Now read on…

When does it start?

There are very few starts. Oh, some things seem to be beginnings. The curtain goes up, the first pawn moves, the first shot is fired*—but that’s not the start. The play, the game, the war is just a little window on a ribbon of events that may extend back thousands of years. The point is, there’s always something before. It’s always a case of Now Read On.

Much human ingenuity has gone into finding the ultimate Before.

The current state of knowledge can be summarized thus:

In the beginning, there was nothing, which exploded.

Other theories about the ultimate start involve gods creating the universe out of the ribs, entrails, and testicles of their father.** There are quite a lot of these. They are interesting, not for what they tell you about cosmology, but for what they say about people. Hey, kids, which part do you think they made your town out of?

But this story starts on the Discworld, which travels through space on the back of four giant elephants which stand on the shell of an enormous turtle and is not made of any bits of anyone’s bodies.

But when to begin?

Thousands of years ago? When a great hot cascade of stones came screaming out of the sky, gouged a hole out of Copperhead Mountain, and flattened the forest for ten miles around?

The dwarfs dug them up, because they were made of a kind of iron, and dwarfs, contrary to general opinion, love iron more than gold. It’s just that although there’s more iron than gold it’s harder to sing songs about. Dwarfs love iron.

And that’s what the stones contained. The love of iron. Alove so strong that it drew all iron things to itself. The three dwarfs who found the first of the rocks only got free by struggling out of their chain-mail trousers.

Many worlds are iron, at the core. But the Discworld is as coreless as a pancake.

On the Disc, if you enchant a needle it will point to the Hub, where the magical field is strongest. It’s simple.

Elsewhere, on worlds designed with less imagination, the needle turns because of the love of iron.

At the time, the dwarfs and the humans had a very pressing need for the love of iron.

And now, spool time forward for thousands of years to a point fifty years or more before the ever-moving now, to a hillside and a young woman, running. Not running away from something, exactly, or precisely running toward anything, but running just fast enough to keep ahead of a young man although, of course, not so far ahead that he’ll give up. Out from the trees and into the rushy valley where, on a slight rise in the ground, are the stones.

They’re about man-height, and barely thicker than a fat man.

And somehow they don’t seem worth it. If there’s a stone circle you mustn’t go near, the imagination suggests, then there should be big brooding trilithons and ancient altar stones screaming with the dark memory of blood-soaked sacrifice. Not these dull stubby lumps.

It will turn out that she was running a bit too fast this time, and in fact the young man in laughing pursuit will get lost and fed up and will eventually wander off back to the town alone. She does not, at this point, know this, but stands absentmindedly adjusting the flowers twined in her hair. It’s been that kind of afternoon.

She knows about the stones. No one ever gets told about the stones. And no one is ever told not to go there, because those who refrain from talking about the stones also know how powerful is the attraction of prohibition. It’s just that going to the stones is not…what we do. Especially if we’re nice girls.

But what we have here is not a nice girl, as generally understood. For one thing, she’s not beautiful. There’s a certain set to the jaw and arch to the nose that might, with a following wind and in the right light, be called handsome by a good-natured liar. Also, there’s a certain glint in her eye generally possessed by those people who have found that they are more intelligent than most people around them but who haven’t yet learned that one of the most intelligent things they can do is prevent said people ever finding this out. Along with the nose, this gives her a piercing expression which is extremely disconcerting. It’s not a face you can talk to. Open your mouth and you’re suddenly the focus of a penetrating stare which declares: what you’re about to say had better be interesting.

Now the eight little stones on their little hill are being subjected to the same penetrating gaze.

Hmm.

And then she approaches, cautiously. It’s not the caution of a rabbit about to run. It’s closer to the way a hunter moves.

She puts her hands on her hips, such as they are.

There’s a skylark in the hot summer sky. Apart from that, there’s no sound. Down in the little valley, and higher in the hills, grasshoppers are sizzling and bees are buzzing and the grass is alive with micro-noise. But it’s always quiet around the stones.

“I’m here,” she says. “Show me.”

A figure of a dark-haired woman in a red dress appears inside the circle. The circle is wide enough to throw a stone across, but somehow the figure manages to approach from a great distance.

Other people would have run away. But the girl doesn’t, and the woman in the circle is immediately interested.

“So you’re real, then.”

“Of course. What is your name, girl?”

“Esmerelda.”

“And what do you want?”

“I don’t want anything.”

“Everyone wants something. Otherwise, why are you here?”

“I just wanted to find out if you was real.”

“To you, certainly…you have good sight.”

The girl nods. You could bounce rocks off her pride.

“And now you have learned this,” said the woman in the circle, “what is it that you really want?”

“Nothing.”

“Really? Last week you went all the way up to the mountains above Copperhead to talk to the trolls. What did you want from them?”

The girl put her head on one side.

“How do you know I did that?”

“It’s at the top of your mind, girl. Anyone could see it. Anyone with…good sight.”

“I shall be able to do that one day,” said the girl smugly.

“Who knows? Possibly. What did you want from the trolls?”

“I…wanted to talk to them. D’you know they think time goes backward? Because you can see the past, they say, and—”

The woman in the circle laughed.

“But they are like the stupid dwarfs! All they are interested in is pebbles. There is nothing of interest in pebbles.”

The girl gives a kind of one-shoulder uni-shrug, as if indicating that pebbles may be full of quiet interest.

“Why can’t you come out from between the stones?”

There was a distinct impression that this was the wrong question to have asked. The woman carefully ignored it.

“I can help you find far more than pebbles,” she said.

“You can’t come out of the circle, can you?”

“Let me give you what you want.”

“I can go anywhere, but you’re stuck in the circle,” said the girl.

“Can you go anywhere?”

“When I am a witch I shall be able to go anywhere.”

“But you’ll never be a witch.”

“What?”

“They say you won’t listen. They say you can’t keep your temper. They say you have no discipline.”

The girl tossed her hair. “Oh, you know that too, do you? Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they? But I mean to be a witch whatever they say. You can find things out for yourself. You don’t have to listen to a lot of daft old ladies who’ve never had a life. And, circle lady, I shall be the best witch there has ever been.”

“With my help, I believe you may,” said the woman in the circle. “Your young man is looking for you, I think,” she added mildly.

Another of those one-shoulder shrugs, indicating that the young man can go on looking all day.

“I will, will I?”

“You could be a great witch. You could be anything. Anything you want. Come into the circle. Let me show you.”

The girl takes a few steps forward, and then hesitates. There is something about the woman’s tone. The smile is pleasant and friendly, but there is something in the voice—too desperate, too urgent, too hungry.

“But I’m learning a lot—”

“Step through the stones now!”

The girl hesitates again.

“How do I know—”

“Circle time is nearly over! Think of what you can learn! Now!”

“But—”

“Step through!”

But that was a long time ago, in the past.* And besides, the bitch is…

…older.

 

A land of ice…

Not winter, because that presumes an autumn and perhaps one day a spring. This is a land of ice, not just a time of ice.

And three figures on horseback, looking down the snow-covered slope to a ring of eight stones. From this side they look much bigger.

You might watch the figures for some time before you realized what it was about them that was strange—stranger, that is, than their clothing. The hot breath of their horses hung in the freezing air. But the breath of the riders did not.

“And this time,” said the figure in the center, a woman in red, “there will be no defeat. The land will welcome us. It must hate humans now.”

“But there were witches,” said one of the other riders. “I remember the witches.”

“Once, yes,” said the woman. “But now…poor things, poor things. Scarce any power in them at all. And suggestible. Pliant minds. I have crept about, my deary. I have crept about o’ nights. I know the witches they have now. Leave the witches to me.”

“I remember the witches,” said the third rider insistently. “Minds like…like metal.”

“Not anymore. I tell you, leave them to me.”

The Queen smiled benevolently at the stone circle.

“And then you can have them,” she said. “For me, I rather fancy a mortal husband. A special mortal. A union of the worlds. To show them that this time we mean to stay.”

“The King will not like that.”

“And when has that ever mattered?”

“Never, lady.”

“The time is right, Lankin. The circles are opening. Soon we can return.”

The second rider leaned on the saddlehorn.

“And I can hunt again,” it said. “When? When?”

“Soon,” said the Queen. “Soon.”

 

It was a dark night, the kind of darkness which is not simply explainable by absence of moon or stars, but the darkness that appears to flow in from somewhere else—so thick and tangible that maybe you could snatch a handful of air and squeeze the night out of it.

It was the kind of darkness which causes sheep to leap fences and dogs to skulk in kennels.

Yet the wind was warm, and not so much strong as loud—it howled around the forests and wailed in chimneys.

On nights like this, normal people would pull the covers over their head, sensing that there were times when the world belonged to something else. In the morning it would be human again; there would be fallen branches, a few tiles off the roof, but human. For now…better to snuggle down…

But there was one man awake.

Jason Ogg, master blacksmith and farrier, pumped the bellows of his forge once or twice for the look of the thing, and sat down on his anvil again. It was always warm in the forge, even with the wind whistling around the eaves.

He could shoe anything, could Jason Ogg. They’d brought him an ant once, for a joke, and he’d sat up all night with a magnifying glass and an anvil made out of the head of a pin. The ant was still around, somewhere—sometimes he could hear it clatter across the floor.

