“I can see you’ve been thinking about this a lot,” said Nanny, speaking very slowly and carefully. “And this kingdom wants a better king, is that it?”

“No! That is, yes. Look—” she leaned forward—“it doesn’t have the same kind of likes and dislikes as people, right?”

Nanny Ogg leaned back. “Well, it wouldn’t, would it,” she ventured.

“It doesn’t care if people are good or bad. I don’t think it could even tell, anymore than you could tell if an ant was a good ant. But it expects the king to care for it.”

“Yes, but,” said Nanny wretchedly. She was becoming a bit afraid of the gleam in Granny’s eye. “Lots of people have killed each other to become king of Lancre. They’ve done all kinds of murder.”

“Don’t matter! Don’t matter!” said Granny, waving her arms. She started counting on her fingers. “For why,” she said. “One, kings go around killing each other because it’s all part of destiny and such and doesn’t count as murder, and two, they killed for the kingdom. That’s the important bit. But this new man just wants the power. He hates the kingdom.”

“It’s a bit like a dog, really,” said Magrat. Granny looked at her with her mouth open to frame some suitable retort, and then her face softened.

“Very much like,” she said. “A dog doesn’t care if its master’s good or bad, just so long as it likes the dog.”

“Well, then,” said Nanny. “No one and nothing likes Felmet. What are we going to do about it?”

“Nothing. You know we can’t meddle.”

“You saved that baby,” said Nanny.

“That’s not meddling!”

“Have it your way,” said Nanny. “But maybe one day he’ll come back. Destiny again. And you said we should hide the crown. It’ll all come back, mark my words. Hurry up with that tea, Magrat.”

“What are you going to do about the burghers?” said Granny.

“I told them they’ll have to sort it out themselves. Once we use magic, I said, it’d never stop. You know that.”

“Right,” said Granny, but there was a hint of wistfulness in her voice.

“I’ll tell you this, though,” said Nanny. “They didn’t like it much. They was muttering when they left.”

Magrat blurted out, “You know the Fool, who lives up at the castle?”

“Little man with runny eyes?” said Nanny, relieved that the conversation had returned to more normal matters.

“Not that little,” said Magrat. “What’s his name, do you happen to know?”

“He’s just called Fool,” said Granny. “No job for a man, that. Running around with bells on.”

“His mother was a Beldame, from over Blackglass way,” said Nanny Ogg, whose knowledge of the genealogy of Lancre was legendary. “Bit of a beauty when she was younger. Broke many a heart, she did. Bit of a scandal there, I did hear. Granny’s right, though. At the end of the day, a Fool’s a Fool.”

“Why d’you want to know, Magrat?” said Granny Weatherwax.

“Oh…one of the girls in the village was asking me,” said Magrat, crimson to the ears.

Nanny cleared her throat, and grinned at Granny Weatherwax, who sniffed aloofly.

“It’s a steady job,” said Nanny. “I’ll grant you that.”

“Huh,” said Granny. “A man who tinkles all day. No kind of husband for anyone, I’d say.”

“You—she’d always know where he was,” said Nanny, who was enjoying this. “You’d just have to listen.”

“Never trust a man with horns on his hat,” said Granny flatly.

Magrat stood up and pulled herself together, giving the impression that some bits had to come quite a long way.

“You’re a pair of silly old women,” she said quietly. “And I’m going home.”

She marched off down the path to her village without another word.

The old witches stared at one another.

“Well!” said Nanny.

“It’s all these books they read today,” said Granny. “It overheats the brain. You haven’t been putting ideas in her head, have you?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.”

Nanny stood up. “I certainly don’t see why a girl should have to be single her whole life just because you think it’s the right thing,” she said. “Anyway, if people didn’t have children, where would we be?”

“None of your girls is a witch,” said Granny, also standing up.

“They could have been,” said Nanny defensively.

“Yes, if you’d let them work it out for themselves, instead of encouragin’ them to throw themselves at men.”

“They’re good-lookin’. You can’t stand in the way of human nature. You’d know that if you’d ever—”

“If I’d ever what?” said Granny Weatherwax, quietly.

They stared at one another in shocked silence. They could both feel it, the tension creeping into their bodies from the ground itself, the hot, aching feeling that they’d started something they must finish, no matter what.

“I knew you when you were a gel,” said Nanny sullenly. “Stuck-up, you were.”

“At least I spent most of the time upright,” said Granny. “Disgustin’, that was. Everyone thought so.”

“How would you know?” snapped Nanny.

“You were the talk of the whole village,” said Granny.

“And you were, too! They called you the Ice Maiden. Never knew that, did you?” sneered Nanny.

“I wouldn’t sully my lips by sayin’ what they called you,” shouted Granny.

“Oh yes?” shrieked Nanny. “Well, let me tell you, my good woman—”

“Don’t you dare talk to me in that tone of voice! I’m not anyone’s good woman—”

“Right!”

There was another silence while they stared at one another, nose to nose, but this silence was a whole quantum level of animosity higher than the last one; you could have roasted a turkey in the heat of this silence. There was no more shouting. Things had got far too bad for shouting. Now the voices came in low and full of menace.

“I should have known better than to listen to Magrat,” growled Granny. “This coven business is ridiculous. It attracts entirely the wrong sort of people.”

“I’m very glad we had this little talk,” hissed Nanny Ogg. “Cleared the air.”

She looked down.

“And you’re in my territory, madam.”

“Madam!”

Thunder rolled in the distance. The permanent Lancre storm, after a trip through the foothills, had drifted back toward the mountains for a one-night stand. The last rays of sunset shone livid through the clouds, and fat drops of water began to thud on the witches’ pointed hats.

“I really don’t have time for all this,” snapped Granny, trembling. “I have far more important things to do.”

“And me,” said Nanny.

“Good night to you.”

“And you.”

They turned their backs on one another and strode away into the downpour.

 

The midnight rain drummed on Magrat’s curtained windows as she thumbed her way purposefully through Goodie Whemper’s books of what, for want of any better word, could be called natural magic.

The old woman had been a great collector of such things and, most unusually, had written them down; witches didn’t normally have much use for literacy. But book after book was filled with tiny, meticulous handwriting detailing the results of patient experiments in applied magic. Goodie Whemper had, in fact, been a research witch.*

Magrat was looking up love spells. Every time she shut her eyes she saw a red-and-yellow figure on the darkness inside. Something had to be done about it.

She shut the book with a snap and looked at her notes. First, she had to find out his name. The old peel-the-apple trick should do that. You just peeled an apple, getting one length of peel, and threw the peel behind you; it’d land in the shape of his name. Millions of girls had tried it and had inevitably been disappointed, unless the loved one was called Scscs. That was because they hadn’t used an unripe Sunset Wonder picked three minutes before noon on the first frosty day in the autumn and peeled left-handedly using a silver knife with a blade less than half an inch wide; Goodie had done a lot of experimenting and was quite explicit on the subject. Magrat always kept a few by for emergencies, and this probably was one.

She took a deep breath, and threw the peel over her shoulder.

She turned slowly.

I’m a witch, she told herself. This is just another spell. There’s nothing to be frightened of. Get a grip of yourself, girl. Woman.

She looked down, and bit the back of her hand out of nervousness and embarrassment.

“Who’d have thought it?” she said aloud.

It had worked.

She turned back to her notes, her heart fluttering. What was next? Ah, yes—gathering fern seed in a silk handkerchief at dawn. Goodie Whemper’s tiny handwriting went on for two pages of detailed botanical instructions which, if carefully followed, resulted in the kind of love potion that had to be kept in a tightly-stoppered jar at the bottom of a bucket of iced water.

Magrat pulled open her back door. The thunder had passed, but now the first gray light of the new day was drowned in a steady drizzle. But it still qualified as dawn, and Magrat was determined.

Brambles tugging at her dress, her hair plastered against her head by the rain, she set out into the dripping forest.

The trees shook, even without a breeze.

 

Nanny Ogg was also out early. She hadn’t been able to get any sleep anyway, and besides, she was worried about Greebo. Greebo was one of her few blind spots. While intellectually she would concede that he was indeed a fat, cunning, evil-smelling multiple rapist, she nevertheless instinctively pictured him as the small fluffy kitten he had been decades before. The fact that he had once chased a female wolf up a tree and seriously surprised a she-bear who had been innocently digging for roots didn’t stop her worrying that something bad might happen to him. It was generally considered by everyone else in the kingdom that the only thing that might slow Greebo down was a direct meteorite strike.

Now she was using a bit of elementary magic to follow his trail, although anyone with a sense of smell could have managed it. It had led her through the damp streets and to the open gates of the castle.

She gave the guards a nod as she went through. It didn’t occur to either of them to stop her because witches, like beekeepers and big gorillas, went where they liked. In any case, an elderly lady banging a bowl with a spoon was probably not the spearhead of an invasion force.

Life as a castle guard in Lancre was extremely boring. One of them, leaning on his spear as Nanny went past, wished there could be some excitement in his job. He will shortly learn the error of his ways. The other guard pulled himself together, and saluted.

“Mornin’, Mum.”

“Mornin’, our Shawn,” said Nanny, and set off across the inner courtyard.

Like all witches Nanny Ogg had an aversion to front doors. She went around the back and entered the keep via the kitchens. A couple of maids curtsied to her. So did the head housekeeper, whom Nanny Ogg vaguely recognized as a daughter-in-law, although she couldn’t remember her name.

And so it was that when Lord Felmet came out of his bedroom he saw, coming along the passage toward him, a witch. There was no doubt about it. From the tip of her pointed hat to her boots, she was a witch. And she was coming for him.

 

Magrat slid helplessly down a bank. She was soaked to the skin and covered in mud. Somehow, she thought bitterly, when you read these spells you always think of it being a fine sunny morning in late spring. And she had forgotten to check what bloody kind of bloody fern it bloody was.

A tree tipped a load of raindrops onto her. Magrat pushed her sodden hair out of her eyes and sat down heavily on a fallen log, from which grew great clusters of pale and embarrassing fungus.

It had seemed such a lovely idea. She’d had great hopes of the coven. She was sure it wasn’t right to be a witch alone, you could get funny ideas. She’d dreamed of wise discussions of natural energies while a huge moon hung in the sky, and then possibly they’d try a few of the old dances described in some of Goodie Whemper’s books. Not actually naked, or skyclad as it was rather delightfully called, because Magrat had no illusions about the shape of her own body and the older witches seemed solid across the hems, and anyway that wasn’t absolutely necessary. The books said that the old-time witches had sometimes danced in their shifts. Magrat had wondered about how you danced in shifts. Perhaps there wasn’t room for them all to dance at once, she’d thought.

What she hadn’t expected was a couple of crochety old women who were barely civil at the best of times and simply didn’t enter into the spirit of things. Oh, they’d been kind to the baby, in their own way, but she couldn’t help feeling that if a witch was kind to someone it was entirely for deeply selfish reasons.

And when they did magic, they made it look as ordinary as housekeeping. They didn’t wear any occult jewelry. Magrat was a great believer in occult jewelry.

It was all going wrong. And she was going home.

She stood up, wrapped her damp dress around her, and set off through the misty woods…

…and heard the running feet. Someone was coming through them at high speed, without caring who heard him, and over the top of the sound of breaking twigs was a curious dull jingling. Magrat sidled behind a dripping holly bush and peered cautiously through the leaves.

It was Shawn, the youngest of Nanny Ogg’s sons, and the metal noise was caused by his suit of chain mail, which was several sizes too big for him. Lancre is a poor kingdom, and over the centuries the chain mail of the palace guards has had to be handed down from one generation to another, often on the end of a long stick. This one made him look like a bullet-proof bloodhound.

She stepped out in front of him.

“Is that you, Miss Magrat?” said Shawn, raising the flap of mail that covered his eyes. “It’s mam!”

“What’s happened to her?”

“He’s locked her up! Said she was coming to poison him! And I can’t get down to the dungeons to see because there’s all new guards! They say she’s been put in chains—” Shawn frowned—“and that means something horrible’s going to happen. You know what she’s like when she loses her temper. We’ll never hear the last of it, miz.”

“Where were you going?” demanded Magrat.

“To fetch our Jason and our Wane and our Darron and our—”

“Wait a moment.”

“Oh, Miss Magrat, suppose they try to torture her? You know what a tongue she’s got on her when she gets angry—”

“I’m thinking,” said Magrat.

“He’s put his own bodyguards on the gates and everything—”

“Look, just shut up a minute, will you, Shawn?”

“When our Jason finds out, he’s going to give the duke a real seeing-to, miz. He says it’s about time someone did.”

Nanny Ogg’s Jason was a young man with the build and, Magrat had always thought, the brains of a herd of oxen. Thick-skinned though he was, she doubted whether he could survive a hail of arrows.

“Don’t tell him yet,” she said thoughtfully. “There could be another way…”

“I’ll go and find Granny Weatherwax, shall I, miz?” said Shawn, hopping from one leg to another. “She’ll know what to do, she’s a witch.”

Magrat stood absolutely still. She had thought she was angry before, but now she was furious. She was wet and cold and hungry and this person—once upon a time, she heard herself thinking she would have burst into tears at this point.

“Oops,” said Shawn. “Um. I didn’t mean. Whoops. Um…” He backed away.

“If you happen to see Granny Weatherwax,” said Magrat slowly, in tones that should have etched her words into glass, “you can tell her that I will sort it all out. Now go away before I turn you into a frog. You look like one anyway.”

She turned, hitched up her skirts, and ran like hell toward her cottage.

 

Lord Felmet was one of nature’s gloaters. He was good at it.

“Quite comfortable, are we?” he said.

Nanny Ogg considered this. “Apart from these stocks, you mean?” she said.

“I am impervious to your foul blandishments,” said the duke. “I scorn your devious wiles. You are to be tortured, I’ll have you know.”

This didn’t appear to have the required effect. Nanny was staring around the dungeon with the vaguely interested gaze of a sightseer.

“And then you will be burned,” said the duchess.

“OK,” said Nanny.

“OK?”

“Well, it’s bloody freezing down here. What’s that big wardrobe thing with the spikes?”

The duke was trembling. “Aha,” he said. “Now you realize, eh? That, my dear lady, is an Iron Maiden. It’s the latest thing. Well may you—”

“Can I have a go in it?”

“Your pleas fall on deaf…” The duke’s voice trailed off. His twitch started up.

The duchess leaned forward until her big red face was inches away from Nanny’s nose.

“This insouciance gives you pleasure,” she hissed, “but soon you will laugh on the other side of your face!”

“It’s only got this side,” said Nanny.

The duchess fingered a tray of implements lovingly. “We shall see,” she said, picking up a pair of pliers.

“And you need not think any others of your people will come to your aid,” said the duke, who was sweating despite the chill. “We alone hold the keys to this dungeon. Ha ha. You will be an example to all those who have been spreading malicious rumors about me. Do not protest your innocence! I hear the voices all the time, lying…”

The duchess gripped him ferociously by the arm. “Enough,” she rasped. “Come, Leonal. We will let her reflect on her fate for a while.”

“…the faces…wicked lies…I wasn’t there, and anyway he fell…my porridge, all salty…” murmured the duke, swaying.

The door slammed behind them. There was a click of locks and a thudding of bolts.

Nanny was left alone in the gloom. A flickering torch high on the wall only made the surrounding darkness more forbidding. Strange metal shapes, designed for no more exalted purpose than the destruct-testing of the human body, cast unpleasant shadows. Nanny Ogg stirred in her chains.

“All right,” she said. “I can see you. Who are you?”

King Verence stepped forward.

“I saw you making faces behind him,” said Nanny Ogg. “All I could do to keep a straight face myself.”

“I wasn’t making faces, woman, I was scowling.”

Nanny squinted. “’Ere, I know you,” she said. “You’re dead.”

“I prefer the term ‘passed over,’” said the king.

“I’d bow,”* said Nanny. “Only there’s all these chains and things. You haven’t seen a cat around here, have you?”

“Yes. He’s in the room upstairs, asleep.”

Nanny appeared to relax. “That’s all right, then,” she said. “I was beginning to worry.” She stared around the dungeon again. “What’s that big bed thing over there?”

“The rack,” said the king, and explained its use. Nanny Ogg nodded.

“What a busy little mind he’s got,” she said.

“I fear, madam, that I may be responsible for your present predicament,” said Verence, sitting down on or at least just above a handy anvil. “I wished to attract a witch.”

“I suppose you’re no good at locks?”

“I fear they would be beyond my capabilities as yet…but surely—” the ghost of the king waved a hand in a vague gesture which encompassed the dungeon, Nanny and the manacles—“to a witch all this is just so much—”

“Solid iron,” said Nanny. “You might be able to walk through it, but I can’t.”

“I didn’t realize,” said Verence. “I thought witches could do magic.”

“Young man,” said Nanny, “you will oblige me by shutting up.”

“Madam! I am a king!”

“You are also dead, so I wouldn’t aspire to hold any opinions if I was you. Now just be quiet and wait, like a good boy.”

