Guards! Guards!

Guards! Guards! is a comic fantasy novel by the English writer Terry Pratchett, first published in 1989. It is the eighth Discworld book and the first about the Ankh-Morpork City Watch.

The conspiracy against the city comes from a secret monastic order whose leader calls himself the Supreme Grand Master. The order plans to remove the Patrician, put a puppet monarch on the throne and keep him under its control, and the instrument is a dragon: it is summoned to frighten the city, and the puppet is to appear to kill it and claim the crown of the defunct royal house. What the order has not counted on is the Watch.

The Watch is a joke in Ankh-Morpork, staffed by men who long ago gave up pretending otherwise, until Carrot Ironfoundersson joins it. Carrot is a human orphan raised by dwarves, and unlike his colleagues he takes the manuals at their word. Captain Sam Vimes is drawn in first by a stolen book of magic from the Unseen University and then by the thefts that precede each appearance of the dragon, and Lady Sybil Ramkin, who breeds small swamp dragons, contributes one of them to the Watch.