But tonight…well, tonight, in some way, he was going to pay the rent. Of course, he owned the forge. It had been passed down for generations. But there was more to a forge than bricks and mortar and iron. He couldn’t put a name to it, but it was there. It was the difference between being a master farrier and just someone who bent iron in complicated ways for a living. And it had something to do with iron. And something to do with being allowed to be very good at his job. Some kind of rent.

One day his dad had taken him aside and explained what he had to do, on nights like this.

There’d be times, he said, there’d be times—and he’d know when they were without being told—there’d be times when someone would come with a horse to shoe. Make them welcome. Shoe the horse. Don’t let your mind wander. And try not to think about anything except horseshoes.

He’d got quite used to it now.

The wind rose, and somewhere there was the creak of a tree going over.

The latch rattled.

Then there was a knock at the door. Once. Twice.

Jason Ogg picked up his blindfold and put it on. That was important, his dad had said. It saved you getting distracted.

He undid the door.

“Evening, m’lord,” he said.

A WILD NIGHT.

He smelled wet horse as it was led into the forge, hooves clattering on the stones.

“There’s tea brewing on the forge and our Dreen done us some biscuits in the tin with A Present from Ankh-Morpork on it.”

THANK YOU. I TRUST YOU ARE WELL.

“Yes, m’lord. I done the shoes already. Won’t hold you up long. I know you’re…very busy, like.”

He heard the click-click of footsteps cross the floor to the old kitchen chair reserved for customers, or at least for the owners of customers.

Jason had laid the tools and the horseshoes and the nails ready to hand on the bench beside the anvil. He wiped his hands on his apron, picked up a file, and set to work. He didn’t like cold shoeing, but he’d shod horses ever since he was ten. He could do it by feel. He picked up a rasp and set to work.

And he had to admit it. It was the most obedient horse he’d ever encountered. Pity he’d never actually seen it. It’d be a pretty good horse, a horse like that…

His dad had said: don’t try to sneak a look at it.

He heard the glug of the teapot and then the glingglong sound of a spoon being stirred and then the clink as the spoon was laid down.

Never any sound, his dad had said. Except when he walks and talks, you’ll never hear him make a sound. No smacking of lips, stuff like that.

No breathing.

Oh, and another thing. When you takes the old shoes off, don’t chuck ’em in the corner for to go for melt with the other scrap. Keep ’em separate. Melt ’em separate. Keep a pot special for it, and make the new shoes out of that metal. Whatever else you do, never put that iron on another living thing.

In fact, Jason had saved one set of the old shoes for pitching contests at the various village fairs, and never lost when he used them. He won so often that it made him nervous, and now they spent most of their time hanging on a nail behind the door.

Sometimes the wind rattled the window frame, or made the coals crackle. A series of thumps and a squawk a little way off suggested that the chicken house at the end of the garden had parted company with the ground.

The customer’s owner poured himself another cup of tea.

Jason finished one hoof and let it go. Then he held out his hand. The horse shifted its weight and raised the last hoof.

This was a horse in a million. Perhaps more.

Eventually, he had finished. Funny, that. It never seemed to take very long. Jason had no use for a clock, but he had a suspicion that a job which took the best part of an hour was at the same time over in a matter of minutes.

“There,” he said. “’Tis done.”

THANK YOU. I MUST SAY THESE ARE VERY GOOD BISCUITS. HOW DO THEY GET THE BITS OF CHOCOLATE IN?

“Dunno, m’lord,” said Jason, staring fixedly at the inside of his blindfold.

I MEAN, THE CHOCOLATE OUGHT TO MELT OUT WHEN THEY’RE BAKED. HOW DO THEY DO IT, DO YOU THINK?

“’Tis probably a craft secret,” said Jason. “I never asks that kind o’ question.”

GOOD MAN. VERY WISE. I MUST—

He had to ask, if only so’s he’d always know that he had asked.

“M’lord?”

YES, MR. OGG?

“I ’as got one question…”

YES, MR. OGG?

Jason ran his tongue over his lips.

“If I were to…take the blindfold off, what’d I see?”

There. It was done now.

There was a clicking sound on the flagstones, and a change in the air movement which suggested to Jason that the speaker was now standing in front of him.

ARE YOU A MAN OF FAITH, MR. OGG?

Jason gave this some swift consideration. Lancre was not knee-deep in religions. There were the Nine Day Wonderers, and the Strict Offlians, and there were various altars to small gods of one sort or another, tucked away in distant clearings. He’d never really felt the need, just like the dwarfs. Iron was iron and fire was fire—start getting metaphysical and you were scraping your thumb on the bottom of your hammer.

WHAT DO YOU REALLY HAVE FAITH IN, RIGHT AT THIS MOMENT?

He’s inches away, Jason thought. I could reach out and touch…

There was a smell. It wasn’t unpleasant. It was hardly anything at all. It was the smell of air in old forgotten rooms. If centuries could smell, then old ones would smell like that.

MR. OGG?

Jason swallowed.

“Well, m’lord,” he said, “right now…I really believe in this blindfold.”

GOOD MAN. GOOD MAN. AND NOW…I MUST BE GOING.

Jason heard the latch lift. There was a thud as the doors scraped back, driven by the wind, and then there was the sound of hooves on the cobbles again.

YOUR WORK, AS ALWAYS, IS SUPERB.

“Thank you, m’lord.”

I SPEAK AS ONE CRAFTSMAN TO ANOTHER.

“Thank you, m’lord.”

WE WILL MEET AGAIN.

“Yes, m’lord.”

WHEN NEXT MY HORSE NEEDS SHOEING.

“Yes, m’lord.”

Jason closed the door and bolted it, although there was probably no point, when you thought about it.

But that was the bargain—you shod anything they brought to you, anything, and the payment was that you could shoe anything. There had always been a smith in Lancre, and everyone knew the smith in Lancre was a very powerful smith indeed.

It was an ancient bargain, and it had something to do with iron.

 

The wind slackened. Now it was a whisper around the horizons, as the sun rose.

This was the octarine grass country. Good growing country, especially for corn.

And here was a field of it, waving gently between the hedges. Not a big field. Not a remarkable one, really. It was just a field with corn in it, except of course during the winter, when there were just pigeons and crows in it.

The wind dropped.

The corn still waved. They weren’t the normal swells of the wind. They spread out from the center of the field like ripples from a dropped stone.

The air sizzled and was filled with an angry buzzing.

Then, in the center of the field, rustling as it bent, the young corn lay down.

In a circle.

And in the sky the bees swarmed and teemed, buzzing angrily.

 

It was a few weeks to midsummer. The kingdom of Lancre dozed in the heat, which shimmered on the forests and the fields.

Three dots appeared in the sky.

After a while, they became identifiable as three female figures on broomsticks, flying in a manner reminiscent of the famous three plaster flying ducks.

Observe them closely.

The first one—let us call her the leader—flies sitting bolt upright, in defiance of air resistance, and seems to be winning. She has features that would generally be described as striking, or even handsome, but she couldn’t be called beautiful, at least by anyone who didn’t want their nose to grow by three feet.

The second is dumpy and bandy-legged with a face like an apple that’s been left for too long and an expression of near-terminal good nature. She is playing a banjo and, until a better word comes to mind, singing. It is a song about a hedgehog.

Unlike the broomstick belonging to the first figure, which is more or less unburdened except for a sack or two, this one is overladen with things like fluffy purple toy donkeys, corkscrews in the shape of small boys urinating, bottles of wine in straw baskets, and other international cultural items. Nestling among them is the smelliest and most evil-minded cat in the world, currently asleep.

The third, and definitely the last, broomstick rider is also the youngest. Unlike the other two, who dress like ravens, she wears bright, cheerful clothes which don’t suit her now and probably didn’t even suit her ten years ago. She travels with an air of vague good-natured hopefulness. There are flowers in her hair but they’re wilting slightly, just like her.

The three witches pass over the borders of Lancre, the kingdom, and very shortly afterward over the town of Lancre itself. They begin their descent over the moorlands beyond, eventually touching down near a standing stone which happens to mark the boundaries of their territories.

They’re back.

And everything’s all right again.

For about five minutes.

 

There was a badger in the privy.

Granny Weatherwax poked it with her broom until it got the message and lumbered off. Then she took down the key which hung on the nail beside the copy of last year’s Almanack And Booke Of Dayes, and walked back up the path to her cottage.

A whole winter away! There’d be a lot to do. Go and pick the goats up from Mr. Skindle, get the spiders out of the chimney, fish the frogs out of the well, and generally get back into the business of minding everyone’s business for them because there’d be no telling what business people’d get up to without a witch around…

But she could afford an hour with her feet up first.

There was a robin’s nest in the kettle, too. The birds had got in through a broken window pane. She carefully took the kettle outside and wedged it over the door so’s to be safe from weasels, and boiled up some water in a saucepan.

Then she wound up the clock. Witches didn’t have much use for clocks, but she kept it for the tick…well, mainly for the tick. It made a place seem lived in. It had belonged to her mother, who’d wound it up every day.

