The boy turned the card over. The obverse read:

 

J. H. “Flannelfoot” Boggis and Nephews

Bespoke Thieves

“The Old Firm”

(Estblshd AM 1789)

All type Theft carryed out Professionly and

with Disgression

Houses cleared. 24-hr service.

No job too small.

LET US QUOTE YOU FOR OUR

FAMILY RATE

 

“It seems to be in order,” he said reluctantly.

Hwel paused in the act of helping the dazed victim to his feet.

“In order?” he shouted. “To rob someone?”

“We’ll give him a chitty, of course,” said Boggis. “Lucky we found him first, really. Some of these newcomers in the business, they’ve got no idea.”*

“Cowboys,” agreed a nephew.

“How much did you steal?” said Tomjon.

Boggis opened the clown’s purse, which was stuck in his belt. Then he went pale.

“Oh, bleeding hell,” he said. The Nephews clustered around.

“We’re for it, sort of thing.”

“Second time this year, uncle.”

Boggis glared at the victim.

“Well, how was I to know? I wasn’t to know, was I? I mean, look at him, how much would you expect him to have on him? Couple of coppers, right? I mean, we’d never have done for him, only it was on our way home. You try and do someone a favor, this is what happens.”

“How much has he got, then?” said Tomjon.

“There must be a hundred silver dollars in here,” moaned Boggis, waving a purse. “I mean, that’s not my league. That’s not my class. I can’t handle that sort of money. You’ve got to be in the Guild of Lawyers or something to steal that much. It’s way over my quota, is that.”

“Give it back then,” said Tomjon.

“But I done him a receipt!”

“They’ve all got, you know, numbers on,” explained the younger of the nephews. “The Guild checks up, sort of…”

Hwel grabbed Tomjon’s hand.

“Will you excuse us a moment?” he said to the frantic thief, and dragged Tomjon to the other side of the alley.

“OK,” he said. “Who’s gone mad? Them? Me? You?”

Tomjon explained.

“It’s legal?”

“Up to a certain point. Fascinating, isn’t it? Man in a pub told me about it, sort of thing.”

“But he’s stolen too much?”

“So it appears. I gather the Guild is very strict about it.”

There was a groan from the victim hanging between them. He tinkled gently.

“Look after him,” said Tomjon. “I’ll sort this out.”

He went back to the thieves, who were looking very worried.

“My client feels,” he said, “that the situation could be resolved if you give the money back.”

“Ye-es,” said Boggis, approaching the idea as if it was a brand new theory of cosmic creation. “But it’s the receipt, see, we have to fill it up, time and place, signed and everything…”

“My client feels that possibly you could rob him of, let us say, five copper pieces,” said Tomjon, smoothly.

“—I bloody don’t!—” shouted the Fool, who was coming around.

“That represents two copper pieces as the going rate, plus expenses of three copper pieces for time, call-out fees—”

“Wear and tear on cosh,” said Boggis.

“Exactly.”

“Very fair. Very fair.” Boggis looked over Tomjon’s head at the Fool, who was now completely conscious and very angry. “Very fair,” he said loudly. “Statesmanlike. Much obliged, I’m sure.” He looked down at Tomjon. “And anything for yourself, sir?” he added. “Just say the word. We’ve got a special on GBH this season. Practically painless, you’ll barely feel a thing.”

“Hardly breaks the skin,” said the older nephew. “Plus you get choice of limb.”

“I believe I am well served in that area,” said Tomjon smoothly.

“Oh. Well. Right you are then. No problem.”

“Which merely leaves,” continued Tomjon, as the thieves started to walk away, “the question of legal fees.”

 

The gentle grayness at the stump of the night flowed across Ankh-Morpork. Tomjon and Hwel sat on either side of the table in their lodgings, counting.

“Three silver dollars and eighteen copper pieces in profit, I make it,” said Tomjon.

“That was amazing,” said the Fool. “I mean, the way they volunteered to go home and get some more money as well, after you gave them that speech about the rights of man.”

He dabbed some more ointment on his head.

“And the youngest one started to cry,” he added. “Amazing.”

“It wears off,” said Hwel.

“You’re a dwarf, aren’t you?”

Hwel didn’t feel he could deny this.

“I can tell you’re a Fool,” he said.

“Yes. It’s the bells, isn’t it?” said the Fool wearily, rubbing his ribs.

“Yes, and the bells.” Tomjon grimaced and kicked Hwel under the table.

“Well, I’m very grateful,” said the Fool. He stood up, and winced. “I’d really like to show my gratitude,” he added. “Is there a tavern open around here?”

Tomjon joined him at the window, and pointed down the length of the street.

“See all those tavern signs?” he said.

“Yes. Gosh. There’s hundreds.”

“Right. See the one at the end, with the blue and white sign?”

“Yes. I think so.”

“Well, as far as I know, that’s the only one around here that’s ever closed.”

“Then pray allow me to treat you to a drink. It’s the least I can do,” said the Fool nervously. “And I’m sure the little fellow would like something to quaff.”

Hwel gripped the edge of the table and opened his mouth to roar.

And stopped.

He stared at the two figures. His mouth stayed open.

It closed again with a snap.

“Something the matter?” said Tomjon.

Hwel looked away. It had been a long night. “Trick of the light,” he muttered. “And I could do with a drink,” he added. “A bloody good quaff.”

In fact, he thought, why fight it? “I’ll even put up with the singing,” he said.

 

“Was’ the nex’ wor’?”

“S’gold. I think.”

“Ah.”

Hwel looked unsteadily into his mug. Drunkenness had this to be said for it, it stopped the flow of inspirations.

“And you left out the ‘gold,’” he said.

“Where?” said Tomjon. He was wearing the Fool’s hat.

Hwel considered this. “I reckon,” he said, concentrating, “it was between the ‘gold’ and the ‘gold’. An’ I reckon,” he peered again into the mug. It was empty, a horrifying sight. “I reckon,” he tried again, and finally gave up, and substituted, “I reckon I could do with another drink.”

“My shout this time,” said the Fool. “Hahaha. My squeak. Hahaha.” He tried to stand up, and banged his head.

In the gloom of the bar a dozen axes were gripped more firmly. The part of Hwel that was sober, and was horrified to see the rest of him being drunk, urged him to wave his hand at the beetling brows glaring at them through the gloom.

“S’all right,” he said, to the bar at large. “He don’t mean it, he ver’ funny wossname, idiot. Fool. Ver’ funny Fool, all way from wassisplace.”

“Lancre,” said the Fool, and sat down heavily on the bar.

“S’right. Long way away from wossname, sounds like foot disease. Don’t know how to behave. Don’t know many dwarfs.”

“Hahaha,” said the Fool, clutching his head. “Bit short of them where I come from.”

Someone tapped Hwel on the shoulder. He turned and looked into a craggy, hairy face under an iron helmet. The dwarf in question was tossing a throwing axe up and down in a meaningful way.

“You ought to tell your friend to be a bit less funny,” he suggested. “Otherwise he will be amusing the demons in Hell!”

Hwel squinted at him through the alcoholic haze.

“Who’re you?” he said.

“Grabpot Thundergust,” said the dwarf, striking his chain-mailed torso. “And I say—”

Hwel peered closer.

“Here, I know you,” he said. “You got a cosmetics mill down Hobfast Street. I bought a lot of greasepaint off you last week—”

A look of panic crossed Thundergust’s face. He leaned forward in panic. “Shutup, shutup,” he whispered.

“That’s right, it said the Halls of Elven Perfume and Rouge Co.,” said Hwel happily.

“Ver’ good stuff,” said Tomjon, who was trying to stop himself from sliding off the tiny bench. “Especially your No. 19, Corpse Green, my father swears it’s the best. First class.”

The dwarf hefted his axe uneasily. “Well, er,” he said. “Oh. But. Yes. Well, thank you. Only the finest ingredients, mark you.”

“Chop them up with that, do you?” said Hwel innocently, pointing to the axe. “Or is it your night off?”

Thundergust’s brows beetled again like a cockroach convention.

“Here, you’re not with the theater?”

“Tha’s us,” said Tomjon. “Strolling players.” He corrected himself. “Standing-still players now. Haha. Slidin’-down players now.”

The dwarf dropped his axe and sat down on the bench, his face suddenly softened with enthusiasm.

“I went last week,” he said. “Bloody good, it was. There was this girl and this fellow, but she was married to this old man, and there was this other fellow, and they said he’d died, and she pined away and took poison, but then it turned out this man was the other man really, only he couldn’t tell her on account of—” Thundergust stopped, and blew his nose. “Everyone died in the end,” he said. “Very tragic. I cried all the way home, I don’t mind telling you. She was so pale.”

“No. 19 and a layer of powder,” said Tomjon cheerfully. “Plus a bit of brown eyeshadow.”

“Eh?”

“And a couple of hankies in the vest,” he added.

“What’s he saying?” said the dwarf to the company at, for want of a better word, large.

Hwel smiled into his tankard.

“Give ’em a bit of Gretalina’s soliloquy, boy,” he said.

“Right.”

Tomjon stood up, hit his head, sat down and then knelt on the floor as a compromise. He clasped his hands to what would have been, but for a few chance chromosomes, his bosom.

“You lie who call it Summer…” he began.

The assembled dwarfs listened in silence for several minutes. One of them dropped his axe, and was noisily hushed by the rest of them.

“…and melting snow. Farewell,” Tomjon finished. “Drinks phial, collapses behind battlements, down ladder, out of dress and into tabard for Comic Guard No. 2, wait one, entrance left. What ho, good—”

“That’s about enough,” said Hwel quietly.

Several of the dwarfs were crying into their helmets. There was a chorus of blown noses.

Thundergust dabbed at his eyes with a chain-mail handkerchief.

“That was the most saddest thing I’ve ever heard,” he said. He glared at Tomjon. “Hang on,” he said, as realization dawned. “He’s a man. I bloody fell in love with that girl on stage.” He nudged Hwel. “He’s not a bit of an elf, is he?”

“Absolutely human,” said Hwel. “I know his father.”

Once again he stared hard at the Fool, who was watching them with his mouth open, and looked back at Tomjon.

Nah, he thought. Coincidence.

“S’acting,” he said. “A good actor can be anything, right?”

He could feel the Fool’s eye boring into the back of his short neck.

“Yes, but dressing up as women, it’s a bit—” said Thundergust doubtfully.

Tomjon slipped off his shoes and knelt down on them, bringing his face level with the dwarf’s. He gave him a calculating stare for a few seconds, and then adjusted his features.

And there were two Thundergusts. True, one of them was kneeling and had apparently been shaved.

“What ho, what ho,” said Tomjon in the dwarf’s voice.

This was by way of being a hilarious gag to the rest of the dwarfs, who had an uncomplicated sense of humor. As they gathered around the pair Hwel felt a gentle touch on the shoulder.

“You two are with a theater?” said the Fool, now almost sober.

“S’right.”

“Then I’ve come five hundred miles to find you.”

 

It was, as Hwel would have noted in his stage directions, Later the Same Day. The sounds of hammering as the Dysk theater rose from its cradle of scaffolding thumped through Hwel’s head and out the other side.

He could remember the drinking, he was certain. And the dwarfs bought lots more rounds when Tomjon did his impersonations. Then they had all gone to another bar Thundergust knew, and then they’d gone to a Klatchian take-away, and after that it was just a blur…

He wasn’t very good at quaffing. Too much of the drink actually landed in his mouth.

Judging by the taste in it, some incontinent creature of the night had also scored a direct hit.

“Can you do it?” said Vitoller.

Hwel smacked his lips to get rid of the taste.

“I expect,” said Tomjon. “It sounded interesting, the way he told it. Wicked king ruling with the help of evil witches. Storms. Ghastly forests. True Heir to Throne in Life-and-Death Struggle. Flash of Dagger. Screams, alarums. Evil king dies. Good triumphs. Bells ring out.”

“Showers of rose petals could be arranged,” said Vitoller. “I know a man who can get them at practically cost.”

They both looked at Hwel, who was drumming his fingers on his stool. All three found their attention drawn to the bag of silver the Fool had given Hwel. Even by itself it represented enough money to complete the Dysk. And there had been talk of more to follow. Patronage, that was the thing.

“You’ll do it then, will you?” said Vitoller.

“It’s got a certain something,” Hwel conceded. “But…I don’t know…”

“I’m not trying to pressure you,” said Vitoller. All three pairs of eyes swiveled back to the money bag.

“It seems a bit fishy,” Tomjon conceded. “I mean, the Fool is decent enough. But the way he tells it…it’s very odd. His mouth says the words, and his eyes say something else. And I got the impression he’d much rather we believed his eyes.”

“On the other hand,” said Vitoller hurriedly, “what harm could it do? The pay’s the thing.”

Hwel raised his head.

“What?” he said muzzily.

“I said, the play’s the thing,” said Vitoller.

There was silence again, except for the drumming of Hwel’s fingertips. The bag of silver seemed to have grown larger. In fact, it seemed to fill the room.

“The thing is—” Vitoller began, unnecessarily loudly.

“The way I see it—” Hwel began.

They both stopped.

“After you. Sorry.”

“It wasn’t important. Go ahead.”

“I was going to say, we could afford to build the Dysk anyway,” said Hwel.

“Just the shell and the stage,” said Vitoller. “But not all the other things. Not the trapdoor mechanism, or the machine for lowering gods out of heaven. Or the big turntable, or the wind fans.”

“We used to manage without all that stuff,” said Hwel. “Remember the old days? All we had was a few planks and a bit of painted sacking. But we had a lot of spirit. If we wanted wind we had to make it ourselves.” He drummed his fingers for a while. “Of course,” he added quietly, “we should be able to afford a wave machine. A small one. I’ve got this idea about this ship wrecked on an island, where there’s this—”

“Sorry.” Vitoller shook his head.

“But we’ve had some huge audiences!” said Tomjon.

“Sure, lad. Sure. But they pay in ha’pennies. The artificers want silver. If we wanted to be rich men—people,” he corrected hurriedly, “we should have been born carpenters.” Vitoller shifted uneasily. “I already owe Chrystophrase the Troll more than I should.”

The other two stared.

“He’s the one that has people’s limbs torn off!” said Tomjon.

“How much do you owe him?” said Hwel.

“It’s all right,” said Vitoller hurriedly, “I’m keeping up the interest payments. More or less.”

“Yes, but how much does he want?”

“An arm and a leg.”

The dwarf and boy stared at him in horror. “How could you have been so—”

“I did it for you two! Tomjon deserves a better stage, he doesn’t want to go ruining his health sleeping in lattys and never knowing a home, and you, my man, you need somewhere settled, with all the proper things you ought to have, like trapdoors and…wave machines and so forth. You talked me into it, and I thought, they’re right. It’s no life out on the road, giving two performances a day to a bunch of farmers and going around with a hat afterward, what sort of future is that? I thought, we’ve got to get a place somewhere, with comfortable seats for the gentry, people who don’t throw potatoes at the stage. I said, blow the cost. I just wanted you to—”

“All right, all right!” shouted Hwel. “I’ll write it!”

“I’ll act it,” said Tomjon.

“I’m not forcing you, mind,” said Vitoller. “It’s your own choice.”

Hwel frowned at the table. There were, he had to admit, some nice touches. Three witches was good. Two wouldn’t be enough, four would be too many. They could be meddling with the destinies of mankind, and everything. Lots of smoke and green light. You could do a lot with three witches. It was surprising no one had thought of it before.

“So we can tell this Fool that we’ll do it, can we?” said Vitoller, his hand on the bag of silver.

And of course you couldn’t go wrong with a good storm. And there was the ghost routine that Vitoller had cut out of Please Yourself, saying they couldn’t afford the muslin. And perhaps he could put Death in, too. Young Dafe would make a damn good Death, with white make-up and platform soles…

“How far away did he say he’d come from?” he said.

“The Ramtops,” and the playmaster. “Some little kingdom no one has ever heard of. Sounds like a chest infection.”

“It’d take months to get there.”

“I’d like to go, anyway,” said Tomjon. “That’s where I was born.”

Vitoller looked at the ceiling. Hwel looked at the floor. Anything was better, just at that moment, than looking at each other’s face.

“That’s what you said,” said the boy. “When you did a tour of the mountains, you said.”

“Yes, but I can’t remember where,” said Vitoller. “All those little mountain towns looked the same to me. We spent more time pushing the lattys across rivers and dragging them up hills than we ever did on the stage.”

“I could take some of the younger lads and we could make a summer of it,” said Tomjon. “Put on all the old favorites. And we could still be back by Soulcake Day. You could stay here and see to the theater, and we could be back for a Grand Opening.” He grinned at his father. “It’d be good for them,” he said slyly. “You always said some of the young lads don’t know what a real acting life is like.”

“Hwel’s still got to write the play,” Vitoller pointed out.

Hwel was silent. He was staring at nothing at all. After a while one hand fumbled in his doublet and brought out a sheaf of paper, and then disappeared in the direction of his belt and produced a small corked ink pot and a bundle of quills.