Against all his instincts, the king found himself obeying. There was no gainsaying that tone of voice. It spoke to him across the years, from his days in the nursery. Its echoes told him that if he didn’t eat it all up he would be sent straight to bed.

Nanny Ogg stirred in her chains. She hoped they would turn up soon.

“Er,” said the king uneasily. “I feel I owe you an explanation…”

 

“Thank you,” said Granny Weatherwax, and because Shawn seemed to be expecting it, added, “You’ve been a good boy.”

“Yes’m,” said Shawn. “M’m?”

“Was there something else?”

Shawn twisted the end of his chain-mail vest out of embarrassment. “It’s not true what everyone’s been saying about our mam, is it, m’m?” he said. “She doesn’t go around putting evil curses on folk. Except for Daviss the butcher. And old Cake-bread, after he kicked her cat. But they wasn’t what you’d call real curses, was they, m’m?”

“You can stop calling me m’m.”

“Yes, m’m.”

“They’ve been saying that, have they?”

“Yes, m’m.”

“Well, your mam does upset people sometimes.”

Shawn hopped from one leg to another.

“Yes, m’m, but they says terrible things about you, m’m, savin’ your presence, m’m.”

Granny stiffened.

“What things?”

“Don’t like to say, m’m.”

“What things?”

Shawn considered his next move. There weren’t many choices.

“A lot of things what aren’t true, m’m,” he said, establishing his credentials as early as possible. “All sorts of things. Like, old Verence was a bad king and you helped him on the throne, and you caused that bad winter the other year, and old Norbut’s cow dint give no milk after you looked at it. Lot of lies, m’m,” he added, loyally.

“Right,” said Granny.

She shut the door in his panting face, stood in thought for a moment, and retired to her rocking chair.

Eventually she said, once more, “Right.”

A little later she added, “She’s a daft old besom, but we can’t have people going around doing things to witches. Once you’ve lost your respect, you ain’t got a thing. I don’t remember looking at old Norbut’s cow. Who’s old Norbut?”

She stood up, took her pointed hat from its hook behind the door and, glaring into the mirror, skewered it in place with a number of ferocious hatpins. They slid on one by one, as unstoppable as the wrath of God.

She vanished into the outhouse for a moment and came back with her witch’s cloak, which served as a blanket for sick goats when not otherwise employed.

Once upon a time it had been black velvet; now it was just black. It was carefully and slowly fastened by a tarnished silver brooch.

No samurai, no questing knight, was ever dressed with as much ceremony.

Finally Granny drew herself up, surveyed her dark reflection in the glass, gave a thin little smile of approval, and left via the back door.

The air of menace was only slightly dispelled by the sound of her running up and down outside, trying to get her broomstick started.

 

Magrat was also regarding herself in the mirror.

She’d dug out a startlingly green dress that was designed to be both revealing and clinging, and would have been if Magrat had anything to display or cling to, so she’d shoved a couple of rolled-up stockings down the front in an effort to make good the more obvious deficiencies. She had also tried a spell on her hair, but it was naturally magic-resistant and already the natural shape was beginning to assert itself (a dandelion clock at about 2 p.m.).

Magrat had also tried makeup. This wasn’t an unqualified success. She didn’t have much practice. She was beginning to wonder if she’d overdone the eyeshadow.

Her neck, fingers and arms between them carried enough silverware to make a full-sized dinner service, and over everything she had thrown a black cloak lined with red silk.

In a certain light and from a carefully chosen angle, Magrat was not unattractive. Whether any of these preparations did anything for her is debatable, but they did mean that a thin veneer of confidence overlaid her trembling heart.

She drew herself up and turned this way and that. The clusters of amulets, magical jewelry and occult bangles on various parts of her body jingled together; any enemy wouldn’t only have to be blind to fail to notice that a witch was approaching, he’d have to be deaf as well.

She turned to her worktable and examined what she rather self-consciously, and never in Granny’s hearing, called her Tools of the Craft. There was the white-handled knife, used in the preparation of magical ingredients. There was the black-handled knife, used in the magical workings themselves; Magrat had carved so many runes into its handle it was in constant danger of falling in half. They were undoubtedly powerful, but…

Magrat shook her head regretfully, went over to the kitchen dresser and took out the breadknife. Something told her that at times like these a good sharp breadknife was probably the best friend a girl could have.

 

“I spy, with my little eye,” said Nanny Ogg, “something beginning with P.”

The ghost of the king stared wearily around the dungeons.

“Pliers,” he suggested.

“No.”

“Pilliwinks?”

“That’s a pretty name. What is it?”

“It’s a kind of thumbscrew. Look,” said the king.

“It’s not that,” said Nanny.

“Choke-pear?” he said desperately.

“That’s a C, and anyway I don’t know what it is,” said Nanny Ogg. The king obligingly indicated it on the tray, and explained its use.

“Definitely not,” said Nanny.

“Smouldering Boot of Punishment?” said the king.

“You’re a bit too good at these names,” said Nanny sharply. “You sure you didn’t use them when you were alive?”

“Absolutely, Nanny,” said the ghost.

“Boys that tell lies go to a bad place,” warned Nanny.

“Lady Felmet had most of them installed herself, it’s the truth,” said the king desperately; he felt his position to be precarious enough without having any bad places to worry about.

Nanny sniffed. “Right, then,” she said, slightly mollified. “It was ‘pinchers.’”

“But pinchers is just another name for pl—” the king began, and stopped himself in time. During his adult life he’d been afraid of no man, beast or combination of the two, but Nanny’s voice brought back old memories of schoolroom and nursery, of life under strict orders given by stern ladies in long skirts, and nursery food—mostly gray and brown—which seemed indigestible at the time but now appeared a distant ambrosia.

“That’s five to me,” said Nanny happily.

“They’ll be back soon,” said the king. “Are you sure you’ll be all right?”

“If I’m not, precisely how much help can you be?” said Nanny.

There was the sound of bolts sliding back.

 

There was already a crowd outside the castle as Granny’s broomstick wobbled uncertainly toward the ground. They went quiet as she strode forward, and parted to let her pass. She had a basket of apples under her arm.

“There’s a witch in the dungeons,” someone whispered to Granny. “And foul tortures, they say!”

“Nonsense,” said Granny. “It couldn’t be. I expect Nanny Ogg has just gone to advize the king, or something.”

“They say Jason Ogg’s gone to fetch his brothers,” said a stallholder, in awe.

“I really advize you all to return home,” said Granny Weatherwax. “There has probably been a misunderstanding. Everyone knows a witch cannot be held against her will.”

“It’s gone too far this time,” said a peasant. “All this burning and taxing and now this. I blame you witches. It’s got to stop. I know my rights.”

“What rights are they?” said Granny.

“Dunnage, cowhage-in-ordinary, badinage, leftovers, scrommidge, clary and spunt,” said the peasant promptly. “And acornage, every other year, and the right to keep two-thirds of a goat on the common. Until he set fire to it. It was a bloody good goat, too.”

“A man could go far, knowing his rights like you do,” said Granny. “But right now he should go home.”

She turned and looked at the gates. There were two extremely apprehensive guards on duty. She walked up to them, and fixed one of them with a look.

“I am a harmless old seller of apples,” she said, in a voice more appropriate for the opening of hostilities in a middle-range war. “Pray let me past, dearie.” The last word had knives in it.

“No one must enter the castle,” said one of the guards. “Orders of the duke.”

Granny shrugged. The apple-seller gambit had never worked more than once in the entire history of witchcraft, as far as she knew, but it was traditional.

“I know you, Champett Poldy,” she said. “I recall I laid out your grandad and I brought you into the world.” She glanced at the crowds, which had regathered a little way off, and turned back to the guard, whose face was already a mask of terror. She leaned a little closer, and said, “I gave you your first good hiding in this valley of tears and by all the gods if you cross me now I will give you your last.”

There was a soft metallic noise as the spear fell out of the man’s fearful fingers. Granny reached and gave the trembling man a reassuring pat on the shoulder.

“But don’t worry about it,” she added. “Have an apple.”

She made to step forward, and a second spear barred her way. She looked up with interest.

The other guard was not a Ramtopper, but a city-bred mercenary brought up to swell the ranks depleted in recent years. His face was a patchwork of scar tissue. Several of the scars rearranged themselves into what was possibly a sneer.

“So that’s witches’ magic, is it?” said the guard. “Pretty poor stuff. Maybe it frightens these country idiots, woman, but it doesn’t frighten me.”

“I imagine it takes a lot to frighten a big strong lad like you,” said Granny, reaching up to her hat.

“And don’t you try to put the wind up me, neither.” The guard stared straight ahead, and rocked gently on the balls of his feet. “Old ladies like you, twisting people around. It shouldn’t be stood for, like they say.”

“Just as you like,” said Granny, pushing the spear aside.

“Listen, I said—” the guard began, and grabbed Granny’s shoulder. Her hand moved so quickly it hardly seemed to move at all, but suddenly he was clutching at his arm and moaning.

Granny replaced the hatpin in her hat and ran for it.

 

“We will begin,” said the duchess, leering, “with the Showing of the Implements.”

“Seen ’em,” said Nanny. “Leastways, all the ones beginning with P, S, I, T and W.”

“Then let us see how long you can keep that light conversational tone. Light the brazier, Felmet,” snapped the duchess.

“Light the brazier, Fool,” said the duke.

The Fool moved slowly. He hadn’t expected any of this. Torturing people hadn’t been on his mental agenda. Hurting old ladies in cold blood wasn’t his cup of tea, and actually hurting witches in blood of any temperature whatsoever failed to be an entire twelve-course banquet. Words, he’d said. All this probably came under the heading of sticks and stones.

“I don’t like doing this,” he murmured under his breath.

“Fine,” said Nanny Ogg, whose hearing was superb. “I’ll remember that you didn’t like it.”

“What’s that?” said the duke sharply.

“Nothing,” said Nanny. “Is this going to take long? I haven’t had breakfast.”

The Fool lit a match. There was the faintest disturbance in the air beside him, and it went out. He swore, and tried another. This time his shaking hands managed to get it as far as the brazier before it, too, flared and darkened.

“Hurry up, man!” said the duchess, laying out a tray of tools.

“Doesn’t seem to want to light—” muttered the Fool, as another match became a fluttering streak of flame and then went out.

The duke snatched the box from his trembling fingers and caught him across the cheek with a handful of rings.

“Can no orders of mine be obeyed?” he screamed. “Infirm of purpose! Weak! Give me the box!”

The Fool backed away. Someone he couldn’t see was whispering things he couldn’t quite make out in his ear.

“Go outside,” hissed the duke, “and see that we are not disturbed!”

The Fool tripped over the bottom step, turned and, with a last imploring look at Nanny, scampered through the door. He capered a little bit, out of force of habit.

“The fire isn’t completely necessary,” said the duchess. “It merely assists. Now, woman, will you confess?”

“What to?” said Nanny.

“It’s common knowledge. Treason. Malicious witchcraft. Harboring the king’s enemies. Theft of the crown—”

A tinkling noise made them look down. A bloodstained dagger had fallen off the bench, as though someone had tried to pick it up but just couldn’t get the strength together. Nanny heard the king’s ghost swear under its breath, or what would have been its breath.

“—and spreading false rumors,” finished the duchess.

“—salt in my food—” said the duke, nervously, staring at the bandages on his hand. He kept getting the feeling that there was a fourth person in the dungeon.

“If you do confess,” said the duchess, “you will merely be burned at the stake. And, please, no humorous remarks.”

“What false rumors?”

The duke closed his eyes, but the visions were still there. “Concerning the accidental death of the late King Verence,” he whispered hoarsely. The air swirled again.

Nanny sat with her head cocked to one side, as though listening to a voice only she could hear. Except that the duke was certain that he could hear something too, not exactly a voice, something like the distant sighing of the wind.

“Oh, I don’t know nothing false,” she said. “I know you stabbed him, and you gave him the dagger. It was at the top of the stairs.” She paused, head cocked, nodded, and added, “Just by the suit of armor with the pike, and you said, ‘If it’s to be done, it’s better if it’s done quickly,’ or something, and then you snatched the king’s own dagger, the very same what is now lying on the floor, out of his belt and—”

“You lie! There were no witnesses. We made…there was nothing to witness! I heard someone in the dark, but there was no one there! There couldn’t have been anyone seeing anything!” screamed the duke. His wife scowled at him.

“Do shut up, Leonal,” she said. “I think within these four walls we can dispense with that sort of thing.”

“Who told her? Did you tell her?”

“And calm down. No one told her. She’s a witch, for goodness sake, they find out about these things. Second glance, or something.”

“Sight,” said Nanny.

“Which you will not possess much longer, my good woman, unless you tell us who else knows and indeed, assist us on a number of other matters,” said the duchess grimly. “And you will do so, believe me. I am skilled in these things.”

Granny glanced around the dungeon. It was beginning to get crowded. King Verence was bursting with such angry vitality that he was very nearly apparent, and was furiously trying to get a grip on a knife. But there were others behind—wavering, broken shapes, not exactly ghosts but memories, implanted in the very substances of the walls themselves by sheer pain and terror.

“My own dagger! The bastards! They killed me with my own dagger,” said the ghost of King Verence silently, raising his transparent arms and imploring the netherworld in general to witness this ultimate humiliation. “Give me strength…”

“Yes,” said Nanny. “It’s worth a try.”

“And now we will commence,” said the duchess.

 

“What?” said the guard.

“I SAID,” said Magrat, “I’ve come to sell my lovely apples. Don’t you listen?”

“There’s not a sale on, is there?” The guard was extremely nervous since his colleague had been taken off to the infirmary. He hadn’t taken the job in order to deal with this sort of thing.

It dawned on him.

“You’re not a witch, are you?” he said, fumbling awkwardly with his pike.

“Of course not. Do I look like one?”

The guard looked at her occult bangles, her lined cloak, her trembling hands and her face. The face was particularly worrying. Magrat had used a lot of powder to make her face pale and interesting. It combined with the lavishly applied mascara to give the guard the impression that he was looking at two flies that had crashed into a sugar bowl. He found his fingers wanted to make a sign to ward off the evil eyeshadow.

“Right,” he said uncertainly. His mind was grinding through the problem. She was a witch. Just lately there’d been a lot of gossip about witches being bad for your health. He’d been told not to let witches pass, but no one had said anything about apple sellers. Apple sellers were not a problem. It was witches that were the problem. She’d said she was an apple seller and he wasn’t about to doubt a witch’s word.

Feeling happy with this application of logic, he stood to one side and gave an expansive wave.

“Pass, apple seller,” he said.

“Thank you,” said Magrat sweetly. “Would you like an apple?”

“No, thanks. I haven’t finished the one the other witch gave me.” His eyes rolled. “Not a witch. Not a witch, an apple seller. An apple seller. She ought to know.”

“How long ago was this?”

“Just a few minutes…”

Granny Weatherwax was not lost. She wasn’t the kind of person who ever became lost. It was just that, at the moment, while she knew exactly where SHE was, she didn’t know the position of anywhere else. Currently she had arrived in the kitchens again, precipitating a breakdown in the cook, who was trying to roast some celery. The fact that several people had tried to buy apples from her wasn’t improving her temper.

Magrat found her way to the Great Hall, empty and deserted at this time of day except for a couple of guards who were playing dice. They wore the tabards of Felmet’s own personal bodyguard, and stopped their game as soon as she appeared.

“Well, well,” said one, leering. “Come to keep us company, have you, my pretty.”*

“I was looking for the dungeons,” said Magrat, to whom the words “sexual harassment” were a mere collection of syllables.

“Just fancy,” said one of the guards, winking at the other. “I reckon we can help you there.” They got up and stood either side of her; she was aware of two chins you could strike matches on and an overpowering smell of stale beer. Frantic signals from outlying portions of her mind began to break down her iron-hard conviction that bad things only happened to bad people.

They escorted her down several flights of steps into a maze of dank, arched passageways as she sought hurriedly for some polite way of disengaging herself.

“I should warn you,” she said, “I am not, as I may appear, a simple apple seller.”

“Fancy that.”

“I am, in fact, a witch.”

This did not make the impression she had hoped. The guards exchanged glances.

“Fair enough,” said one. “I’ve always wondered what it was like to kiss a witch. Around here they do say you gets turned into a frog.”

The other guard nudged him. “I reckon, then,” he said, in the slow, ripe tones of one who thinks that what he is about to say next is going to be incredibly funny, “you kissed one years ago.”

The brief guffaw was suddenly interrupted when Magrat was flung against the wall and treated to a close up view of the guard’s nostrils.

“Now listen to me, sweetheart,” he said. “You ain’t the first witch we’ve had down here, if witch you be, but you could be lucky and walk out again. If you are nice to us, d’you see?”

There was a shrill, short scream from somewhere nearby.

“That, you see,” said the guard, “was a witch having it the hard way. You could do us all a favor, see? Lucky you met us, really.”