It hadn’t come as a surprise to her when her mother died, firstly because Esme Weatherwax was a witch and witches have an insight into the future and secondly because she was already pretty experienced in medicine and knew the signs. So she’d had a chance to prepare herself, and hadn’t cried at all until the day afterward, when the clock stopped right in the middle of the funeral lunch. She’d dropped a tray of ham rolls and then had to go and sit by herself in the privy for a while, so that no one would see.

Time to think about that sort of thing, now. Time to think about the past…

The clock ticked. The water boiled. Granny Weatherwax fished a bag of tea from the meager luggage on her broomstick, and swilled out the teapot.

The fire settled down. The clamminess of a room unlived-in for months was gradually dispelled. The shadows lengthened.

Time to think about the past. Witches have an insight into the future. The business she’d have to mind soon enough would be her own…

And then she looked out of the window.

 

Nanny Ogg balanced carefully on a stool and ran a finger along the top of the dresser. Then she inspected the finger. It was spotless.

“Hummph,” she said. “Seems to be moderately clean.”

The daughters-in-law shivered with relief.

“So far,” Nanny added.

The three young women drew together in their mute terror.

Her relationship with her daughters-in-law was the only stain on Nanny Ogg’s otherwise amiable character. Sons-in-law were different—she could remember their names, even their birthdays, and they joined the family like overgrown chicks creeping under the wings of a broody bantam. And grandchildren were treasures, every one. But any woman incautious enough to marry an Ogg son might as well resign herself to a life of mental torture and nameless domestic servitude.

Nanny Ogg never did any housework herself, but she was the cause of housework in other people.

She got down from the stool and beamed at them.

“You kept the place quite nice,” she said. “Well done.”

Her smile faded.

“Under the bed in the spare room,” she said. “Haven’t looked under there yet, have I?”

Inquisitors would have thrown Nanny Ogg out of their ranks for being too nasty.

She turned as more members of the family filed into the room, and her face contorted into the misty grin with which she always greeted grandchildren.

Jason Ogg pushed his youngest son forward. This was Pewsey Ogg, aged four, who was holding something in his hands.

“What you got there, then?” said Nanny. “You can show your Nan.”

Pewsey held it up.

“My word, you have been a—”

It happened right there, right then, right in front of her.

 

And then there was Magrat.

She’d been away eight months.

Now panic was setting in. Technically she was engaged to the king, Verence II. Well…not exactly engaged, as such. There was, she was almost sure, a general unspoken understanding that engagement was a definite option. Admittedly she’d kept on telling him that she was a free spirit and definitely didn’t want to be tied down in any way, and of course this was the case, more or less, but…but…

But…well…eight months. Anything could have happened in eight months. She should have come straight back from Genua, but the other two had been enjoying themselves.

She wiped the dust off her mirror and examined herself critically. Not a lot to work with, really. No matter what she did with her hair it took about three minutes for it to tangle itself up again, like a garden hosepipe left in a shed.* She’d bought herself a new green dress, but what had looked exciting and attractive on the plaster model looked like a furled umbrella on Magrat.

Whereas Verence had been here reigning for eight months. Of course, Lancre was so small that you couldn’t lie down without a passport, but he was a genuine king and genuine kings tended to attract young women looking for career opportunities in the queening department.

She did her best with the dress and dragged a vengeful brush through her hair.

Then she went up to the castle.

Guard duty at Lancre castle was the province of anyone who didn’t have much of anything else to do at the moment. On duty today was Nanny Ogg’s youngest son Shawn, in ill-fitting chain-mail. He brought himself to what he probably thought was attention as Magrat pattered past, and then dropped his pike and hurried after her.

“Can you slow down a bit, please, miss?”

He overtook her, ran up the steps to the door, picked up a trumpet that was hanging from a nail by a bit of string, and blew an amateurish fanfare. Then he looked panicky again.

“Wait right there, miss, right there…count to five, and then knock,” he said, and darted through the door, slamming it behind him.

Magrat waited, and then tried the knocker.

After a few seconds Shawn opened the door. He was red in the face and had a powdered wig on back to front.

“Yeeeuss?” he drawled, and tried to look like a butler.

“You’ve still got your helmet on under the wig,” said Magrat helpfully.

Shawn deflated. His eyes swiveled upward.

“Everyone at the haymaking?” said Magrat.

Shawn raised his wig, removed the helmet, and put the wig back. Then he distractedly put the helmet back on top of the wig.

“Yes, and Mr. Spriggins the butler is in bed with his trouble again,” said Shawn. “There’s only me, miss. And I’ve got to get the dinner started before I’m off ’ome because Mrs. Scorbic is poorly.”

“You don’t have to show me in,” said Magrat. “I do know the way.”

“No, it’s got to be done proper,” said Shawn. “You just keep movin’ slow and leave it to me.”

He ran on ahead and flung open some double doors—

“Meeeyisss Magraaaaat Garrrrrli-ick!”

—and scurried toward the next set of doors.

By the third pair he was out of breath, but he did his best.

“Meeeyisss…Magraaaaa…Garrrrrli-ick…His Majesteeeyyaa the Ki—Oh, bugger, now where’s he gone?”

The throne room was empty.

They eventually found Verence II, King of Lancre, in the stable yard.

Some people are born to kingship. Some achieve kingship, or at least Arch-Generalissimo-Father-of-His-Countryship. But Verence had kingship thrust upon him. He hadn’t been raised to it, and had only arrived at the throne by way of one of those complicated mix-ups of fraternity and parentage that are all too common in royal families.

He had in fact been raised to be a Fool, a man whose job it was to caper and tell jokes and have custard poured down his trousers. This had naturally given him a grave and solemn approach to life and a grim determination never to laugh at anything ever again, especially in the presence of custard.

In the role of ruler, then, he had started with the advantage of ignorance. No one had ever told him how to be a king, so he had to find out for himself. He’d sent off for books on the subject. Verence was a great believer in the usefulness of knowledge derived from books.

He had formed the unusual opinion that the job of a king is to make the kingdom a better place for everyone to live in.

Now he was inspecting a complicated piece of equipment. It had a pair of shafts for a horse, and the rest of it looked like a cartful of windmills.

He glanced up, and smiled in an absentminded way.

“Oh, hello,” he said. “All back safe then?”

“Um—” Magrat began.

“It’s a patent crop rotator,” said Verence. He tapped the machine. “Just arrived from Ankh-Morpork. The wave of the future, you know. I’ve really been getting interested in agricultural improvement and soil efficiency. We’ll really have to get cracking on this new three-field system.”

Magrat was caught off balance.

“But I think we’ve only got three fields,” she said, “and there isn’t much soil in—”

“It’s very important to maintain the correct relationship between grains, legumes, and roots,” said Verence, raising his voice. “Also, I’m seriously considering clover. I should be interested to know what you think!”

“Um—”

“And I think we should do something about the pigs!” Verence shouted. “The Lancre Stripe! Is very hardy! But we could really bring the poundage up! By careful cross-breeding! With, say, the Sto Saddleback! I’m having a boar sent up—Shawn, will you stop blowing that damn trumpet!”

Shawn lowered the trumpet.

“I’m doin’ a fanfare, your majesty.”

“Yes, yes, but you’re not supposed to go on. A few brief notes are a sufficiency.” Verence sniffed. “And something’s burning.”

“Oh, blow…it’s the carrots…” Shawn hurried away.

“That’s better,” said Verence. “Where were we?”

“Pigs, I think,” said Magrat, “but I really came to—”

“It all comes down to the soil,” said Verence. “Get the soil right, and everything else follows. Incidentally, I’m arranging the marriage for Midsummer Day. I thought you’d like that.”

Magrat’s mouth formed an O.

“We could move it, of course, but not too much because of the harvest,” said Verence.

“I’ve had some invitations sent out already, to the more obvious guests,” said Verence.

“And I thought it might be a nice idea to have some sort of fair or festival beforehand,” said Verence.

“I asked Boggi’s in Ankh-Morpork to send up their best dressmaker with a selection of materials and one of the maids is about your size and I think you’ll be very pleased with the result,” said Verence.

“And Mr. Ironfoundersson, the dwarf, came down the mountain specially to make the crown,” said Verence.

“And my brother and Mr. Vittoller’s Men can’t come because they’re touring Klatch, apparently, but Hwel the playsmith has written a special play for the wedding entertainment. Something even rustics can’t muck up, he says,” said Verence.

“So that’s all settled then?” said Verence.

Finally, Magrat’s voice returned from some distant apogee, slightly hoarse.

“Aren’t you supposed to ask me?” she demanded.

“What? Um. No, actually,” said Verence. “No. Kings don’t ask. I looked it up. I’m the king, you see, and you are, no offense meant, a subject. I don’t have to ask.”

Magrat’s mouth opened for the scream of rage but, at last, her brain jolted into operation.

Yes, it said, of course you can yell at him and sweep away. And he’ll probably come after you.

Very probably.

Um.

Maybe not that probably. Because he might be a nice little man with gentle runny eyes but he’s also a king and he’s been looking things up. But very probably quite probably.

