Guards! Guards!
Chapters - Terry Pratchett
Section: Vimes in the Gutter
In the ancient city of Ankh-Morpork, drunken Captain Sam Vimes of the Night Watch lies in the gutter outside the Watch House, mourning the state of his life and city. Meanwhile, at Unseen University, the Librarian - an orangutan transformed by magical accident - sleeps peacefully in the Library, unaware that someone is creeping through the shelves.
A mysterious robed figure makes his way through the rainy streets to a secret meeting of the Elucidated Brethren of the Ebon Night, a pathetic secret society led by the cunning Supreme Grand Master. The Supreme Grand Master manipulates his dim-witted followers - Brother Watchtower, Brother Plasterer, Brother Fingers, and others - into believing they can summon a real dragon to terrorize the city, which would then require a king to slay it. A king the Supreme Grand Master intends to control.
The Brethren overcome their fear of practicing magic and, using a stolen book and assorted magical trinkets, perform the summoning ritual. The Supreme Grand Master experiences the dragon's consciousness as it briefly materializes in the city, incinerating an unfortunate thief named Zebbo Mooty. Death himself arrives to collect the victim, noting the unusual circumstances.
On page: Samuel 'Sam' Vimes, The Librarian, Lupine Wonse, Brother Watchtower, Brother Plasterer, Brother Fingers, Brother Doorkeeper, Brother Dunnykin, Death, Zebbo Mooty·Mentioned: Herbert Gaskin
Section: Carrot Heads to the City
A young man named Carrot Ironfoundersson journeys towards Ankh-Morpork, sent by his adoptive dwarf father to join the City Watch. Raised in a gold mine by dwarfs, Carrot has only recently learned he is actually human, found as a toddler near burned carts and dead travellers. He carries a mysteriously unmagical sword and a book of The Laws and Ordinances of Ankh-Morpork, given to him by old Mr Varneshi, whose great-grandfather served in the Watch.
Carrot arrives in the city and is directed to find Captain Vimes at a tavern. He takes lodgings at Mrs Palm's boarding house, where he meets a young woman named Reet. With earnest literal-mindedness, Carrot immediately begins enforcing the law, arresting the President of the Thieves' Guild and marching him to the palace.
Lord Vetinari, the Patrician, is amused but concerned by the complaint from head thief Urdo van Pew. He instructs his secretary Lupine Wonse to sort it out. Vimes is summoned and discovers, to his bewilderment, that a volunteer has actually joined the Watch. Wonse, revealed to be Vimes's childhood acquaintance from the Shades, warns him to control his new recruit.
POV: Carrot Ironfoundersson·On page: Samuel 'Sam' Vimes, Havelock Vetinari, Lupine Wonse, Mr Varneshi, Urdo van Pew·Mentioned: Mrs Palm, Reet, Fred Colon
Section: Carrot Joins the Watch
Carrot is partnered with Corporal Nobbs, a small, bandy-legged man of questionable morals who tries to teach him the real ways of the Watch - which mostly involve avoiding trouble and checking doorhandles. Carrot is appalled to discover dwarfs fighting and drinking in a city bar, and shames them into better behaviour by speaking to them in the Old Tongue. Sergeant Colon, the third member of the Night Watch, is a dependable but unambitious man who has maintained thirty years of happy marriage primarily through never being home at the same time as his wife.
Nobby takes Carrot to the Mended Drum, the most notorious tavern in the city, where the Librarian is drinking peacefully. Carrot proceeds to formally arrest the barman for numerous violations of the Laws and Ordinances, triggering an enormous brawl. When Vimes, Colon, and Nobby arrive, they find Carrot has single-handedly fought the entire bar, including the troll bouncer Detritus.
Meanwhile, the Elucidated Brethren perform a second summoning. The dragon appears and incinerates six criminals in the Shades, leaving their silhouettes burned into a wall. The Watch, drunkenly wandering through the Shades, narrowly witness the dragon's fiery attack - a flash of blue-white fire and the roar of wings in the darkness.
POV: Carrot Ironfoundersson·On page: Nobby Nobbs, Fred Colon, Samuel 'Sam' Vimes, The Librarian, Detritus, Lupine Wonse
Section: The Talon Prints
The Patrician inspects the scorched wall in the Shades but dismisses Vimes's dragon theory, suggesting it was gang warfare or a wading bird. Vimes disobeys orders and secretly makes a plaster cast of the enormous talon prints. Carrot nearly arrests the Patrician for a coach wheel violation before Colon intervenes with quick military commands.
Vimes investigates, noting the dragon tracks come out of an alley but never went in. He discovers a peanut shell - evidence the Librarian was watching from the rooftops. At the University Library, the Librarian discovers a book has been stolen from a rarely-visited section: The Summoning of Dragons.