His questing hand stopped its wandering. “What’s this?” he said to Magrat’s pale face. “A knife? A knife? I reckon we’ve got to take that very seriously, don’t you, Hron?”

“You got to tie her hands and gag her,” said Hron hurriedly. “They can’t do no magic if they can’t speak or wave their hands about…”

“You can take your hands off her!”

All three stared down the passage at the Fool. He was jingling with rage.

“Let her go this minute!” he shouted. “Or I’ll report you!”

“Oh, you’ll report us, will you?” said Hron. “And will anyone listen to you, you earwax-colored little twerp?”

“This is a witch we have here,” said the other guard. “So you can go and tinkle somewhere else.” He turned back to Magrat. “I like a girl with spirit,” he said, incorrectly as it turned out.

The Fool advanced with the bravery of the terminally angry.

“I told you to let her go,” he repeated.

Hron drew his sword and winked at his companion.

Magrat struck. It was an unplanned, instinctive blow, its stopping power considerably enhanced by the weight of rings and bangles; her arm whirred around in an arc that connected with her captor’s jaw and spun him twice before he folded up in a heap with a quiet little sigh, and incidentally with several symbols of occult significance enbossed on his cheek.

Hron gaped at him, and then looked at Magrat. He raised his sword at about the same moment that the Fool cannoned into him, and the two men went down in a struggling heap. Like most small men the Fool relied on the initial mad rush to secure an advantage and was at a loss for a follow-through, and it would probably have gone hard with him if Hron hadn’t suddenly become aware that a breadknife was pressed to his neck.

“Let go of him,” said Magrat, pushing her hair out of her eyes.

He stiffened. “You’re wondering whether I really would cut your throat,” panted Magrat. “I don’t know either. Think of the fun we could have together, finding out.”

She reached down with her other hand and hauled the Fool to his feet by his collar.

“Where did that scream come from?” she said, without taking her eyes off the guard.

“It was down this way. They’ve got her in the torture dungeon and I don’t like it, it’s going too far, and I couldn’t get in and I couldn’t get in and I came to look for someone—”

“Well, you’ve found me,” said Magrat.

“You,” she said to Hron, “will stay here. Or run away, for all I care. But you won’t follow us.”

He nodded, and stared after them as they hurried down the passage. “The door’s locked,” said the Fool. “There’s all sorts of noises, but the door’s locked.”

“Well, it’s a dungeon, isn’t it?”

“They’re not supposed to lock from the inside!”

It was, indeed, unbudgeable. Silence came from the other side—a busy, thick silence that crawled through the cracks and spilled out into the passage, a kind of silence that is worse than screams.

The Fool hopped from one foot to the other as Magrat explored the door’s rough surface.

“Are you really a witch?” he said. “They said you were a witch, are you really? You don’t look like a witch, you look very, that is…” He blushed. “Not like a, you know, crone at all, but absolutely beautiful…” His voice trailed into silence…

I am totally in control of the situation, Magrat told herself. I never thought I would be, but I am thinking absolutely clearly.

And she realized, in an absolutely clear way, that her padding had slipped down to her waist, her head felt as though a family of unhygienic birds had been nesting in it, and her eyeshadow had not so much run as sprinted. Her dress was torn in several places, her legs were scratched, her arms were bruised, and for some reason she felt on top of the world.

“I think you’d better stand back, Verence,” she said. “I’m not sure how this is going to work.”

There was a sharp intake of breath.

“How did you know my name?”

Magrat sized up the door. The oak was old, centuries old, but she could sense just a little sap under a surface varnished by the years into something that was nearly as tough as stone. Normally what she had in mind would require a day’s planning and a bagful of exotic ingredients. At least, so she’d always believed. Now she was prepared to doubt it. If you could conjure demons out of washtubs, you could do anything.

She became aware that the Fool had spoken.

“Oh, I expect I heard it somewhere,” she said vaguely.

“I shouldn’t think so, I never use it,” said the Fool. “I mean, it’s not a popular name with the duke. It was me mam, you see. They like to name you after kings, I suppose. My grandad said I had no business having a name like that and he said I shouldn’t go around—”

Magrat nodded. She was looking around the dank tunnel with a professional’s eye.

It wasn’t a promising place. The old oak planks had been down here in the darkness all these years, away from the clock of the seasons…

On the other hand…Granny had said that somehow all trees were one tree, or something like that. Magrat thought she understood it, although she didn’t know exactly what it meant. And it was springtime up there. The ghost of life that still lived in the wood must know that. Or if it had forgotten, it must be told.

She put her palms flat on the door again and shut her eyes, tried to think her way out through the stone, out of the castle, and into the thin, black soil of the mountains, into the air, into the sunlight…

The Fool was merely aware that Magrat was standing very still. Then her hair stood out from her head, gently, and there was a smell of leaf mold.

And then, without warning, the hammer that can drive a marshmallow-soft toadstool through six inches of solid pavement or an eel across a thousand miles of hostile ocean to a particular pond in an upland field, struck up through her and into the door.

She stepped back carefully, her mind stunned, fighting against a desperate urge to bury her toes into the rock and put forth leaves. The Fool caught her, and the shock nearly knocked him over.

Magrat sagged against the faintly jingling body, and felt triumphant. She had done it! And with no artificial aids! If only the others could have seen this…

“Don’t go near it,” she mumbled. “I think I gave it rather…a lot.” The Fool was still holding her toastrack body in his arms and was too overcome to utter a word, but she still got a reply.

“I reckon you did,” said Granny Weatherwax, stepping out of the shadows. “I never would have thought of it myself.”

Magrat peered at her.

“You’ve been here all the time?”

“Just a few minutes.” Granny glanced at the door. “Good technique,” she said, “but it’s old wood. Been in a fire, too, I reckon. Lot of iron nails and stuff in there. Can’t see it working, I’d have tried the stones if it was me, but—”

She was interrupted by a soft “pop.”

There was another, and then a whole series of them together, like a shower of meringues.

Behind her, very gently, the door was breaking into leaf.

Granny stared at it for a few seconds, and then met Magrat’s terrified gaze.

“Run!” she yelled.

They grabbed the Fool and scurried into the shelter of a convenient buttress.

The door gave a warning creak. Several of its planks twisted in vegetable agony and there was a shower of rock splinters when nails were expelled like thorns from a wound, ricocheting off the stonework. The Fool ducked as part of the lock whirred over his head and smashed into the opposite wall.

The lower parts of the planks extended questing white roots, which slithered across the damp stone to the nearest crack and began to auger in. Knotholes bulged, burst and thrust out branches which hit the stones of the doorway and tumbled them aside. And all the time there was a low groan, the sound of the cells of the wood trying to contain the surge of raw life pounding through them.

“If it had been me,” said Granny Weatherwax, as part of the ceiling caved in further along the passage, “I wouldn’t have done it like that. Not that I’m objecting, mind you,” she said, as Magrat opened her mouth. “It’s a reasonable job. I think you might have overdone it a bit, that’s all.”

“Excuse me,” said the Fool.

“I can’t do rocks,” said Magrat.

“Well, no, rocks is an acquired taste—”

“Excuse me.”

The two witches stared at him, and he backed away.

“Weren’t you supposed to be rescuing someone?” he said.

“Oh,” said Granny. “Yes. Come on, Magrat. We’d better see what she’s been getting up to.”

“There were screams,” said the Fool, who couldn’t help feeling they weren’t taking things seriously enough.

“I daresay,” said Granny, pushing him aside and stepping over a writhing taproot. “If anyone locked me in a dungeon, there’d be screams.”

There was a lot of dust inside the dungeon, and by the nimbus of light around its one torch Magrat could dimly make out two figures cowering in the furthest corner. Most of the furniture had been overturned and scattered across the floor; it didn’t look as though any of it had been designed to be the last word in comfort. Nanny Ogg was sitting quite calmly in what appeared to be a sort of stocks.

“Took your time,” she observed. “Let me out of this, will you? I’m getting cramp.”

And there was the dagger.

It spun gently in the middle of the room, glinting when the turning blade caught the light.

“My own dagger!” said the ghost of the king, in a voice only the witches could hear. “All this time and I never knew it! My own dagger! They bloody well did me in with my own bloody knife!”

He took another step toward the royal couple, waving the dagger. A faint gurgle escaped from the lips of the duke, glad to be out of there.

“He’s doing well, isn’t he,” said Nanny, as Magrat helped her out of her prison.

“Isn’t that the old king? Can they see him?”

“Shouldn’t think so.”

King Verence staggered slightly under the weight. He was too old for such poltergeist activity; you had to be an adolescent for this…

“Let me just get a grip on this thing,” he said. “Oh, damn…”

The knife dropped from the ghost’s tenuous grasp and clattered to the floor. Granny Weatherwax stepped forward smartly and put her foot on it.

“The dead shouldn’t kill the living,” she said. “It could be a dangerous wossname, precedent. We’d all be outnumbered, for one thing.”

The duchess surfaced from her terror first. There had been knives swooping through the air and exploding doors, and now these women were defying her in her own dungeons. She couldn’t be sure how she was supposed to react to the supernatural items, but she had very firm ideas about how she should tackle the last one.

Her mouth opened like the gateway to a red hell. “Guards!” she yelled, and spotted the Fool hovering near the door. “Fool! Fetch the guards!”

“They’re busy. We were just leaving,” said Granny. “Which one of you is the duke?”

Felmet stared pink-eyed up at her from his half-crouch in the corner. A thin dribble of saliva escaped from the corner of his mouth, and he giggled.

Granny looked closer. In the center of those streaming eyes something else looked back at her.

“I’m going to give you no cause,” she said quietly. “But it would be better for you if you left this country. Abdicate, or whatever.”

“In favor of whom?” said the duchess icily. “A witch?”

“I won’t,” said the duke.

“What did you say?”

The duke pulled himself upright, brushed some of the dust off his clothes, and looked Granny full in the face. The coldness in the center of his eyes was larger.

“I said I won’t,” he said. “Do you think a bit of simple conjuring would frighten me? I am the king by right of conquest, and you cannot change it. It is as simple as that, witch.”

He moved closer.

Granny stared at him. She hadn’t faced anything like this before. The man was clearly mad, but at the heart of his madness was a dreadful cold sanity, a core of pure interstellar ice in the center of the furnace. She’d thought him weak under a thin shell of strength, but it went a lot further than that. Somewhere deep inside his mind, somewhere beyond the event horizon of rationality, the sheer pressure of insanity had hammered his madness into something harder than diamond.

“If you defeat me by magic, magic will rule,” said the duke. “And you can’t do it. And any king raised with your help would be under your power. Hag-ridden, I might say. That which magic rules, magic destroys. It would destroy you, too. You know it. Ha. Ha.”

Granny’s knuckles whitened as he moved closer.

“You could strike me down,” he said. “And perhaps you could find someone to replace me. But he would have to be a fool indeed, because he would know he was under your evil eye, and if he mispleased you, why, his life would be instantly forfeit. You could protest all you wished, but he’d know he ruled with your permission. And that would make him no king at all. Is this not true?”

Granny looked away. The other witches hung back, ready to duck.

“I said, is this not true?”

“Yes,” said Granny. “It is true…”

“Yes.”

“…but there is one who could defeat you,” said Granny slowly.

“The child? Let him come when he is grown. A young man with a sword, seeking his destiny.” The duke sneered. “Very romantic. But I have many years to prepare. Let him try.”

Beside him King Verence’s fist smashed through the air and quite failed to connect.

The duke leaned closer until his nose was an inch from Granny’s face.

“Get back to your cauldrons, wyrd sisters,” he said softly.

 

Granny Weatherwax stalked through the passages of Lancre Castle like a large, angry bat, the duke’s laughter echoing around her head.

“You could give him boils or something,” said Nanny Ogg. “Hemorrhoids are good. That’s allowed. It won’t stop him ruling, it just means he’ll have to rule standing up. Always good for a laugh, that. Or piles.”

Granny Weatherwax said nothing. If fury were heat, her hat would have caught fire.

“Mind you, that’d probably make him worse,” said Nanny, running to keep up. “Same with toothache.” She gave a sideways glance at Granny’s twitching features.

“You needn’t fret,” she said. “They didn’t do anything much. But thanks, anyway.”

“I ain’t worried about you, Gytha Ogg,” snapped Granny. “I only come along ’cos Magrat was fretting. What I say is, if a witch can’t look after herself, she’s got no business calling herself a witch.”

“Magrat done well with the woodwork, I thought.”

Even in the grip of her sullen fury, Granny Weatherwax spared a nod.

“She’s coming along,” she said. She looked up and down the corridor, and then leaned closer to Nanny Ogg’s ear.

“I ain’t going to give him the pleasure of saying it,” she said, “but he’s got us beaten.”

“Well, I don’t know,” said Nanny. “Our Jason and a few sharp lads could soon—”

“You saw some of his guards. These aren’t the old sort. These are a tough kind.”

“We could give the boys just a bit of help—”

“It wouldn’t work. People have to sort this sort of thing out for themselves.”

“If you say so, Esme,” said Nanny meekly.

“I do. Magic’s there to be ruled, not for ruling.”

Nanny nodded and then, remembering a promise, reached down and picked up a fragment of stone from the rubble on the tunnel floor.

“I thought you’d forgotten,” said the ghost of the king, by her ear.

Further down the passage the Fool was capering after Magrat.

“Can I see you again?” he said.

“Well…I don’t know,” said Magrat, her heart singing a smug song.

“How about tonight?” said the Fool.

“Oh, no,” said Magrat. “I’m very busy tonight.” She had intended to curl up with a hot milk drink and Goodie Whemper’s notebooks on experimental astrology, but instinct told her that any suitor should have an uphill struggle put in front of him, just to make him keener.

“Tomorrow night, then?” the Fool persisted.

“I think I should be washing my hair.”

“I could get Friday night free.”

“We do a lot of work at night, you see—”

“The afternoon, then.”

Magrat hesitated. Perhaps instinct had got it wrong. “Well—” she said.

“About two o’clock. In the meadow by the pond, all right?”

“Well—”

“See you there, then. All right?” said the Fool desperately.

“Fool!” The duchess’s voice echoed along the passage, and a look of terror crossed his face.

“I’ve got to go,” he said. “The meadow, OK? I’ll wear something so you recognize me. All right?”

“All right,” echoed Magrat, hypnotized by the sheer pressure of his persistence. She turned and ran after the other witches.

There was pandemonium outside the castle. The crowd that had been there at Granny’s arrival had grown considerably, and had flowed in through the now unguarded gateway and lapped around the keep. Civil disobedience was new to Lancre, but its inhabitants had already mastered some of its more elementary manifestations, viz, the jerking of rakes and sickles in the air with simple up-and-down motions accompanied by grimaces and cries of “Gerrh!,” although a few citizens, who hadn’t quite grasped the idea, were waving flags and cheering. Advanced students were already eyeing the more combustible buildings inside the walls. Several sellers of hot meat pies and sausages in a bun had appeared from nowhere* and were doing a brisk trade. Pretty soon someone was going to throw something.

The three witches stood at the top of the steps that led to the keep’s main door and surveyed the seas of faces.

“There’s our Jason,” said Nanny happily. “And Wane and Darron and Kev and Trev and Nev—”

“I will remember their faces,” said Lord Felmet, emerging between them and putting a hand on their shoulders. “And do you see my archers, on the walls?”

“I see ’em,” said Granny grimly.

“Then smile and wave,” said the duke. “So that the people may know that all is well. After all, have you not been to see me today on matters of state?”

He leaned closer to Granny.

“Yes, there are a hundred things you could do,” he said. “But the ending would always be the same.” He drew back. “I’m not an unreasonable man, I hope,” he added, in cheerful tones. “Perhaps, if you persuade the people to be calm, I may be prevailed upon to moderate my rule somewhat. I make no promises, of course.”

Granny said nothing.

“Smile and wave,” commanded the duke.

Granny raised one hand in a vague motion and produced a brief rictus that had nothing whatsoever to do with humor. Then she scowled and nudged Nanny Ogg, who was waving and mugging like a maniac.

“No need to get carried away,” she hissed.

“But there’s our Reet and our Sharleen and their babbies,” said Nanny. “Coo-eee!”

“Will you shut up, you daft old besom!” snapped Granny. “And pull yourself together!”

“Jolly good, well done,” said the duke. He raised his hands, or at least his hand. The other still ached. He’d tried the grater again last night, but it hadn’t worked.

“People of Lancre,” he cried, “do not be afeared! I am your friend. I will protect you from the witches! They have agreed to leave you in peace!”

Granny stared at him as he spoke. He’s one of these here maniac depressives, she said. Up and down like a wossname. Kill you one minute and ask you how you’re feeling the next.

She became aware that he was looking at her expectantly.

“What?”

“I said, I’ll now call upon the respected Granny Weatherwax to say a few words, ha ha,” he said.

“You said that, did you?”

“Yes!”