But…

Do you want to bet the rest of your life? Isn’t this what you wanted anyway? Isn’t it what you came here hoping for? Really?

Verence was looking at her with some concern.

“Is it the witching?” he said. “You don’t have to give that up entirely, of course. I’ve got a great respect for witches. And you can be a witch queen, although I think that means you have to wear rather revealing clothes and keep cats and give people poisoned apples. I read that somewhere. The witching’s a problem, is it?”

“No,” Magrat mumbled, “it’s not that…um…did you mention a crown?”

“You’ve got to have a crown,” said Verence. “Queens do. I looked it up.”

Her brain cut in again. Queen Magrat, it suggested. It held up the mirror of the imagination…

“You’re not upset, are you?” said Verence.

“What? Oh. No. Me? No.”

“Good. That’s all sorted out, then. I think that just about covers everything, don’t you?”

“Um—”

Verence rubbed his hands together.

“We’re doing some marvelous things with legumes,” he said, as if he hadn’t just completely rearranged Magrat’s life without consulting her. “Beans, peas…you know. Nitrogen fixers. And marl and lime, of course. Scientific husbandry. Come and look at this.”

He bounced away enthusiastically.

“You know,” he said, “we could really make this kingdom work.”

Magrat trailed after him.

So that was all settled, then. Not a proposal, just a statement. She hadn’t been quite sure how the moment would be, even in the darkest hours of the night, but she’d had an idea that roses and sunsets and bluebirds might just possibly be involved. Clover had not figured largely. Beans and other leguminous nitrogen fixers were not a central feature.

On the other hand Magrat was, at the core, far more practical than most people believed who saw no further than her vague smile and collection of more than three hundred pieces of occult jewelry, none of which worked.

So this was how you got married to a king. It all got arranged for you. There were no white horses. The past flipped straight into the future, carrying you with it.

Perhaps that was normal. Kings were busy people. Magrat’s experience of marrying them was limited.

“Where are we going?” she said.

“The old rose garden.”

Ah…well, this was more like it.

Except that there weren’t any roses. The walled garden had been stripped of its walks and arbors and was now waist high in green stalks with white flowers. Bees were furiously at work in the blossoms.

“Beans?” said Magrat.

“Yes! A specimen crop. I keep bringing the farmers up here to show them,” said Verence. He sighed. “They nod and mumble and smile but I’m afraid they just go off and do the same old things.”

“I know,” said Magrat. “The same thing happened when I tried to give people lessons in natural childbirth.”

Verence raised an eyebrow. Even to him the thought of Magrat giving lessons in childbirth to the fecund and teak-faced women of Lancre was slightly unreal.

“Really? How had they been having babies before?” he said.

“Oh, any old way,” said Magrat.

They looked at the little buzzing bean field.

“Of course, when you’re queen, you won’t need to—” Verence began.

It happened softly, almost like a kiss, as light as the touch of sunlight.

There was no wind, only a sudden heavy calmness that made the ears pop.

The stems bent and broke, and lay down in a circle.

The bees roared, and fled.

 

The three witches arrived at the standing stone together.

They didn’t even bother with explanations. There were some things you know.

“In the middle of my bloody herbs!” said Granny Weatherwax.

“On the palace garden!” said Magrat.

“Poor little mite! And he was holding it up to show me, too!” said Nanny Ogg.

Granny Weatherwax paused.

“What’re you talking about, Gytha Ogg?” she said.

“Our Pewsey was growing mustard-and-cress on a flannel for his Nan,” said Nanny Ogg, patiently. “He shows it to me, right enough, and just as I bends down and—splat! Crop circle!”

“This,” said Granny Weatherwax, “is serious. It’s been years since they’ve been as bad as this. We all know what it means, don’t we. What we’ve got—”

“Um,” said Magrat.

“—to do now is—”

“Excuse me,” said Magrat. There were some things you had to be told.

“Yes?”

“I don’t know what it means,” said Magrat. “I mean, old Goodie Whemper—”

“—maysherestinpeace—” the older witches chorused.

“—told me once that the circles were dangerous, but she never said anything about why.”

The older witches shared a glance.

“Never told you about the Dancers?” said Granny Weatherwax.

“Never told you about the Long Man?” said Nanny Ogg.

“What Dancers? You mean those old stones up on the moor?”

“All you need to know right now,” said Granny Weatherwax, “is that we’ve got to put a stop to Them.”

“What Them?”

Granny radiated innocence…

“The circles, of course,” she said.

“Oh, no,” said Magrat. “I can tell by the way you said it. You said Them as though it was some sort of curse. It wasn’t just a them, it was a them with a capital The.”

The old witches looked awkward again.

“And who’s the Long Man?” said Magrat.

“We do not,” said Granny, “ever talk about the Long Man.”

“No harm in telling her about the Dancers, at any rate,” mumbled Nanny Ogg.

“Yes, but…you know…I mean…she’s Magrat,” said Granny.

“What’s that meant to mean?” Magrat demanded.

“You probably won’t feel the same way about Them, is what I am saying,” said Granny.

“We’re talking about the—” Nanny Ogg began.

“Don’t name ’em!”

“Yeah, right. Sorry.”

“Mind you, a circle might not find the Dancers,” said Granny. “We can always hope. Could be just random.”

“But if one opens up inside the—” said Nanny Ogg.

Magrat snapped.

“You just do this on purpose! You talk in code the whole time! You always do this! But you won’t be able to when I’m queen!”

That stopped them.

Nanny Ogg put her head on one side.

“Oh?” she said. “Young Verence popped the question, then?”

“Yes!”

“When’s the happy event?” said Granny Weatherwax, icily.

“Two weeks’ time,” said Magrat. “Midsummer Day.”

“Bad choice, bad choice,” said Nanny Ogg. “Shortest night o’ the year—”

“Gytha Ogg!”

“And you’ll be my subjects,” said Magrat, ignoring this. “And you’ll have to curtsy and everything!”

She knew as soon as she said it that it was stupid, but anger drove her on.

Granny Weatherwax’s eyes narrowed.

“Hmm,” she said. “We will, will we?”

“Yes, and if you don’t,” said Magrat, “you can get thrown in prison.”

“My word,” said Granny. “Deary deary me. I wouldn’t like that. I wouldn’t like that at all.”

All three of them knew that the castle dungeons, which in any case had never been its most notable feature, were now totally unused. Verence II was the most amiable monarch in the history of Lancre. His subjects regarded him with the sort of good-natured contempt that is the fate of all those who work quietly and conscientiously for the public good. Besides, Verence would rather cut his own leg off than put a witch in prison, since it’d save trouble in the long run and probably be less painful.

“Queen Magrat, eh?” said Nanny Ogg, trying to lighten the atmosphere a bit. “Cor. Well, the old castle could do with a bit of lightening up—”

“Oh, it’ll lighten up all right,” said Granny.

“Well, anyway, I don’t have to bother with this sort of thing,” said Magrat. “Whatever it is. It’s your business. I just shan’t have time, I’m sure.”

“I’m sure you can please yourself, your going-to-be-majesty,” said Granny Weatherwax.

“Hah!” said Magrat. “I can! You can jol—you can damn well find another witch for Lancre! All right? Another soppy girl to do all the dreary work and never be told anything and be talked over the head of the whole time. I’ve got better things to do!”

“Better things than being a witch?” said Granny.

Magrat walked into it.

“Yes!”

“Oh, dear,” murmured Nanny.

“Oh. Well, then I expect you’ll be wanting to be off,” said Granny, her voice like knives. “Back to your palace, I’ll be bound.”

“Yes!”

Magrat picked up her broomstick.

Granny’s arm shot out very fast and grabbed the handle.

“Oh, no,” she said, “you don’t. Queens ride around in golden coaches and whatnot. Each to their own. Brooms is for witches.”

“Now come on, you two,” began Nanny Ogg, one of nature’s mediators. “Anyway, someone can be a queen and a w—”

“Who cares?” said Magrat, dropping the broomstick. “I don’t have to bother with that sort of thing anymore.”

She turned, clutched at her dress, and ran. She became a figure outlined against the sunset.

“You daft old besom, Esme,” said Nanny Ogg. “Just because she’s getting wed.”

“You know what she’d say if we told her,” said Granny Weatherwax. “She’d get it all wrong. The Gentry. Circles. She’d say it was…nice. Best for her if she’s out of it.”

“They ain’t been active for years and years,” said Nanny. “We’ll need some help. I mean…when did you last go up to the Dancers?”

“You know how it is,” said Granny. “When it’s so quiet…you don’t think about ’em.”

“We ought to have kept ’em cleared.”

“True.”

“We better get up there first thing tomorrow,” said Nanny Ogg.

“Yes.”

“Better bring a sickle, too.”

 

There isn’t much of the kingdom of Lancre where you could drop a football and not have it roll away from you. Most of it is moorland and steeply forested hillside, giving way to sharp and ragged mountains where even trolls wouldn’t go and valleys so deep that they have to pipe the sunlight in.

There was an overgrown path up to the moorland where the Dancers stood, even though it was only a few miles from the town. Hunters tracked up there sometimes, but only by accident. It wasn’t that the hunting was bad but, well—

—there were the stones.