They watched as, without once looking at them, the dwarf smoothed out the paper, opened the ink pot, dipped a quill, held it poised like a hawk waiting for its prey, and then began to write.

Vitoller nodded at Tomjon.

Walking as quietly as they could, they left the room.

 

Around mid-afternoon they took up a tray of food and a bundle of paper.

The tray was still there at teatime. The paper had gone.

A few hours later a passing member of the company reported hearing a yell of “It can’t work! It’s back to front!” and the sound of something being thrown across the room.

Around supper Vitoller heard a shouted request for more candles and fresh quills.

Tomjon tried to get an early night, but sleep was murdered by the sound of creativity from the next room. There were mutterings about balconies, and whether the world really needed wave machines. The rest was silence, except for the insistent scratching of quills.

Eventually, Tomjon dreamed.

“Now. Have we got everything this time?”

“Yes, Granny.”

“Light the fire, Magrat.”

“Yes, Granny.”

“Right. Let’s see now—”

“I wrote it all down, Granny.”

“I can read, my girl, thank you very much. Now, what’s this. ‘Round about the cauldron go, In the poisoned entrails throw…’ What are these supposed to be?”

“Our Jason slaughtered a pig yesterday, Esme.”

“These look like perfectly good chitterlin’s to me, Gytha. There’s a couple of decent meals in them, if I’m any judge.”

“Please, Granny.”

“There’s plenty of starvin’ people in Klatch who wouldn’t turn up their nose at ’em, that’s all I’m saying…All right, all right. ‘Whole grain wheat and lentils too, In the cauldron seethe and stew’? What happened to the toad?”

“Please, Granny. You’re slowing it down. You know Goodie was against all unnecessary cruelty. Vegetable protein is a perfectly acceptable substitute.”

“That means no newt or fenny snake either, I suppose?”

“No, Granny.”

“Or tiger’s chaudron?”

“Here.”

“What the hell’s this, excuse my Klatchian?”

“It’s a tiger’s chaudron. Our Wane bought it off a merchant from forn parts.”

“You sure?”

“Our Wane asked special, Esme.”

“Looks like any other chaudron to me. Oh, well. ‘Double hubble, stubble trouble, Fire burn and cauldron bub—’ WHY isn’t the cauldron bubbling, Magrat?”

Tomjon awoke, shivering. The room was dark. Outside a few stars pierced the mists of the city, and there was the occasional whistle of burglars and footpads as they went about their strictly lawful occasions.

There was silence from the next room, but he could see the light of a candle under the door.

He went back to bed.

Across the turgid river the Fool had also awakened. He was staying in the Fool’s Guild, not out of choice but because the duke hadn’t given him any money for anything else, and getting to sleep had been difficult in any case. The chilly walls had brought back too many memories. Besides, if he listened hard he could hear the muted sobs and occasional whimpers from the students’ dormitories, as they contemplated with horror the life that lay ahead of them.

He punched the rock-hard pillow, and sank into a fitful sleep. Perchance to dream.

“Slab and grue, yes. But it doesn’t say how slab and grue.”

“Goodie Whemper recommended testing a bit in a cup of cold water, like toffee.”

“How inconvenient that we didn’t think to bring one, Magrat.”

“I think we should be getting on, Esme. The night’s nearly gone.”

“Just don’t blame me if it doesn’t work properly, that’s all. Lessee…‘Baboon hair and…’ Who’s got the baboon hair? Oh, thank you, Gytha, though it looks more like cat hair to me, but never mind. ‘Baboon hair and mandrake root,’ and if that’s real mandrake I’m very surprised, ‘carrot juice and tongue of boot,’ I see, a little humor, I suppose…”

“Please hurry!”

“All right, all right. ‘Owl hoot and glow-worm glimmer. Boil—and then allow to simmer.’”

“You know, Esme, this doesn’t taste half bad.”

“You’re not supposed to drink it, you daft doyenne!”

Tomjon sat bolt upright in bed. That was them again, the same faces, the bickering voices, distorted by time and space.

Even after he looked out of the window, where fresh daylight was streaming through the city, he could still hear the voices grumbling into the distance, like old thunder, fading away…

“I for one didn’t believe it about the tongue of boot.”

“It’s still very runny. Do you think we should put some corn-flour into it?”

“It won’t matter. Either he’s on his way, or he isn’t…”

He got up and doused his face in the washbasin.

Silence rolled in swathes from Hwel’s room. Tomjon slipped on his clothes and pushed open the door.

It looked as though it had snowed indoors, great heavy flakes that had drifted into odd corners of the room. Hwel sat at his low table in the middle of the floor, his head pillowed on a pile of paper, snoring.

Tomjon tiptoed across the room and picked up a discarded ball of paper at random. He smoothed it out and read:

 

KING: Now, I’m just going to put the crown on this bush here, and you will tell me if anyone tries to take it, won’t you?

GROUNDLINGS: Yes!

KING: Now if I could just find my horsey…

(1st assassin pops up behind rock.)

AUDIENCE: Behind you!

(1st assassin disappears.)

KING: You’re trying to play tricks on old Kingy, you naughty…

 

There was a lot of crossing out, and a large blot. Tomjon threw it aside and selected another ball at random.

 

KING: Is this a duck knife dagger I see behind beside in front of before me, its beak handle pointing at me my hand?

1ST MURDERER: I’faith, it is not so. Oh no it isn’t!

2ND MURDERER: Thou speakest truth, sire. Oh yes it is!

 

Judging by the creases in the paper, this one had been thrown at the wall particularly hard. Hwel had once explained to Tomjon his theory about inspirations, and by the look of it a whole shower had fallen last night.

Fascinated by this insight into the creative processes, however, Tomjon tried a third discarded attempt:

 

QUEEN: Faith, there is a sound without! Mayhap it is my husband returning! Quick, into the garderobe, and wait not upon the order of your going!

MURDERER: Marry, but your maid still has my pantoufles!

MAID (opening door): The Archbishop, your majesty.

PRIEST (under bed): Bless my soul!

(Divers alarums)

 

Tomjon wondered vaguely what divers alarums, which Hwel always included somewhere in the stage directions, actually were. Hwel always refused to say. Perhaps they referred to dangerous depths, or lack of air pressure.

He sidled toward the table and, with great care, pulled the sheaf of paper from under the sleeping dwarf’s head, lowering it gently onto a cushion.

The top sheet read:

 

Verence Felmet Small God’s Eve A Night Of Knives Daggers Kings, by, Hwel of Vitoller’s Men. A Comedy Tragedy in Eight Five Six Three Nine Acts.

Characters: Felmet, A Good King.

Verence, A Bad King.

Wethewacs, Ane Evil Witch

Hogg, Ane Likewise Evil Witch

Magerat, Ane Sirene…

Tomjon flicked over the page.

 

Scene: A Drawing Room Ship at Sea Street in Pseudopolis Blasted Moor. Enter Three Witches…

Hwel snored.

In his dreams gods rose and fell, ships moved with cunning and art across canvas oceans, pictures jumped and ran together and became flickering images; men flew on wires, flew without wires, great ships of illusion fought against one another in imaginary skies, seas opened, ladies were sawn in half, a thousand special effects men giggled and gibbered. Through it all he ran with his arms open in desperation, knowing that none of this really existed or ever would exist and all he really had was a few square yards of planking, some canvas and some paint on which to trap the beckoning images that invaded his head.

Only in our dreams are we free. The rest of the time we need wages.

 

“It’s a good play,” said Vitoller, “apart from the ghost.”

“The ghost stays,” said Hwel sullenly.

“But people always jeer and throw things. Anyway, you know how hard it is to get all the chalk dust out of the clothes.”

“The ghost stays. It’s a dramatic necessity.”

“You said it was a dramatic necessity in the last play.”

“Well, it was.”

“And in Please Yourself, and in A Wizard of Ankh, and all the rest of them.”

“I like ghosts.”

They stood to one side and watched the dwarf artificers assembling the wave machine. It consisted of half a dozen long spindles, covered in complex canvas spirals painted in shades of blue and green and white, and stretching the complete width of the stage. An arrangement of cogs and endless belts led to a treadmill in the wings. When the spirals were all turning at once people with weak stomachs had to look away.

“Sea battles,” breathed Hwel. “Shipwrecks. Tritons. Pirates!”

“Squeaky bearings, laddie,” groaned Vitoller, shifting his weight on his stick. “Maintenance expenses. Overtime.”

“It does look extremely…intricate,” Hwel admitted. “Who designed it?”

“A daft old chap in the Street of Cunning Artificers,” said Vitoller. “Leonard of Quirm. He’s a painter really. He just does this sort of thing for a hobby. I happened to hear that he’s been working on this for months. I just snapped it up quick when he couldn’t get it to fly.”

They watched the mock waves turn.

“You’re bent on going?” said Vitoller, at last.

“Yes. Tomjon’s still a bit wild. He needs an older head around the place.”

“I’ll miss you, laddie. I don’t mind telling you. You’ve been like a son to me. How old are you, exactly? I never did know.”

“A hundred and two.”

Vitoller nodded gloomily. He was sixty, and his arthritis was playing him up.

“You’ve been like a father to me, then,” he said.

“It evens out in the end,” said Hwel diffidently. “Half the height, twice the age. You could say that on the overall average we live about the same length of time as humans.”

The playmaster sighed. “Well, I don’t know what I will do without you and Tomjon around, and that’s a fact.”

“It’s only for the summer, and a lot of the lads are staying. In fact it’s mainly the apprentices that are going. You said yourself it’d be good experience.”

Vitoller looked wretched and, in the chilly air of the half-finished theater, a good deal smaller than usual, like a balloon two weeks after the party. He prodded some wood shavings distractedly with his stick.

“We grow old, Master Hwel. At least,” he corrected himself, “I grow old and you grow older. We have heard the gongs at midnight.”

“Aye. You don’t want him to go, do you?”

“I was all for it at first. You know. Then I thought, there’s destiny afoot. Just when things are going well, there’s always bloody destiny. I mean, that’s where he came from. Somewhere up in the mountains. Now fate is calling him back. I shan’t see him again.”

“It’s only for the summer—”

Vitoller held up a hand. “Don’t interrupt. I’d got the right dramatic flow there.”

“Sorry.”

Flick, flick, went the stick on the wood shavings, knocking them into the air.

“I mean, you know he’s not my flesh and blood.”

“He’s your son, though,” said Hwel. “This hereditary business isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

“It’s fine of you to say that.”

“I mean it. Look at me. I wasn’t supposed to be writing plays. Dwarfs aren’t even supposed to be able to read. I shouldn’t worry too much about destiny, if I was you. I was destined to be a miner. Destiny gets it wrong half the time.”

“But you said he looks like the Fool person. I can’t see it myself, mark you.”

“The light’s got to be right.”

“Could be some destiny at work there.”

Hwel shrugged. Destiny was funny stuff, he knew. You couldn’t trust it. Often you couldn’t even see it. Just when you knew you had it cornered, it turned out to be something else—coincidence, maybe, or providence. You barred the door against it, and it was standing behind you. Then just when you thought you had it nailed down it walked away with the hammer.

He used destiny a lot. As a tool for his plays it was even better than a ghost. There was nothing like a bit of destiny to get the old plot rolling. But it was a mistake to think you could spot the shape of it. And as for thinking it could be controlled…

 

Granny Weatherwax squinted irritably into Nanny Ogg’s crystal ball. It wasn’t a particularly good one, being a greenish glass fishing float brought back from forn seaside parts by one of her sons. It distorted everything including, she suspected, the truth.

“He’s definitely on his way,” she said, at last. “In a cart.”

“A fiery white charger would have been favorite,” said Nanny Ogg. “You know. Caparisoned, and that.”

“Has he got a magic sword?” said Magrat, craning to see.

Granny Weatherwax sat back.

“You’re a disgrace, the pair of you,” she said. “I don’t know—magic chargers, fiery swords. Ogling away like a couple of milkmaids.”

“A magic sword is important,” said Magrat. “You’ve got to have one. We could make him one,” she added wistfully. “Out of thunderbolt iron. I’ve got a spell for that. You take some thunderbolt iron,” she said uncertainly, “and then you make a sword out of it.”

“I can’t be having with that old stuff,” said Granny. “You can wait days for the damn things to hit and then they nearly take your arm off.”

“And a strawberry birthmark,” said Nanny Ogg, ignoring the interruption.

The other two looked at her expectantly.

“A strawberry birthmark,” she repeated. “It’s one of those things you’ve got to have if you’re a prince coming to claim your kingdom. That’s so’s everyone will know. O’course, I don’t know how they know it’s strawberry.”

“Can’t abide strawberries,” said Granny vaguely, quizzing the crystal again.

In its cracked green depths, smelling of bygone lobsters, a minute Tomjon kissed his parents, shook hands or hugged the rest of the company, and climbed aboard the leading latty.

It must of worked, she told herself. Else he wouldn’t be coming here, would he? All those others must be his trusty band of good companions. After all, common sense, he’s got to come five hundred miles across difficult country, anything could happen.

I daresay the armor and swords is in the carts.

She detected a twinge of doubt, and set out to quell it instantly. There isn’t any other reason for him to come, stands to reason. We got the spell exactly right. Except for the ingredients. And most of the poetry. And it probably wasn’t the right time. And Gytha took most of it home for the cat, which couldn’t of been proper.

But he’s on his way. What can’t speak, can’t lie.

“Best put the cloth over it when you’ve done, Esme,” said Nanny. “I always get worried someone’ll peer in at me when I’m having my bath.”

“He’s on his way,” said Granny, the satisfaction in her voice so strong you could have ground corn with it. She dropped the black velvet bag over the ball.

“It’s a long road,” said Nanny. “There’s many a slip twixt dress and drawers. There could be bandits.”

“We shall watch over him,” said Granny.

“That’s not right. If he’s going to be king he ought to be able to fight his own battles,” said Magrat.

“We don’t want him to go wasting his strength,” said Nanny primly. “We want him good and fresh for when he gets here.”

“And then, I hope, we shall leave him to fight his battles in his own way,” said Magrat.

Granny clapped her hands together in a businesslike fashion.

“Quite right,” she said. “Provided he looks like winning.”

They had been meeting at Nanny Ogg’s cottage. Magrat made an excuse to tarry after Granny left, around dawn, allegedly to help Nanny with tidying up.

“Whatever happened to not meddling?” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“You know, Nanny.”

“It’s not proper meddling,” said Nanny awkwardly. “Just helping matters along.”

“Surely you can’t really think that!”

Nanny sat down and fidgeted with a cushion.

“Well, see, all this not meddling business is fine in the normal course of things,” she said. “Not meddling is easy when you don’t have to. And then I’ve got the family to think about. Our Jason’s been in a couple of fights because of what people have been saying. Our Shawn was thrown out of the army. The way I see it, when we get the new king in, he should owe us a few favors. It’s only fair.”

“But only last week you were saying—” Magrat stopped, shocked at this display of pragmatism.

“A week is a long time in magic,” said Nanny. “Fifteen years, for one thing. Anyway, Esme is determined and I’m in no mood to stop her.”

“So what you’re saying,” said Magrat, icily, “is that this ‘not meddling’ thing is like taking a vow not to swim. You’ll absolutely never break it unless of course you happen to find yourself in the water?”

“Better than drowning,” Nanny said.

She reached up to the mantelpiece and took down a clay pipe that was like a small tar pit. She lit it with a spill from the remains of the fire, while Greebo watched her carefully from his cushion.

Magrat idly lifted the hood from the ball and glared at it.

“I think,” she said, “that I will never really understand about witchcraft. Just when I think I’ve got a grip on it, it changes.”

“We’re all just people.” Nanny blew a cloud of blue smoke at the chimney. “Everyone’s just people.”

“Can I borrow the crystal?” said Magrat suddenly.

“Feel free,” said Nanny. She grinned at Magrat’s back. “Had a row with your young man?” she said.

“I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Haven’t seen him around for weeks.”

“Oh, the duke sent him to—” Magrat stopped, and went on—“sent him away for something or other. Not that it bothers me at all, either way.”

“So I see. Take the ball, by all means.”

Magrat was glad to get back home. No one was about on the moors at night anyway, but over the last couple of months things had definitely been getting worse. On top of the general suspicion of witches, it was dawning on the few people in Lancre who had any dealings with the outside world that a) either more things had been happening than they had heard about before or b) time was out of joint. It wasn’t easy to prove,* but the few traders who came along the mountain tracks after the winter seemed to be rather older than they should have been. Unexplained happenings were always more or less expected in the Ramtops because of the high magical potential, but several years disappearing overnight was a bit of a first.

She locked the door, fastened the shutters, and carefully laid the green glass globe on the kitchen table.

She concentrated…

 

The Fool dozed under the tarpaulins of the river barge, heading up the Ankh at a steady two miles an hour. It wasn’t an exciting method of transport but it got you there eventually.

He looked safe enough, but he was tossing and turning in his sleep.

Magrat wondered what it was like, spending your whole life doing something you didn’t want to do. Like being dead, she considered, only worse, the reason being, you were alive to suffer it.