“You’ve gone a long way too far,” said Granny.

“I have, haven’t I!” The duke giggled.

Granny turned to the expectant crowds, which went silent.

“Go home,” she said.

There was a further long silence.

“Is that all?” said the duke.

“Yes.”

“What about pledges of eternal allegiance?”

“What about them? Gytha, will you stop waving at people!”

“Sorry.”

“And now we are going to go, too,” said Granny.

“But we were getting on so well,” said the duke.

“Come, Gytha,” said Granny icily. “And where’s Magrat got to?”

Magrat looked up guiltily. She had been deep in conversation with the Fool, although it was the kind of conversation where both parties spend a lot of time looking at their feet and picking at their fingernails. Ninety percent of true love is acute, ear-burning embarrassment.

“We’re leaving,” said Granny.

“Friday afternoon, remember,” hissed the Fool.

“Well, if I can,” said Magrat.

Nanny Ogg leered.

And so Granny Weatherwax swept down the steps and through the crowds, with the other two running behind her. Several of the grinning guards caught her eye and wished they hadn’t, but here and there, among the watching crowd, was a barely suppressed snigger. She hurtled through the gateway, across the drawbridge and through the town. Granny walking fast could beat most other people at a run.

Behind them the duke, who had crested the latest maniac peak on the switchback of his madness and was coasting speedily toward the watersplash of despair, laughed.

“Ha ha.”

Granny didn’t stop until she was outside the town and under the welcoming eaves of the forest. She turned off the road and flumped down on a log, her face in her hands.

The other two approached her carefully. Magrat patted her on the back.

“Don’t despair,” she said. “You handled it very well, we thought.”

“I ain’t despairing, I’m thinking,” said Granny. “Go away.”

Nanny Ogg raised her eyebrows at Magrat in a warning fashion. They backed off to a suitable distance although, with Granny in her present mood, the next universe might not be far enough, and sat down on a moss-grown stone.

“Are you all right?” said Magrat. “They didn’t do anything, did they?”

“Never laid a finger on me,” said Nanny. She sniffed. “They’re not your real royalty,” she added. “Old King Gruneweld, for one, he wouldn’t have wasted time waving things around and menacing people. It’d been bang, needles right under the fingernails from the word go, and no messing. None of this evil laughter stuff. He was a real king. Very gracious.”

“He was threatening to burn you.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t of stood for it. I see you’ve got a follower,” said Nanny.

“Sorry?” said Magrat.

“The young fellow with the bells,” said Nanny. “And the face like a spaniel what’s just been kicked.”

“Oh, him.” Magrat blushed hotly under her pale makeup. “Really, he’s just this man. He just follows me around.”

“Can be difficult, can that,” said Nanny sagely.

“Besides, he’s so small. And he capers all over the place,” said Magrat.

“Looked at him carefully, have you?” said the old witch.

“Pardon?”

“You haven’t, have you? I thought not. He’s a very clever man, that Fool. He ought to have been one of them actor men.”

“What do you mean?”

“Next time you have a look at him like a witch, not like a woman,” said Nanny, and gave Magrat a conspiratorial nudge. “Good bit of work with the door back there,” she added. “Coming on well, you are. I hope you told him about Greebo.”

“He said he’d let him out directly, Nanny.”

There was a snort from Granny Weatherwax.

“Did you hear the sniggering in the crowd?” she said. “Someone sniggered!”

Nanny Ogg sat down beside her.

“And a couple of them pointed,” she said. “I know.”

“It’s not to be borne!”

Magrat sat down on the other end of the log.

“There’s other witches,” she said. “There’s lots of witches further up the Ramtops. Maybe they can help.”

The other two looked at her in pained surprise.

“I don’t think we need go that far,” sniffed Granny. “Asking for help.”

“Very bad practice,” nodded Nanny Ogg.

“But you asked a demon to help you,” said Magrat.

“No, we didn’t,” said Granny.

“Right. We didn’t.”

“We ordered it to assist.”

“S’right.”

Granny Weatherwax stretched out her legs and looked at her boots. They were good strong boots, with hobnails and crescent-shaped scads; you couldn’t believe a cobbler had made them, someone had laid down a sole and built up from there.

“I mean, there’s that witch over Skund way,” she said. “Sister Whosis, wossname, her son went off to be a sailor—you know, Gytha, her who sniffs and puts them antimassacres on the backs of chairs soon as you sits down—”

“Grodley,” said Nanny Ogg. “Sticks her little finger out when she drinks her tea and drops her Haitches all the time.”

“Yes. Hwell. I haven’t hlowered myself to talk to her hever since that business with the gibbet, you recall. I daresay she’d just love to come snooping haround here, running her fingers over heverything and sniffling, telling us how to do things. Oh, yes. Help. We’d all be in a fine to-do if we went around helping all the time.”

“Yes, and over Skund way the trees talk to you and walk around of night,” said Nanny. “Without even asking permission. Very poor organization.”

“Not really good organization, like we’ve got here?” said Magrat.

Granny stood up purposefully.

“I’m going home,” she said.

There are thousands of good reasons why magic doesn’t rule the world. They’re called witches and wizards, Magrat reflected, as she followed the other two back to the road.

It was probably some wonderful organization on the part of Nature to protect itself. It saw to it that everyone with any magical talent was about as ready to cooperate as a she-bear with toothache, so all that dangerous power was safely dissipated as random bickering and rivalry. There were differences in style, of course. Wizards assassinated each other in drafty corridors, witches just cut one another dead in the street. And they were all as self-centered as a spinning top. Even when they help other people, she thought, they’re secretly doing it for themselves. Honestly, they’re just like big children.

Except for me, she thought smugly.

“She’s very upset, isn’t she,” said Magrat to Nanny Ogg.

“Ah, well,” said Nanny. “There’s the problem, see. The more you get used to magic, the more you don’t want to use it. The more it gets in your way. I expect, when you were just starting out, you learned a few spells from Goodie Whemper, maysherestinpeace, and you used them all the time, didn’t you?”

“Well, yes. Everyone does.”

“Well-known fact,” agreed Nanny. “But when you get along in the Craft, you learn that the hardest magic is the sort you don’t use at all.”

Magrat considered the proposition cautiously. “This isn’t some kind of Zen, is it?” she said.

“Dunno. Never seen one.”

“When we were in the dungeons, Granny said something about trying the rocks. That sounded like pretty hard magic.”

“Well, Goodie wasn’t much into rocks,” said Nanny. “It’s not really hard. You just prod their memories. You know, of the old days. When they were hot and runny.”

She hesitated, and her hand flew to her pocket. She gripped the lump of castle stone and relaxed.

“Thought I’d forgotten it, for a minute,” she said, lifting it out. “You can come out now.”

He was barely visible in the brightness of day, a mere shimmer in the air under the trees. King Verence blinked. He wasn’t used to daylight.

“Esme,” said Nanny. “There’s someone to see you.”

Granny turned slowly and squinted at the ghost.

“I saw you in the dungeon, didn’t I?” she said. “Who’re you?”

“Verence, King of Lancre,” said the ghost, and bowed. “Do I have the honor of addressing Granny Weatherwax, doyenne of witches?”

It has already been pointed out that just because Verence came from a long line of kings didn’t mean that he was basically stupid, and a year without the distractions of the flesh had done wonders as well. Granny Weatherwax considered herself totally unsusceptible to buttering up, but the king was expertly applying the equivalent of the dairy surplus of quite a large country. Bowing was a particularly good touch.

A muscle twitched at the corner of Granny’s mouth. She gave a stiff little bow in return, because she wasn’t quite sure what “doyenne” meant.

“I’m her,” she conceded.

“You can get up now,” she added, regally.

King Verence remained kneeling, about two inches above the actual ground.

“I crave a boon,” he said urgently.

“Here, how did you get out of the castle?” said Granny.

“The esteemed Nanny Ogg assisted me,” said the king. “I reasoned, if I am anchored to the stones of Lancre, then I can also go where the stones go. I am afraid I indulged in a little trickery to arrange matters. Currently I am haunting her apron.”

“Not the first, either,” said Granny, automatically.

“Esme!”

“And I beg you, Granny Weatherwax, to restore my son to the throne.”

“Restore?”

“You know what I mean. He is in good health?”

Granny nodded. “The last time we Looked at him, he was eating an apple,” she said.

“It is his destiny to be King of Lancre!”

“Yes, well. Destiny is tricky, you know,” said Granny.

“You will not help?”

Granny looked wretched. “It’s meddling, you see,” she said. “It always goes wrong if you meddle in politics. Like, once you start, you can’t stop. Fundamental rule of magic, is that. You can’t go around messing with fundamental rules.”

“You’re not going to help?”

“Well…naturally, one day, when your lad is a bit older…”

“Where is he now?” said the king, coldly.

The witches avoided one another’s faces.

“We saw him safe out of the country, you see,” said Granny awkwardly.

“Very good family,” Nanny Ogg put in quickly.

“What kind of people?” said the king. “Not commoners, I trust?”

“Absolutely not,” said Granny with considerable firmness as a vision of Vitoller floated across her imagination. “Not common at all. Very uncommon. Er.”

Her eyes implored Magrat for help.

“They were Thespians,” said Magrat firmly, her voice radiating such approval that the king found himself nodding automatically.

“Oh,” he said. “Good.”

“Were they?” whispered Nanny Ogg. “They didn’t look it.”

“Don’t show your ignorance, Gytha Ogg,” sniffed Granny. She turned back to the ghost of the king. “Sorry about that, your majesty. It’s just her showing off. She don’t even know where Thespia is.”

“Wherever it is, I hope that they know how to school a man in the arts of war,” said Verence. “I know Felmet. In ten years he’ll be dug in here like a toad in a stone.”

The king looked from witch to witch. “What kind of kingdom will he have to come back to? I hear what the kingdom is becoming, even now. Will you watch it change, over the years, become shoddy and mean?” The king’s ghost faded.

His voice hung in the air, faint as a breeze.

“Remember, good sisters,” he said, “the land and the king are one.”

And he vanished.

The embarrassed silence was broken by Magrat blowing her nose.

“One what?” said Nanny Ogg.

“We’ve got to do something,” said Magrat, her voice choked with emotion. “Rules or no rules!”

“It’s very vexing,” said Granny, quietly.

“Yes, but what are you going to do?” she said.

“Reflect on things,” said Granny. “Think about it all.”

“You’ve been thinking about it for a year,” Magrat said.

“One what? Are one what?” said Nanny Ogg.

“It’s no good just reacting,” said Granny. “You’ve got to—”

A cart came bouncing and rumbling along the track from Lancre. Granny ignored it.

“—give these things careful consideration.”

“You don’t know what to do, do you?” said Magrat.

“Nonsense. I—”

“There’s a cart coming, Granny.”

Granny Weatherwax shrugged. “What you youngsters don’t realize—” she began.

Witches never bothered with elementary road safety. Such traffic as there was on the roads of Lancre either went around them or, if this was not possible, waited until they moved out of the way. Granny Weatherwax had grown up knowing this for a fact; the only reason she didn’t die knowing that it wasn’t was that Magrat, with rather better reflexes, dragged her into the ditch.

It was an interesting ditch. There were jiggling corkscrew things in it which were direct descendants of things which had been in the primordial soup of creation. Anyone who thought that ditchwater was dull could have spent an instructive half-hour in that ditch with a powerful microscope. It also had nettles in it, and now it had Granny Weatherwax.

She struggled up through the weeds, incoherent with rage, and rose from the ditch like Venus Anadyomene, only older and with more duckweed.

“T-t-t,” she said, pointing a shaking finger at the disappearing cart.

“It was young Nesheley from over Inkcap way,” said Nanny Ogg, from a nearby bush. “His family were always a bit wild. Of course, his mother was a Whipple.”

“He ran us down!” said Granny.

“You could have got out of the way,” said Magrat.

“Get out of the way?” said Granny. “We’re witches! People get out of our way!” She squelched onto the track, her finger still pointing at the distant cart. “By Hoki, I’ll make him wish he’d never been born—”

“He was quite a big baby, I recall,” said the bush. “His mother had a terrible time.”

“It’s never happened to me before, ever,” said Granny, still twanging like a bowstring. “I’ll teach him to run us down as though, as though, as though we was ordinary people!”

“He already knows,” said Magrat. “Just help me get Nanny out of this bush, will you?”

“I’ll turn his—”

“People haven’t got any respect anymore, that’s what it is,” said Nanny, as Magrat helped her with the thorns. “It’s all due to the king being one, I expect.”

“We’re witches!” screamed Granny, turning her face toward the sky and shaking her fists.

“Yes, yes,” said Magrat. “The harmonious balance of the universe and everything. I think Nanny’s a bit tired.”

“What’ve I been doing all this time?” said Granny, with a rhetorical flourish that would have made even Vitoller gasp.

“Not a lot,” said Magrat.

“Laughed at! Laughed at! On my own roads! In my own country!” screamed Granny. “That just about does it! I’m not taking ten more years of this! I’m not taking another day of it!”

The trees around her began to sway and the dust from the road sprang up into writhing shapes that tried to swirl out of her way. Granny Weatherwax extended one long arm and at the end of it unfolded one long finger and from the tip of its curving nail there was a brief flare of octarine fire.

Half a mile down the track all four wheels fell off the cart at once.

“Lock up a witch, would he?” Granny shouted at the trees.

Nanny struggled to her feet.

“We’d better grab her,” she whispered to Magrat. The two of them leapt at Granny and forced her arms down to her sides.

“I’ll bloody well show him what a witch could do!” she yelled.

“Yes, yes, very good, very good,” said Nanny. “Only perhaps not just now and not just like this, eh?”

“Wyrd sisters, indeed!” Granny yelled. “I’ll make his—”

“Hold her a minute, Magrat,” said Nanny Ogg, and rolled up her sleeve.

“It can be like this with the highly-trained ones,” she said, and brought her plam around in a slap that lifted both witches off their feet. On such a flat, final note the universe might have ended.

At the conclusion of the breathless silence which followed Granny Weatherwax said, “Thank you.”

She adjusted her dress with some show of dignity, and added, “But I meant it. We’ll meet tonight at the stone and do what must be done. Ahem.”

She reset the pins in her hat and set off unsteadily in the direction of her cottage.

“Whatever happened to the rule about not meddling in politics?” said Magrat, watching her retreating back.

Nanny Ogg massaged some life back into her fingers.

“By Hoki, that woman’s got a jaw like an anvil,” she said. “What was that?”

“I said, what about this rule about not meddling?” said Magrat.

“Ah,” said Nanny. She took the girl’s arm. “The thing is,” she explained, “as you progress in the Craft, you’ll learn there is another rule. Esme’s obeyed it all her life.”

“And what’s that?”

“When you break rules, break ’em good and hard,” said Nanny, and grinned a set of gums that were more menacing than teeth.

 

The duke smiled out over the forest.

“It works,” he said. “The people mutter against the witches. How do you do it, Fool?”

“Jokes, nuncle. And gossip. People are halfway ready to believe it anyway. Everyone respects the witches. The point is that no one actually likes them very much.”

Friday afternoon, he thought. I’ll have to get some flowers. And my best suit, the one with the silver bells. Oh gosh.

“This is very pleasing. If it goes on like this, Fool, you shall have a knighthood.”

This was no. 302, and the Fool knew better than to let a feed line go hungry. “Marry, nuncle,” he said wearily, ignoring the spasm of pain that crawled across the duke’s face, “if’n I had a Knighthood (Night Hood), why, it would keep my ears Warm in Bedde; i’faith, if many a Knight is a Fool, why, should a—”

“Yes, yes, all right,” snapped Lord Felmet. In fact he was feeling much better already. His porridge hadn’t been over-salted this evening, and there was a decently empty feel about the castle. There were no more voices on the cusp of hearing.

He sat down on the throne. It felt really comfortable for the first time.

The duchess sat beside him, her chin on her hand, watching the Fool intently. This bothered him. He thought he knew where he stood with the duke, it was just a matter of hanging on until his madness curved back to the cheerful stage, but the duchess genuinely frightened him.

“It seems that words are extremely powerful,” she said.

“Indeed, lady.”

“You must have made a lengthy study.”

The Fool nodded. The power of words had sustained him through the hell of the Guild. Wizards and witches used words as if they were tools to get things done, but the Fool reckoned that words were things in their own right.

“Words can change the world,” he said.

Her eyes narrowed.

“So you have said before. I remain unconvinced. Strong men change the world,” she said. “Strong men and their deeds. Words are just like marzipan on a cake. Of course you think words are important. You are weak, you have nothing else.”

“Your ladyship is wrong.”

The duchess’s fat hand drummed impatiently on the arm of her throne.

“You had better,” she said, “be able to substantiate that comment.”

“Lady, the duke wishes to chop down the forests, is this not so?”

“The trees talk about me,” whispered Lord Felmet. “I hear them whisper when I go riding. They tell lies about me!”

The duchess and the Fool exchanged glances.