Stone circles were common enough everywhere in the mountains. Druids built them as weather computers and since it was always cheaper to build a new 33-MegaLith circle than upgrade an old slow one there were generally plenty of ancient ones around.

No druids ever came near the Dancers.

The stones weren’t shaped. They weren’t even positioned in any particularly significant way. There wasn’t any of that stuff about the sun striking the right stone at dawn on the right day. Someone had just dragged eight red rocks into a rough circle.

But the weather was different. People said that, if it started to rain, it always began to fall inside the circle a few seconds after it had started outside, as if the rain was coming from further away. If clouds crossed the sun, it’d be a moment or two before the light faded inside the circle.

William Scrope is going to die in a couple of minutes. It has to be said that he shouldn’t have been hunting deer out of season, and especially not the fine stag he was tracking, and certainly not a fine stag of the Ramtop Red species, which is officially endangered although not as endangered, right now, as William Scrope.

It was ahead of him, pushing through the bracken, making so much noise that a blind man could have tracked it.

Scrope waded through after it.

Mist was still hanging around the stones, not in a blanket but in long raggedy strings.

The stag reached the circle now, and stopped. It trotted back and forth once or twice, and then looked up at Scrope.

He raised the crossbow.

The stag turned, and leapt between the stones.

There were only confused impressions from then on. The first was of—

—distance. The circle was a few yards across, it shouldn’t suddenly appear to contain so much distance.

And the next was of—

—speed. Something was coming out of the circle, a white dot growing bigger and bigger.

He knew he’d aimed the bow. But it was whirled out of his hands as the thing struck, and suddenly there was only the sensation of—

—peace.

And the brief remembrance of pain.

William Scrope died.

William Scrope looked through his hands at the crushed bracken. The reason that it was crushed was that his own body was sprawled upon it.

His newly deceased eyes surveyed the landscape.

There are no delusions for the dead. Dying is like waking up after a really good party, when you have one or two seconds of innocent freedom before you recollect all the things you did last night which seemed so logical and hilarious at the time, and then you remember the really amazing thing you did with a lampshade and two balloons, which had them in stitches, and now you realize you’re going to have to look a lot of people in the eye today and you’re sober now and so are they but you can both remember.

“Oh,” he said.

The landscape flowed around the stones. It was all so obvious now, when you saw it from the outside…

Obvious. No walls, only doors. No edges, only corners—

WILLIAM SCROPE.

“Yes?”

IF YOU WOULD PLEASE STEP THIS WAY.

“Are you a hunter?”

I LIKE TO THINK I AM A PICKER-UP OF UNCONSIDERED TRIFLES.

Death grinned hopefully. Scrope’s post-physical brow furrowed.

“What? Like…sherry, custard…that sort of thing?”

Death sighed. Metaphors were wasted on people. Sometimes he felt that no one took him seriously enough.

I TAKE AWAY PEOPLE’S LIVES IS WHAT I MEAN, he said testily.

“Where to?”

WE SHALL HAVE TO SEE, WON’T WE?

William Scrope was already fading into the mist.

“That thing that got me—”

YES?

“I thought they were extinct!”

“NO. THEY JUST WENT AWAY.

“Where to?”

Death extended a bony digit.

OVER THERE.

 

Magrat hadn’t originally intended to move into the palace before the wedding, because people would talk. Admittedly a dozen people lived in the palace, which had a huge number of rooms, but she’d still be under the same roof, and that was good enough. Or bad enough.

That was before. Now her blood was sizzling. Let people talk. She had a pretty good idea which people they’d be, too. Which person, anyway. Witch person. Hah. Let them talk all they liked.

She got up early and packed her possessions, such as they were. It wasn’t exactly her cottage, and most of the furniture went with it. Witches came and went, but witches’ cottages went on forever, usually with the same thatch they started with.

But she did own the set of magical knives, the mystic colored cords, the assorted grails and crucibles, and a box full of rings, necklaces, and bracelets heavy with the hermetic symbols of a dozen religions. She tipped them all into a sack.

Then there were the books. Goodie Whemper had been something of a bookworm among witches. There were almost a dozen. She hesitated about the books, and finally she let them stay on the shelves.

There was the statutory pointy hat. She’d never liked it anyway, and had always avoided wearing it. Into the sack with it.

She looked around wild-eyed until she spotted the small cauldron in the inglenook. That’d do. Into the sack with that, and then tie the neck with string.

On the way up to the palace she crossed the bridge over Lancre Gorge and tossed the sack into the river.

It bobbed for a moment in the strong current, and then sank.

She’d secretly hoped for a string of multicolored bubbles, or even a hiss. But it just sank. Just as if it wasn’t anything very important.

 

Another world, another castle…

The elf galloped over the frozen moat, steam billowing from its black horse and from the thing it carried over its neck.

It rode up the steps and into the hall itself, where the Queen sat amidst her dreams…

“My lord Lankin?”

“A stag!”

It was still alive. Elves were skilled at leaving things alive, often for weeks.

“From out of the circle?”

“Yes, lady!”

“It’s weakening. Did I not tell you?”

“How long? How long?”

“Soon. Soon. What went through the other way?”

The elf tried to avoid her face.

“Your…pet, lady.”

“No doubt it won’t go far.” The Queen laughed. “No doubt it will have an amusing time…”

 

It rained briefly at dawn.

There’s nothing nastier to walk through than shoulder-high wet bracken. Well, there is. There are an uncountable number of things nastier to walk through, especially if they’re shoulder-high. But here and now, thought Nanny Ogg, it was hard to think of more than one or two.

They hadn’t landed inside the Dancers, of course. Even birds detoured rather than cross that airspace. Migrating spiders on gossamer threads floating half a mile up curved around it. Clouds split in two and flowed around it.

Mist hung around the stones. Sticky, damp mist.

Nanny hacked vaguely at the clinging bracken with her sickle.

“You there, Esme?” she muttered.

Granny Weatherwax’s head rose from a clump of bracken a few feet away.

“There’s been things going on,” she said, in a cold and deliberate tone.

“Like what?”

“All the bracken and weeds is trampled around the stones. I reckon someone’s been dancing.”

Nanny Ogg gave this the same consideration as would a nuclear physicist who’d just been told that someone was banging two bits of sub-critical uranium together to keep warm.

“They never,” she said.

“They have. And another thing…”

It was hard to imagine what other thing there could be, but Nanny Ogg said “Yes?” anyway.

“Someone got killed up here.”

“Oh, no,” moaned Nanny Ogg. “Not inside the circle too.”

“Nope. Don’t be daft. It was outside. A tall man. He had one leg longer’n the other. And a beard. He was probably a hunter.”

“How’d you know all that?”

“I just trod on ’im.”

The sun rose through the mists.

 

The morning rays were already caressing the ancient stones of Unseen University, premier college of wizardry, five hundred miles away.

Not that many wizards were aware of this.

For most of the wizards of Unseen University their lunch was the first meal of the day. They were not, by and large, breakfast people. The Archchancellor and the Librarian were the only two who knew what the dawn looked like from the front, and they tended to have the entire campus to themselves for several hours.

The Librarian was always up early because he was an orang-utan, and they are naturally early risers, although in his case he didn’t bellow a few times to keep other males off his territory. He just unlocked the Library and fed the books.

And Mustrum Ridcully, the current Archchancellor, liked to wander around the sleepy buildings, nodding to the servants and leaving little notes for his subordinates, usually designed for no other purpose than to make it absolutely clear that he was up and attending to the business of the day while they were still fast asleep.*

Today, however, he had something else on his mind. More or less literally.

It was round. There was healthy growth all around it. He could swear it hadn’t been there yesterday.

He turned his head this way and that, squinting at the reflection in the mirror of the other mirror he was holding above his head.

The next member of staff to wake up after Ridcully and the Librarian was the Bursar; not because he was a naturally early riser, but because by around ten o’clock the Archchancellor’s very limited supply of patience came to an end and he would stand at the bottom of the stairs and shout:

“Bursaaar!”

—until the Bursar appeared.

In fact it happened so often that the Bursar, a natural neurovore,* frequently found that he’d got up and dressed himself in his sleep several minutes before the bellow. On this occasion he was upright and fully clothed and halfway to the door before his eyes snapped open.

Ridcully never wasted time on small talk. It was always large talk or nothing.

“Yes, Archchancellor?” said the Bursar, glumly.

The Archchancellor removed his hat.

“What about this, then?” he demanded.

“Um, um, um…what, Archchancellor?”

“This, man! This!”

Close to panic, the Bursar stared desperately at the top of Ridcully’s head.

“The what? Oh. The bald spot?”

“I have not got a bald spot!”

“Um, then—”

“I mean it wasn’t there yesterday!”

“Ah. Well. Um.” At a certain point something always snapped inside the Bursar, and he couldn’t stop himself. “Of course these things do happen and my grandfather always swore by a mixture of honey and horse manure, he rubbed it on every day—”

“I’m not going bald!”

A tic started to dance across the Bursar’s face. The words started to come out by themselves, without the apparent intervention of his brain.

“—and then he got this device with a glass rod and, and, and you rubbed it with a silk cloth and—”

“I mean it’s ridiculous! My family have never gone bald, except for one of my aunts!”