Seeking expert advice on dragons, Vimes visits Lady Sybil Ramkin in her grand but neglected mansion on Scoone Avenue. She is a large, formidable aristocrat who breeds swamp dragons - small, sickly creatures prone to exploding. Among her collection is a pathetic runt called Goodboy Bindle Featherstone with oversized eyebrows, stubby wings, and an oddly intelligent stare. Lady Ramkin confirms the plaster cast could be from a noble dragon - Draco nobilis - supposedly long extinct. As she speaks, all her little dragons fall silent and stare upward at the roof.
POV: Samuel 'Sam' Vimes·On page: Havelock Vetinari, Lupine Wonse, Carrot Ironfoundersson, Fred Colon, The Librarian, Lady Sybil Ramkin-Vimes, Errol
Section: The Summoning of Dragons
The Librarian leads Carrot to the Library to report the stolen book through an elaborate game of charades, identifying it as The Summoning of Dragons. Meanwhile, the great dragon takes flight over the city, setting fires with pinpoint accuracy - a coach house belonging to an oppressive businessman and a small vegetable shop. Vimes witnesses it from Lady Ramkin's hilltop home with Lady Ramkin marvelling at the impossibility of the creature's flight.
Colon and Nobby, on a plainclothes detective mission in a tavern, spot the dragon on a rooftop. The Supreme Grand Master grows more confident in his control. The Patrician offers a fifty-thousand-dollar reward for the dragon's head, attracting professional dragon hunters and the enterprising Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler, who sells anti-dragon cream and portable lair detectors.
Vimes stations the Watch on rooftops. He spots the dragon roosting on the Tower of Art at Unseen University - a massive creature disguised among the turrets. The dragon drops from the tower, swoops over the rooftops, and destroys the Watch House with devastating fire. Carrot saves Vimes and Colon by jumping off the roof, and they end up at Lady Ramkin's house, where Vimes wakes up in her bed with cracked ribs.
POV: Samuel 'Sam' Vimes·On page: Carrot Ironfoundersson, The Librarian, Lady Sybil Ramkin-Vimes, Fred Colon, Nobby Nobbs, Havelock Vetinari, Cut Me Own Throat Dibbler, Lupine Wonse, Errol
Section: Errol the Runt
Vimes defends Lady Ramkin's dragons from an angry mob using a small dragon as a weapon, threatening them in a scene that would make a certain famous movie inspector proud. He adopts the runt Goodboy Bindle Featherstone, soon nicknamed Errol. Lady Ramkin provides the Watch with a new headquarters in Pseudopolis Yard and the Librarian is sworn in as a Special Constable.
The Supreme Grand Master plans his final move: a puppet king will slay the dragon with a magnificent sword, winning the throne. The Brethren summon the dragon one last time. In the city, a young man rides in claiming to be heir to the throne, challenging the dragon in the Plaza of Broken Moons. Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler sells sausages and coronation mugs to the crowd.
The dragon inexplicably fails to flame the challenger - its fire ducts seemingly blocked - and the young man drives the jewelled sword home. The dragon vanishes in a thunderclap and purple smoke, leaving no remains. The crowd goes wild. Lord Vetinari is locked in his own dungeons without resistance, and the city celebrates its new king. But Vimes, alone at the Yard, catalogues his doubts on paper: the dragon was too heavy to fly, too hot to exist, appeared from nowhere, and vanished too completely.
POV: Samuel 'Sam' Vimes·On page: Lady Sybil Ramkin-Vimes, Errol, Nobby Nobbs, Fred Colon, Carrot Ironfoundersson, The Librarian, Cut Me Own Throat Dibbler, Lupine Wonse, Havelock Vetinari
Section: Dragon in the Sky
Vimes investigates the plaza where the dragon was 'killed' and discovers a terrifying truth - the dragon didn't die, it went somewhere. A sausage thrown upward vanishes into an invisible tunnel in the sky, and violent purple lightning erupts, searching the city. The energy locks onto the Unseen University Library and the great dragon materializes in the plaza, bigger and more powerful than ever, having learned to feed on magical energy.
Lady Ramkin rescues Vimes in her coach as the lightning searches. The dragon confronts Vimes outside the new Watch House, but is distracted by a horn blast and flies off to the Plaza of Broken Moons, where the Supreme Grand Master's puppet king is about to be crowned.
The Librarian, meanwhile, navigates the perilous dimension of L-space - the space between all libraries everywhere - travelling back in time to read The Summoning of Dragons before it was stolen. He learns the book's dreadful secrets but cannot interfere with the course of history. He follows the thief back and discovers the identity of the Supreme Grand Master.