She considered the Fool to be weak, badly led and sorely in need of some backbone. And she was longing for him to get back, so she could look forward to never seeing him again.

 

It was a long, hot summer.

They didn’t rush things. There was a lot of country between Ankh-Morpork and the Ramtops. It was, Hwel had to admit, fun. It wasn’t a word dwarfs were generally at home with.

Please Yourself went over well. It always did. The apprentices excelled themselves. They forget lines, and played jokes; in Sto Lat the whole third act of Gretalina and Mellias was performed against the backdrop for the second act of The Mage Wars, but no one seemed to notice that the greatest love scene in history was played on a set depicting a tidal wave sweeping across a continent. That was possibly because Tomjon was playing Gretalina. The effect was so disconcertingly riveting that Hwel made him swap roles for the next house, if you could apply the term to a barn hired for the day, and the effect still had more rivets than a suit of plate armor, including the helmet, and even though Gretalina in this case was now young Wimsloe, who was a bit simple and tended to stutter and whose spots might eventually clear up.

The following day, in some nameless village in the middle of an endless sea of cabbages, he let Tomjon play Old Miskin in Please Yourself, a role that Vitoller always excelled in. You couldn’t let anyone play it who was under the age of forty, not unless you wanted an Old Miskin with a cushion up his jerkin and greasepaint wrinkles.

Hwel didn’t consider himself old. His father had still been digging three tons of ore a day at the age of two hundred.

Now, he felt old. He watched Tomjon hobble off the stage, and for a fleeting instant knew what it was to be a fat old man, pickled in wine, fighting old wars that no one cared about anymore, hanging grimly onto the precipice of late middle-age for fear of dropping off into antiquity, but only with one hand, because with the other he was giving the finger to Death. Of course, he’d known that when he wrote the part. But he hadn’t known it.

The same magic didn’t seem to infuse the new play. They tried it a few times, just to see how it went. The audience watched attentively, and went home. They didn’t even bother to throw anything. It wasn’t that they thought it was bad. They didn’t think it was anything.

But all the right ingredients were there, weren’t they? Tradition was full of people giving evil rulers a well-justified seeing to. Witches were always a draw. The apparition of Death was particularly good, with some lovely lines. Mix them all together…and they seemed to cancel out, become a mere humdrum way of filling the stage for a couple of hours.

Late at night, when the cast was asleep, Hwel would sit up in one of the carts and feverishly rewrite. He rearranged scenes, cut lines, added lines, introduced a clown, included another fight, and tuned up the special effects. It didn’t seem to have any effect. The play was like some marvelous intricate painting, a feast of impressions close to, a mere blur from the distance.

When the inspirations were sleeting fast he even tried changing the style. In the morning the early risers grew accustomed to finding discarded experiments decorating the grass around the carts, like extremely literate mushrooms.

Tomjon kept one of the strangest:

“I think,” said Tomjon, later, “you ought to slow down a bit. You’ve done what was ordered. No one said it had to sparkle.”

“It could, you know. If I could just get it right.”

“You’re absolutely sure about the ghost, are you?” said Tomjon. The way he threw the line away made it clear that he wasn’t.

“There’s nothing wrong with the ghost,” snapped Hwel. “The scene with the ghost is the best I’ve done.”

“I was just wondering if this is the right play for it, that’s all.”

“The ghost stays. Now let’s get on, boy.”

 

Two days later, with the Ramtops a blue and white wall that was beginning to dominate the Hubward horizon, the company was attacked. There wasn’t much drama; they had just manhandled the lattys across a ford and were resting in the shade of a grove of trees, which suddenly fruited robbers.

Hwel looked along the line of half a dozen stained and rusty blades. Their owners seemed slightly uncertain about what to do next.

“We’ve got a receipt somewhere—” he began.

Tomjon nudged him. “These don’t look like Guild thieves,” he hissed. “They definitely look freelance to me.”

It would be nice to say that the leader of the robbers was a black-bearded, swaggering brute, with a red headscarf and one gold earring and a chin you could clean pots with. Actually it would be practically compulsory. And, in fact, this was so. Hwel thought the wooden leg was overdoing it, but the man had obviously studied the role.

“Well now,” said the bandit chief. “What have we here, and do they have any money?”

“We’re actors,” said Tomjon.

“That ought to answer both questions,” said Hwel.

“And none of your repartee,” said the bandit. “I’ve been to the city, I have. I know repartee when I see it and—” he half turned to his followers, raising an eyebrow to indicate that the next remark was going to be witty—“if you’re not careful I can make a few cutting remarks of my own.”

There was dead silence behind him until he made an impatient gesture with his cutlass.

“All right,” he said, against a chorus of uncertain laughter. “We’ll just take any loose change, valuables, food and clothing you might be having.”

“Could I say something?” said Tomjon.

The company backed away from him. Hwel smiled at his own feet.

“You’re going to beg for mercy, are you?” said the bandit.

“That’s right.”

Hwel thrust his hands deep into his pockets and looked up at the sky, whistling under his breath and trying not to break into a maniac grin. He was aware that the other actors were also looking expectantly at Tomjon.

He’s going to give them the mercy speech from The Troll’s Tale, he thought…

“The point I’d just like to make is that—” said Tomjon, and his stance changed subtly, his voice became deeper, his right hand flung out dramatically—” ‘The worth of man lies not in feats of arms, Or the fiery hunger o’the ravening—’”

It’s going to be like when that man tried to rob us back in Sto Lat, Hwel thought. If they end up giving us their swords, what the hell can we do with them? And it’s so embarrassing when they start crying.

It was at this moment that the world around him took a green tint and he thought he could make out, right on the cusp of hearing, other voices.

“There’s men with swords, Granny!”

“—rend with glowing blades the marvel of the world—” Tomjon said, and the voices at the edge of imagination said, “No king of mine is going to beg anything off anyone. Give me that milk jug, Magrat.”

“—the heart of compassion, the kiss—”

“That was a present from my aunt.”

“—this jewel of jewels, this crown of crowns.”

There was silence. One or two of the bandits were weeping silently into their hands.

Their chief said, “Is that it?”

For the first time in his life Tomjon looked nonplussed.

“Well, yes,” he said. “Er. Would you like me to repeat it?”

“It was a good speech,” the bandit conceded. “But I don’t see what it’s got to do with me. I’m a practical man. Hand over your valuables.”

His sword came up until it was level with Tomjon’s throat.

“And all the rest of you shouldn’t be standing there like idiots,” he added. “Come on. Or the boy gets it.”

Wimsloe the apprentice raised a cautious hand.

“What?” said the bandit.

“A-are you s-sure you listened carefully, sir?”

“I won’t tell you again! Either I hear the clink of coins, or you hear a gurgle!”

In fact what they all heard was a whistling noise, high in the air, and the crash as a milk jug, its sides frosted with the ice of altitude, dropped out of the sky onto the spike atop the chief’s helmet.

The remaining bandits took one look at the results, and fled.

The actors stared down at the recumbent bandit. Hwel prodded a lump of frozen milk with his boot.

“Well, well,” he said weakly.

“He didn’t take any notice!” whispered Tomjon.

“A born critic,” said the dwarf. It was a blue and white jug. Funny how little details stood out at a time like this. It had been smashed several times in the past, he could see, because the pieces had been carefully glued together again. Someone had really loved that jug.

“What we’re dealing with here,” he said, rallying some shreds of logic, “is a freak whirlwind. Obviously.”

“But milk jugs don’t just drop out of the sky,” said Tomjon, demonstrating the astonishing human art of denying the obvious.

“I don’t know about that. I’ve heard of fish and frogs and rocks,” said Hwel. “There’s nothing against crockery.” He began to rally. “It’s just one of these uncommon phenomenons. They happen all the time in this part of the world, there’s nothing unusual about it.”

They got back onto the carts and rode on in unaccustomed silence. Young Wimsloe collected every bit of jug he could find and stored them carefully in the props box, and spent the rest of the day watching the sky, hoping for a sugar basin.

 

The lattys toiled up the dusty slopes of the Ramtops, mere motes in the foggy glass of the crystal.

“Are they all right?” said Magrat.

“They’re wandering all over the place,” said Granny. “They may be good at the acting, but they’ve got something to learn about the traveling.”

“It was a nice jug,” said Magrat. “You can’t get them like that anymore. I mean, if you’d have said what was on your mind, there was a flatiron, on the shelf.”

“There’s more to life than milk jugs.”

“It had a daisy pattern around the top.”

Granny ignored her.

“I think,” she said, “it’s time we had a look at this new king. Close up.” She cackled.

“You cackled, Granny,” said Magrat darkly.

“I did not! It was,” Granny fumbled for a word, “a chuckle.”

“I bet Black Aliss used to cackle.”

“You want to watch out you don’t end up the same way as she did,” said Nanny, from her seat by the fire. “She went a bit funny at the finish, you know. Poisoned apples and suchlike.”

“Just because I might have chuckled a…a bit roughly,” sniffed Granny. She felt that she was being unduly defensive. “Anyway, there’s nothing wrong with cackling. In moderation.”

 

“I think,” said Tomjon, “that we’re lost.”

Hwel looked at the baking purple moorland around them, which stretched up to the towering spires of the Ramtops themselves. Even in the height of summer there were pennants of snow flying from the highest peaks. It was a landscape of describable beauty.

Bees were busy, or at least endeavoring to look and sound busy, in the thyme by the trackside. Cloud shadows flickered over the alpine meadows. There was the kind of big, empty silence made by an environment that not only doesn’t have any people in it, but doesn’t need them either.

Or signposts.

“We were lost ten miles ago,” said Hwel. “There’s got to be a new word for what we are now.”

“You said the mountains were honeycombed with dwarf mines,” said Tomjon. “You said a dwarf could tell wherever he was in the mountains.”

“Underground, I said. It’s all a matter of strata and rock formations. Not on the surface. All the landscape gets in the way.”

“We could dig you a hole,” said Tomjon.

But it was a nice day and, as the road meandered through clumps of hemlock and pine, outposts of the forest, it was pleasant enough to let the mules go at their own pace. The road, Hwel felt, had to go somewhere.

This geographical fiction has been the death of many people. Roads don’t necessarily have to go anywhere, they just have to have somewhere to start.

“We are lost, aren’t we?” said Tomjon, after a while.

“Certainly not.”

“Where are we, then?”

“The mountains. Perfectly clear on any atlas.”

“We ought to stop and ask someone.”

Tomjon gazed around at the rolling countryside. Somewhere a lonely curlew howled, or possibly it was a badgar—Hwel was a little hazy about rural matters, at least those that took place higher than about the limestone layer. There wasn’t another human being within miles.

“Who did you have in mind?” he said sarcastically.

“That old woman in the funny hat,” said Tomjon, pointing. “I’ve been watching her. She keeps ducking down behind a bush when she thinks I’ve seen her.”

Hwel turned and looked down at a bramble bush, which wobbled.

“Ho there, good mother,” he said.

The bush sprouted an indignant head.

“Whose mother?” it said.

Hwel hesitated. “Just a figure of speech, Mrs…Miss…”

“Mistress,” snapped Granny Weatherwax. “And I’m a poor old woman gathering wood,” she added defiantly.

She cleared her throat. “Lawks,” she went on. “You did give me a fright, young master. My poor old heart.”

There was silence from the carts. Then Tomjon said, “I’m sorry?”

“What?” said Granny.

“Your poor old heart what?”

“What about my poor old heart?” said Granny, who wasn’t used to acting like an old woman and had a very limited repertoire in this area. But it’s traditional that young heirs seeking their destiny get help from mysterious old women gathering wood, and she wasn’t about to buck tradition.

“It’s just that you mentioned it,” said Hwel.

“Well, it isn’t important. Lawks. I expect you’re looking for Lancre,” said Granny testily, in a hurry to get to the point.

“Well, yes,” said Tomjon. “All day.”

“You’ve come too far,” said Granny. “Go back about two miles, and take the track on the right, past the stand of pines.”

Wimsloe tugged at Tomjon’s shirt.

“When you m-meet a m-mysterious old lady in the road,” he said, “you’ve got to offer to s-share your lunch. Or help her across the r-river.”

“You have?”

“It’s t-terribly b-bad luck not to.”

Tomjon gave Granny a polite smile.

“Would you care to share our lunch, good mo—old wo—ma’am?”

Granny looked doubtful.

“What is it?”

“Salt pork.”

She shook her head. “Thanks all the same,” she said graciously. “But it gives me wind.”

She turned on her heel and set off through the bushes.

“We could help you across the river if you like,” shouted Tomjon after her.

“What river?” said Hwel. “We’re on the moor, there can’t be a river in miles.”

“Y-you’ve got to get them on y-your side,” said Wimsloe. “Then t-they help you.”

“Perhaps we should have asked her to wait while we went and looked for one,” said Hwel sourly.

They found the turning. It led into a forest criss-crossed with as many tracks as a marshalling yard, the sort of forest where the back of your head tells you the trees are turning around to watch you as you go past and the sky seems to be very high up and a long way off. Despite the heat of the day a dank, impenetrable gloom hovered among the tree trunks, which crowded up to the track as if intending to obliterate it completely.

They were soon lost again, and decided that being lost somewhere where you didn’t know where you were was even worse than being lost in the open.

“She could have given more explicit instructions,” said Hwel.

“Like ask at the next crone,” said Tomjon. “Look over there.”

He stood up in the seat.

“Ho there, old…good…” he hazarded.

Magrat pushed back her shawl.

“Just a humble wood gatherer,” she snapped. She held up a twig for proof. Several hours waiting with nothing but trees to talk to hadn’t improved her temper.

Wimsloe nudged Tomjon, who nodded and fixed his face in an ingratiating smile.

“Would you care to share our lunch, old…good wo…miss?” he said. “It’s only salt pork, I’m afraid.”

“Meat is extremely bad for the digestive system,” said Magrat. “If you could see inside your colon you’d be horrified.”

“I think I would,” muttered Hwel.

“Did you know that an adult male carries up to five pounds of undigested red meat in his intestines at all times?” said Magrat, whose informative lectures on nutrition had been known to cause whole families to hide in the cellar until she went away. “Whereas pine kernels and sunflower seeds—”

“There aren’t any rivers around that you need helping over, are there?” said Tomjon desperately.

“Don’t be silly,” said Magrat. “I’m just a humble wood gatherer, lawks, collecting a few sticks and mayhap directing lost travelers on the road to Lancre.”

“Ah,” said Hwel, “I thought we’d get to that.”

“You fork left up ahead and turn right at the big stone with the crack in it, you can’t miss it,” said Magrat.

“Fine,” growled Hwel. “Well, we won’t keep you. I’m sure you’ve got a lot of wood to collect and so forth.”

He whistled the mules into a plod again, grumbling to himself.

When, an hour later, the track ran out among a landscape of house-sized boulders, Hwel laid down the reins carefully and folded his arms. Tomjon stared at him.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he said.

“Waiting,” said the dwarf grimly.

“It’ll be getting dark soon.”

“We won’t be here long,” said Hwel.

Eventually Nanny Ogg gave up and came out from behind her rock.

“It’s salt pork, understand?” said Hwel sharply. “Take it or leave it, OK? Now—which way’s Lancre?”

“Keep on, left at the ravine, then you pick up the track that leads to a bridge, you can’t miss it,” said Nanny promptly.

Hwel grabbed the reins. “You forgot about the lawks.”

“Bugger. Sorry. Lawks.”

“And you’re a humble old wood gatherer, I expect,” Hwel went on.

“Spot on, lad,” said Nanny cheerfully. “Just about to make a start, as a matter of fact.”

Tomjon nudged the dwarf.

“You forgot about the river,” he said. Hwel glared at him.

“Oh yes,” he muttered, “and can you wait here while we go and find a river.”

“To help you across,” said Tomjon carefully.

Nanny Ogg gave him a bright smile. “There’s a perfectly good bridge,” she said. “But I wouldn’t say no to a lift. Move over.”

To Hwel’s irritation Nanny Ogg hitched up her skirts and scrambled onto the board, inserting herself between Tomjon and the dwarf and then twisting like an oyster knife until she occupied half the seat.

“You mentioned salt pork,” she said. “There wouldn’t be any mustard, would there?”

“No,” said Hwel sullenly.

“Can’t abide salt pork without condiments,” said Nanny conversationally. “But pass it over, anyway.” Wimsloe wordlessly handed over the basket holding the troupe’s supper. Nanny lifted the lid and gave it a critical assessment.

“That cheese in there is a bit off,” she said. “It needs eating up quick. What’s in the leather bottle?”

“Beer,” said Tomjon, a fraction of a second before Hwel had the presence of mind to say, “Water.”

“Pretty weak stuff,” said Nanny, eventually. She fumbled in her apron pocket for her tobacco pouch.

“Has anyone got a light?” she inquired.

A couple of actors produced bundles of matches. Nanny nodded, and put the pouch away.

“Good,” she said. “Now, has anyone got any tobacco?”