“—and, and, and then he’d collect morning dew and wash his head, and, and, and—”

Ridcully subsided. He was not an unkind man.

“What’re you taking for it at the moment?” he murmured.

“Dried, dried, dried, dried,” stuttered the Bursar.

“The old dried frog pills, right?”

“R-r-r-r.”

“Left-hand pocket?”

“R-r-r-r.”

“OK…right…swallow…”

They stared at one another for a moment.

The Bursar sagged.

“M-m-much better now, Archchancellor, thank you.”

“Something’s definitely happening, Bursar. I can feel it in my water.”

“Anything you say, Archchancellor.”

“Bursar?”

“Yes, Archchancellor?”

“You ain’t a member of some secret society or somethin’, are you?”

“Me? No, Archchancellor.”

“Then it’d be a damn good idea to take your underpants off your head.”

 

“Know him?” said Granny Weatherwax.

Nanny Ogg knew everyone in Lancre, even the forlorn thing on the bracken.

“It’s William Scrope, from over Slice way,” she said. “One of three brothers. He married that Palliard girl, remember? The one with the air-cooled teeth?”

“I hope the poor woman’s got some respectable black clothes,” said Granny Weatherwax.

“Looks like he’s been stabbed,” said Nanny. She turned the body over, gently but firmly. Corpses as such didn’t worry her. Witches generally act as layers-out of the dead as well as midwives; there were plenty of people in Lancre for whom Nanny Ogg’s face had been the first and last thing they’d ever seen, which had probably made all the bit in the middle seem quite uneventful by comparison.

“Right through,” she said. “Stabbed right through. Blimey. Who’d do a thing like that?”

Both the witches turned to look at the stones.

“I don’t know what, but I knows where it come from,” said Granny.

Now Nanny Ogg could see that the bracken all around the stones was indeed well trodden down, and quite brown.

“I’m going to get to the bottom of this,” said Granny.

“You’d better not go into—”

“I knows exactly where I should go, thank you.”

There were eight stones in the Dancers. Three of them had names. Granny walked around the ring until she reached the one known as the Piper.

She removed a hatpin from among the many that riveted her pointy hat to her hair and held it about six inches from the stone. Then she let it go, and watched what happened.

She went back to Nanny.

“There’s still power there,” she said. “Not much, but the ring is holding.”

“But who’d be daft enough to come up here and dance around the stones?” said Nanny Ogg, and then, as a treacherous thought drifted across her mind, she added, “Magrat’s been away with us the whole time.”

“We shall have to find out,” said Granny, setting her face in a grim smile. “Now help me up with the poor man.”

Nanny Ogg bent to the task.

“Coo, he’s heavy. We could’ve done with young Magrat up here.”

“No. Flighty,” said Granny Weatherwax. “Head easily turned.”

“Nice girl, though.”

“But soppy. She thinks you can lead your life as if fairy stories work and folk songs are really true. Not that I don’t wish her every happiness.”

“Hope she does all right as queen,” said Nanny.

“We taught her everything she knows,” said Granny Weatherwax.

“Yeah,” said Nanny Ogg, as they disappeared into the bracken. “D’you think…maybe…?”

“What?”

“D’you think maybe we ought to have taught her everything we know?”

“It’d take too long.”

“Yeah, right.”

 

It took a while for letters to get as far as the Archchancellor. The post tended to be picked up from the University gates by anyone who happened to be passing, and then left lying on a shelf somewhere or used as a pipe lighter or a bookmark or, in the case of the Librarian, as bedding.

This one had only taken two days, and was quite intact apart from a couple of cup rings and a bananary fingerprint. It arrived on the table along with the other post while the faculty were at breakfast. The Dean opened it with a spoon.

“Anyone here know where Lancre is?” he said.

“Why?” said Ridcully, looking up sharply.

“Some king’s getting married and wants us to come.”

“Oh dear, oh dear,” said the Lecturer in Recent Runes. “Some tinpot king gets wed and he wants us to come?”

“It’s up in the mountains,” said the Archchancellor, quietly. “Good trout fishin’ in those parts, as I recall. My word. Lancre. Good grief. Hadn’t thought about the place in years. You know, there’s glacier lakes up there where the fish’ve never seen a rod. Lancre. Yes.”

“And it’s far too far,” said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.

Ridcully wasn’t listening. “And there’s deer. Thousands of head of deer. And elk. Wolves all over the place. Mountain lions too, I shouldn’t wonder. I heard that Ice Eagles have been seen up there again, too.”

His eyes gleamed.

“There’s only half a dozen of ’em left,” he said.

Mustrum Ridcully did a lot for rare species. For one thing, he kept them rare.

“It’s the back of beyond,” said the Dean. “Right off the edge of the map.”

“Used to stay with my uncle up there, in the holidays,” said Ridcully, his eyes misty with distance. “Great days I had up there. Great days. The summers up there…and the sky’s a deeper blue than anywhere else, it’s very…and the grass…and…”

He returned abruptly from the landscapes of memory.

“Got to go, then,” he said. “Duty calls. Head of state gettin’ married. Important occasion. Got to have a few wizards there. Look of the thing. Nobblyess obligay.”

“Well, I’m not going,” said the Dean. “It’s not natural, the countryside. Far too many trees. Never could stand it.”

“The Bursar could do with an outing,” said Ridcully. “Seems a bit jumpy just lately, can’t imagine why.” He leaned forward to look along the High Table. “Bursaaar!”

The Bursar dropped his spoon into his oatmeal.

“See what I mean?” said Ridcully. “Bundle o’ nerves the whole time. I WAS SAYING YOU COULD DO WITH SOME FRESH AIR, BURSAR.” He nudged the Dean heavily. “Hope he’s not going off his rocker, poor fella,” he said, in what he chose to believe was a whisper. “Spends too much time indoors, if you get my drift.”

The Dean, who went outdoors about once a month, shrugged his shoulders.

“I EXPECT YOU’D LIKE A LITTLE TIME AWAY FROM THE UNIVERSITY, EH?” said the Archchancellor, nodding and grimacing madly. “Peace and quiet? Healthy country livin’?”

“I, I, I, I should like that very much, Archchancellor,” said the Bursar, hope rising in his face like an autumn mushroom.

“Good man. Good man. You shall come with me,” said Ridcully, beaming.

The Bursar’s expression froze.

“Got to be someone else, too,” said Ridcully. “Volunteers, anyone?”

The wizards, townies to a man, bent industriously over their food. They always bent industriously over their food in any case, but this time they were doing it to avoid catching Ridcully’s eye.

“What about the Librarian?” said the Lecturer in Recent Runes, throwing a random victim to the wolves.

There was a sudden babble of relieved agreement.

“Good choice,” said the Dean. “Just the thing for him. Countryside. Trees. And…and…trees.”

“Mountain air,” said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.

“Yes, he’s been looking peaky lately,” said the Reader in Invisible Writings.

“It’d be a real treat for him,” said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.

“Home away from home, I expect,” said the Dean. “Trees all over the place.”

They all looked expectantly at the Archchancellor.

“He doesn’t wear clothes,” said Ridcully. “And he goes ‘ook’ all the time.”

“He does wear the old green robe thing,” said the Dean.

“Only when he’s had a bath.”

Ridcully rubbed his beard. In fact he quite liked the Librarian, who never argued with him and always kept himself in shape, even if that shape was a pear shape. It was the right shape for an orang-utan.

The thing about the Librarian was that no one noticed he was an orang-utan anymore, unless a visitor to the University happened to point it out. In which case someone would say, “Oh, yes. Some kind of magical accident, wasn’t it? Pretty sure it was something like that. One minute human, next minute an ape. Funny thing, really…can’t remember what he looked like before. I mean, he must have been human, I suppose. Always thought of him as an ape, really. It’s more him.”

And indeed it had been an accident among the potent and magical books of the University library that had as it were bounced the Librarian’s genotype down the evolutionary tree and back up a different branch, with the significant difference that now he could hang on to it upside down with his feet.

“Oh, all right,” said the Archchancellor. “But he’s got to wear something during the ceremony, if only for the sake of the poor bride.”

There was a whimper from the Bursar.

All the wizards turned toward him.

His spoon landed on the floor with a small thud. It was wooden. The wizards had gently prevented him from having metal cutlery since what was now known as the Unfortunate Incident At Dinner.

“A-a-a-a,” gurgled the Bursar, trying to push himself away from the table.

“Dried frog pills,” said the Archchancellor. “Someone fish ’em out of his pocket.”

The wizards didn’t rush this. You could find anything in a wizard’s pocket—peas, unreasonable things with legs, small experimental universes, anything…

The Reader in Invisible Writings craned to see what had unglued his colleague.

“Here, look at his porridge,” he said.

There was a perfect round depression in the oatmeal.

“Oh dear, another crop circle,” said the Dean.

The wizards relaxed.

“Damn things turning up everywhere this year,” said the Archchancellor. He hadn’t taken his hat off to eat the meal. This was because it was holding down a poultice of honey and horse manure and a small mouse-powered electrostatic generator he’d got those clever young fellas in the High Energy Magic research building to knock together for him, clever fellas they were, one day he might even understand half of what they were always gabblin’ on about…

In the meantime, he’d keep his hat on.