“But,” the Fool continued, “this policy has met with fanatical opposition.”

“What?”

“People don’t like it.”

The duchess exploded. “What does that matter?” she roared. “We rule! They will do what we say or they will be pitilessly executed!”

The Fool bobbed and capered and waved his hands in a conciliatory fashion.

“But, my love, we will run out of people,” murmured the duke.

“No need, no need!” said the Fool desperately. “You don’t have to do that at all! What you do is, you—” he paused for a moment, his lips moving quickly—“you embark upon a far-reaching and ambitious plan to expand the agricultural industry, provide long-term employment in the sawmills, open new land for development, and reduce the scope for banditry.”

This time the duke looked baffled. “How will I do that?” he said.

“Chop down the forests.”

“But you said—”

“Shut up, Felmet,” said the duchess. She subjected the Fool to another long, thoughtful stare.

“Exactly how,” she said, eventually, “does one go about knocking over the houses of people one does not like?”

“Urban clearance,” said the Fool.

“I was thinking of burning them down.”

“Hygienic urban clearance,” the Fool added promptly.

“And sowing the ground with salt.”

“Marry, I suspect that is hygienic urban clearance and a program of environmental improvements. It might be a good idea to plant a few trees as well.”

“No more trees!” shouted Felmet.

“Oh, it’s all right. They won’t survive. The important thing is to have planted them.”

“But I also want us to raise taxes,” said the duchess.

“Why, nuncle—”

“And I am not your nuncle.”

“N’aunt?” said the Fool.

“No.”

“Why…prithee…you need to finance your ambitious program for the country.”

“Sorry?” said the duke, who was getting lost again.

“He means that chopping down trees costs money,” said the duchess. She smiled at the Fool. It was the first time he had ever seen her look at him as if he was other than a disgusting little cockroach. There was still a large element of cockroach in her glance, but it said: good little cockroach, you have learned a trick.

“Intriguing,” she said. “But can your words change the past?”

The Fool considered this.

“More easily, I think,” he said. “Because the past is what people remember, and memories are words. Who knows how a king behaved a thousand years ago? There is only recollection, and stories. And plays, of course.”

“Ah, yes. I saw a play once,” said Felmet. “Bunch of funny fellows in tights. A lot of shouting. The people liked it.”

“You tell me history is what people are told?” said the duchess.

The Fool looked around the throne room and found King Gruneberry the Good (906-967).

“Was he?” he said, pointing. “Who knows, now? What was he good at? But he will be Gruneberry the Good until the end of the world.”

The duke was leaning forward in his throne, his eyes gleaming.

“I want to be a good ruler,” he said. “I want people to like me. I would like people to remember me fondly.”

“Let us assume,” said the duchess, “that there were other matters, subject to controversy. Matters of historical record that had…been clouded.”

“I didn’t do it, you know,” said the duke, quickly. “He slipped and fell. That was it. Slipped and fell. I wasn’t even there. He attacked me. It was self-defense.” His voice fell to a mumble. “I have no recollection of it at this time,” he murmured. He rubbed his dagger hand, although the word was becoming inappropriate.

“Be quiet, husband,” snapped the duchess. “I know you didn’t do it. I wasn’t there with you, you may recall. It was I who didn’t hand you the dagger.” The duke shuddered again.

“And now, Fool,” said Lady Felmet. “I was saying, I believe, that perhaps there are matters that should be properly recorded.”

“Marry, that you were not there at the time?” said the Fool, brightly.

It is true that words have power, and one of the things they are able to do is get out of someone’s mouth before the speaker has the chance to stop them. If words were sweet little lambs, then the Fool watched them bound cheerfully away into the flame-thrower of the duchess’s glare.

“Not where?” she said.

“Anywhere,” said the Fool hastily.

“Stupid man! Everyone is somewhere.”

“I mean, you were everywhere but at the top of the stairs,” said the Fool.

“Which stairs?”

“Any stairs,” said the Fool, who was beginning to sweat. “I distinctly remember not seeing you!”

The duchess eyed him for a while.

“So long as you remember it,” she said. The duchess rubbed her chin, which made an audible rasping noise.

“Reality is only weak words, you say. Therefore, words are reality. But how can words become history?”

“It was a very good play, the play that I saw,” said Felmet dreamily. “There were fights, and no one really died. Some very good speeches, I thought.”

There was another sandpapery sound from the duchess.

“Fool?” she said.

“Lady?”

“Can you write a play? A play that will go around the world, a play that will be remembered long after rumor has died?”

“No, lady. It is a special talent.”

“But can you find someone who has it?”

“There are such people, lady.”

“Find one,” murmured the duke. “Find the best. Find the best. The truth will out. Find one.”

 

The storm was resting. It didn’t want to be, but it was. It had spent a fortnight understudying a famous anticyclone over the Circle Sea, turning up every day, hanging around in the cold front, grateful for a chance to uproot the occasional tree or whirl a farmhouse to any available emerald city of its choice. But the big break in the weather had never come.

It consoled itself with the thought that even the really great storms of the past—the Great Gale of 1789, for example, of Hurricane Zelda and Her Amazing Raining Frogs—had gone through this sort of thing at some stage in their career. It was just part of the great tradition of the weather.

Besides, it had had a good stretch in the equivalent of pantomime down on the plains, bringing seasonal snow and terminal frostbite to millions. It just had to be philosophical about being back up here now with nothing much to do except wave the heather about. If weather was people, this storm would be filling in time wearing a cardboard hat in a hamburger hell.

Currently it was observing three figures moving slowly over the moor, converging with some determination on a bare patch where the standing stone stood, or usually stood, though just at the moment it wasn’t visible.

It recognized them as old friends and connoisseurs, and conjured up a brief unseasonal roll of thunder as a form of greeting. This was totally ignored.

“The bloody stone’s gone,” said Granny Weatherwax. “However many there is of it.”

Her face was pale. It might also have been drawn; if so, then it was by a very neurotic artist. She looked as though she meant business. Bad business.

“Light the fire, Magrat,” she added automatically.

“I daresay we’ll all feel better for a cup of tea,” said Nanny Ogg, mouthing the words like a mantra. She fumbled in the recesses of her shawl. “With something in it,” she added, producing a small bottle of applejack.

“Alcohol is a deceiver and tarnishes the soul,” said Magrat virtuously.

“I never touch the stuff,” said Granny Weatherwax. “We should keep a clear head, Gytha.”

“Just a drop in your tea isn’t drinking,” said Nanny. “It’s medicine. It’s a chilly old wind up here, sisters.”

“Very well,” said Granny. “But just a drop.”

They drank in silence. Eventually Granny said, “Well, Magrat. You know all about the coven business. We might as well do it right. What do we do next?”

Magrat hesitated. She wasn’t up to suggesting dancing naked.

“There’s a song,” she said. “In praise of the full moon.”

“It ain’t full,” Granny pointed out. “It’s wossname. Bulging.”

“Gibbous,” said Nanny obligingly.

“I think it’s in praise of full moons in general,” Magrat hazarded. “And then we have to raise our consciousness. It really ought to be full moon for that, I’m afraid. Moons are very important.”

Granny gave her a long, calculating look.

“That’s modern witchcraft for you, is it?” she said.

“It’s part of it, Granny. There’s a lot more.”

Granny Weatherwax sighed. “Each to her own, I suppose. I’m blowed if I’ll let a ball of shiny rock tell me what to do.”

“Yes, bugger all that,” said Nanny. “Let’s curse somebody.”

 

The Fool crept cautiously along the nighttime corridors. He wasn’t taking any chances either. Magrat had given him a graphic account of Greebo’s general disposition, and the Fool had borrowed a couple of gloves and a sort of metal wimple from the castle’s store of hereditary chain mail.

He reached the lumber room, lifted the latch cautiously, pushed the door and then flung himself against the wall.

The corridor became slightly darker as the more intense darkness inside the room spilled out and mingled with the rather lighter darkness already there.

Apart from that, nothing. The number of spitting, enraged balls of murderous fur pouring through the door was zero. The Fool relaxed, and slipped inside.

Greebo dropped on his head.

It had been a long day. The room did not offer the kind of full life that Greebo had come to expect and demand. The only point of interest had been the discovery, around mid-morning, of a colony of mice who had spent generations eating their way through a priceless tapestry history of Lancre and had just got as far as King Murune (709-745), who met a terrible fate,* when they did, too. He had sharpened his claws on a bust of Lancre’s only royal vampire, Queen Grimnir the Impaler (1514-1553, 1553-1557, 1557-1562, 1562-1567 and 1568-1573). He had performed his morning ablutions on a portrait of an unknown monarch, which was beginning to dissolve. Now he was bored, and also angry.

He raked his claws across the place where the Fool’s ears should have been, and was rewarded with nothing more than a metallic scraping noise.

“Who’s a good boy, den?” said the Fool. “Wowsa wowsa whoosh.”

This intrigued Greebo. The only other person who had ever spoken to him like this was Nanny Ogg; everyone else addressed him as “Yarrgeroffoutofityahbarstard.” He leaned down very carefully, intrigued by the new experience.

From the Fool’s point of view an upside-down cat face lowered itself slowly into his field of vision, wearing an expression of evil-eyed interest.

“Does oo want to go home, den?” said the Fool hopefully. “Look, Mr. Door is open.”

Greebo increased his grip. He had found a friend.

The Fool shrugged, very carefully, turned, and walked back into the passage. He made his way down through the hall, out into the courtyard, around the side of the guardroom and out through the main gate, nodding—carefully—to the guards.

“Man just went past with a cat on his head,” one of them remarked, after a minute or two’s reflection.

“See who it was?”

“The Fool, I think.”

There was a thoughtful pause. The second guard shifted his grip on his halberd.

“It’s a rotten job,” he said. “But I suppose someone’s got to do it.”

 

“We ain’t going to curse anyone,” said Granny firmly. “It hardly ever works if they don’t know you’ve done it.”

“What you do is, you send him a doll of himself with pins in.”

“No, Gytha.”

“All you have to do is get hold of some of his toenails,” Nanny persisted, enthusiastically.

“No.”

“Or some of his hair or anything. I’ve got some pins.”

“No.”

“Cursing people is morally unsound and extremely bad for your karma,” said Magrat.

“Well, I’m going to curse him anyway,” said Nanny. “Under my breath, like. I could of caught my death in that dungeon for all he cared.”

“We ain’t going to curse him,” said Granny. “We’re going to replace him. What did you do with the old king?”

“I left the rock on the kitchen table,” said Nanny. “I couldn’t stand it anymore.”

“I don’t see why,” said Magrat. “He seemed very pleasant. For a ghost.”

“Oh, he was all right. It was the other,” said Nanny.

“Others?”

“‘Pray carry a stone out of the palace so’s I can haunt it, good mother,’ he says,” said Nanny Ogg. “‘It’s bloody boring in here, Mistress Ogg, excuse my Klatchian,’ he says, so of course I did. I reckon they was all listening. Ho yes, they all thinks, all aboard, time for a bit of a holiday. I’ve nothing against ghosts. Especially royal ghosts,” she added loyally. “But my cottage isn’t the place for them. I mean, there’s some woman in a chariot yelling her head off in the washhouse. I ask you. And there’s a couple of little kiddies in the pantry, and men without heads all over the place, and someone screaming under the sink, and there’s this little hairy man wandering around looking lost and everything. It’s not right.”

“Just so long as he’s not here,” said Granny. “We don’t want any men around.”

“He’s a ghost, not a man,” said Magrat.

“We don’t have to go into details,” Granny said icily.

“But you can’t put the old king back on the throne,” said Magrat. “Ghosts can’t rule. You’d never get the crown to stay on. It’d drop through.”

“We’re going to replace him with his son,” said Granny. “Proper succession.”

“Oh, we’ve been through all that,” said Nanny, dismissively. “In about fifteen years’ time, perhaps, but—”

“Tonight,” said Granny.

“A child on the throne? He wouldn’t last five minutes.”

“Not a child,” said Granny quietly. “A grown man. Remember Aliss Demurrage?”

There was silence. Then Nanny Ogg sat back.

“Bloody hell,” she whispered. “You ain’t going to try that, are you?”

“I mean to have a go.”

“Bloody hell,” said Nanny again, very quietly, and added, “you’ve been thinking about this, have you?”

“Yes.”

“See here, Esme. I mean, Black Aliss was one of the best. I mean, you’re very good at, well, headology and thinking and that. I mean, Black Aliss, well, she just upped and went at it.”

“You saying I couldn’t do it, are you?”

“Excuse me,” said Magrat.

“No. No. Of course not,” said Nanny, ignoring her.

“Right.”

“Only…well, she was a, you know, a hoyden of witches, like the king said.”

“Doyenne,” said Granny, who had looked it up. “Not hoyden.”

“Excuse me,” said Magrat, louder this time. “Who was Black Aliss? And,” she added quickly, “none of this exchanging meaningful glances and talking over my head. There’s three witches in this coven, remember?”

“She was before your time,” said Nanny Ogg. “Before mine, really. She lived over Skund way. Very powerful witch.”

“If you listen to rumor,” said Granny.

“She turned a pumpkin into a royal coach once,” said Nanny.

“Showy,” said Granny Weatherwax. “That’s no help to anyone, turning up at a ball smelling like a pie. And that business with the glass slipper. Dangerous, to my mind.”

“But the biggest thing she ever did,” said Nanny, ignoring the interruption, “was to send a whole palace to sleep for a hundred years until…” She hesitated. “Can’t remember. Was there rose bushes involved, or was it spinning wheels in that one? I think some princess had to finger…no, there was a prince. That was it.”

“Finger a prince?” said Magrat, uneasily.

“No…he had to kiss her. Very romantic, Black Aliss was. There was always a bit of romance in her spells. She liked nothing better than Girl meets Frog.”

“Why did they call her Black Aliss?”

“Fingernails,” said Granny.

“And teeth,” said Nanny Ogg. “She had a sweet tooth. Lived in a real gingerbread cottage. Couple of kids shoved her in her own oven at the end. Shocking.”

“And you’re going to send the castle to sleep?” said Magrat.

“She never sent the castle to sleep,” said Granny. “That’s just an old wives’ tale,” she added, glaring at Nanny. “She just stirred up time a little. It’s not as hard as people think. Everyone does it all the time. It’s like rubber, is time. You can stretch it to suit yourself.”

Magrat was about to say, that’s not right, time is time, every second lasts a second, that’s what it’s for, that’s its job…

And then she recalled weeks that had flown past and afternoons that had lasted forever. Some minutes had lasted hours, some hours had gone past so quickly she hadn’t been aware they’d gone past at all…

“But that’s just people’s perception,” she said. “Isn’t it?”

“Oh, yes,” said Granny, “of course it is. It all is. What difference does that make?”

“A hundred years’d be over-egging it, mind,” said Nanny.

“I reckon fifteen’d be a nice around number,” said Granny. “That means the lad will be eighteen at the finish. We just do the spell, go and fetch him, he can manifest his destiny, and everything will be nice and neat.”

Magrat didn’t comment on this, because it had occurred to her that destinies sounded easy enough when you talked about them but were never very bankable where real human beings were concerned. But Nanny Ogg sat back and tipped another generous measure of apple brandy in her tea.

“Could work out nice,” she said. “A bit of peace and quiet for fifteen years. If I recall the spell, after you say it you have to fly around the castle before cock crow.”

“I wasn’t thinking about that,” said Granny. “It wouldn’t be right. Felmet would still be king all that time. The kingdom would still get sick. No, what I was thinking of doing was moving the whole kingdom.”

She beamed at them.

“The whole of Lancre?” said Nanny.

“Yes.”

“Fifteen years into the future?”

“Yes.”

Nanny looked at Granny’s broomstick. It was a well-made thing, built to last, apart from the occasional starting problem. But there were limits.

“You’ll never do it,” she said. “Not around the whole kingdom in that. That’s all the way up to Powderknife and down to Drumlin’s Fell. You just couldn’t carry enough magic.”

“I’ve thought of that,” said Granny.

She beamed again. It was terrifying.

She explained the plan. It was dreadful.

A minute later the moor was deserted, as the witches hurried to their tasks. It was silent for a while, apart from the squeak of bats and the occasional rustle of the wind in the heather.

Then there was a bubbling from the nearby peat bog. Very slowly, crowned with a thicket of sphagnum moss, the standing stone surfaced and peered around the landscape with an air of deep distrust.

 

Greebo was really enjoying this. At first he thought his new friend was taking him to Magrat’s cottage, but for some reason he’d wandered off the path in the dark and was taking a stroll in the forest. In one of the more interesting bits, Greebo had always felt. It was a hummocky area, rich in hidden potholes and small, intense swamps, full of mist even in fine weather. Greebo often came up here on the offchance that a wolf was lying up for the day.

“I thought cats could find their own way home,” the Fool muttered.