The dragon incinerates the Elucidated Brethren's meeting hall, killing most of the Brothers. Only Brother Fingers, out fetching pizzas, survives. Wonse, away at the coronation, is the Supreme Grand Master.
POV: Samuel 'Sam' Vimes·On page: Lady Sybil Ramkin-Vimes, The Librarian, Errol, Fred Colon, Nobby Nobbs, Carrot Ironfoundersson, Brother Fingers, Brother Watchtower
Section: A Dragon Crowned King
The great dragon descends on the coronation in the Plaza of Broken Moons, incinerating the puppet king, the High Priest, and seizing Lupine Wonse. Rather than killing him, it carries him to the palace and installs itself as the new ruler. Vimes laughs bitterly at the irony - Ankh-Morpork has crowned a dragon king.
Errol begins eating everything he can find - coal, iron, lamp oil, mothballs - his body undergoing some mysterious internal transformation. Wonse, now the dragon's terrified servant, presents the city's council with the new reality: the dragon demands tribute of gold and jewels, plans foreign conquest, and requires a monthly sacrifice of a high-born maiden. The councillors, horrified but cowed, say nothing.
Vimes is stripped of his badge by Wonse at the coronation after mistaking a raven for the dragon. He returns to the Yard to find Errol has eaten everything including his last bottle of whiskey. Sergeant Colon and Nobby reminisce about the death of Gaskin, their former colleague, killed because he ran too fast after a criminal. Carrot insists things should not be this way.
POV: Samuel 'Sam' Vimes·On page: Lupine Wonse, Lady Sybil Ramkin-Vimes, Errol, Fred Colon, Nobby Nobbs, Carrot Ironfoundersson, Havelock Vetinari, The Librarian·Mentioned: Herbert Gaskin
Section: Vimes Confronts Wonse
Vimes realizes that Wonse is the Supreme Grand Master - recognizing his distinctive skipping run from the night the Brethren's house was destroyed. He confronts Wonse in the palace, who tries to bribe him with his job back. Vimes delivers a defining speech about being an officer of the law, not of any ruler, and punches Wonse. But Wonse calls the palace guards and has Vimes thrown into the dungeons.
In the dungeon, Vimes finds the Patrician living in surprising comfort, having organized the rats to bring him food, books, and a mirror for shaving. The Librarian, armed with a badge and a sense of duty, infiltrates the palace through the rooftops. He rips the dungeon bars free with his enormous orangutan strength and frees Vimes.
Meanwhile, the rank - Colon, Nobby, and Carrot - sit on rooftops trying to calculate million-to-one odds for an arrow shot at the dragon's vulnerable spot, adjusting the conditions (standing on one leg, hat on backwards, tongue sticking out) until the odds are precisely right.
Wonse sends guards to arrest Lady Ramkin as the dragon's first sacrificial maiden. She fights back with a broadsword but is overpowered and chained to a rock in the plaza.
POV: Samuel 'Sam' Vimes·On page: Lupine Wonse, Lady Sybil Ramkin-Vimes, Errol, Fred Colon, Nobby Nobbs, Carrot Ironfoundersson, Havelock Vetinari, The Librarian
Section: Errol Takes Flight
Errol has undergone a complete transformation - his body has rearranged its internal plumbing to flame backwards, becoming a living jet engine with silver scales, capable of supersonic flight. He launches from the destroyed dragon kennels and challenges the great dragon. Though he cannot match its fire, he is impossibly fast and agile, weaving around every flame blast.
Errol streaks out over the plains, accelerates beyond the speed of sound, and returns in a devastating sonic boom that stuns the great dragon, sending it crashing through a row of cottages. Carrot immediately arrests the stunned dragon, reading it its rights and defending it from the mob with a roof beam.
Vimes and his men storm the palace, overpowering the guards. Inside, the Patrician has already escaped his dungeon (he had a key all along) and is tormenting Wonse by appearing in every room through secret passages. When the Watch arrives, Carrot is told to throw the book at Wonse - and being a literal-minded dwarf-raised lad, hurls The Laws and Ordinances at his head, knocking him backwards through a gap in the ruined floor to his death.
The Patrician reclaims his throne. Errol, it turns out, was not fighting the dragon but courting it - the great dragon is female. The two fly off together into the sunset over the Rim of the Disc. At a reward ceremony, the Watch asks only for a small pay rise and a new kettle. Vimes visits Lady Ramkin for a dinner she has carefully arranged, and as the million-to-one chance would have it, they begin a relationship. And all is well.
POV: Samuel 'Sam' Vimes·On page: Errol, Lady Sybil Ramkin-Vimes, Carrot Ironfoundersson, Fred Colon, Nobby Nobbs, Lupine Wonse, Havelock Vetinari, The Librarian, Death·Mentioned: Cut Me Own Throat Dibbler