 

Half an hour later the lattys rattled over the Lancre Bridge, across some of the outlying farmlands, and through the forests that made up most of the kingdom.

“This is it?” said Tomjon.

“Well, not all of it,” said Nanny, who had been expecting rather more enthusiasm. “There’s lots more of it behind the mountains over there. But this is the flat bit.”

“You call this flat?”

“Flattish,” Nanny conceded. “But the air’s good. That’s the palace up there, offering outstanding views of the surrounding countryside.”

“You mean forests.”

“You’ll like it here,” said Nanny encouragingly.

“It’s a bit small.”

Nanny thought about this. She’d spent nearly all her life inside the boundaries of Lancre. It had always seemed about the right size to her.

“Bijou,” she said. “Handy foreverywhere.”

“Everywhere where?”

Nanny gave up. “Everywhere close,” she said.

Hwel said nothing. The air was good, rolling down the unclimbable slopes of the Ramtops like a sinus wash, tinted with turpentine from the high forests. They passed through a gateway into what was, up here, probably called a town; the cosmopolitan he had become decided that, down on the plains, it would just about have qualified as an open space.

“There’s an inn,” said Tomjon doubtfully.

Hwel followed his gaze. “Yes,” he said, eventually. “Yes, it probably is.”

“When are we going to do the play?”

“I don’t know. I think we just send up to the castle and say we’re here.” Hwel scratched his chin. “Fool said the king or whoever would want to see the script.”

Tomjon looked around Lancre town. It seemed peaceful enough. It didn’t look like the kind of place likely to turn actors out at nightfall. It needed the population.

“This is the capital city of the kingdom,” said Nanny Ogg. “Well-designed streets, you’ll notice.”

“Streets?” said Tomjon.

“Street,” corrected Granny. “Also houses in quite good repair, stone’s throw from river—”

“Throw?”

“Drop,” Nanny conceded. “Neat middens, look, and extensive—”

“Madam, we’ve come to entertain the town, not buy it,” said Hwel.

Nanny Ogg looked sidelong at Tomjon.

“Just wanted you to see how attractive it is,” she said.

“Your civic pride does you credit,” said Hwel. “And now, please, leave the cart. I’m sure you’ve got some wood to gather. Lawks.”

“Much obliged for the snack,” said Nanny, climbing down.

“Meals,” corrected Hwel.

Tomjon nudged him. “You ought to be more polite,” he said. “You never know.” He turned to Nanny. “Thank you, good—oh, she’s gone.”

 

“They’ve come to do a theater,” said Nanny.

Granny Weatherwax carried on shelling beans in the sun, much to Nanny’s annoyance.

“Well? Aren’t you going to say something? I’ve been finding out things,” she said. “Picking up information. Not sitting around making soup—”

“Stew.”

“I reckon it’s very important,” sniffed Nanny.

“What kind of a theater?”

“They didn’t say. Something for the duke, I think.”

“What’s he want a theater for?”

“They didn’t say that, either.”

“It’s probably all a trick to get in the castle,” Granny said knowingly. “Very clever idea. Did you see anything in the carts?”

“Boxes and bundles and such.”

“They’ll be full of armor and weapons, depend upon it.”

Nanny Ogg looked doubtful.

“They didn’t look very much like soldiers to me. They were awfully young and spotty.”

“Clever. I expect in the middle of the play the king will manifest his destiny, right where everyone can see him. Good plan.”

“That’s another thing,” said Nanny, picking up a bean pod and chewing it. “He doesn’t seem to like the place much.”

“Of course he does. It’s in his blood.”

“I brought him the pretty way. He didn’t seem very impressed.”

Granny hesitated.

“He was probably suspicious of you,” she concluded. “He was probably too overcome to speak, really.”

She put down the bowl of beans and looked thoughtfully at the trees.

“Have you got any family still working up at the castle?” she said.

“Shirl and Daff help out in the kitchens since the cook went off his head.”

“Good. I’ll have a word with Magrat. I think we should see this theater.”

 

“Perfect,” said the duke.

“Thank you,” said Hwel.

“You’ve got it exactly spot on about that dreadful accident,” said the duke. “You might almost have been there. Ha. Ha.”

“You weren’t, were you?” said Lady Felmet, leaning forward and glaring at the dwarf.

“I just used my imagination,” said Hwel hurriedly. The duchess glared at him, suggesting that his imagination could consider itself lucky it wasn’t being dragged off to the courtyard to explain itself to four angry wild horses and a length of chain.

“Exactly right,” said the duke, leafing one-handedly through the pages. “This is exactly, exactly, exactly how it was.”

“Will have been,” snapped the duchess.

The duke turned another page.

“You’re in this too,” he said. “Amazing. It’s a word for word how I’m going to remember it. I see you’ve got Death in it, too.”

“Always popular,” said Hwel. “People expect it.”

“How soon can you act it?”

“Stage it,” corrected Hwel, and added, “We’ve tried it out. As soon as you like.” And then we can get away from here, he said to himself, away from your eyes like two raw eggs and this female mountain in the red dress and this castle which seems to act like a magnet for the wind. This is not going to go down as one of my best plays, I know that much.

“How much did we say we were going to pay you?” said the duchess.

“I think you mentioned another hundred silver pieces,” said Hwel.

“Worth every penny,” said the duke.

Hwel left hurriedly, before the duchess could start to bargain. But he felt he’d gladly pay something to be out of this place. Bijou, he thought. Gods, how could anyone like a kingdom like this?

 

The Fool waited in the meadow with the lake. He stared wistfully at the sky and wondered where the hell Magrat was. This was, she said, their place; the fact that a few dozen cows also shared it at the moment didn’t appear to make any difference.

She turned up in a green dress and a filthy temper.

“What’s all this about a play?” she said.

The Fool sagged onto a willow log.

“Aren’t you glad to see me?” he said.

“Well, yes. Of course. Now, this play…”

“My lord wants something to convince people that he is the rightful King of Lancre. Himself mostly, I think.”

“Is that why you went to the city?”

“Yes.”

“It’s disgusting!”

The Fool sat calmly. “You would prefer the duchess’s approach?” he said. “She just thinks they ought to kill everyone. She’s good at that sort of thing. And then there’d be fighting, and everything. Lots of people would die anyway. This way might be easier.”

“Oh, where’s your spunk, man?”

“Pardon?”

“Don’t you want to die nobly for a just cause?”

“I’d much rather live quietly for one. It’s all right for you witches, you can do what you like, but I’m circumscribed,” said the Fool.

Magrat sat down beside him. Find out all about this play, Granny had ordered. Go and talk to that jingling friend of yours. She’d replied, He’s very loyal. He might not tell me anything. And Granny had said, This is no time for half measures. If you have to, seduct him.

“When’s this play going to be, then?” she said, moving closer.

“Marry, I’m sure I’m not allowed to tell you,” said the Fool. “The duke said to me, he said, don’t tell the witches that it’s tomorrow night.”

“I shouldn’t, then,” agreed Magrat.

“At eight o’clock.”

“I see.”

“But meet for sherry beforehand at seven-thirty, i’faith.”

“I expect you shouldn’t tell me who is invited, either,” said Magrat.

“That’s right. Most of the dignitaries of Lancre. You understand I’m not telling you this.”

“That’s right,” said Magrat.

“But I think you have a right to know what it is you’re not being told.”

“Good point. Is there still that little gate around the back, that leads to the kitchens?”

“The one that is often left unguarded?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, we hardly ever guard it these days.”

“Do you think there might be someone guarding it at around eight o’clock tomorrow?”

“Well, I might be there.”

“Good.”

The Fool pushed away the wet nose of an inquisitive cow.

“The duke will be expecting you,” he added.

“You said he said we weren’t to know.”

“He said I mustn’t tell you. But he also said, ‘They’ll come anyway, I hope they do.’ Strange, really. He seemed in a very good mood when he said it. Um. Can I see you after the show?”

“Is that all he said?”

“Oh, there was something about showing witches their future. I didn’t understand it. I really would like to see you after the show, you know. I brought—”

“I think I might be washing my hair,” said Magrat vaguely. “Excuse me, I really ought to be going.”

“Yes, but I brought you this pres—” said the Fool vaguely, watching her departing figure.

He sagged as she disappeared between the trees, and looked down at the necklace wound tightly between his nervous fingers. It was, he had to admit, terribly tasteless, but it was the sort of thing she liked, all silver and skulls. It had cost him too much.

A cow, misled by his horns, stuck its tongue in his ear.

It was true, the Fool thought. Witches did do unpleasant things to people, sometimes.

 

Tomorrow night came, and the witches went by a roundabout route to the castle, with considerable reluctance.

“If he wants us to be here, I don’t want to go,” said Granny. “He’s got some plan. He’s using headology on us.”

“There’s something up,” said Magrat. “He had his men set fire to three cottages in our village last night. He always does that when he’s in a good mood. That new sergeant is a quick man with the matches, too.”

“Our Daff said she saw them actors practicin’ this morning,” said Nanny Ogg, who was carrying a bag of walnuts and a leather bottle from which rose a rich, sharp smell. “She said it was all shouting and stabbing and then wondering who done it and long bits with people muttering to themselves in loud voices.”

“Actors,” said Granny, witheringly. “As if the world weren’t full of enough history without inventing more.”

“They shout so loud, too,” said Nanny. “You can hardly hear yourself talk.” She was also carrying, deep in her apron pocket, a lump of haunted castle rock. The king was getting in free.

Granny nodded. But, she thought, it was going to be worth it. She hadn’t got the faintest idea what Tomjon had in mind, but her inbuilt sense of drama assured her that the boy would be bound to do something important. She wondered if he would leap off the stage and stab the duke to death, and realized that she was hoping like hell that he would.

“All hail wossname,” she said under her breath, “who shall be king here, after.”

“Let’s get a move on,” said Nanny. “All the sherry’ll be gone.”

The Fool was waiting despondently inside the little wicket gate. His face brightened when he saw Magrat, and then froze in an expression of polite surprise when he saw the other two.

“There’s not going to be any trouble, is there?” he said. “I don’t want there to be any trouble. Please.”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” said Granny regally, sweeping past.

“Wotcha, jinglebells,” said Nanny, elbowing the man in the ribs. “I hope you haven’t been keeping our girl here up late o’nights!”

“Nanny!” said Magrat, shocked. The Fool gave the terrified, ingratiating rictus of young men everywhere when confronted by importunate elderly women commenting on their intimately personal lives.

The older witches brushed past. The Fool grabbed Magrat’s hand.

“I know where we can get a good view,” he said.

She hesitated.

“It’s all right,” said the Fool urgently. “You’ll be perfectly safe with me.”

“Yes, I will, won’t I,” said Magrat, trying to look around him to see where the others had gone.

“They’re staging the play outside, in the big courtyard. We’ll get a lovely view from one of the gate towers, and no one else will be there. I put some wine up there for us, and everything.”

When she still looked half-reluctant he added, “And there’s a cistern of water and a fireplace that the guards use sometimes. In case you want to wash your hair.”

 

The castle was full of people standing around in that polite, sheepish way affected by people who see each other all day and are now seeing each other again in unusual social circumstances, like an office party. The witches passed quite unremarked among them and found seats in the rows of benches in the main courtyard, set up before a hastily assembled stage.

Nanny Ogg waved her bag of walnuts at Granny.

“Want one?” she said.

An alderman of Lancre shuffled past her and pointed politely to the seat on her left.

“Is anyone sitting here?” he said.

“Yes,” said Nanny.

The alderman looked distractedly at the rest of the benches, which were filling up fast, and then down at the clearly empty space in front of him. He hitched up his robes with a determined expression.

“I think that since the play is commencing to start, your friends must find a seat elsewhere, when they arrive,” he said, and sat down.

Within seconds his face went white. His teeth began to chatter. He clutched at his stomach and groaned.*

“I told you,” said Nanny, as he lurched away. “What’s the good of asking if you’re not going to listen?” She leaned toward the empty seat. “Walnut?”

“No, thank you,” said King Verence, waving a spectral hand. “They go right through me, you know.”

“Pray, gentles all, list to our tale…”

“What’s this?” hissed Granny. “Who’s the fellow in the tights?”

“He’s the Prologue,” said Nanny. “You have to have him at the beginning so everyone knows what the play’s about.”

“Can’t understand a word of it,” muttered Granny. “What’s a gentle, anyway?”

“Type of maggot,” said Nanny.

“That’s nice, isn’t it? ‘Hallo maggots, welcome to the show.’ Puts people in a nice frame of mind, doesn’t it?”

There was a chorus of “sshs.”

“These walnuts are damn tough,” said Nanny, spitting one out into her hand. “I’m going to have to take my shoe off to this one.”

Granny subsided into unaccustomed, troubled silence, and tried to listen to the prologue. The theater worried her. It had a magic of its own, one that didn’t belong to her, one that wasn’t in her control. It changed the world, and said things were otherwise than they were. And it was worse than that. It was magic that didn’t belong to magical people. It was commanded by ordinary people, who didn’t know the rules. They altered the world because it sounded better.

The duke and duchess were sitting on their thrones right in front of the stage. As Granny glared at them the duke half turned, and she saw his smile.

I want the world the way it is, she thought. I want the past the way it was. The past used to be a lost better than it is now.

And the band struck up.

Hwel peered around a pillar and signaled to Wimsloe and Brattsley, who hobbled out into the glare of the torches.

OLD MAN (an Elder): “What hath befell the land?”

OLD WOMAN (a Crone): “’Tis a terror—”

The dwarf watched them for a few seconds from the wings, his lips moving soundlessly. Then he scuttled back to the guardroom where the rest of the cast were still in the last hasty stages of dressing. He uttered the stage manager’s traditional scream of rage.

“C’mon,” he ordered. “Soldiers of the king, at the double! And the witches—where are the blasted witches?”

Three junior apprentices presented themselves.

“I’ve lost my wart!”

“The cauldon’s all full of yuk!”

“There’s something living in this wig!”

“Calm down, calm down,” screamed Hwel. “It’ll all be all right on the night!”

“This is the night, Hwel!”

Hwel snatched a handful of putty from the makeup table and slammed on a wart like an orange. The offending straw wig was rammed on its owner’s head, livestock and all, and the cauldron was very briefly inspected and pronounced full of just the right sort of yuk, nothing wrong with yuk like that.

On stage a guard dropped his shield, bent down to pick it up, and dropped his spear. Hwel rolled his eyes and offered up a silent prayer to any gods that might be watching.

It was already going wrong. The earlier rehearsals had their little teething troubles, it was true, but Hwel had known one or two monumental horrors in his time and this one was shaping up to be the worst. The company was more jittery than a potful of lobsters. Out of the corner of his ear he heard the on-stage dialogue falter, and scurried to the wings.

“—avenge the terror of thy father’s death—” he hissed, and hurried back to the trembling witches. He groaned. Divers alarums. This lot were supposed to be terrorizing a kingdom. He had about a minute before the cue.

“Right!” he said, pulling himself together. “Now, what are you? You’re evil hags, right?”

“Yes, Hwel,” they said meekly.

“Tell me what you are,” he commanded.

“We’re evil hags, Hwel.”

“Louder!”

“We’ve Evil Hags!”

Hwel stalked the length of the quaking line, then turned abruptly on his heel, “And what are you going to do?”

The 2nd Witche scratched his crawling wig.

“We’re going to curse people?” he ventured. “It says in the script—”

“I-can’t-HEAR-you!”

“We’re going to curse people!” they chorused, springing to attention and staring straight ahead to avoid his gaze.

Hwel stumped back along the line.

“What are you?”

“We’re hags, Hwel!”

“What kind of hags?”

“We’re black and midnight hags!” they yelled, getting into the spirit.

“What kind of black and midnight hags?”

“Evil black and midnight hags!”

“Are you scheming?”

“Yeah!”

“Are you secret?”

“Yeah!”

Hwel drew himself to his full height, such as it was.

“What-are-you?” he screamed.

“We’re scheming evil secret black and midnight hags!”

“Right!” He pointed a vibrating finger toward the stage and lowered his voice and, at that moment, a dramatic inspiration dived through the atmosphere and slammed into his creative node, causing him to say, “Now I want you to get out there and give ’em hell. Not for me. Not for the goddam captain.” He shifted the butt of an imaginary cigar from one side of his mouth to the other, and pushed back a nonexistent tin helmet, and rasped, “But for Corporal Walkowski and his little dawg.”

They stared at him in disbelief.

On cue, someone shook a sheet of tin and broke the spell.

Hwel rolled his eyes. He’d grown up in the mountains, where thunderstorms stalked from peak to peak on legs of lightning. He remembered thunderstorms that left mountains a different shape and flattened whole forests. Somehow, a sheet of tin wasn’t the same, no matter how enthusiastically it was shaken.

Just once, he thought, just once. Let me get it right just once.

He opened his eyes and glared at the witches.

“What are you hanging around here for?” he yelled. “Get out there and curse them!”

He watched them scamper onto the stage, and then Tomjon tapped him on the head.

“Hwel, there’s no crown.”