He cursed himself under his breath. It would have been easy to take this wretched creature back to Nanny Ogg’s house, which was only a few streets away, almost in the shadow of the castle. But then he’d had the idea of delivering it to Magrat. It would impress her, he thought. Witches were very keen on cats. And then she’d be bound to ask him in, for a cup of tea or something…

He put his foot in another water-filled hole. Something wriggled underneath it. The Fool groaned, and stepped back onto a tumescent mushroom.

“Look, cat,” he said. “You’ve got to come down, right? And then you can find your way home and I’ll follow you. Cats are good at seeing in the dark and finding their own way home,” he added hopefully.

He reached up. Greebo sank his claws into his arm as a friendly warning, and found to his surprise that this had no effect on chain mail.

“There’s a good cat,” said the Fool, and lowered him to the ground. “Go on, find your way home. Any home will do.”

Greebo’s grin gradually faded, until there was nothing left but the cat. This was nearly as spooky as the opposite way around.

He stretched and yawned to hide his embarrassment. Being called a good cat in the middle of one of his favorite stalking grounds wasn’t going to do anything for his prowl-credibility. He disappeared into the undergrowth.

The Fool peered into the gloom. It dawned on him that while he liked forests, he liked them at one remove, as it were; it was nice to know that they were there, but the forests of the mind were not quite the same as real forests that, for example, you got lost in. They had more mighty oaks and fewer brambles. They also tended to be viewed in daylight, and the trees didn’t have malevolent faces and long scratchy branches. The trees of the imagination were proud giants of the forest. Most of the trees here appeared to be vegetable gnomes, mere trellises for fungi and ivy.

The Fool was vaguely aware that you could tell which direction the Hub lay by seeing which side of the trees the moss grew on. A quick inspection of the nearby trunks indicated that, in defiance of all normal geography, the Hub lay everywhere.

Greebo had vanished.

The Fool sighed, removed his chain mail protection, and tinkled gently through the night in search of high ground. High ground seemed a good idea. The ground he was on at the moment appeared to be trembling. He was sure it shouldn’t do that.

 

Magrat hovered on her broomstick several hundred feet above the Turnwise borders of Lancre, looking down on a sea of mist through which the occasional treetop poked like a seaweed-covered rock at high tide. A bulging moon floated above her, probably gibbous again. Even a decent thin crescent would have been better, she felt. More appropriate.

She shivered, and wondered where Granny Weatherwax was at this moment.

The old witch’s broomstick was known and feared throughout the skies of Lancre. Granny had been introduced to flying quite late in life, and after some initial suspicion had taken to it like a bluebottle to an ancient fish head. A problem, however, was that Granny saw every flight simply as a straight line from A to B and was unable to get alongside the idea that other users of the air might have any rights whatsoever; the flight migration patterns of an entire continent had been changed because of that simple fact. High-speed evolution among local birds had developed a generation that flew on their backs, so that they could keep a watchful eye on the skies.

Granny’s implicit belief that everything should get out of her way extended to other witches, very tall trees and, on occasion, mountains.

Granny had also browbeaten the dwarfs who lived under the mountains and in fear of their lives into speeding the thing up. Many an egg had been laid in midair by unsuspecting fowls who had suddenly glimpsed Granny bearing down on them, scowling over the top of the broomstick.

“Oh dear,” thought Magrat. “I hope she hasn’t happened to someone.”

A midnight breeze turned her gently around in the air, like an unsupported weathercock. She shivered and squinted at the moonlit mountains, the high Ramtops, whose freezing crags and ice-green chasms acknowledged no king or cartographer. Only on the Rimward side was Lancre open to the world; the rest of its borders looked as jagged as a wolf’s mouth and far more impassable. From up here it was possible to see the whole kingdom…

There was a ripping noise in the sky above her, a blast of wind that spun her around again, and a Doppler-distorted cry of, “Stop dreaming, girl!”

She gripped the bristles with her knees and urged the stick upward.

It took several minutes to catch up with Granny, who was lying almost full length along her broomstick to reduce wind resistance. Dark treetops roared far below them as Magrat came alongside. Granny turned to her, holding her hat on with one hand.

“Not before time,” she snapped. “I don’t reckon this one’s got more’n a few minutes flight left. Come on, get a move on.”

She reached out a hand. So did Magrat. Unsteadily, the broomsticks bucking and dipping in one another’s slipstream, they touched fingertips.

Magrat’s arm tingled as the power flowed up it.* Granny’s broomstick jerked forward.

“Leave me a bit,” shouted Magrat. “I’ve got to get down!”

“Shouldn’t be difficult,” screamed Granny, above the noise of the wind.

“I mean get down safely!”

“You’re a witch, ain’t you? By the way, did you bring the cocoa? I’m freezing up here!”

Magrat nodded desperately, and with her spare hand passed up a straw bag.

“Right,” said Granny. “Well done. See you at Lancre Bridge.”

She uncurled her fingers.

Magrat whirled away in the buffeting wind, clinging tightly to a broomstick which now, she feared, had about as much buoyancy as a bit of firewood. It certainly wasn’t capable of sustaining a full-grown woman against the beckoning fingers of gravity.

As she plunged down toward the forest roof in a long shallow dive she reflected that there was possibly something complimentary in the way Granny Weatherwax resolutely refused to consider other people’s problems. It implied that, in her considerable opinion, they were quite capable of sorting them out by themselves.

Some kind of Change spell was probably in order.

Magrat concentrated.

Well, that seemed to work.

Nothing in the sight of mortal man had in fact changed. What Magrat had achieved was a mere adjustment of the mental processes, from a bewildered and slightly frightened woman gliding inexorably toward the inhospitable ground to a clearheaded, optimistic and positive thinking woman who had really got it together, was taking full responsibility for her own life and in general knew where she was coming from although, unfortunately, where she was heading had not changed in any way. But she felt a lot better about it.

She dug her heels in and forced the broomstick to yield the last dregs of its power in a brief burst, sending it skimming erratically a few feet from the trees. As it sagged again and started to plow a furrow among the midnight leaves she tensed herself, prayed to whatever gods of the forest might be listening that she would land on something soft, and let go.

There are three thousand known major gods on the Disc, and research theologians discover more every week. Apart from the minor gods of rock, tree and water, there are two that haunt the Ramtops—Hoki, half a man, half a goat, and entirely a bad practical joker, who was banished from Dunmanifestin for pulling the old exploding mistletoe joke on Blind Io, chief of all the gods; and also Herne the Hunted, the terrified and apprehensive deity of all small furry creatures whose destiny it is to end their lives as a brief, crunchy squeak…

Either could have been candidates for the small miracle which then occurred, for—in a forest full of cold rocks, jagged stumps and thorn bushes—Magrat landed on something soft.

Granny, meanwhile, was accelerating toward the mountains on the second leg of the journey. She consumed the regrettably tepid cocoa and, with proper environmental consideration, dropped the bottle as she passed over an upland lake.

It turned out that Magrat’s idea of sustaining food was two rounds of egg and cress sandwiches with the crusts cut off and, Granny noticed before the wind whipped it away, a small piece of parsley placed with consideration and care on top of each one. Granny regarded them for some time. Then she ate them.

A chasm loomed, still choked with winter snow. Like a tiny spark in the darkness, a dot of light against the hugeness of the Ramtops, Granny tackled the maze of the mountains.

Back in the forest, Magrat sat up and absent-mindedly pulled a twig from her hair. A few yards away the broomstick dropped through the trees, showering leaves.

A groan and a small, half-hearted tinkle caused her to peer into the gloom. An indistinct figure was on its hands and knees, searching for something.

“Did I land on you?” said Magrat.

“Someone did,” said the Fool.

They crawled nearer to one another.

“You?”

“You!”

“What are you doing here?”

“Marry, I was walking along the ground,” said the Fool. “A lot of people do, you know. I mean, I know it’s been done before. It’s not original. It probably lacks imagination but, well, it’s always been good enough for me.”

“Did I hurt you?”

“I think I’ve got one or two bells that won’t be the same again.”

The Fool scrabbled through the leafmould, and finally located his hated hat. It clonked.

“Totally crushed, i’faith,” he said, putting it on anyway. He seemed to feel better for that, and went on, “Rain, yes, hail, yes, even lumps of rock. Fish and small frogs, OK. Women no, up till now. Is it going to happen again?”

“You’ve got a bloody hard head,” said Magrat, pulling herself to her feet.

“Modesty forbids me to comment,” said the Fool, and then remembered himself and added, quickly, “Prithee.”

They stared at one another again, their minds racing.

Magrat thought: Nanny said look at him properly. I’m looking at him. He just looks the same. A sad thin little man in a ridiculous jester’s outfit, he’s practically a hunchback.

Then, in the same way that a few random bulges in a cloud can suddenly become a galleon or a whale in the eye of the beholder, Magrat realized that the Fool was not a little man. He was at least of average height, but he made himself small, by hunching his shoulders, bandying his legs and walking in a half-crouch that made him appear as though he was capering on the spot.

I wonder what else Gytha Ogg noticed? she thought, intrigued.

He rubbed his arm and gave her a lopsided grin.

“I suppose you haven’t got any idea where we are?” he said.

“Witches never get lost,” said Magrat firmly. “Although they can become temporarily mislaid. Lancre’s over that way, I think. I’ve got to find a hill, if you’ll excuse me.”

“To see where you are?”

“To see when, I think. There’s a lot of magic going on tonight.”

“Is there? Then I think I’ll accompany you,” the Fool added chivalrously, after peering cautiously into the tree-haunted gloom that apparently lay between him and his flagstones. “I wouldn’t want anything to happen to you.”

Granny lay low over the broomstick as it plunged through the trackless chasms of the mountains, leaning from side to side in the hope that this might have some effect on the steering which seemed, strangely, to be getting worse. Falling snow behind her was whipped and spiraled into odd shapes by the wind of her passage. Rearing waves of crusted snow, poised all winter over the glacial valleys, trembled and then began the long, silent fall. Her flight was punctuated by the occasional boom of an avalanche.

She looked down at a landscape of sudden death and jagged beauty, and knew it was looking back at her, as a dozing man may watch a mosquito. She wondered if it realized what she was doing. She wondered if it’d make her fall any softer, and mentally scolded herself for such softness. No, the land wasn’t like that. It didn’t bargain. The land gave hard, and took hard. A dog always bit deepest on the veterinary hand.

And then she was through, vaulting so low over the last peak that one of her boots filled with snow, and barrelling down toward the lowlands.

The mist, never far away in the mountains, was back again, but this time it was making a fight of it and had become a thick, silver sea in front of her. She groaned.

Somewhere in the middle of it Nanny Ogg floated, taking the occasional pull from a hip flask as a preventative against the chill.

And thus it was that Granny, her hat and iron-gray hair dripping with moisture, her boots shedding lumps of ice, heard the distant and muffled sound of a voice enthusiastically explaining to the invisible sky that the hedgehog had less to worry over than just about any other mammal. Like a hawk that has spotted something small and fluffy in the grass, like a wandering interstellar flu germ that has just seen a nice blue planet drifting by, Granny turned the stick and plunged down through the choking billows.

“Come on!” she screamed, drunk with speed and exhilaration, and the sound from five hundred feet overhead put a passing wolf severely off its supper. “This minute, Gytha Ogg!”

Nanny Ogg caught her hand with considerable reluctance and the pair of broomsticks swept up again and into the clear, starlit sky.

The Disc, as always, gave the impression that the Creator has designed it specifically to be looked at from above. Streamers of cloud in white and silver stretched away to the Rim, stirred into thousand-mile swirls by the turning of the world. Behind the speeding brooms the sullen roof of the fog was dragged up into a curling tunnel of white vapor, so that the watching gods—and they were certainly watching—could see the terrible flight as a furrow in the sky.

A thousand feet and rising fast into the frosty air, the two witches were bickering again.

“It was a bloody stupid idea,” moaned Nanny. “I never liked heights.”

“Did you bring something to drink?”

“Certainly. You said.”

“Well?”

“I drank it, didn’t I,” said Nanny. “Sitting around up there at my age. Our Jason would have a fit.”

Granny gritted her teeth. “Well, let’s have the power,” she said. “I’m running out of up. Amazing how—”

Granny’s voice ended in a scream as, without any warning at all, her broomstick pinwheeled sharply across the clouds and dropped from sight.

 

The Fool and Magrat sat on a log on a small outcrop that looked out across the forest. The lights of Lancre town were in fact not very far away, but neither of them had suggested leaving.

The air between them crackled with unspoken thoughts and wild surmisings.

“You’ve been a Fool long?” said Magrat, politely. She blushed in the darkness. In that atmosphere it sounded the most impolite of questions.

“All my life,” said the Fool bitterly. “I cut my teeth on a set of bells.”

“I suppose it gets handed on, from father to son?” said Magrat.

“I never saw much of my father. He went off to be Fool for the Lords of Quirm when I was small,” said the Fool. “Had a row with my grandad. He comes back from time to time, to see my mam.”

“I never saw much of my father. He went off to be Fool for the Lords of Quirm when I was small,” said the Fool. “Had a row with my grandad. He comes back from time to time, to see my mam.”

“That’s terrible.”

There was a sad jingle as the Fool shrugged. He vaguely recalled his father as a short, friendly little man, with eyes like a couple of oysters. Doing something as brave as standing up to the old boy must have been quite outside his nature. The sound of two suits of bells shaken in anger still haunted his memory, which was full enough of bad scenes as it was.

“Still,” said Magrat, her voice higher than usual and with a vibrato of uncertainty, “it must be a happy life. Making people laugh, I mean.”

When there was no reply she turned to look at the man. His face was like stone. In a low voice, talking as though she was not there, the Fool spoke.

He spoke of the Guild of Fools and Joculators in Ankh-Morpork.

Most visitors mistook it at first sight for the offices of the Guild of Assassins, which in fact was the rather pleasant, airy collection of buildings next door (the Assassins always had plenty of money); sometimes the young Fools, slaving at their rote in rooms that were always freezing, even in high summer, heard the young Assassins at play over the wall and envied them, even though, of course, the number of piping voices grew noticeably fewer toward the end of them (the Assassins also believed in competitive examination).

In fact all sorts of sounds managed to breach the high grim windowless walls, and from keen questioning of servants the younger Fools picked up a vision of the city beyond. There were taverns out there, and parks. There was a whole bustling world, in which the students and apprentices of the various Guilds and Colleges took a full ripe part, either by playing tricks on it, running through it shouting, or throwing parts of it up. There was laughter which paid no attention to the Five Cadences or Twelve Inflections. And—although the students debated this news in the dormitories at night—there was apparently unauthorized humor, delivered freestyle, with no reference to the Monster Fun Book or the Council or anyone.

Out there, beyond the stained stonework, people were telling jokes without reference to the Lords of Misrule.

It was a sobering thought. Well, not a sobering thought in actual fact, because alcohol wasn’t allowed in the Guild. But if it was, it would have been.

There was nowhere more sober than the Guild.

The Fool spoke bitterly of the huge, redfaced Brother Prankster, of evenings learning the Merry Jests, of long mornings in the freezing gymnasium learning the Eighteen Pratfalls and the accepted trajectory for a custard pie. And juggling. Juggling! Brother Jape, a man with a soul like cold boiled string, taught juggling. It wasn’t that the Fool was bad at juggling that reduced him to incoherent fury. Fools were expected to be bad at juggling, especially if juggling inherently funny items like custard pies, flaming torches or extremely sharp cleavers. What had Brother Jape laying about him in red-hot, clanging rage was the fact that the Fool was bad at juggling because he wasn’t any good at it.

“Didn’t you want to be anything else?” said Magrat.

“What else is there?” said the Fool. “I haven’t seen anything else I could be.”

Student Fools were allowed out, in the last year of training, but under a fearsome set of restrictions. Capering miserably through the streets he’d seen wizards for the first time, moving like dignified carnival floats. He’d seen the surviving assassins, foppish, giggling young men in black silk, as sharp as knives underneath; he’d seen priests, their fantastic costumes only slightly marred by the long rubber sacrificial aprons they wore for major services. Every trade and profession had its costume, he saw, and he realized for the first time that the uniform he was wearing had been carefully and meticulously designed for no other purpose than making its wearer look like a complete and utter pillock.

Even so, he’d persevered. He’d spent his whole life persevering.

He persevered precisely because he had absolutely no talent, and because grandfather would have flayed him alive if he didn’t. He memorized the authorized jokes until his head rang, and got up even earlier in the morning to juggle until his elbows creaked. He had perfected his grasp of the comic vocabulary until only the very senior Lords could understand him. He’d capered and clowned with an impenetrable grim determination and he’d graduated top of his year and had been awarded the Bladder of Honor. He’d dropped it down the privy when he came home.

Magrat was silent.

The Fool said, “How did you get to be a witch?”

“Um?”

“I mean, did you go to a school or something?”

“Oh. No. Goodie Whemper just walked down to the village one day, got all us girls lined up, and chose me. You don’t choose the Craft, you see. It chooses you.”

“Yes, but when do you actually become a witch?”

