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Sergeant Colon had given hi gentle hands, nibbling at it

It wasn't that the city suddenly had a king Orangs are traditionalists, and you couldn't get s neat, and things weren't neat Or, rather, they were too neat Truth and reality were never as neat as this Sudden heirs to ancient thrones didn't grow on trees, and he should know

Besides, no-one was looking for his book That was human priorities for you

The book was the key to it He was sure of that Well, there was one way to find out as in the book It was a perilous way, but the Librarian a perilous ways all day

In the silence of the sleeping library he opened his desk and removed from its deepest recesses a s exposed You couldn't be too careful with all this paper around

He also took a bag of peanuts and, after soth of the string and used it-to tie the badge around his neck, like a talisman Then he tied one end of the ball to the desk and, after a moment's conte out the string behind hie equals power

The string was important After a while the Librarian stopped He concentrated all his powers of librarianship

Power equals energy

People were stupid, soerous place because of all the h, but what erous places there could ever be was the siy equalsthat was apparently a few feet long and walked along it briskly for half an hour

Matter equals mass

And mass distorts space It distorts it into polyfractal L-space

So, while the Dewey syste out to look so up in the multidimensional folds of L-space what you really need is a ball of string

Now the rain was trying hard It glistened off the flagstones in the Plaza of Broken Moons, littered here and there with torn bunting, flags, broken bottles and the occasional regurgitated supper There was still plenty of thunder about, and a green, fresh smell in the air A few shreds of mist from the Ankh hovered over the stones It would be dawn soon

Vis as he picked his way across the plaza The boy had stood here

He peered through the s So the dragon had been hovering-he paced forward-here

"And," said Vimes, "this is where it was killed"

He fus in there-keys, bits of string, corks His finger closed on a stub end of chalk

He knelt down Errol jumped off his shoulder and waddled away to inspect the detritus of the celebration He always sniffed everything before he ate it, Vimes noticed It was a bit of a puzzle why he bothered, because he always ate it anyway

Its head had been about, let's see, here

He walked backwards, dragging the chalk over the stones, progressing slowly over the da aaway towards a tail which stretched out to here, change hands, now head for the other wing

When he finished he walked to the centre of the outline and ran his hands over the stones He realised he was half-expecting the So, so a broken bottle with every sign of enjoyment "You knohat I think?" said Vimes "I think it went soain

"All right, all right," ht It wasn't that dramatic"

Errol stopped in h it was on's head turned to face upwards

What it was staring at intently was a patch of empty air There wasn't much else you could say about it

Vimes shivered under his cape This was daft

"Look, don'tthere"

Errol started to tremble

"It's just the rain," said Vimes "Go on, finish your bottle Nice bottle"

A thin, worried keening noise broke froon's mouth

"I'll show you," said Vies, cast aside by a hungry reveller who had decided he was never going to be that hungry He picked it up

"Look," he said, and threw it upwards

He felt sure, watching its trajectory, that it ought to have fallen back to the ground It shouldn't have fallen away, as if he'd dropped it neatly into a tunnel in the sky And the tunnel shouldn't have been looking back at hi lashed from the empty air and struck the houses on the near side of the plaza, skittering across the walls for several yards before sinking out with a suddenness that almost denied that it had ever happened at all

Then it erupted again, this tiht broke where it hit into a network of searching tendrils spreading across the stones

The third atte an actinic column that eventually rose fifty or sixty feet in the air, appeared to stabilise, and started to spin slowly