“Particularly strong, too,” said the Dean. “The gardener told me yesterday they’re playing merry hell with the cabbages.”

“I thought them things only turned up out in fields and things,” said Ridcully. “Perfectly normal natural phenomenon.”

“If there is a suitably high flux level, the inter-continuum pressure can probably overcome quite a high base reality quotient,” said the Reader in Invisible Writings.

The conversation stopped. Everyone turned to look at this most wretched and least senior member of the staff.

The Archancellor glowered.

“I don’t even want you to begin to start explainin’ that,” he said. “You’re probably goin’ to go on about the universe bein’ a rubber sheet with weights on it again, right?”

“Not exactly a—”

“And the word ‘quantum’ is hurryin’ toward your lips again,” said Ridcully.

“Well, the—”

“And ‘continuinuinuum’ too, I expect,” said Ridcully.

The Reader in Invisible Writings, a young wizard whose name was Ponder Stibbons, sighed deeply.

“No, Archchancellor, I was merely pointing out—”

“It’s not wormholes again, is it?”

Stibbons gave up. Using a metaphor in front of a man as unimaginative as Ridcully was like a red rag to a bu—was like putting something very annoying in front of someone who was annoyed by it.

It was very hard, being a reader in Invisible Writings.*

“I reckon you’d better come too,” said Ridcully.

“Me, Archchancellor?”

“Can’t have you skulking around the place inventing millions of other universes that’re too small to see and all the rest of that continuinuinuum stuff,” said Ridcully. “Anyway, I shall need someone to carry my rods and crossbo—my stuff,” he corrected himself.

Stibbons stared at his plate. It was no good arguing. What he had really wanted out of life was to spend the next hundred years of it in the University, eating big meals and not moving much in between them. He was a plump young man with a complexion the color of something that lives under a rock. People were always telling him to make something of his life, and that’s what he wanted to do. He wanted to make a bed of it.

“But, Archchancellor,” said the Lecturer in Recent Runes, “it’s still too damn far.”

“Nonsense,” said Ridcully. “They’ve got that new turnpike open all the way to Sto Helit now. Coaches every Wednesday, reg’lar. Bursaaar! Oh, give him a dried frog pill, someone…Mr. Stibbons, if you could happen to find yourself in this universe for five minutes, go and arrange some tickets. There. All sorted out, right?”

 

Magrat woke up.

And knew she wasn’t a witch anymore. The feeling just crept over her, as part of the normal stock-taking that any body automatically does in the first seconds of emergence from the pit of dreams: arms: 2, legs: 2, existential dread: 58%, randomized guilt: 94%, witchcraft level: 00.00.

The point was, she couldn’t remember ever being anything else. She’d always been a witch. Magrat Garlick, third witch, that was what she was. The soft one.

She knew she’d never been much good at it. Oh, she could do some spells and do them quite well, and she was good at herbs, but she wasn’t a witch in the bone like the old ones. They made sure she knew it.

Well, she’d just have to learn queening. At least she was the only one in Lancre. No one’d be looking over her shoulder the whole time, saying things like, “You ain’t holding that scepter right!”

Right…

Someone had stolen her clothes in the night.

She got up in her nightshirt and hopped over the cold flagstones to the door. She was halfway there when it opened of its own accord.

She recognized the small dark girl that came in, barely visible behind a stack of linen. Most people in Lancre knew everyone else.

“Millie Chillum?”

The linen bobbed a curtsy.

“Yes’m?”

Magrat lifted up part of the stack.

“It’s me, Magrat,” she said. “Hello.”

“Yes’m.” Another bob.

“What’s up with you, Millie?”

“Yes’m.” Bob, bob.

“I said it’s me. You don’t have to look at me like that.”

“Yes’m.”

The nervous bobbing continued. Magrat found her own knees beginning to jerk in sympathy but as it were behind the beat, so that as she was bobbing down she overtook the girl bobbing up.

“If you say ‘yes’m’ again, it will go very hard with you,” she managed, as she went past.

“Y—right, your majesty, m’m.”

Faint light began to dawn.

“I’m not queen yet, Millie. And you’ve known me for twenty years,” panted Magrat, on the way up.

“Yes’m. But you’re going to be queen. So me mam told me I was to be respectful,” said Millie, still curtsying nervously.

“Oh. Well. All right, then. Where are my clothes?”

“Got ’em here, your pre-majesty.”

“They’re not mine. And please stop going up and down all the time. I feel a bit sick.”

“The king ordered ’em from Sto Helit special, m’m.”

“Did he, eh? How long ago?”

“Dunno, m’m.”

He knew I was coming home, thought Magrat. How? What’s going on here?

There was a good deal more lace than Magrat was used to, but that was, as it were, the icing on the cake. Magrat normally wore a simple dress with not much underneath it except Magrat. Ladies of quality couldn’t get away with that kind of thing. Millie had been provided with a sort of technical diagram, but it wasn’t much help.

They studied it for some time.

“This is a standard queen outfit, then?”

“Couldn’t say, m’m. I think his majesty just sent ’em a lot of money and said to send you everything.”

They spread out the bits on the floor.

“Is this the pantoffle?”

Outside, on the battlements, the guard changed. In fact he changed into his gardening apron and went off to hoe the beans. Inside, there was considerable sartorial discussion.

“I think you’ve got it up the wrong way, m’m. Which bit’s the farthingale?”

“Says here Insert Tabbe A into Slotte B. Can’t find Slotte B.”

“These’re like saddlebags. I’m not wearing these. And this thing?”

“A ruff, m’m. Um. They’re all the rage in Sto Helit, my brother says.”

“You mean they make people angry? And what’s this?”

“Brocade, I think.”

“It’s like cardboard. Do I have to wear this sort of thing everyday?”

“Don’t know, I’m sure, m’m.”

“But Verence just trots around in leather gaiters and an old jacket!”

“Ah, but you’re queen. Queens can’t do that sort of thing. Everyone knows that, m’m. It’s all right for kings to go wandering around with their arse half out their trous—”

She rammed her hand over her mouth.

“It’s all right,” said Magrat. “I’m sure even kings have…tops to their legs just like everyone else. Just go on with what you were saying.”

Millie had gone bright red.

“I mean, I mean, I mean, queens has got to be ladylike,” she managed. “The king got books about it. Ettiquetty and stuff.”

Magrat surveyed herself critically in the mirror.

“It really suits you, your soon-going-to-be-majesty,” said Millie.

Magrat turned this way and that.

“My hair’s a mess,” she said, after a while.

“Please m’m, the king said he’s having a hairdresser come all the way from Ankh-Morpork, m’m. For the wedding.”

Magrat patted a tress into place. It was beginning to dawn on her that being a queen was a whole new life.

“My word,” she said. “And what happens now?”

“Dunno, m’m.”

“What’s the king doing?”

“Oh, he had breakfast early and buggered off over to Slice to show old Muckloe how to breed his pigs out of a book.”

“So what do I do? What’s my job?”

Millie looked puzzled although this did not involve much of a change in her general expression.

“Dunno, m’m. Reigning, I suppose. Walking around in the garden. Holding court. Doin’ tapestry. That’s very popular among queens. And then…er…later on there’s the royal succession…”

“At the moment,” said Magrat firmly, “we’ll have a go at the tapestry.”

 

Ridcully was having difficulty with the Librarian.

“I happen to be your Archchancellor, sir!”

“Oook.”

“You’ll like it up there! Fresh air! Bags of trees! More woods than you can shake a stick at!”

“Oook!”

“Come down this minute!”

“Oook!”

“The books’ll be quite safe here during the holidays. Good grief, it’s hard enough to get students to come in here at the best of times—”

“Oook!”

Ridcully glared at the Librarian, who was hanging by his toes from the top shelf of Parazoology Ba to Mn.

“Oh, well,” he said, his voice suddenly low and cunning, “it’s a great shame, in the circumstances. They’ve got a pretty good library in Lancre castle, I heard. Well, they call it a library—it’s just a lot of old books. Never had a catalogue near ’em, apparently.”

“Oook?”

“Thousands of books. Someone told me there’s incunibles, too. Shame, really, you not wanting to see them.”

Ridcully’s voice could have greased axles.

“Oook?”

“But I can see your mind is quite made up. So I shall be going. Farewell.”

Ridcully paused outside the Library door, counting under his breath. He’d reached “three” when the Librarian knuckled through at high speed, caught by the incunibles.

“So that’ll be four tickets, then?” said Ridcully.

 

Granny Weatherwax set about finding out what had been happening around the stones in her own distinctive way.

People underestimate bees.

Granny Weatherwax didn’t. She had half a dozen hives of them and knew, for example, there is no such creature as an individual bee. But there is such a creature as a swarm, whose component cells are just a bit more mobile than those of, say, the common whelk. Swarms see everything and sense a lot more, and they can remember things for years, although their memory tends to be external and built out of wax. A honeycomb is a hive’s memory—the placement of egg cells, pollen cells, queen cells, honey cells, different types of honey, are all part of the memory array.