“Hmm?” said the dwarf, his mind wrestling with ways of building thunder-and-lightning machines.

“There’s no crown, Hwel. I’ve got to wear a crown.”

“Of course there’s a crown. The big one with the red glass, very impressive, we used it in that place with the big square—”

“I think we left it there.”

There was another tinny roll of thunder but, even so, the part of Hwel that was living the play heard a faltering voice on stage. He darted to the wings.

“—I have smother’d many a babe—” he hissed, and sprinted back.

“Well, just find another one, then,” he said vaguely. “In the props box. You’re the Evil King, you’ve got to have a crown. Get on with it, lad, you’re on in a few minutes. Improvise.”

Tomjon wandered back to the box. He’d grown up among crowns, big golden crowns made of wood and plaster, studded with finest glass. He’d cut his teeth on the hat-brims of Authority. But most of them had been left in the Dysk now. He pulled out collapsible daggers and skulls and vases, the strata of the years and, right at the bottom, his fingers closed on something thin and crown shaped, which no one had ever wanted to wear because it looked so uncrownly.

It would be nice to say it tingled under his hand. Perhaps it did.

 

Granny was sitting as still as a statue, and almost as cold. The horror of realization was stealing over her.

“That’s us,” she said. “Round that silly cauldron. That’s meant to be us, Gytha.”

Nanny Ogg paused with a walnut halfway to her gums. She listened to the words.

“I never shipwrecked anybody!” she said. “They just said they shipwreck people! I never did!”

Up in the tower Magrat elbowed the Fool in the ribs.

“Green blusher,” she said, staring at the 3rd Witche. “I don’t look like that. I don’t, do I?”

“Absolutely not,” said the Fool.

“And that hair!”

The Fool peered through the crenellations like an over-eager gargoyle.

“It looks like straw,” he said. “Not very clean, either.”

He hesitated, picking at the lichened stonework with his fingers. Before he’d left the city he’d asked Hwel for a few suitable words to say to a young lady, and he had been memorizing them on the way home. It was now or never.

“I’d like to know if I could compare you to a summer’s day. Because—well, June 12th was quite nice, and…Oh. You’ve gone…”

 

King Verence gripped the edge of his seat; his fingers went through it. Tomjon had strutted onto the stage.

“That’s him, isn’t it? That’s my son?”

The uncracked walnut fell from Nanny Ogg’s fingers and rolled onto the floor. She nodded.

Verence turned a haggard, transparent face toward her.

“But what is he doing? What is he saying?”

Nanny shook her head. The king listened with his mouth open as Tomjon, lurching crabwise across the stage, launched into his major speech.

“I think he’s meant to be you,” said Nanny, distantly.

“But I never walked like that! Why’s he got a hump on his back? What’s happened to his leg?” He listened some more, and added, in horrified tones, “And I certainly never did that! Or that. Why is he saying I did that?”

The look he gave Nanny was full of pleading. She shrugged.

The king reached up, lifted off his spectral crown, and examined it.

“And it’s my crown he’s wearing! Look, this is it! And he’s saying I did all those—” He paused for a minute, to listen to the latest couplet, and added, “All right. Maybe I did that. So I set fire to a few cottages. But everyone does that. It’s good for the building industry, anyway.”

He put the ghostly crown back on his head.

“Why’s he saying all this about me?” he pleaded.

“It’s art,” said Nanny. “It wossname, holds a mirror up to life.”

Granny turned slowly in her seat to look at the audience. They were staring at the performance, their faces rapt. The words washed over them in the breathless air. This was real. This was more real even than reality. This was history. It might not be true, but that had nothing to do with it.

Granny had never had much time for words. They were so insubstantial. Now she wished that she had found the time. Words were indeed insubstantial. They were as soft as water, but they were also as powerful as water and now they were rushing over the audience, eroding the levees of veracity, and carrying away the past.

That’s us down there, she thought. Everyone knows who we really are, but the things down there are what they’ll remember—three gibbering old baggages in pointy hats. All we’ve ever done, all we’ve ever been, won’t exist anymore.

She looked at the ghost of the king. Well, he’d been no worse than any other king. Oh, he might burn down the odd cottage every now and again, in a sort of absent-minded way, but only when he was really angry about something, and he could give it up any time he liked. Where he wounded the world, he left the kind of wounds that healed.

Whoever wrote this Theater knew about the uses of magic. Even I believe what’s happening, and I know there’s no truth in it.

This is Art holding a Mirror up to Life. That’s why everything is exactly the wrong way around.

We’ve lost. There is nothing we can do against this without becoming exactly what we aren’t.

Nanny Ogg gave her a violent nudge in the ribs.

“Did you hear that?” she said. “One of ’em said we put babbies in the cauldron! They’ve done a slander on me! I’m not sitting here and have’em say we put babbies in a cauldron!”

Granny grabbed her shawl as she tried to stand up.

“Don’t do anything!” she hissed. “It’ll make things worse.”

“‘Ditch-delivered by a drabe,’ they said. That’ll be young Millie Hipwood, who didn’t dare tell her mum and then went out gathering firewood. I was up all night with that one,” Nanny muttered. “Fine girl she produced. It’s a slander! What’s a drabe?” she added.

“Words,” said Granny, half to herself. “That’s all that’s left. Words.”

“And now there’s a man with a trumpet come on. What’s he going to do? Oh. End of Act One,” said Nanny.

The words won’t be forgotten, thought Granny. They’ve got a power to them. They’re damn good words, as words go.

There was yet another rattle of thunder, which ended with the kind of crash made, for example, by a sheet of tin escaping from someone’s hands and hitting the wall.

In the world outside the stage the heat pressed down like a pillow, squeezing the very life out of the air. Granny saw a footman bend down to the duke’s ear. No, he won’t stop the play. Of course he won’t. He wants it to run its course.

The duke must have felt the heat of her gaze on the back of his neck. He turned, focused on her, and gave her a strange little smile. Then he nudged his wife. They both laughed.

Granny Weatherwax was often angry. She considered it one of her strong points. Genuine anger was one of the world’s great creative forces. But you had to learn how to control it. That didn’t mean you let it trickle away. It meant you dammed it, carefully, let it develop a working head, let it drown whole valleys of the mind and then, just when the whole structure was about to collapse, opened a tiny pipeline at the base and let the iron-hard stream of wrath power the turbines of revenge.

She felt the land below her, even through several feet of foundations, flagstones, one thickness of leather and two thicknesses of sock. She felt it waiting.

She heard the king say, “My own flesh and blood? Why has he done this to me? I’m going to confront him!”

She gently took Nanny Ogg’s hand.

“Come, Gytha,” she said.

 

Lord Felmet sat back in his throne and beamed madly at the world, which was looking good right at the moment. Things were working out better than he had dared to hope. He could feel the past melting behind him, like ice in the spring thaw.

On an impulse he called the footman back.

“Call the captain of the guard,” he said, “and tell him to find the witches and arrest them.”

The duchess snorted.

“Remember what happened last time, foolish man?”

“We left two of them loose,” said the duke. “This time…all three. The tide of public feeling is on our side. That sort of thing affects witches, depend upon it.”

The duchess cracked her knuckles to indicate her view of public opinion.

“You must admit, my treasure, that the experiment seems to be working.”

“It would appear so.”

“Very well. Don’t just stand there, man. Before the play ends, tell him. Those witches are to be under lock and key.”

 

Death adjusted his cardboard skull in front of the mirror, twitched his cowl into a suitable shape, stood back and considered the general effect. It was going to be his first speaking part. He wanted to get it right.

“Cower now, Brief Mortals,” he said. “For I am Death, ’Gainst Whom No…no…no…Hwel, ’gainst whom no?”

“Oh, good grief, Dafe. ‘’Gainst whom no lock will hold nor fasten’d portal bar,’ I really don’t see why you have difficulty with…not that way up, you idiots!” Hwel strode off through the backstage mêlée in pursuit of a pair of importunate scene shifters.

“Right,” said Death, to no one in particular. He turned back to the mirror.

“’Gainst Whom No…Tumpty-Tum…nor Tumpty-Tumpty bar,” he said, uncertainly, and flourished his scythe. The end fell off.

“Do you think I’m fearsome enough?” he said, as he tried to fix it on again.

Tomjon, who was sitting on his hump and trying to drink some tea, gave him an encouraging nod.

“No problem, my friend,” he said. “Compared to a visit from you, even Death himself would hold no fears. But you could try a bit more hollowness.”

“How d’you mean?”

Tomjon put down his cup. Shadows seemed to move across his face; his eyes sank, his lips drew back from his teeth, his skin stretched and paled.

“I HAVE COME TO GET YOU, YOU TERRIBLE ACTOR,” he intoned, each syllable falling into place like a coffin lid. His features sprang back into shape.

“Like that,” he said.

Dafe, who had flattened himself against the wall, relaxed a bit and gave a nervous giggle.

“Gods, I don’t know how you do it,” he said. “Honestly, I’ll never be as good as you.”

“There really isn’t anything to it. Now run along, Hwel’s fit to be tied as it is.”

Dafe gave him a look of gratitude and ran off to help with the scene shifting.

Tomjon sipped his tea uneasily, the backstage noises whirring around him like so much fog. He was worried.

Hwel had said that everything about the play was fine, except for the play itself. And Tomjon kept thinking that the play itself was trying to force itself into a different shape. His mind had been hearing other words, just too faint for hearing. It was almost like eavesdropping on a conversation. He’d had to shout more to drown out the buzzing in his head.

This wasn’t right. Once a play was written it was, well, written. It shouldn’t come alive and start twisting itself around.

No wonder everyone needed prompting all the time. The play was writhing under their hands, trying to change itself.

Ye gods, he’d be glad to get out of this spooky castle, and away from this mad duke. He glanced around, decided that it would be some time before the next act was called, and wandered aimlessly in search of fresher air.

A door yielded to his touch and he stepped out onto the battlements. He pushed it shut behind him, cutting off the sounds of the stage and replacing them by a velvet hush. There was a livid sunset imprisoned behind bars of cloud, but the air was as still as a mill pond and as hot as a furnace. In the forest below some night bird screamed.

He walked to the other end of the battlements and peered down into the sheer depths of the gorge. Far beneath, the Lancre boiled in its eternal mists.

He turned, and walked into a draft of such icy coldness that he gasped.

Unusual breezes plucked at his clothing. There was a strange muttering in his ear, as though someone was trying to talk to him but couldn’t get the speed right. He stood rigid for a moment, getting his breath, and then fled for the door.

 

“But we’re not witches!”

“Why do you look like them, then? Tie their hands, lads.”

“Yes, excuse me, but we’re not really witches!”

The captain of the guard looked from face to face. His gaze took in the pointy hats, the disordered hair smelling of damp haystacks, the sickly green complexions and the herd of warts. Guard captain for the duke wasn’t a job that offered long-term prospects for those who used initiative. Three witches had been called for, and these seemed to fit the bill.

The captain never went to the theater. When he was on the rack of adolescence he’d been badly frightened by a Punch and Judy show, and since then had taken pains to avoid any organized entertainment and had kept away from anywhere where crocodiles could conceivably be expected. He’d spent the last hour enjoying a quiet drink in the guardroom.

“I said tie their hands, didn’t I?” he snapped.

“Shall we gag them as well, cap’n?”

“But if you’d just listen, we’re with the theater—”

“Yes,” said the captain, shuddering. “Gag them.”

“Please…”

The captain leaned down and stared at three pairs of frightened eyes. He was trembling.

“That,” he said, “is the last time you’ll eat anyone’s sausage.”

He was aware that now the soldiers were giving him odd looks as well. He coughed and pulled himself together.

“Very well then, my theatrical witches,” he said. “You’ve done your show, and now it’s time for your applause.” He nodded to his men.

“Clap them in chains,” he said.

 

Three other witches sat in the gloom behind the stage, staring vacantly into the darkness. Granny Weatherwax had picked up a copy of the script, which she peered at from time to time, as if seeking ideas.

“‘Divers alarums and excursions’,” she read, uncertainly.

“That means lots of terrible happenings,” said Magrat. “You always put that in plays.”

“Alarums and what?” said Nanny Ogg, who hadn’t been listening.

“Excursions,” said Magrat patiently.

“Oh.” Nanny Ogg brightened a bit. “The seaside would be nice,” she said.

“Do shut up, Gytha,” said Granny Weatherwax. “They’re not for you. They’re only for divers, like it says. Probably so they can recover from all them alarums.”

“We can’t let this happen,” said Magrat, quickly and loudly. “If this gets about, witches’ll always be old hags with green blusher.”

“And meddlin’ in the affairs of kings,” said Nanny. “Which we never do, as is well known.”

“It’s not the meddlin’ I object to,” said Granny Weatherwax, her chin on her hand. “It’s the evil meddling.”

“And the unkindness to animals,” muttered Magrat. “All that stuff about eye of dog and ear of toad. No one uses that kind of stuff.”

Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg carefully avoided one another’s faces.

“Drabe!” said Nanny Ogg bitterly.

“Witches just aren’t like that,” said Magrat. “We live in harmony with the great cycles of Nature, and do no harm to anyone, and it’s wicked of them to say we don’t. We ought to fill their bones with hot lead.”

The other two looked at her with a certain amount of surprised admiration. She blushed, although not greenly, and looked at her knees.

“Goodie Whemper did a recipe,” she confessed. “It’s quite easy. What you do is, you get some lead, and you—”

“I don’t think that would be appropriate,” said Granny carefully, after a certain amount of internal struggle. “It could give people the wrong idea.”

“But not for long,” said Nanny wistfully.

“No, we can’t be having with that sort of thing,” said Granny, a little more firmly this time. “We’d never hear the last of it.”

“Why don’t we just change the words?” said Magrat. “When they come back on stage we could just put the ’fluence on them so they forget what they’re saying, and give them some new words.”

“I suppose you’re an expert at theater words?” said Granny sarcastically. “They’d have to be the proper sort, otherwise people would suspect.”

“Shouldn’t be too difficult,” said Nanny Ogg dismissively. “I’ve been studyin’ it. You go tumpty-tumpty-tumpty.”

Granny gave this some consideration.

“There’s more to it than that, I believe,” she said. “Some of those speeches were very good. I couldn’t understand hardly any of it.”

“There’s no trick to it at all,” Nanny Ogg insisted. “Anyway, half of them are forgetting their lines as it is. It’ll be easy.”

“We could put words in their mouths?” said Magrat.

Nanny Ogg nodded. “I don’t know about new words,” she said. “But we can make them forget these words.”

They both looked at Granny Weatherwax. She shrugged.

“I suppose it’s worth a try,” she conceded.

“Witches as yet unborn will thank us for it,” said Magrat ardently.

“Oh, good,” said Granny.

“At last! What are you three playing at? We’ve been looking for you everywhere!”

The witches turned to see an irate dwarf trying to loom over them.

“Us?” said Magrat. “But we’re not in—”

“Oh yes you are, remember, we put it in last week. Act Two, Downstage, around the cauldron. You haven’t got to say anything. You’re symbolizing occult forces at work. Just be as wicked as you can. Come on, there’s good lads. You’ve done well so far.”

Hwel slapped Magrat on the bottom. “Good complexion you’ve got there, Wilph,” he said encouragingly. “But for goodness’ sake use a bit more padding, you’re still the wrong shape. Fine warts there, Billem. I must say,” he added, standing back, “you look as nasty a bunch of hags as a body might hope to clap eyes on. Well done. Shame about the wigs. Now run along. Curtain up in one minute. Break a leg.”

He gave Magrat another ringing slap on her rump, slightly hurting his hand, and hurried off to shout at someone else.

None of the witches dared to speak. Magrat and Nanny Ogg found themselves instinctively turning toward Granny.

She sniffed. She looked up. She looked around. She looked at the brightly lit stage behind her. She brought her hands together with a clap that echoed around the castle, and then rubbed them together.

“Useful,” she said grimly. “Let’s do the show right here.”

Nanny squinted sullenly after Hwel. “Break your own leg,” she muttered.

 

Hwel stood in the wings and gave the signal for the curtains. And for the thunder.

It didn’t come.

“Thunder!” he hissed, in a voice heard by half the audience. “Get on with it!”

A voice from behind the nearest pillar wailed, “I went and bent the thunder, Hwel! It just goes clonk-clonk!”

Hwel stood silent for a moment, counting. The company watched him, awestruck but not, unfortunately, thunderstruck.

At last he raised his fists to the open sky and said, “I wanted a storm! Just a storm. Not even a big storm. Any storm. Now I want to make myself absolutely CLEAR! I have had ENOUGH! I want thunder right NOW!”

The stab of lightning that answered him turned the multihued shadows of the castle into blinding white and searing black. It was followed by a roll of thunder, on cue.

It was the loudest noise Hwel had ever heard. It seemed to start inside his head and work its way outward.

It went on and on, shaking every stone in the castle. Dust rained down. A distant turret broke away with balletic slowness and, tumbling end over end, dropped gently into the hungry depths of the gorge.

When it finished it left a silence that rang like a bell.

