I think he said, 'but it might just work'.''

She smiled at him.

And then it arose and struck Vimes that, in her own special category, she was quite beautiful; this was the category of all the women, in his entire life, who had ever thought he was worth smiling at. She couldn't do worse, but then, he couldn't do better. So maybe it balanced out. She wasn't getting any younger but then, who was? And she had style and money and common-sense and self-assurance and all the things that he didn't, and she had opened her heart, and if you let her she could engulf you; the woman was a city.