“When the other witches treat you as one, I suppose.” Magrat sighed. “If they ever do,” she added. “I thought they would after I did that spell in the corridor. It was pretty good, after all.”

“Marry, ’twas a rite of passage,” said the Fool, unable to stop himself. Magrat gave him a blank look. He coughed.

“The other witches being those two old ladies?” he said, relapsing into his usual gloom.

“Yes.”

“Very strong characters, I imagine.”

“Very,” said Magrat, with feeling.

“I wonder if they ever met my grandad,” said the Fool.

Magrat looked at her feet.

“They’re quite nice really,” she said. “It’s just that, well, when you’re a witch you don’t think about other people. I mean, you think about them, but you don’t actually think about their feelings, if you see what I mean. At least, not unless you think about it.” She looked at her feet again.

“You’re not like that,” said the Fool.

“Look, I wish you’d stop working for the duke,” said Magrat desperately. “You know what he’s like. Torturing people and setting fire to their cottages and everything.”

“But I’m his Fool,” said the Fool. “A Fool has to be loyal to his master. Right up until he dies. I’m afraid it’s tradition. Tradition is very important.”

“But you don’t even like being a Fool!”

“I hate it. But that’s got nothing to do with it. If I’ve got to be a Fool, I’ll do it properly.”

“That’s really stupid,” said Magrat.

“Foolish, I’d prefer.”

The Fool had been edging along the log. “If I kiss you,” he added carefully, “do I turn into a frog?”

Magrat looked down at her feet again. They shuffled themselves under her dress, embarrassed at all this attention.

She could sense the shades of Gytha Ogg and Esme Weatherwax on either side of her. Granny’s specter glared at her. A witch is master of every situation, it said.

Mistress, said the vision of Nanny Ogg, and made a brief gesture involving much grinning and waving of forearms.

“We shall have to see,” she said.

It was destined to be the most impressive kiss in the history of foreplay.

Time, as Granny Weatherwax had pointed out, is a subjective experience. The Fool’s years in the Guild had been an eternity whereas the hours with Magrat on the hilltop passed like a couple of minutes. And, high above Lancre, a double handful of seconds extended like taffy into hours of screaming terror.

“Ice!” screamed Granny. “It’s iced up!”

Nanny Ogg came alongside, trying vainly to match courses with the tumbling, bucking broomstick. Octarine fire crackled over the frozen bristles, shorting them out at random. She leaned over and snatched a handful of Granny’s skirt.

“I tole you it was daft!” she shouted. “You went all through all that wet mist and then up into the cold air, you daft besom!”

“You let go of my skirt, Gytha Ogg!”

“Come on, grab hold o’mine. You’re on fire at the back there!”

They shot through the bottom of the cloud bank and screamed in unison as the shrub-covered ground emerged from nowhere and aimed itself directly at them.

And went past.

Nanny looked down a black perspective at the bottom of which a boil of white water was dimly visible. They had flown over the edge of Lancre Gorge.

Blue smoke was pouring out of Granny’s broomstick but she hung on, determined, and forced it around.

“What the hell you doing?” roared Nanny.

“I can follow the river,” Granny Weatherwax screamed, above the crackle of flames. “Don’t you worry!”

“You come aboard, d’you hear? It’s all over, you can’t do it…”

There was a small explosion behind Granny and several handfuls of burning bristles broke off and whirled away into the booming depths of the gorge. Her stick jerked sideways and Nanny grabbed her around the shoulders as a gout of fire snapped another binding.

The blazing broomstick shot from between her legs, twisted in the air, and went straight upward, trailing sparks and making a noise like a wet finger dragged around the top of a wineglass.

This left Nanny flying upside down, supporting Granny Weatherwax at arm’s length. They stared into one another’s face and screamed.

“I can’t pull you up!”

“Well I can’t climb up, can I? Act your age, Gytha!”

Nanny considered this. Then she let go.

Three marriages and an adventurous girlhood had left Nanny Ogg with thigh muscles that could crack coconuts, and the G-forces sucked at her as she forced the speeding stick down and around in a tight loop.

Ahead of her she made out Granny Weatherwax dropping like a stone, one hand clutching her hat, the other trying to prevent gravity from seeing up her skirts. She urged the stick forward until it creaked, snatched the falling witch around the waist, fought the plunging stick back up to level flight, and sagged.

The subsequent silence was broken by Granny Weatherwax saying, “Don’t you ever do that again, Gytha Ogg.”

“I promise.”

“Now turn us around. We’re heading for Lancre Bridge, remember?”

Nanny obediently turned the broomstick, brushing the canyon walls as she did so.

“It’s still miles to go,” she said.

“I mean to do it,” said Granny. “There’s plenty of night left.”

“Not enough, I’m thinking.”

“A witch doesn’t know the meaning of the word ‘failure,’ Gytha.”

They shot up into the clear air again. The horizon was a line of golden light as the slow dawn of the Disc sped across the land, bulldozing the suburbs of the night.

“Esme?” said Nanny Ogg, after a while.

“What?”

“It means ‘lack of success.’”

They flew in chilly silence for several seconds.

“I was speaking wossname. Figuratively,” said Granny.

“Oh. Well. You should of said.”

The line of light was bigger, brighter. For the first time a flicker of doubt invaded Granny Weatherwax’s mind, puzzled to find itself in such unfamiliar surroundings.

“I wonder how many cockerels there are in Lancre?” she said quietly.

“Was that one of them wossname questions?”

“I was just wondering.”

Nanny Ogg sat back. There were thirty-two of crowing age, she knew. She knew because she’d worked it out last night—tonight—and had given Jason his instructions. She had fifteen grown-up children and innumerable grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and they’d had most of the evening to get into position. It should be enough.

“Did you hear that?” said Granny. “Over Razorback way?”

Nanny looked innocently across the misty landscape. Sound traveled very clearly in these early hours.

“What?” she said.

“Sort of an ‘urk’ noise?”

“No.”

Granny spun around.

“Over there,” she said. “I definitely heard it this time. Something like ‘cock-a-doo-arrgh.’”

“Can’t say I did, Esme,” said Nanny, smiling at the sky. “Lancre Bridge up ahead.”

“And over there! Right down there! It was a definite squawk!”

“Dawn chorus, Esme, I expect. Look, only half a mile to go.”

Granny glared at the back of her colleague’s head.

“There’s something going on here,” she said.

“Search me, Esme.”

“Your shoulders are shaking!”

“Lost my shawl back there. I’m a bit chilly. Look, we’re nearly there.”

Granny glared ahead, her mind a maze of suspicions. She was going to get to the bottom of this. When she had time.

The damp logs of Lancre’s main link to the outside world drifted gently underneath them. From the chicken farm half a mile away came a chorus of strangled squawks and a thud.

“And that? What was that, then?” demanded Granny.

“Fowl pest. Careful, I’m bringing us down.”

“Are you laughing at me?”

“Just pleased for you, Esme. You’ll go down in history for this, you know.”

They drifted between the timbers of the bridge. Granny Weatherwax alighted cautiously on the greasy planking and adjusted her dress.

“Yes. Well,” she added, nonchalantly.

“Better than Black Aliss, everyone’ll say,” Nanny Ogg went on.

“Some people will say anything,” said Granny. She peered over the parapet at the foaming torrent far below, and then up at the distant outcrop on which stood Lancre Castle.

“Do you think they will?” she added, nonchalantly.

“Mark my words.”

“Hmm.”

“But you’ve got to complete the spell, mind.”

Granny Weatherwax nodded. She turned to face the dawn, raised her arms, and completed the spell.

 

It is almost impossible to convey the sudden passage of fifteen years and two months in words.

It’s a lot easier in pictures, when you just use a calendar with lots of pages blowing off, or a clock with hands moving faster and faster until they blur, or trees bursting into blossom and fruiting in a matter of seconds…

Well, you know. Or the sun becomes a fiery streak across the sky, and days and nights flicker past jerkily like a bad zoetrope, and the fashions visible in the clothes shop across the road whip on and off faster than a lunchtime stripper with five pubs to do.

There are any amount of ways, but they won’t be required because, in fact, none of this happened.

The sun did jerk sideways a bit, and it seemed that the trees on the rimward side of the gorge were rather taller, and Nanny couldn’t shake off the sensation that someone had just sat down heavily on her, squashed her flat, and then opened her out again.

This was because the kingdom did not, in so many words, move through time in the normal flickering sky, high-speed photography sense of the word. It moved around it, which is much cleaner, considerably easier to achieve, and saves all that traveling around trying to find a laboratory opposite a dress shop that will keep the same dummy in the window for sixty years, which has traditionally been the most time-consuming and expensive bit of the whole business.

 

The kiss lasted more than fifteen years.

Not even frogs can manage that.

The Fool drew back, his eyes glazed, his expression one of puzzlement.

“Did you feel the world move?” he said.

Magrat peered over his shoulder at the forest.

“I think she’s done it,” she said.

“Done what?”

Magrat hesitated. “Oh. Nothing. Nothing much, really.”

“Shall we have another try? I don’t think we got it quite right that time.”

Magrat nodded.

This time it lasted only fifteen seconds. It seemed longer.

 

A tremor ran through the castle, shaking the breakfast tray from which the Duke Felmet, much to his relief, was eating porridge that wasn’t too salty.

It was felt by the ghosts that now filled Nanny Ogg’s cottage like a rugby team in a telephone box.

It spread to every henhouse in the kingdom, and a number of hands relaxed their grip. And thirty-two purple-faced cockerels took a deep breath and crowed like maniacs, but they were too late, too late…

 

“I still reckon you were up to something,” said Granny Weatherwax.

“Have another cup of tea,” said Nanny pleasantly.

“You won’t go and put any drink in it, will you,” Granny said flatly. “It was the drink what did it last night. I would never have put myself forward like that. It’s shameful.”

“Black Aliss never done anything like it,” said Nanny, encouragingly. “I mean, it was a hundred years, all right, but it was only one castle she moved. I reckon anyone could do a castle.”

Granny’s frown puckered at the edge.

“And she let all weeds grow over it,” she observed primly.

“Right enough.”

“Very well done,” said King Verence, eagerly. “We all thought it was superb. Being in the ethereal plane, of course, we were in a position to observe closely.”

“Very good, your graciousness,” said Nanny Ogg. She turned and observed the crowding ghosts behind him, who hadn’t been granted the privilege of sitting at, or partly through, the kitchen table.

“But you lot can bugger off back to the outhouse,” she said. “The cheek! Except the kiddies, they can stay,” she added. “Poor little mites.”

“I am afraid it feels so good to be out of the castle,” said the king.

Granny Weatherwax yawned.

“Anyway,” she said, “we’ve got to find the boy now. That’s the next step.”

“We shall look for him directly after lunch.”

“Lunch?”

“It’s chicken,” said Nanny. “And you’re tired. Besides, making a decent search will take a long time.”

“He’ll be in Ankh-Morpork,” said Granny. “Mark my words. Everyone ends up there. We’ll start with Ankh-Morpork. You don’t have to search for people when destiny is involved, you just wait for them in Ankh-Morpork.”

Nanny brightened up. “Our Karen got married to an innkeeper from there,” she said. “I haven’t seen the baby yet. We could get free board and everything.”

“We needn’t actually go. The whole point is that he should come here. There’s something about that city,” said Granny. “It’s like a drain.”

 

“It’s five hundred miles away!” said Magrat. “You’ll be away for ages!”

“I can’t help it,” said the Fool. “The duke’s given me special instructions. He trusts me.”

“Huh! To hire more soldiers, I expect?”

“No. Nothing like that. Not as bad as that.” The Fool hesitated. He’d introduced Felmet to the world of words. Surely that was better than hitting people with swords? Wouldn’t that buy time? Wouldn’t it be best for everybody, in the circumstances?

“But you don’t have to go! You don’t want to go!”

“That doesn’t have much to do with it. I promised to be loyal to him—”

“Yes, yes, until you’re dead. But you don’t even believe that! You were telling me how much you hated the whole Guild and everything!”

“Well, yes. But I still have to do it. I gave my word.”

Magrat came close to stamping her foot, but didn’t sink so low.

“Just when we were getting to know one another!” she shouted. “You’re pathetic!”

The Fool’s eyes narrowed. “I’d only be pathetic if I broke my word,” he said. “But I may be incredibly ill-advized. I’m sorry. I’ll be back in a few weeks, anyway.”

“Don’t you understand I’m asking you not to listen to him?”

“I said I’m sorry. I couldn’t see you again before I go, could I?”

“I shall be washing my hair,” said Magrat stiffly.

“When?”

“Whenever!”

 

Hwel pinched the bridge of his nose and squinted wearily at the wax-spattered paper.

The play wasn’t going at all well.

He’d sorted out the falling chandelier, and found a place for a villain who wore a mask to conceal his disfigurement, and he’d rewritten one of the funny bits to allow for the fact that the hero had been born in a handbag. It was the clowns who were giving him trouble again. They kept changing every time he thought about them. He preferred them in twos, that was traditional, but now there seemed to be a third one, and he was blowed if he could think of any funny lines for him.

His quill moved scratchily over the latest sheet of paper, trying to catch the voices that had streamed through his dreaming mind and had seemed so funny at the time.

His tongue began to stick out of the corner of his mouth. He was sweating.

This iss My Little Study, he wrote. Hey, with a Little Study youe could goe a Long Way. And I wishe youed start now. Iffe You can’t leave yn a Cab then leave yn a Huff. Iff thates too soone, thenn leave yn a minute and a Huff. Say, have you Gott a Pensil? A crayon?—

Hwel stared at this in horror. On the page it looked nonsensical, ridiculous. And yet, and yet, in the thronged auditorium of his mind…

He dipped the quill in the inkpot, and chased the echoes further.

Seconde Clown: Atsa right, Boss.

Third Clowne: [business with bladder on stick] Honk. Honk.

Hwel gave up. Yes, it was funny, he knew it was funny, he’d heard the laughter in his dreams. But it wasn’t right. Not yet. Maybe never. It was like the other idea about the two clowns, one fat, one thin…Thys ys amain Dainty Messe youe have got me into, Stanleigh…He had laughed until his chest ached, and the rest of the company had looked at him in astonishment. But in his dreams it was hilarious.

He laid down the pen and rubbed his eyes. It must be nearly midnight, and the habit of a lifetime told him to spare the candles although, for a fact, they could afford all the candles they could eat now, whatever Vitoller might say.

Hour gongs were being struck all across the city and night-watchmen were proclaiming that it was indeed midnight and also that, in the face of all the evidence, all was well. Many of them got as far as the end of the sentence before being mugged.

Hwel pushed open the shutters and looked out at Ankh-Morpork.

It would be tempting to say the twin city was at its best this time of year, but that wouldn’t be entirely correct. It was at its most typical.

The river Ankh, the cloaca of half a continent, was already pretty wide and silt laden when it reached the city’s outskirts. By the time it left it didn’t so much flow as exude. Owing to the accretion of the mud of centuries the bed of the river was in fact higher than some of the low lying areas and now, with the snow melt swelling the flow, many of the low-rent districts on the Morpork side were flooded, if you can use that word for a liquid you could pick up in a net. This sort of thing happened every year and would have caused havoc with the drains and sewage systems, so it is just as well that the city didn’t have very many. Its inhabitants merely kept a punt handy in the back yard and, periodically, built another story on the house.

It was reckoned to be very healthy there. Very few germs were able to survive.

Hwel looked across a sort of misty sea in which buildings clustered like a sandcastle competition at high tide. Flares and lighted windows made pleasing patterns on the iridescent surface, but there was one glare of light, much closer to hand, which particularly occupied his attention.

On a patch of slightly higher ground by the river, bought by Vitoller for a ruinous sum, a new building was rising. It was growing even by night, like a mushroom—Hwel could see the cressets burning all along the scaffolding as the hired craftsmen and even some of the players themselves refused to let the mere shade of the sky interrupt their labors.

New buildings were rare in Morpork, but this was even a new type of building.

The Dysk.

Vitoller had been aghast at the idea at first, but young Tomjon had kept at him. And everyone knew that once the lad had got the feel of it he could persuade water to flow uphill.

“But we’ve always moved around, laddie,” said Vitoller, in the desperate voice of one who knows that, at the end of it all, he’s going to lose the argument. “I can’t go around settling down at my time of life.”

“It’s not doing you any good,” said Tomjon firmly. “All these cold nights and frosty mornings. You’re not getting any younger. We should stay put somewhere, and let people come to us. And they will, too. You know the crowds we’re getting now. Hwel’s plays are famous.”

“It’s not my plays,” Hwel had said. “It’s the players.”

“I can’t see me sitting by a fire in a stuffy room and sleeping on feather beds and all that nonsense,” said Vitoller, but he’d seen the look on his wife’s face and had given in.

And then there had been the theater itself. Making water run uphill was a parlor trick compared to getting the cash out of Vitoller but, it was a fact, they had been doing well these days. Ever since Tomjon had been big enough to wear a ruff and say two words without his voice cracking.