Hwel looked up at the sky. Great black clouds were blowing across the castle, blotting out the stars.

The storm was back.

It had spent ages learning its craft. It had spent years lurking in distant valleys. It had practiced for hours in front of a glacier. It had studied the great storms of the past. It had honed its art to perfection. And now, tonight, with what it could see was clearly an appreciative audience waiting for it, it was going to take them by, well…tempest.

Hwel smiled. Perhaps the gods did listen, after all. He wished he’d asked for a really good wind machine as well.

He gestured frantically at Tomjon.

“Get on with it!”

The boy nodded, and launched into his main speech.

“And now our domination is complete—”

Behind him on the stage the witches bent over the cauldron.

“It’s just tin, this one,” hissed Nanny. “And it’s full of all yuk.”

“And the fire is just red paper,” whispered Magrat. “It looked so real from up there, it’s just red paper! Look, you can poke it—”

“Never mind,” said Granny. “Just look busy, and wait until I say.”

As the Evil King and the Good Duke began the exchange that was going to lead to the exciting Duel Scene they became uncomfortably aware of activity behind them, and occasional chuckles from the audience. After a totally inappropriate burst of laughter Tomjon risked a sideways glance.

One of the witches was taking their fire to bits. Another one was trying to clean the cauldron. The third one was sitting with her arms folded, glaring at him.

“The very soil cries out at tyranny—” said Wimsloe, and then caught the expression on Tomjon’s face and followed his gaze. His voice trailed into silence.

“‘And calls me forth for vengeance,’” prompted Tomjon helpfully.

“B-but—” whispered Wimsloe, trying to point surreptitiously with his dagger.

“I wouldn’t be seen dead with a cauldron like this,” said Nanny Ogg, in a whisper loud enough to carry to the back of the courtyard. “Two days’ work with a scourer and a bucket of sand, is this.”

“‘And calls me forth for vengeance’” hissed Tomjon. Out of the tail of his eye he saw Hwel in the wings, frozen in an attitude of incoherent rage.

“How do they make it flicker?” said Magrat.

“Be quiet, you two,” said Granny. “You’re upsetting people.” She raised her hat to Wimsloe. “Go ahead, young man. Don’t mind us.”

“Wha?” said Wimsloe.

“Aha, it calls you forth for vengeance, does it?” said Tomjon, in desperation. “And the heavens cry revenge, too, I expect.”

On cue, the storm produced a thunderbolt that blew the top off another tower…

The duke crouched in his seat, his face a panorama of fear. He extended what had once been a finger.

“There they are,” he breathed. “That’s them. What are they doing in my play? Who said they could be in my play?”

The duchess, who was less inclined to deal in rhetorical questions, beckoned to the nearest guard.

On stage Tomjon was sweating under the load of the script. Wimsloe was incoherent. Now Gumridge, who was playing the part of the Good Duchess in a wig of flax, had lost the thread as well.

“Aha, thou callst me an evil king, though thou wisperest it so none save I may hear it,” Tomjon croaked. “And thou hast summoned the guard, possibly by some most secret signal, owing nought to artifice of lips or tongue.”

A guard came on crabwise, still stumbling from Hwel’s shove. He stared at Granny Weatherwax.

“Hwel says what the hell’s going on?” he hissed.

“What was that?” said Tomjon. “Did I hear you say I come, my lady?”

“Get these people off, he says!”

Tomjon advanced to the front of the stage.

“Thou babblest, man. See how I dodge thy tortoise spear. I said, see how I dodge thy tortoise spear. Thy spear, man. You’re holding it in thy bloody hand, for goodness’ sake.”

The guard gave him a desperate, frozen grin.

Tomjon hesitated. Three other actors around him were staring fixedly at the witches. Looming up in front of him with all the inevitability of a tax demand was a sword fight during which, it was beginning to appear, he would have to parry his own wild thrusts and stab himself to death.

He turned to the three witches. His mouth opened.

For the first time in his life his awesome memory let him down. He could think of nothing to say.

Granny Weatherwax stood up. She advanced to the edge of the stage. The audience held its breath. She held up a hand.

“Ghosts of the mind and all device away, I bid the Truth to have—” she hesitated—“its tumpty-tumpty day.”

Tomjon felt the chill engulf him. The others, too, jolted into life.

Up from out of the depths of their blank minds new words rushed, words red with blood and revenge, words that had echoed among the castle’s stones, words stored in silicon, words that would have themselves heard, words that gripped their mouths so tightly that an attempt not to say them would result in a broken jaw.

“Do you fear him now?” said Gumridge. “And he so amazed with drink? Take his dagger, husband—you are a blade’s width from the kingdom.”

“I dare not,” Wimsloe said, trying to look in astonishment at his own lips.

“Who will know?” Gumridge waved a hand toward the audience. He’d never act so well again. “See, there is only eyeless night. Take the dagger now, take the kingdom tomorrow. Have a stab at it, man.”

Wimsloe’s hand shook.

“I have it, wife,” he said. “Is this a dagger I see before me?”

“Of course it’s a bloody dagger. Come on, do it now. The weak deserve no mercy. We’ll say he fell down the stairs.”

“But people will suspect!”

“Are there no dungeons? Are there no pilliwinks? Possession is nine parts of the law, husband, when what you possess is a knife.”

Wimsloe drew his arm back.

“I cannot! He has been kindness itself to me!”

“And you can be Death itself to him…”

 

Dafe could hear the voices a long way off. He adjusted his mask, checked the deathliness of his appearance in the mirror, and peered at the script in the empty backstage gloom.

“Cower Now, Brief Mortals,” he said. “I Am Death, ’Gainst Who—’Gainst Who—”

WHOM.

“Oh, thanks,” said the boy distractedly. “’Gainst Whom No Lock May Hold—”

WILL HOLD.

“Will Hold Nor Fasten’d Portal Bar, Here To—to—to—”

HERE TO TAKE MY TALLY ON THIS NIGHT OF KINGS.

Dafe sagged.

“You’re so much better at it,” he moaned. “You’ve got the right voice and you can remember the words.” He turned around. “It’s only three lines and Hwel will…have…my…guts…for.”

He froze. His eyes widened and became two saucers of fear as Death snapped his fingers in front of the boy’s rigid face.

FORGET, he commanded, and turned and stalked silently toward the wings.

His eyeless skull took in the line of costumes, the waxy debris of the makeup table. His empty nostrils snuffed up the mixed smells of mothballs, grease and sweat.

There was something here, he thought, that nearly belonged to the gods. Humans had built a world inside the world, which reflected it in pretty much the same way as a drop of water reflects the landscape. And yet…and yet…

Inside this little world they had taken pains to put all the things you might think they would want to escape from—hatred, fear, tyranny, and so forth. Death was intrigued. They thought they wanted to be taken out of themselves, and every art humans dreamt up took them further in. He was fascinated.

He was here for a very particular and precise purpose. There was a soul to be claimed. There was no time for inconsequentialities. But what was time, after all?

His feet did an involuntary little clicking dance across the stones. Alone, in the gray shadows, Death tapdanced.

—THE NEXT NIGHT IN YOUR DRESSING ROOM THEY HANG A STAR—

He pulled himself together, adjusted his scythe, and waited silently for his cue.

He’d never missed one yet.

He was going to get out there and slay them.

 

“And you can be Death itself to him. Now!”

Death entered, his feet clicking across the stage.

COWER NOW, BRIEF MORTALS, he said, FOR I AM DEATH, ’GAINST WHOM NO…NO…’GAINST WHOM…

He hesitated. He hesitated, for the very first time in the eternity of his existence.

For although the Death of the Discworld was used to dealing with people by the million, at the same time every death was intimate and personal.

Death was seldom seen except by those of an occult persuasion and his clients themselves. The reason that no one else saw him was that the human brain is clever enough to edit sights too horrible for it to cope with, but the problem here was that several hundred people were in fact expecting to see Death at this point, and were therefore seeing him.

Death turned slowly and stared back at hundreds of watching eyes.

Even in the grip of the truth Tomjon recognized a fellow actor in distress, and fought for mastery of his lips.

“‘…lock will hold…’” he whispered, through teeth fixed in a grimace.

Death gave him a manic grin of stagefright.

WHAT? he whispered, in a voice like an anvil being hit with a small lead hammer.

“‘…lock will hold, nor fasten’d portal…,’” said Tomjon encouragingly.

…LOCK WILL HOLD NOR FASTEN’D PORTAL…UH…repeated Death desperately, watching his lips.

“‘…bar!…’”

BAR.

“No, I cannot do it!” said Wimsloe. “I will be seen! Down there in the hall, someone watches!”

“There is no one!”

“I feel the stare!”

“Dithering idiot! Must I put it in for you? See, his foot is upon the top stair!”

Wimsloe’s face contorted with fear and uncertainty. He drew back his hand.

“No!”

The scream came from the audience. The duke was half-risen from his seat, his tortured knuckles at his mouth. As they watched he lurched forward between the shocked people.

“No! I did not do it! It was not like that! You cannot say it was like that! You were not there!” He stared at the upturned faces around him, and sagged.

“Nor was I,” he giggled. “I was asleep at the time, you know. I remember it quite well. There was blood on the counterpane, there was blood on the floor, I could not wash off the blood, but these are not proper subjects for the inquiry. I cannot allow the discussion of national security. It was just a dream, and when I awoke, he’d be alive tomorrow. And tomorrow it wouldn’t have happened because it was not done. And tomorrow you can say I did not know. And tomorrow you can say I had no recollection. What a noise he made in falling! Enough to wake the dead…who would have thought he had so much blood in him?…” By now he had climbed onto the stage, and grinned brightly at the assembled company.

“I hope that sorts it all out,” he said. “Ha. Ha.”

In the silence that followed Tomjon opened his mouth to utter something suitable, something soothing, and found that there was nothing he could say.

But another personality stepped into him, took over his lips, and spoke thusly:

“With my own bloody dagger, you bastard! I know it was you! I saw you at the top of the stairs, sucking your thumb! I’d kill you now, except for the thought of having to spend eternity listening to your whining. I, Verence, formerly King of—”

“What testimony is this?” said the duchess. She stood in front of the stage, with half a dozen soldiers beside her.

“These are just slanders,” she added. “And treason to boot. The rantings of mad players.”

“I was bloody King of Lancre!” shouted Tomjon.

“In which case you are the alleged victim,” said the duchess calmly. “And unable to speak for the prosecution. It is against all precedent.”

Tomjon’s body turned toward Death.

“You were there! You saw it all!”

I SUSPECT I WOULD NOT BE CONSIDERED AN APPROPRIATE WITNESS.

“Therefore there is no proof, and where there is no proof there is no crime,” said the duchess. She motioned the soldiers forward.

“So much for your experiment,” she said to her husband. “I think my way is better.”

She looked around the stage, and found the witches.

“Arrest them,” she said.

“No,” said the Fool, stepping out of the wings.

“What did you say?”

“I saw it all,” said the Fool, simply. “I was in the Great Hall that night. You killed the king, my lord.”

“I did not!” screamed the duke. “You were not there! I did not see you there! I order you not to be there!”

“You did not dare say this before,” said Lady Felmet.

“Yes, lady. But I must say it now.”

The duke focused unsteadily on him.

“You swore loyalty unto death, my Fool,” he hissed.

“Yes, my lord. I’m sorry.”

“You’re dead.”

The duke snatched a dagger from Wimsloe’s unresisting hand, darted forward, and plunged it to the hilt into the Fool’s heart. Magrat screamed.

The Fool rocked back and forth unsteadily.

“Thank goodness that’s over,” he said, as Magrat pushed her way through the actors and clasped him to what could charitably be called her bosom. It struck the Fool that he had never looked a bosom squarely in the face, at least since he was a baby, and it was particularly cruel of the world to save the experience until after he was dead.

He gently moved one of Magrat’s arms and pulled the despicable horned cowl from his head, and tossed it as far as possible. He didn’t have to be a Fool anymore or, he realized, bother about vows or anything. What with bosoms as well, death seemed to be an improvement.

“I didn’t do it,” said the duke.

No pain, thought the Fool. Funny, that. On the other hand, you obviously can’t feel pain when you are dead. It would be wasted.

“You all saw that I didn’t do it,” said the duke.

Death gave the Fool a puzzled look. Then he reached into the recesses of his robes and pulled out an hourglass. It had bells on it. He gave it a gentle shake, which made them tinkle.

“I gave no orders that any such thing should be done,” said the duke calmly. His voice came from a long way off, from wherever his mind was now. The company stared at him wordlessly. It wasn’t possible to hate someone like this, only to feel acutely embarrassed about being anywhere near him. Even the Fool felt embarrassed, and he was dead.

Death tapped the hourglass, and then peered at it to see if it had gone wrong.

“You are all lying,” said the duke, in tranquil tones. “Telling lies is naughty.”

He stabbed several of the nearest actors in a dreamy, gentle way, and then held up the blade.

“You see?” he said. “No blood! It wasn’t me.” He looked up at the duchess, towering over him now like a red tsunami over a small fishing village.

“It was her,” he said. “She did it.”

He stabbed her once or twice, on general principles, and then stabbed himself and let the dagger drop from his fingers.

After a few seconds reflection he said, in a voice far nearer the worlds of sanity, “You can’t get me now.”

He turned to Death. “Will there be a comet?” he said. “There must be a comet when a prince dies. I’ll go and see, shall I?”

He wandered away. The audience broke into applause.

“You’ve got to admit he was real royalty,” said Nanny Ogg, eventually. “It only goes to show, royalty goes eccentric far better than the likes of you and me.”

Death held the hourglass to his skull, his face radiating puzzlement.

Granny Weatherwax picked up the fallen dagger and tested the blade with her finger. It slid into the handle quite easily, with a faint squeaking noise.

She passed it to Nanny.

“There’s your magic sword,” she said.

Magrat looked at it, and then back at the Fool.

“Are you dead or not?” she said.

“I must be,” said the Fool, his voice slightly muffled. “I think I’m in paradise.”

“No, look, I’m serious.”

“I don’t know. But I’d like to breathe.”

“Then you must be alive.”

“Everyone’s alive,” said Granny. “It’s a trick dagger. Actors probably can’t be trusted with real ones.”

“After all, they can’t even keep a cauldron clean,” said Nanny.

“Whether everyone is alive or not is a matter for me,” said the duchess. “As ruler it is my pleasure to decide. Clearly my husband has lost his wits.” She turned to her soldiers. “And I decree—”

“Now!” hissed King Verence in Granny’s ear. “Now!”

Granny Weatherwax drew herself up.

“Be silent, woman!” she said. “The true King of Lancre stands before you!”

She clapped Tomjon on the shoulder.

“What, him?”

“Who, me?”

“Ridiculous,” said the duchess. “He’s a mummer, of sorts.”

“She’s right, miss,” said Tomjon, on the edge of panic. “My father runs a theater, not a kingdom.”

“He is the true king. We can prove it,” said Granny.

“Oh, no,” said the duchess. “We’re not having that. There’s no mysterious returned heirs in this kingdom. Guards—take him.”

Granny Weatherwax held up a hand. The soldiers lurched from foot to foot, uncertainly.

“She’s a witch, isn’t she?” said one of them, tentatively.

“Certainly,” said the duchess.

The guards shifted uneasily.

“We seen where they turn people into newts,” said one.

“And then shipwreck them.”

“Yeah, and alarum the divers.”

“Yeah.”

“We ought to talk about this. We ought to get extra for witches.”

“She could do anything to us, look. She could be a drabe, even.”

“Don’t be foolish,” said the duchess. “Witches don’t do that sort of thing. They’re just stories to frighten people.”

The guard shook his head.

“It looked pretty convincing to me.”

“Of course it did, it was meant—” the duchess began. She sighed, and snatched a spear out of the guard’s hand.

“I’ll show you the power of these witches,” she said, and hurled it at Granny’s face.

Granny moved her hand across at snakebite speed and caught the spear just behind the head.

“So,” she said, “and it comes to this, does it?”

“You don’t frighten me, wyrd sisters,” said the duchess.

Granny stared her in the eye for a few seconds. She gave a grunt of surprise.

“You’re right,” she said. “We really don’t, do we…”

“Do you think I haven’t studied you? Your witchcraft is all artifice and illusion, to amaze weak minds. It holds no fears for me. Do your worst.”

Granny studied her for a while.

“My worst?” she said, eventually. Magrat and Nanny Ogg shuffled gently out of her way.

The duchess laughed.

“You’re clever,” she said. “I’ll grant you that much. And quick. Come on, hag. Bring on your toads and demons, I’ll…”

She stopped, her mouth opening and shutting a bit without any words emerging. Her lips drew back in a rictus of terror, her eyes looked beyond Granny, beyond the world, toward something else. One knuckled hand flew to her mouth and she made a little whimpering noise. She froze, like a rabbit that has just seen a stoat and knows, without any doubt, that it is the last stoat that it will ever see.

“What have you done to her?” said Magrat, the first to dare to speak. Granny smirked.

“Headology,” said Granny, and smirked. “You don’t need any Black Aliss magic for it.”

