from
Guards! Guards!
by
Terry Pratchett

This is where the dragons went.

They lie. . .

Not dead, not asleep. Not waiting, because waiting implies expectation. Possibly the word we’re looking for here is. . .

. . .dormant.

And although the space they occupy isn’t like normal space, nevertheless they are packed in tightly. Not a cubic inch there but is filled by a claw, a talon, a scale, the tip of a tail, so the effect is like one of those trick drawings and your eyeballs eventually realize that the space between each dragon is, in fact, another dragon.

They could put you in mind of a can of sardines, if you thought sardines were huge and scaly and proud and arrogant.

And presumably, somewhere, there’s the key.

Knowledge = power = energy = matter = mass;
a good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.

“To the axeman, all supplicants are the same height.”

“Demarcation, they call it,” said Brother Plasterer. “Like, I don’t go around fiddling with the mystic interleaved wossnames of causality, and they don’t do any plastering.”

Letters rarely got written in that mine. Work stopped and the whole clan had sat around in respectful silence as his pen scrittered across the parchment. [...] His sister had been sent down to the village to ask Mistress Garlick the witch how you stopped spelling recommendation.

“Don’t we have to chant a mystic prune or something?”

“I shall deal with the matter momentarily,” he said. It was a good word. It always made people hesitate. They were never quite sure whether he meant he’d deal with it now, or just deal with it briefly. And no-one ever dared ask.

Over the door a motto in the ancient tongue of the city was now almost eroded by time and grime and lichen, but could just be made out:

FABRICATI DIEM, PVNC

It translated – according to Sergeant Colon, who had served in foreign parts and considered himself an expert on languages – as ‘To Protect and to Serve’.

There are many horrible sights in the multiverse. Somehow, though, to a soul attuned to the subtle rhythms of a library, there are few worse sights than a hole where a book ought to be.

Human nature, the Patrician always said, was a marvellous thing. Once you understood where its levers were.

The Patrician didn’t believe in unnecessary cruelty.* He did not believe in pointless revenge. But he was a great believer in the need for things to be sorted out.

* While being bang alongside the idea of necessary cruelty, of course.

Wielding a sword, the Supreme Brand Master considered, was simply the messy business of dynastic surgery. It was just a matter of thrust and cut. Whereas a king had to flourish one. It had to catch the light in just the right way, leaving watchers in no doubt that here was Destiny’s chosen. He’d taken a long time preparing the sword and shield. It had been very expensive. The shield shone like a dollar in a sweep’s earhole but the sword, the sword was magnificent. . .

It was long and shiny. It looked like something some genius of metalwork — one of those little Zen guys who works only by the light of dawn and can beat a club sandwich of folded steels into something with the cutting edge of a scalpel and the stopping-power of a sex-craxed rhinoceros on bad acid — had made and then retired in tears because he’d never, ever, do anything so good again. There were so many jewels on the hilt it had to be sheathed in velvet, you had to look at it through smoked glass. Just laying a hand on it practically conferred kingship.

“Are you saying,” said the assassin slowly, “that what we’ve got here is the first civic dragon?”

“That’s evolution for you,” said the wizard, happily. “It should do well, too,” he added. “Plenty of nesting sites, and a more than adequate food supply.”

Silence greeted this statement, until the merchant said, “What exactly is it that they do eat?”

The thief shrugged. “I seem to recall stories about virgins chained to huge rocks,” he volunteered.

“It’ll starve round here, then,” said the assassin. “We’re on loam.”

Once you’ve ruled out the impossible then whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truth. The problem lay in working out what was impossible, of course.

Colon was sulking because Vimes had forbidden him to use his bow and arrow.

These weren’t encouraged in the city, since the heft and throw of a longbow’s arrow could send it through an innocent bystander a hundred yards away rather than the innocent bystander at whom it was aimed.

Noble dragons don’t have friends. The nearest they can get to the idea is an enemy who is still alive.

Books bend space and time. One reason the owners of those aforesaid little rambling, poky second-hand bookshops always seem slightly unearthly is that many of them really are, having strayed into this world after taking a wrong turning in their own bookshops in worlds where it is considered commendable business practice to wear carpet slippers all the time and open your shop only when you feel like it. You stray into L-space at your peril.

Very senior librarians, however, once they have proved themselves worthy by performing some valiant act of librarianship, are accepted into a secret order and are taught the raw arts of survival beyond the Shelves We Know.

“Might have been just an innocent bystander, sir,” said Carrot.

“What, in Ankh-Morpork?”

“Yes, sir.”

“We should have grabbed him, then, just for the rarity value,” said Vimes.

The three rules of the Librarians of Time and Space are: 1) Silence; 2) Books must be returned no later than the last date shown; and 3) Do not interfere with the nature of causality.

If there was anything that depressed him more than his own cynicism, it was that quite often it still wasn’t as cynical as real life.

“I mean, it wouldn’t want us to go around killing its own kind, would it?”

“Well, sir, people do, sir,” said the guard sulkily.

“Ah, well,” said the captain. “That’s different.” He tapped the side of his helmet meaningfully. “That’s ’cos we’re intelligent.”

“Never build a dungeon you wouldn’t be happy to spend the night in yourself,” said the Patrician, laying out the food on the cloth. “The world would be a happier place if more people remembered that.”

“I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are the good people and the bad people,” said the man. “You’re wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.”