Hwel and Vitoller had watched the first few beams of the wooden framework go up.

“It’s against nature,” Vitoller had complained, leaning on his stick. “Capturing the spirit of the theater, putting it in a cage. It’ll kill it.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Hwel diffidently. Tomjon had laid his plans well, he’d devoted an entire evening to Hwel before even broaching the subject to his father, and now the dwarf’s mind was on fire with the possibilities of backdrops and scenery changes and wings and flies and magnificent engines that could lower gods from the heavens and trapdoors that could raise demons from hell. Hwel was no more capable of objecting to the new theater than a monkey was of resenting a banana plantation.

“Damn thing hasn’t even got a name,” Vitoller had said. “I should call it the Golde Mine, because that’s what it’s costing me. Where’s the money going to come from, that’s what I’d like to know.”

In fact they’d tried a lot of names, none of which suited Tomjon.

“It’s got to be a name that means everything,” he said. “Because there’s everything inside it. The whole world on the stage, do you see?”

And Hwel had said, knowing as he said it that what he was saying was exactly right, “The Disc.”

And now the Dysk was nearly done, and still he hadn’t written the new play.

He shut the window and wandered back to his desk, picked up the quill, and pulled another sheet of paper toward him. A thought struck him. The whole world was a stage, to the gods…

Presently he began to write.

All the Disc it is but an Theater, he wrote, Ane alle men and wymmen are but Players. He made the mistake of pausing, and another inspiration sleeted down, sending his train of thought off along an entirely new track.

He looked at what he had written and added: Except Those who selle popcorn.

After a while he crossed this out, and tried: Like unto thee Staje of a Theater ys the World, whereon alle Persons strut as Players.

This seemed a bit better.

He thought for a bit, and continued conscientiously: Sometimes they walke on. Sometimes they walke off.

He seemed to be losing it. Time, time, what he needed was an infinity…

There was a muffled cry and a thump from the next room. Hwel dropped the quill and pushed open the door cautiously.

The boy was sitting up in bed, white-faced. He relaxed when Hwel came in.

“Hwel?”

“What’s up, lad? Nightmares?”

“Gods, it was terrible! I saw them again! I really thought for a minute that—”

Hwel, who was absent-mindedly picking up the clothes that Tomjon had strewn around the room, paused in his work. He was keen on dreams. That was when the ideas came.

“That what?” he said.

“It was like…I mean, I was sort of inside something, like a bowl, and there were these three terrible faces peering in at me.”

“Aye?”

“Yes, and then they all said, ‘All hail…’ and then they started arguing about my name, and then they said, ‘Anyway, who shall be king hereafter?’ And then one of them said, ‘Here after what?’ and one of the other two said, ‘Just hereafter, girl, it’s what you’re supposed to say in these circumstances, you might try and make an effort,’ and then they all peered closer, and one of the others said, ‘He looks a bit peaky, I reckon it’s all that foreign food,’ and then the youngest one said, ‘Nanny, I’ve told you already, there’s no such place as Thespia,’ and then they bickered a bit, and one of the old ones said, ‘He can’t hear us, can he? He’s tossing and turning a bit,’ and the other one said, ‘You know I’ve never been able to get sound on this thing, Esme,’ and then they bickered some more, and it went cloudy, and then…I woke up…” he finished lamely. “It was horrible, because every time they came close to the bowl it sort of magnified everything, so all you could see was eyes and nostrils.”

Hwel hoisted himself onto the edge of the narrow bed.

“Funny old things, dreams,” he said.

“Not much funny about that one.”

“No, but I mean, last night, I had this dream about a little bandy-legged man walking down a road,” said Hwel. “He had a little black hat on, and he walked as though his boots were full of water.”

Tomjon nodded politely.

“Yes?” he said. “And—?”

“Well, that was it. And nothing. He had this little cane which he twirled and, you know, it was incredibly…”

The dwarf’s voice trailed off. Tomjon’s face had that familiar expression of polite and slightly condescending puzzlement that Hwel had come to know and dread.

“Anyway, it was very amusing,” he said, half to himself. But he knew he’d never convince the rest of the company. If it didn’t have a custard pie in it somewhere, they said, it wasn’t funny.

Tomjon swung his legs out of bed and reached for his britches.

“I’m not going back to sleep,” he said. “What’s the time?”

“It’s after midnight,” said Hwel. “And you know what your father said about going to bed late.”

“I’m not,” said Tomjon, pulling on his boots. “I’m getting up early. Getting up early is very healthy. And now I’m going out for a very healthy drink. You can come too,” he added, “to keep an eye on me.”

Hwel gave him a doubting look.

“You also know what your father says about going out drinking,” he said.

“Yes. He said he used to do it all the time when he was a lad. He said he’d think nothing of quaffing ale all night and coming home at 5 a.m., smashing windows. He said he was a bit of a roister-doister, not like these white-livered people today who can’t hold their drink.” Tomjon adjusted his doublet in front of the mirror, and added, “You know, Hwel, I reckon responsible behavior is something to get when you grow older. Like varicose veins.”

Hwel sighed. Tomjon’s memory for ill-judged remarks was legendary.

“All right,” he said. “Just the one, though. Somewhere decent.”

“I promise.” Tomjon adjusted his hat. It had a feather in it.

“By the way,” he said, “exactly how does one quaff?”

“I think it means you spill most of it,” said Hwel.

 

If the water of the river Ankh was rather thicker and more full of personality than ordinary river water, so the air in the Mended Drum was more crowded than normal air. It was like dry fog.

Tomjon and Hwel watched it spilling out into the street. The door burst open and a man came through backward, not actually touching the ground until he hit the wall on the opposite side of the street.

An enormous troll, employed by the owners to keep a measure of order in the place, came out dragging two more limp bodies which he deposited on the cobbles, kicking them once or twice in soft places.

“I reckon they’re roistering in there, don’t you?” said Tomjon.

“It looks like it,” said Hwel. He shivered. He hated taverns. People always put their drinks down on his head.

They scurried in quickly while the troll was holding one unconscious drinker up by one leg and banging his head on the cobbles in a search for concealed valuables.

Drinking in the Drum has been likened to diving in a swamp, except that in a swamp the alligators don’t pick your pockets first. Two hundred eyes watched the pair as they pushed their way through the crowd to the bar, a hundred mouths paused in the act of drinking, cursing or pleading, and ninety-nine brows crinkled with the effort of working out whether the newcomers fell into category A, people to be frightened of or B, people to frighten.

Tomjon walked through the crowd as though it was his property and, with the impetuosity of youth, rapped on the bar. Impetuosity was not a survival trait in the Mended Drum.

“Two pints of your finest ale, landlord,” he said, in tones so carefully judged that the barman was astonished to find himself obediently filling the first mug before the echoes had died away.

Hwel looked up. There was an extremely big man on his right, wearing the outside of several large bulls and more chains than necessary to moor a warship. A face that looked like a building site with hair on it glared down at him.

“Bloody hell,” it said. “It’s a bloody lawn ornament.”

Hwel went cold. Cosmopolitan as they were, the people of Morpork had a breezy, no-nonsense approach to the nonhuman races, i.e. hit them over the head with a brick and throw them in the river. This did not apply to trolls, naturally, because it is very difficult to be racially prejudiced against creatures seven feet tall who can bite through walls, at least for very long. But people three feet high were absolutely designed to be discriminated against.

The giant prodded Hwel on the top of his head.

“Where’s your fishing rod, lawn ornament?” he said.

The barman pushed the mugs across the puddled counter.

“Here you are,” he said, leering. “One pint. And one half pint.”

Tomjon opened his mouth to speak, but Hwel nudged him sharply in the knee. Put up with it, put up with it, slip out as soon as possible, it was the only way…

“Where’s your little pointy hat, then?” said the bearded man.

The room had gone quiet. This looked like being cabaret time.

“I said, where’s your pointy hat, dopey?”

The barman got a grip of the blackthorn stick with nails in which lived under the counter, just in case, and said, “Er—”

“I was talking to the lawn ornament here.”

The man took the dregs of his own drink and poured them carefully over the silent dwarf’s head.

“I ain’t drinking here again,” he muttered, when even this failed to have any effect. “It’s bad enough they let monkeys drink here, but pygmies—”

Now the silence in the bar took on a whole new intensity in which the sound of a stool being slowly pushed back was like the creak of doom. All eyes swiveled to the other end of the room, where sat the one drinker in the Mended Drum who came into category C.

What Tomjon had thought was an old sack hunched over the bar was extending arms and—other arms, except that they were its legs. A sad, rubbery face turned toward the speaker, its expression as melancholy as the mists of evolution. Its funny lips curled back. There was absolutely nothing funny about its teeth.

“Er,” said the barman again, his voice frightening even him in that terrible simian silence. “I don’t think you meant that, did you? Not about monkeys, eh? You didn’t really, did you?”

“What the hell’s that?” hissed Tomjon.

“I think it’s an orangutan,” said Hwel. “An ape.”

“A monkey’s a monkey,” said the bearded man, at which several of the Drum’s more percipient customers started to edge for the door. “I mean, so what? But these bloody lawn ornaments—”

Hwel’s fist struck out at groin height.

Dwarfs have a reputation as fearsome fighters. Any race of three-foot tall people who favor axes and go into battle as into a championship tree-felling competition soon get talked about. But years of wielding a pen instead of a hammer had relieved Hwel’s punches of some of their stopping power, and it could have been the end of him when the big man yelled and drew his sword if a pair of delicate, leathery hands hadn’t instantly jerked the thing from his grip and, with only a small amount of effort, bent it double.*

When the giant growled, and turned around, an arm like a couple of broom handles strung together with elastic and covered with red fur unfolded itself in a complicated motion and smacked him across the jaw so hard that he rose several inches in the air and landed on a table.

By the time that the table had slid into another table and overturned a couple of benches there was enough impetus to start the night’s overdue brawl, especially since the big man had a few friends with him. Since no one felt like attacking the ape, who had dreamily pulled a bottle from the shelf and smashed the bottom off on the counter, they hit whoever happened to be nearest, on general principles. This is absolutely correct etiquette for a tavern brawl.

Hwel walked under a table and dragged Tomjon, who was watching all this with interest, after him.

“So this is roistering. I always wondered.”

“I think perhaps it would be a good idea to leave,” said the dwarf firmly. “Before there’s, you know, any trouble.”

There was a thump as someone landed on the table above them, and a tinkle of broken glass.

“Is it real roistering, do you suppose, or merely rollicking?” said Tomjon, grinning.

“It’s going to be bloody murder in a minute, my lad!”

Tomjon nodded, and crawled back out into the fray. Hwel heard him thump on the bar counter with something and call for silence.

Hwel put his arms over his head in panic.

“I didn’t mean—” he began.

In fact calling for silence was a sufficiently rare event in the middle of a tavern brawl that silence was what Tomjon got. And silence was what he filled.

Hwel started as he heard the boy’s voice ring out, full of confidence and absolutely first-class projection.

“Brothers! And yet may I call all men brother, for on this night—”

The dwarf craned up to see Tomjon standing on a chair, one hand raised in the prescribed declamatory fashion. Around him men were frozen in the act of giving one another a right seeing-to, their faces turned to his.

Down at tabletop height Hwel’s lips moved in perfect synchronization with the words as Tomjon went through the familiar speech. He risked another look.

The fighters straightened up, pulled themselves together, adjusted the hang of their tunics, glanced apologetically at one another. Many of them were in fact standing to attention.

Even Hwel felt a fizz in his blood, and he’d written those words. He’d slaved half a night over them, years ago, when Vitoller had declared that they needed another five minutes in Act III of The King of Ankh.

“Scribble us something with a bit of spirit in it,” he’d said. “A bit of zip and sizzle, y’know. Something to summon up the blood and put a bit of backbone in our friends in the ha’penny seats. And just long enough to give us time to change the set.”

He’d been a bit ashamed of that play at the time. The famous Battle of Morpork, he strongly suspected, had consisted of about two thousand men lost in a swamp on a cold, wet day, hacking one another into oblivion with rusty swords. What would the last King of Ankh have said to a pack of ragged men who knew they were outnumbered, outflanked and outgeneralled? Something with bite, something with edge, something like a drink of brandy to a dying man; no logic, no explanation, just words that would reach right down through a tired man’s brain and pull him to his feet by his testicles.

Now he was seeing its effect.

He began to think the walls had fallen away, and there was a cold mist blowing over the marshes, its choking silence broken only by the impatient cries of the carrion birds…

And this voice.

And he’d written the words, they were his, no half-crazed king had ever really spoken like this. And he’d written all this to fill in a gap so that a castle made of painted sacking stretched over a frame could be shoved behind a curtain, and this voice was taking the coal dust of his words and filling the room with diamonds.

I made these words, Hwel thought. But they don’t belong to me. They belong to him.

Look at those people. Not a patriotic thought among them, but if Tomjon asked them, this bunch of drunkards would storm the Patrician’s palace tonight. And they’d probably succeed.

I just hope his mouth never falls into the wrong hands…

As the last syllables died away, their white-hot echoes searing across every mind in the room, Hwel shook himself and crawled out of hiding and jabbed Tomjon on the knee.

“Come away now, you fool,” he hissed. “Before it wears off.”

He grasped the boy firmly by the arm, handed a couple of complimentary tickets to the stunned barman, and hurried up the steps. He didn’t stop until they were a street away.

“I thought I was doing rather well there,” said Tomjon.

“A good deal too well, I reckon.”

The boy rubbed his hands together. “Right. Where shall we go next?”

“Next?”

“Tonight is young!”

“No, tonight is dead. It’s today that’s young,” said the dwarf hurriedly.

“Well, I’m not going home yet. Isn’t there somewhere a bit more friendly? We haven’t actually drunk anything.”

Hwel sighed.

“A troll tavern,” said Tomjon. “I’ve heard about them. There’s some down in the Shades.* I’d like to see a troll tavern.”

“They’re for trolls only, boy. Molten lava to drink and rock music and cheese ‘n’ chutney flavored pebbles.”

“What about dwarf bars?”

“You’d hate it,” said Hwel, fervently. “Besides, you’d run out of headroom.”

“Low dives, are they?”

“Look at it like this—how long do you think you could sing about gold?”

“‘It’s yellow and it goes chink and you can buy things with it,’” said Tomjon experimentally, as they strolled through the crowds on the Plaza of Broken Moons. “Four seconds, I think.”

“Right. Five hours of it gets a bit repetitive.” Hwel kicked a pebble gloomily. He’d investigated a few dwarf bars last time they were in town, and hadn’t approved. For some reason his fellow expatriates, who at home did nothing more objectionable than mine a bit of iron ore and hunt small creatures, felt impelled, once in the big city, to wear chain mail underwear, go around with axes in their belts, and call themselves names like Timkin Rumbleguts. And no one could beat a city dwarf when it came to quaffing. Sometimes they missed their mouths altogether.

“Anyway,” he added, “you’d get thrown out for being too creative. The actual words are, ‘Gold, gold, gold, gold, gold, gold.’”

“Is there a chorus?”

“‘Gold, gold, gold, gold, gold,’” said Hwel.

“You left out a ‘gold’ there.”

“I think it’s because I wasn’t cut out to be a dwarf.”

“Cut down, lawn ornament,” said Tomjon.

There was a little hiss of indrawn breath.

“Sorry,” said Tomjon hurriedly. “It’s just that father—”

“I’ve known your father for a long time,” said Hwel. “Through thick and thin, and there was a damn sight more thin than thick. Since before you were bor—” He hesitated. “Times were hard in those days,” he mumbled. “So what I’m saying is…well, some things you earn.”

“Yes. I’m sorry.”

“You see, just—” Hwel paused at the mouth of a dark alley. “Did you hear something?” he said.

They squinted into the alley, once again revealing themselves as newcomers to the city. Morporkians don’t look down dark alleys when they hear strange noises. If they see four struggling figures their first instinct is not to rush to anyone’s assistance, or at least not to rush to the assistance of the one who appears to be losing and on the wrong end of someone else’s boot. Nor do they shout “Oi!” Above all, they don’t look surprised when the assailants, instead of guiltily running off, flourish a small piece of cardboard in front of them.

“What’s this?” said Tomjon.

“It’s a clown!” said Hwel. “They’ve mugged a clown!”

“‘Theft Licence’?” said Tomjon, holding the card up to the light.

“That’s right,” said the leader of the three. “Only don’t expect us to do you too, ’cos we’re on our way home.”

“S’right,” said one of his assistants. “It’s the thingy, the quota.”

“But you were kicking him!”

“Worl, not a lot. Not what you’d call actual kicking.”

“More foot nudging, sort of thing,” said the third thief.

“Fair’s fair. He bloody well went and fetched Ron here a right thump, didn’t he?”

“Yeah. Some people have no idea.”

“Why, you heartless—” Hwel began, but Tomjon laid a cautioning hand on his head.