“Yes, but what have you done?”

“No one becomes like she is without building walls inside their head,” she said. “I’ve just knocked them down. Every scream. Every plea. Every pang of guilt. Every twinge of conscience. All at once. There’s a little trick to it.”

She gave Magrat a condescending smile. “I’ll show you one day, if you like.”

Magrat thought about it. “It’s horrible,” she said.

“Nonsense,” Granny smiled terribly. “Everyone wants to know their true self. Now, she does.”

“Sometimes, you have to be kind to be cruel,” said Nanny Ogg approvingly.

“I think it’s probably the worst thing that could happen to anyone,” said Magrat, as the duchess swayed backward and forward.

“For goodness’ sake use your imagination, girl,” said Granny. “There are far worse things. Needles under the fingernails, for one. Stuff with pliers.”

“Red-hot knives up the jacksie,” said Nanny Ogg. “Handle first, too, so you cut your fingers trying to pull them out—”

“This is simply the worst that I can do,” said Granny Weatherwax primly. “It’s all right and proper, too. A witch should act like that, you know. There’s no need for any dramatic stuff. Most magic goes on in the head. It’s headology. Now, if you’d—”

A noise like a gas leak escaped from the duchess’s lips. Her head jerked back suddenly. She opened her eyes, blinked, and focused on Granny. Sheer hatred suffused her features.

“Guards!” she said. “I told you to take them!”

Granny’s jaw sagged. “What?” she said. “But—but I showed you your true self…”

“I’m supposed to be upset by that, am I?” As the soldiers sheepishly grabbed Granny’s arms the duchess pressed her face close to Granny’s, her tremendous eyebrows a V of triumphant hatred. “I’m supposed to grovel on the floor, is that it? Well, old woman, I’ve seen exactly what I am, do you understand, and I’m proud of it! I’d do it all again, only hotter and longer! I enjoyed it, and I did it because I wanted to!”

She thumped the vast expanse of her chest.

“You gawping idiots!” she said. “You’re so weak. You really think that people are basically decent underneath, don’t you?”

The crowd on the stage backed away from the sheer force of her exultation.

“Well, I’ve looked underneath,” said the duchess. “I know what drives people. It’s fear. Sheer, deep-down fear. There’s not one of you who doesn’t fear me, I can make you widdle your drawers out of terror, and now I’m going to take—”

At this point Nanny Ogg hit her on the back of the head with the cauldron.

“She does go on, doesn’t she?” she said conversationally, as the duchess collapsed. “She was a bit eccentric, if you ask me.”

There was a long, embarrassed silence.

Granny Weatherwax coughed. Then she treated the soldiers holding her to a bright, friendly smile, and pointed to the mound that was now the duchess.

“Take her away and put her in a cell somewhere,” she commanded. The men snapped to attention, grabbed the duchess by her arms, and pulled her upright with considerable difficulty.

“Gently, mind,” said Granny.

She rubbed her hands together and turned to Tomjon, who was watching her with his mouth open.

“Depend on it,” she hissed. “Here and now, my lad, you don’t have a choice. You’re the King of Lancre.”

“But I don’t know how to be a king!”

“We all seed you! You had it down just right, including the shouting.”

“That’s just acting!”

“Act, then. Being a king is, is—” Granny hesitated, and snapped her fingers at Magrat. “What do you call them things, there’s always a hundred of them in anything?”

Magrat looked bewildered. “Do you mean percents?” she said.

“Them,” agreed Granny. “Most of the percents in being a king is acting, if you ask me. You ought to be good at it.”

Tomjon looked for help into the wings, where Hwel should have been. The dwarf was in fact there, but he wasn’t paying much attention. He had the script in front of him, and was rewriting furiously.

 

BUT I ASSURE YOU, YOU ARE NOT DEAD. TAKE IT FROM ME.

The duke giggled. He had found a sheet from somewhere and had draped it over himself, and was sidling along some of the castle’s more deserted corridors. Sometimes he would go “whoo-oo” in a low voice.

This worried Death. He was used to people claiming that they were not dead, because death always came as a shock, and a lot of people had some trouble getting over it. But people claiming that they were dead with every breath in their body was a new and unsettling experience.

“I shall jump out on people,” said the duke dreamily. “I shall rattle my bones all night, I shall perch on the roof and foretell a death in the house—”

THAT’S BANSHEES.

“I shall if I want,” said the duke, with a trace of earlier determination. “And I shall float through walls, and knock on tables, and drip ectoplasm on anyone I don’t like. Ha. Ha.”

IT WON’T WORK. LIVING PEOPLE AREN’T ALLOWED TO BE GHOSTS. I’M SORRY.

The duke made an unsuccessful attempt to float through a wall, gave up, and opened a door out onto a crumbling section of the battlements. The storm had died away a bit, and a thin rind of moon lurked behind the clouds like a ticket tout for eternity.

Death stalked through the wall behind him.

“Well then,” said the duke, “if I’m not dead, why are you here?”

He jumped up onto the wall and flapped his sheet.

WAITING.

“Wait forever, bone face!” said the duke triumphantly. “I shall hover in the twilight world, I shall find some chains to shake, I shall—”

He stepped backward, lost his balance, landed heavily on the wall and slid. For a moment the remnant of his right hand scrabbled ineffectually at the stonework, and then it vanished.

Death is obviously potentially everywhere at the same time, and in one sense it is no more true to say that he was on the battlements, picking vaguely at non-existent particles of glowing metal on the edge of his scythe blade, than that he was waist-deep in the foaming, rock-toothed waters in the depths of Lancre gorge, his calcareous gaze sweeping downward and stopping abruptly at a point where the torrent ran a few treacherous inches over a bed of angular pebbles.

After a while the duke sat up, transparent in the phosphorescent waves.

“I shall haunt their corridors,” he said, “and whisper under the doors on still nights.” His voice grew fainter, almost lost in the ceaseless roar of the river. “I shall make basket chairs creak most alarmingly, just you wait and see.”

Death grinned at him.

NOW YOU’RE TALKING.

It started to rain.

 

Ramtop rain has a curiously penetrative quality which makes ordinary rain seem almost arid. It poured in torrents over the castle roofs, and somehow seemed to go right through the tiles and fill the Great Hall with a warm, uncomfortable moistness.*

The hall was crowded with half the population of Lancre. Outside, the rushing of the rain even drowned out the distant roar of the river. It soaked the stage. The colors ran and mingled in the painted backdrop, and one of the curtains sagged away from its rail and flapped sadly into a puddle.

Inside, Granny Weatherwax finished speaking.

“You forgot about the crown,” whispered Nanny Ogg.

“Ah,” said Granny. “Yes, the crown. It’s on his head, d’you see? We hid it among the crowns when the actors left, the reason being, no one would look for it there. See how it fits him so perfectly.”

It was a tribute to Granny’s extraordinary powers of persuasion that everyone did see how perfectly it fitted Tomjon. In fact the only one who didn’t was Tomjon himself, who was aware that it was only his ears that were stopping it becoming a necklace.

“Imagine the sensation when he put it on for the first time,” she went on. “I expect there was an eldritch tingling sensation.”

“Actually, it felt rather—” Tomjon began, but no one was listening to him. He shrugged and leaned over to Hwel, who was still scribbling busily.

“Does eldritch mean uncomfortable?” he hissed.

The dwarf looked at him with unfocused eyes.

“What?”

“I said, does eldritch mean uncomfortable?”

“Eh? Oh. No. No, I shouldn’t think so.”

“What does it mean then?”

“Dunno. Oblong, I think.” Hwel’s glance returned to his scrawls as though magnetized. “Can you remember what he said after all those tomorrows? I didn’t catch the bit after that…”

“And there wasn’t any need for you to tell everyone I was—adopted,” said Tomjon.

“That’s how it was, you see,” said the dwarf vaguely. “Best to be honest about these things. Now then, did he actually stab her, or just accuse her?”

“I don’t want to be a king!” Tomjon whispered hoarsely. “Everyone says I take after dad!”

“Funny thing, all this taking after people,” said the dwarf vaguely. “I mean, if I took after my dad, I’d be a hundred feet underground digging rocks, whereas—” His voice died away. He stared at the nib of his pen as though it held an incredible fascination.

“Whereas what?”

“Eh?”

“Aren’t you even listening?”

“I knew it was wrong when I wrote it, I knew it was the wrong way round…What? Oh, yes. Be a king. It’s a good job. It seems there’s a lot of competition, at any rate. I’m very happy for you. Once you’re a king, you can do anything you want.”

Tomjon looked at the faces of the Lancre worthies around the table. They had a keen, calculating look, like the audience at a fatstock show. They were weighing him up. It crept upon him in a cold and clammy way that once he was king, he could do anything he wanted. Provided that what he wanted to do was be king.

“You could build your own theater,” said Hwel, his eyes lighting up for a moment. “With as many trapdoors as you wanted, and magnificent costumes. You could act in a new play every night. I mean, it would make the Dysk look like a shed.”

“Who would come to see me?” said Tomjon, sagging in his seat.

“Everyone.”

“What, every night?”

“You could order them to,” said Hwel, without looking up.

I knew he was going to say that, Tomjon thought. He can’t really mean it, he added charitably. He’s got his play. He doesn’t really exist in this world, not right now at the moment.

He took off the crown and turned it over and over in his hands. There wasn’t much metal in it, but it felt heavy. He wondered how heavy it would get if you wore it all the time.

At the head of the table was an empty chair containing, he had been assured, the ghost of his real father. It would have been nice to report that he had experienced anything more, when being introduced to it, than an icy sensation and a buzzing in the ears.

“I suppose I could help father pay off on the Dysk,” he said.

“That would be nice, yes,” said Hwel.

He spun the crown in his fingers and listened glumly to the talk flowing back and forth over his head.

“Fifteen years?” said the Mayor of Lancre.

“We had to,” said Granny Weatherwax.

“I thought the baker was a bit early last week.”

“No, no,” said the witch impatiently. “It doesn’t work like that. No one’s lost anything.”

“According to my figuring,” said the man who doubled as Lancre’s beadle, town clerk and grave-digger, “we’ve all lost fifteen years.”

“No, we’ve all gained them,” said the mayor. “It stands to reason. Time’s like this sort of wiggly road, see, but we took a short cut across the fields.”

“Not at all,” said the clerk, sliding a sheet of paper across the table. “Look here…”

Tomjon let the waters of debate close over him again.

Everyone wanted him to be king. No one thought twice about what he wanted. His views didn’t count.

Yes, that was it. No one wanted him to be king, not precisely him. He just happened to be convenient.

Gold does not tarnish, at least physically, but Tomjon felt that the thin band of metal in his hands had an unpleasant depth to its luster. It had sat on too many troubled heads. If you held it to your ear, you could hear the screams.

He became aware of someone else looking at him, their gaze playing across his face like a blowlamp on a lolly. He looked up.

It was the third witch, the young…the youngest one, with the intense expression and the hedgerow hairstyle. Sitting next to old Fool as though she owned a controlling interest.

It wasn’t his face she was examining. It was his features. Her eyeballs were tracking him from nape to nose like a pair of calipers. He gave her a little brave smile, which she ignored. Just like everyone else, he thought.

Only the Fool noticed him, and returned the smile with an apologetic grin and a tiny conspiratorial wave of the fingers that said: “What are we doing here, two sensible people like us?” The woman was looking at him again, turning her head this way and that and narrowing her eyes. She kept glancing at Fool and back to Tomjon. Then she turned to the oldest witch, the only person in the entire hot, damp room who seemed to have acquired a mug of beer, and whispered in her ear.

The two started a spirited, whispered conversation. It was, thought Tomjon, a particularly feminine way of talking. It normally took place on doorsteps, with all the participants standing with their arms folded and, if anyone was so ungracious as to walk past, they’d stop abruptly and watch them in silence until they were safely out of earshot.

He became aware that Granny Weatherwax had stopped talking, and that the entire hall was staring at him expectantly.

“Hallo?” he said.

“It might be a good idea to hold the coronation tomorrow,” said Granny. “It’s not good for a kingdom to be without a ruler. It doesn’t like it.”

She stood up, pushed back her chair, and came and took Tomjon’s hand. He followed her unprotestingly across the flagstones and up the steps to the throne, where she put her hands on his shoulders and pressed him gently down onto the threadbare red plush cushions.

There was a scraping of benches and chairs. He looked around in panic.

“What’s happening now?” he said.

“Don’t worry,” said Granny firmly. “Everyone wants to come and swear loyalty to you. You just nod graciously and ask everyone what they do and if they enjoy it. Oh, and you’d better give them the crown back.”

Tomjon removed it quickly.

“Why?” he said.

“They want to present it to you.”

“But I’ve already got it!” said Tomjon desperately.

Granny gave a patient sigh.

“Only in the wossname, real sense,” she said. “This is more ceremonial.”

“You mean unreal?”

“Yes,” said Granny. “But much more important.”

Tomjon gripped the arms of the throne.

“Fetch me Hwel,” he said.

“No, you must do it like that. It’s precedent, you see, first you meet the—”

“I said, fetch me the dwarf. Didn’t you hear me, woman?” This time Tomjon got the spin and pitch of his voice just right, but Granny rallied magnificently.

“I don’t think you quite realize who you are talking to, young man,” she said.

Tomjon half rose in his seat. He had played a great many kings, and most of them weren’t the kind of kings who shook hands graciously and asked people whether they enjoyed their work. They were far more the type of kings who got people to charge into battle at five o’clock on a freezing morning and still managed to persuade them that this was better than being in bed. He summoned them all, and treated Granny Weatherwax to a blast of royal hauteur, pride and arrogance.

“We thought we were talking to a subject,” he said. “Now do as we say!”

Granny’s face was immobile for several seconds as she worked out what to do next. Then she smiled to herself, said lightly, “As you wish,” and went and dislodged Hwel, who was still writing.

The dwarf gave a stiff bow.

“None of that,” snapped Tomjon. “What do I do next?”

“I don’t know. Do you want me to write an acceptance speech?”

“I told you. I don’t want to be king!”

“Could be a problem with an acceptance speech, then,” the dwarf agreed. “Have you really thought about this? Being king is a great role.”

“But it’s the only one you get to play!”

“Hmm. Well, just tell them ‘no,’ then.”

“Just like that? Will it work?”

“It’s got to be worth a try.”

A group of Lancre dignitaries were approaching with the crown on a cushion. They wore expressions of constipated respect coupled with just a hint of self-satisfaction. They carried the crown as if it was a Present for a Good Boy.

The Mayor of Lancre coughed behind his hand.

“A proper coronation will take some time to arrange,” he began, “but we would like—”

“No,” said Tomjon.

The mayor hesitated. “Pardon?” he said.

“I won’t accept it.”

The mayor hesitated again. His lips moved and his eyes glazed slightly. He felt that he had got lost somewhere, and decided it would be best to start again.

“A proper coronation will take—” he ventured.

“It won’t,” said Tomjon. “I will not be king.”

The mayor was mouthing like a carp.

“Hwel?” said Tomjon desperately. “You’re good with words.”

“The problem we’ve got here,” said the dwarf, “is that ‘no’ is apparently not among the options when you are offered a crown. I think he could cope with ‘maybe.’”

Tomjon stood up, and grabbed the crown. He held it above his head like a tambourine.

“Listen to me, all of you,” he said. “I thank you for your offer, it’s a great honor. But I can’t accept it. I’ve worn more crowns than you can count, and the only kingdom I know how to rule has got curtains in front of it. I’m sorry.”

Dead silence greeted this. They did not appear to have been the right words.

“Another problem,” said Hwel conversationally, “is that you don’t actually have a choice. You are the king, you see. It’s a job you are lined up for when you’re born.”

“I’d be no good at it!”

“That doesn’t matter. A king isn’t something you’re good at, it’s something you are.”

“You can’t leave me here! There’s nothing but forests!”

Tomjon felt the suffocating cold sensation again, and the slow buzzing in his ears. For a moment he thought he saw, faint as a mist, a tall sad man in front of him, stretching out a hand in supplication.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I really am.”

Through the fading shape he saw the witches, watching him intently.

Beside him Hwel said, “The only chance you’d have is if there was another heir. You don’t remember any brothers and sisters, do you?”

“I don’t remember anyone! Hwel, I—”

There was another ferocious argument among the witches. And then Magrat was striding, striding across the hall, moving like a tidal wave, moving like a rush of blood to the head, shaking off Granny Weatherwax’s restraining hand, bearing down on the throne like a piston, and dragging the Fool behind her.

 

“I say?”

“Er. Halloee!”

“Er, I say, excuse me, can anyone hear us?”

The castle up above was full of hubbub and general rejoicing, and there was no one to hear the polite and frantic voices that echoed along the dungeon passages, getting politer and more frantic with each passing hour.

“Um, I say? Excuse me? Billem’s got this terrible thing about rats, if you don’t mind. Cooeee!”

Let the camera of the mind’s eye pan slowly back along the dim, ancient corridors, taking in the dripping fungi, the rusting chains, the damp, the shadows…

“Can anyone hear us? Look, it’s really too much. There’s been some laughable mistake, look, the wigs come right off…”

Let the plaintive echoes dwindle among the cobwebbed corners and rodent-haunted tunnels, until they’re no more than a reedy whisper on the cusp of hearing.

“I say? I say, excuse me, help?”

Someone is bound to come down here again one of these days.

 

Some time afterward Magrat asked Hwel if he believed in long engagements. The dwarf paused in the task of loading up the latty.*

“About a week, maximum,” he said at last. “With matinees, of course.”

 

A month went past. The early damp-earth odors of autumn drifted over the velvety-dark moors, where the watery starlight was echoed by one spark of a fire.

The standing stone was back in its normal place, but still poised to run if any auditors came into view.

The witches sat in careful silence. This was not going to rate among the hundred most exciting coven meetings of all time. If Mussorgsky had seen them, the night on the bare mountain would have been over by teatime.

Then Granny Weatherwax said, “It was a good banquet, I thought.”

“I was nearly sick,” said Nanny Ogg proudly. “And my Shirl helped out in the kitchen and brought me home some scraps.”

“I heard,” said Granny coldly. “Half a pig and three bottles of fizzy wine went missing, they say.”

“It’s nice that some people think of the old folk,” said Nanny Ogg, completely unabashed. “I got a coronation mug, too.” She produced it. “It says ‘Viva Verence II Rex.’ Fancy him being called Rex. I can’t say it’s a good likeness, mind you. I don’t recall him having a handle sticking out of his ear.”

There was another long, terribly polite pause. Then Granny said, “We were a bit surprised you weren’t there, Magrat.”

“We thought you’d be up at the top of the table, kind of thing,” said Nanny. “We thought you’d have moved in up there.”

Magrat stared fixedly at her feet.

“I wasn’t invited,” she said meekly.

“Well, I don’t know about invited,” said Granny. “We weren’t invited. People don’t have to invite witches, they just know we’ll turn up if we want to. They soon find room for us,” she added, with some satisfaction.

“You see, he’s been very busy,” said Magrat to her feet. “Sorting everything out, you know. He’s very clever, you know. Underneath.”

“Very sober lad,” said Nanny.

“Anyway, it’s full moon,” said Magrat quickly. “You’ve got to go to coven meetings at full moon, no matter what other pressing engagements there may be.”

“Have y—?” Nanny Ogg began, but Granny nudged her sharply in the ribs.

“It’s a very good thing he’s paying so much attention to getting the kingdom working again,” said Granny, soothingly. “It shows proper consideration. I daresay he’ll get around to everything, sooner or later. It’s very demanding, being a king.”

“Yes,” said Magrat, her voice barely audible.

The silence that followed was almost solid. It was broken by Nanny, in a voice as bright and brittle as ice.

“Well, I brought a bottle of that fizzy wine with me,” she said. “In case he’d…in case…in case we felt like a drink,” she rallied, and waved it at the other two.

“I don’t want any,” said Magrat sullenly.

“You drink up, girl,” said Granny Weatherwax. “It’s a chilly night. It’d be good for your chest.”

She squinted at Magrat as the moon drifted out from behind its cloud.

“Here,” she said. “Your hair looks a bit grubby. It looks as though you haven’t washed it for a month.”

Magrat burst into tears.

 

The same moon shone down on the otherwise unremarkable town of Rham Nitz, some ninety miles from Lancre.

Tomjon left the stage to thunderous applause at the concluding act of The Troll of Ankh. A hundred people would go home tonight wondering whether trolls were really as bad as they had hitherto thought although, of course, this wouldn’t actually stop them disliking them in any way whatsoever.

Hwel patted him on the back as he sat down at the makeup table and started scraping off the thick gray sludge that was intended to make him look like a walking rock.

“Well done,” he said. “The love scene—just right. And when you turned around and roared at the wizard I shouldn’t think there was a dry seat in the house.”

“I know.”

Hwel rubbed his hands together.

“We can afford a tavern tonight,” he said. “So if we just—”

“We’ll sleep in the carts,” said Tomjon firmly, squinting at himself in the shard of mirror.

“But you know how much the Fo—the king gave us! It could be feather beds all the way home!”

“It’s straw mattresses and a good profit for us,” said Tomjon. “And that’ll buy you gods from heaven and demons from hell and the wind and the waves and more trapdoors than you can count, my lawn ornament.”

Hwel’s hand rested on Tomjon’s shoulder for a moment. Then he said, “You’re right, boss.”

“Certainly I am. How’s the play going?”

“Hmm? What play?” said Hwel, innocently.

Tomjon carefully removed a plaster brow ridge.

“You know,” he said. “That one. The Lancre King.”

“Oh. Coming along. Coming along, you know. I’ll get it right one of these days.” Hwel changed the subject with speed. “You know, we could work our way down to the river and take a boat home. That would be nice, wouldn’t it?”

“But we could work our way home over land and pick up some more cash. That would be better, wouldn’t it?” Tomjon grinned. “We took one hundred and three pence tonight; I counted heads during the Judgment speech. That’s nearly one silver piece after expenses.”

“You’re your father’s son, and no mistake,” said Hwel.

Tomjon sat back and looked at himself in the mirror.

“Yes,” he said, “I thought I had better be.”

 

Magrat didn’t like cats and hated the idea of mousetraps. She’d always felt that it should be possible to come to some sort of arrangement with creatures like mice so that all available food was rationed in the best interest of all parties. This was a very humanitarian outlook, which is to say that it was not a view shared by mice, and therefore her moonlit kitchen was alive.

When there was a knocking at the door the entire floor appeared to rush toward the walls.

After a few seconds the knocking came again.

There was another pause. Then the knocking rattled the door on its hinges, and a voice cried, “Open in the name of the king!”

A second voice said, in hurt tones, “You don’t have to shout like that. Why did you shout like that? I didn’t order you to shout like that. It’s enough to frighten anybody, shouting like that.”

“Sorry, sire! It goes with the job, sire!”

“Just knock again. A bit more gently, please.”

The knocking might have been a bit softer. Magrat’s apron dropped off its hook on the back of the door.

“Are you sure I can’t do it myself?”

“It’s not done, sire, kings knocking at humble cottage doors. Best leave it to me. OPEN IN THE—”

“Sergeant!”

“Sorry, sire. Forgot myself.”

“Try the latch.”

There was the sound of someone being extremely hesitant.

“Don’t like the sound of that, sire,” said the invisible sergeant. “Could be dangerous. If you want my advice, sire, I’d set fire to the thatch.”

“Set fire?”

“Yessire. We always do that if they don’t answer the door. Brings them out a treat.”

“I don’t think that would be appropriate, sergeant. I think I’ll try the latch, if it’s all the same to you.”

“Breaks my heart to see you do it, sire.”

“Well, I’m sorry.”

“You could at least let me buff it up for you.”

“No!”

“Well, couldn’t I just set fire to the privy—?”

“Absolutely not!”

“That chicken house over there looks as if it would go up like—”

“Sergeant!”

“Sire!”

“Go back to the castle!”

“What, and leave you all alone, sire?”

“This is a matter of extreme delicacy, sergeant. I am sure you are a man of sterling qualities, but there are times when even a king needs to be alone. It concerns a young woman, you understand.”

“Ah. Point taken, sire.”

“Thank you. Help me dismount, please.”

“Sorry about all that, sire. Tactless of me.”

“Don’t mention it.”

“If you need any help getting her alight—”

“Please go back to the castle, sergeant.”

“Yes, sire. If you’re sure, sire. Thank you, sire.”

“Sergeant?”

“Yes, sire?”

“I shall need someone to take my cap and bells back to the Fools’ Guild in Ankh-Morpork now I’m leaving. It seems to me you’re the ideal man.”

“Thank you, sire. Much obliged.”

“It’s your, ah, burning desire to be of service.”

“Yes, sire?”

“Make sure they put you up in one of the guest rooms.”

“Yes, sire. Thank you, sire.”

There was the sound of a horse trotting away. A few seconds later the latch clonked and the Fool crept in.

It takes considerable courage to enter a witch’s kitchen in the dark, but probably no more than it takes to wear a purple shirt with velvet sleeves and scalloped edges. It had this in its favor, though. There were no bells on it.

He had brought a bottle of sparkling wine and a bouquet of flowers, both of which had gone flat during the journey. He laid them on the table, and sat down by the embers of the fire.

He rubbed his eyes. It had been a long day. He wasn’t, he felt, a good king, but he’d had a lifetime of working hard at being something he wasn’t cut out to be, and he was persevering. As far as he could see, none of his predecessors had tried at all. So much to do, so much to repair, so much to organize…

On top of it all there was the problem with the duchess. Somehow he’d felt moved to put her in a decent cell in an airy tower. She was a widow, after all. He felt he ought to be kind to widows. But being kind to the duchess didn’t seem to achieve much, she didn’t understand it, she thought it was just weakness. He was dreadfully afraid that he might have to have her head cut off.

No, being a king was no laughing matter. He brightened up at the thought. There was that to be said about it.

And, after a while, he fell asleep.

 

The duchess was not asleep. She was currently halfway down the castle wall on a rope of knotted sheets, having spent the previous day gradually chipping away the mortar around the bars of her window although, in truth, you could hack your way out of the average Lancre Castle wall with a piece of cheese. The fool! He’d given her cutlery, and plenty of bedclothes! That was how these people reacted. They let their fear do their thinking for them. They were scared of her, even when they thought they had her in their power (and the weak never had the strong in their power, never truly in their power). If she’d thrown herself in prison, she would have found considerable satisfaction in making herself regret she’d ever been born. But they’d just given her blankets, and worried about her.

Well, she’d be back. There was a big world out there, and she knew how to pull the levers that made people do what she wanted. She wouldn’t burden herself with a husband this time, either. Weak! He was the worst of them, no courage in him to be as bad as he knew he was, inside.

She landed heavily on the moss, paused to catch her breath and then, with the knife ready in her hand, slipped away along the castle walls and into the forest.

She’d go all the way down to the far border and swim the river there, or maybe build a raft. By morning she’d be too far away for them ever to find her, and she doubted very much that they’d ever come looking.

Weak!

She moved through the forest with surprising speed. There were tracks, after all, wide enough for carts, and she had a pretty good sense of direction. Besides, all she needed to do was go downhill. If she found the gorge then she just had to follow the flow.

And then there seemed to be too many trees. There was still a track, and it went more or less in the right direction, but the trees on either side of it were planted rather more thickly than one might expect and, when she tried to turn back, there was no track at all behind her. She took to turning suddenly, half expecting to see the trees moving, but they were always standing stoically and firmly rooted in the moss.

She couldn’t feel a wind, but there was a sighing in the treetops.

“All right,” she said, under her breath. “All right. I’m going anyway. I want to go. But I will be back.”

It was at this point that the track opened out into a clearing that hadn’t been there the day before and wouldn’t be there tomorrow, a clearing in which the moonlight glittered off assembled antlers and fangs and serried ranks of glowing eyes.

The weak banded together can be pretty despicable, but it dawned on the duchess that an alliance of the strong can be more of an immediate problem.

There was total silence for a few seconds, broken only by a faint panting, and then the duchess grinned, raised her knife, and charged the lot of them.

The front ranks of the massed creatures opened to let her pass, and then closed in again. Even the rabbits.

The kingdom exhaled.

 

On the moors under the very shadow of the peaks the mighty nocturnal chorus of nature had fallen silent. The crickets had ceased their chirping, the owls had hooted themselves into silence, and the wolves had other matters to attend to.

There was a song that echoed and boomed from cliff to cliff, and resounded up the high hidden valleys, causing miniature avalanches. It funnelled along the secret tunnels under glaciers, losing all meaning as it rang between the walls of ice.

To find out what was actually being sung you would have to go all the way back down to the dying fire by the standing stone, where the cross-resonances and waves of conflicting echoes focused on a small, elderly woman who was waving an empty bottle.

“—with a snail if you slow to a crawl, but the hedgehog—”

“It tastes better at the bottom of the bottle, doesn’t it,” Magrat said, trying to drown out the chorus.

“That’s right,” said Granny, draining her cup.

“Is there any more?”

“I think Gytha finished it, by the sound of it.”

They sat on the fragrant heather and stared up at the moon.

“Well, we’ve got a king,” said Granny. “And there’s an end of it.”

“It’s thanks to you and Nanny, really,” said Magrat, and hiccupped.

“Why?”

“None of them would have believed me if you hadn’t spoken up.”

“Only because we was asked,” said Granny.

“Yes, but everyone knows witches don’t lie, that’s the important thing. I mean, everyone could see they looked so alike, but that could have been coincidence. You see,” Magrat blushed, “I looked up droit de seigneur. Goodie Whemper had a dictionary.”

Nanny Ogg stopped singing.

“Yes,” said Granny Weatherwax. “Well.”

Magrat became aware of an uncomfortable atmosphere.

“You did tell the truth, didn’t you?” she said. “They really are brothers, aren’t they?”

“Oh yes,” said Gytha Ogg. “Definitely. I saw to his mother when your—when the new king was born. And to the queen when young Tomjon was born, and she told me who his father was.”

“Gytha!”

“Sorry.”

The wine was going to her head, but the wheels in Magrat’s mind still managed to turn.

“Just a minute,” she said.

“I remember the Fool’s father,” said Nanny Ogg, speaking slowly and deliberately. “Very personable young man, he was. He didn’t get on with his dad, you know, but he used to visit sometimes. To see old friends.”

“He made friends easily,” said Granny.

“Among the ladies,” agreed Nanny. “Very athletic, wasn’t he? Could climb walls like nobody’s business, I remember hearing.”

“He was very popular at court,” said Granny. “I know that much.”

“Oh, yes. With the queen, at any rate.”

“The king used to go out hunting such a lot,” said Granny.

“It was that droit of his,” said Nanny. “Always out and about with it, he was. Hardly ever home o’nights.”

“Just a minute,” Magrat repeated.

They looked at her.

“Yes?” said Granny.

“You told everyone they were brothers and that Verence was the older!”

“That’s right.”

“And you let everyone believe that—”

Granny Weatherwax pulled her shawl around her.

“We’re bound to be truthful,” she said. “But there’s no call to be honest.”

“No, no, what you’re saying is that the King of Lancre isn’t really—”

“What I’m saying is,” said Granny firmly, “that we’ve got a king who is no worse than most and better than many and who’s got his head screwed on right—”

“Even if it is against the thread,” said Nanny.

“—and the old king’s ghost has been laid to rest happy, there’s been an enjoyable coronation and some of us got mugs we weren’t entitled to, them being only for the kiddies and, all in all, things are a lot more satisfactory than they might be. That’s what I’m saying. Never mind what should be or what might be or what ought to be. It’s what things are that’s important.”

“But he’s not really a king!”

“He might be,” said Nanny.

“But you just said—”

“Who knows? The late queen wasn’t very good at counting. Anyway, he doesn’t know he isn’t royalty.”

“And you’re not going to tell him, are you?” said Granny Weatherwax.

Magrat stared at the moon, which had a few clouds across it.

“No,” she said.

“Right, then,” said Granny. “Anyway, look at it like this. Royalty has to start somewhere. It might as well start with him. It looks as though he means to take it seriously, which is a lot further than most of them take it. He’ll do.”

Magrat knew she had lost. You always lost against Granny Weatherwax, the only interest was in seeing exactly how. “But I’m surprised at the two of you, I really am,” she said. “You’re witches. That means you have to care about things like truth and tradition and destiny, don’t you?”

“That’s where you’ve been getting it all wrong,” said Granny. “Destiny is important, see, but people go wrong when they think it controls them. It’s the other way around.”

“Bugger destiny,” agreed Nanny.

Granny glared at her.

“After all, you never thought being a witch was going to be easy, did you?”

“I’m learning,” said Magrat. She looked across the moor, where a thin rind of dawn glowed on the horizon.

“I think I’d better be off,” she said. “It’s getting early.”

“Me too,” said Nanny Ogg. “Our Shirl frets if I’m not home when she comes to get my breakfast.”

Granny carefully scuffed over the remains of the fire.

“When shall we three meet again?” she said. “Hmm?”

The witches looked at one another sheepishly.

“I’m a bit busy next month,” said Nanny. “Birthdays and such. Er. And the work has really been piling up with all this hurly-burly. You know. And there’s all the ghosts to think about.”

“I thought you sent them back to the castle,” said Granny.

“Well, they didn’t want to go,” said Nanny vaguely. “To be honest, I’ve got used to them around the place. They’re company of an evening. They hardly scream at all, now.”

“That’s nice,” said Granny. “What about you, Magrat?”

“There always seems to be such a lot to do at this time of year, don’t you find?” said Magrat.

“Quite,” said Granny Weatherwax, pleasantly. “It’s no good getting yourself tied down to appointments all the time, is it? Let’s just leave the whole question open, shall we?”

They nodded. And, as the new day wound across the landscape, each one busy with her own thoughts, each one a witch alone, they went home.*

THE END