And then there are the big fat drones. People think all they do is hang around the hive all year, waiting for those few brief minutes when the queen even notices their existence, but that doesn’t explain why they’ve got more sense organs than the roof of the CIAbuilding.

Granny didn’t really keep bees. She took some old wax every year, for candles, and the occasional pound of honey that the hives felt they could spare, but mainly she had them for someone to talk to.

For the first time since she’d returned home, she went to the hives.

And stared.

Bees were boiling out of the entrances. The thrum of wings filled the normally calm little patch behind the raspberry bushes. Brown bodies zipped through the air like horizontal hail.

She wished she knew why.

Bees were her one failure. There wasn’t a mind in Lancre she couldn’t Borrow. She could even see the world through the eyes of earthworms.* But a swarm, a mind made up of thousands of mobile parts, was beyond her. It was the toughest test of all. She’d tried over and over again to ride on one, to see the world through ten thousand pairs of multifaceted eyes all at once, and all she’d ever got was a migraine and an inclination to make love to flowers.

But you could tell a lot from just watching bees. The activity, the direction, the way the guard bees acted…

They were acting extremely worried.

So she went for a lie down, as only Granny Weatherwax knew how.

 

Nanny Ogg tried a different way, which didn’t have much to do with witchcraft but did have a lot to do with her general Oggishness.

She sat for a while in her spotless kitchen, drinking rum and smoking her foul pipe and staring at the paintings on the wall. They had been done by her youngest grandchildren in a dozen shades of mud, most of them of blobby stick figures with the word GRAN blobbily blobbed in underneath in muddy blobby letters.

In front of her the cat Greebo, glad to be home again, lay on his back with all four paws in the air, doing his celebrated something-found-in-the-gutter impersonation.

Finally Nanny got up and ambled thoughtfully down to Jason Ogg’s smithy.

A smithy always occupied an important position in the villages, doing the duty of town hall, meeting room, and general clearing house for gossip. Several men were lounging around in it now, filling in time between the normal Lancre occupations of poaching and watching the women do the work.

“Jason Ogg, I wants a word with you.”

The smithy emptied like magic. It was probably something in Nanny Ogg’s tone of voice. But Nanny reached out and grabbed one man by the arm as he tried to go past at a sort of stumbling crouch.

“I’m glad I’ve run into you, Mr. Quarney,” she said. “Don’t rush off. Store doing all right, is it?”

Lancre’s only storekeeper gave her the look a three-legged mouse gives an athletic cat. Nevertheless, he tried.

“Oh, terrible bad, terrible bad business is right now, Mrs. Ogg.”

“Same as normal, eh?”

Mr. Quarney’s expression was pleading. He knew he wasn’t going to get out without something, he just wanted to know what it was.

“Well, now,” said Nanny, “you know the widow Scrope, lives over in Slice?”

Quarney’s mouth opened.

“She’s not a widow,” he said. “She—”

“Bet you half a dollar?” said Nanny.

Quarney’s mouth stayed open, and around it the rest of his face recomposed itself in an expression of fascinated horror.

“So she’s to be allowed credit, right, until she gets the farm on its feet,” said Nanny, in the silence. Quarney nodded mutely.

“That goes for the rest of you men listening outside the door,” said Nanny, raising her voice. “Dropping a cut of meat on her doorstep once a week wouldn’t come amiss, eh? And she’ll probably want extra help come harvest. I knows I can depend on you all. Now, off you go…”

They ran for it, leaving Nanny Ogg standing triumphantly in the doorway.

Jason Ogg looked at her hopelessly, a fifteen-stone man reduced to a four-year-old boy.

“Jason?”

“I got to do this bit of brazing for old—”

“So,” said Nanny, ignoring him, “what’s been happening in these parts while we’ve been away, my lad?”

Jason poked at the fire distractedly with an iron bar.

“Oh, well, us had a big whirlwind on Hogswatchnight and one of Mother Peason’s hens laid the same egg three times, and old Poorchick’s cow gave birth to a seven-headed snake, and there was a rain of frogs over in Slice—”

“Been pretty normal, then,” said Nanny Ogg. She refilled her pipe in a casual but meaningful way.

“All very quiet, really,” said Jason. He pulled the bar out of the fire, laid it on the anvil, and raised his hammer.

“I’ll find out sooner or later, you know,” said Nanny Ogg.

Jason didn’t turn his head, but his hammer stopped in mid-air.

“I always does, you know,” said Nanny Ogg.

The iron cooled from the color of fresh straw to bright red.

“You knows you always feels better for telling your old mum,” said Nanny Ogg.

The iron cooled from red to spitting black. But Jason, used all day to the searing heat of a forge, seemed to be uncomfortably warm.

“I should beat it up before it gets cold,” said Nanny Ogg.

“Weren’t my fault, Mum! How could I stop ’em?”

Nanny sat back in the chair, smiling happily.

“What them would these be, my son?”

“That young Diamanda and that Perdita and that girl with the red hair from over in Bad Ass and them others. I says to old Peason, I says you’d have something to say, I tole ’em Mistress Weatherwax’d get her knic—would definitely be sarcastic when she found out,” said Jason. “But they just laughs. They said they could teach ’emselves witching.”

Nanny nodded. Actually, they were quite right. You could teach yourself witchcraft. But both the teacher and the pupil had to be the right kind of person.

“Diamanda?” she said. “Don’t recall the name.”

“Really she’s Lucy Tockley,” said Jason. “She says Diamanda is more…more witchy.”

“Ah. The one that wears the big floppy felt hat?”

“Yes, Mum.”

“She’s the one that paints her nails black, too?”

“Yes, Mum.”

“Old Tockley sent her off to school, didn’t he?”

“Yes, Mum. She came back while you was gone.”

“Ah.”

Nanny Ogg lit her pipe from the forge. Floppy hat and black nails and education. Oh, dear.

“How many of these gels are there, then?” she said.

“Bout half a dozen. But they’m good at it, Mum.”

“Yeah?”

“And it ain’t as if they’ve been doing anything bad.”

Nanny Ogg stared reflectively at the glow in the forge.

There was a bottomless quality to Nanny Ogg’s silences. And also a certain directional component. Jason was quite clear that the silence was being aimed at him.

He always fell for it. He tried to fill it up.

“And that Diamanda’s been properly educated,” he said. “She knows some lovely words.”

Silence.

“And I knows you’ve always said there weren’t enough young girls interested in learnin’ witching these days,” said Jason. He removed the iron bar and hit it a few times, for the look of the thing.

More silence flowed in Jason’s direction.

“They goes and dances up in the mountains every full moon.”

Nanny Ogg removed her pipe and inspected the bowl carefully.

“People do say,” said Jason, lowering his voice, “that they dances in the altogether.”

“Altogether what?” said Nanny Ogg.

“You know, Mum. In the nudd.”

“Cor. There’s a thing. Anyone see where they go?”

“Nah. Weaver the thatcher says they always gives him the slip.”

“Jason?”

“Yes, Mum?”

“They bin dancin’ around the stones.”

Jason hit his thumb.

 

There were a number of gods in the mountains and forests of Lancre. One of them was known as Herne the Hunted. He was a god of the chase and the hunt. More or less.

Most gods are created and sustained by belief and hope. Hunters danced in animal skins and created gods of the chase, who tended to be hearty and boisterous with the tact of a tidal wave. But they are not the only gods of hunting. The prey has an occult voice too, as the blood pounds and the hounds bay. Herne was the god of the chased and the hunted and all small animals whose ultimate destiny is to be an abrupt damp squeak.

He was about three feet high with rabbit ears and very small horns. But he did have an extremely good turn of speed, and was using it to the full as he tore madly through the woods.

“They’re coming! They’re coming! They’re all coming back!”

 

“Who are?” said Jason Ogg. He was holding his thumb in the water trough.

Nanny Ogg sighed.

“Them,” she said. “You know. Them. We ain’t certain, but…”

“Who’s Them?”

Nanny hesitated. There were some things you didn’t tell ordinary people. On the other hand, Jason was a blacksmith, which meant he wasn’t ordinary. Blacksmiths had to keep secrets. And he was family; Nanny Ogg had had an adventurous youth and wasn’t very good at counting, but she was pretty certain he was her son.

“You see,” she said, waving her hands vaguely, “them stones…the Dancers…see, in the old days…see, once upon a time…”

She stopped, and tried again to explain the essentially fractal nature of reality.

“Like…there’s some places that’re thinner than others, where the old doorways used to be, well, not doorways, never exactly understood it myself, not doorways as such, more places where the world is thinner…Anyway, the thing is, the Dancers…are a kind of fence…we, well, when I say we I mean thousands of years ago…I mean, but they’re not just stones, they’re some kind of thunderbolt iron but…there’s things like tides, only not with water, it’s when worlds get closer together’n you can nearly step between ’em…anyway, if people’ve been hangin’ around the stones, playin’ around…then They’ll be back, if we’re not careful.”

“What They?”

“That’s the whole trouble,” said Nanny, miserably. “If I tells you, you’ll get it all wrong. They lives on the other side of the Dancers.”

Her son stared at her. Then a faint grin of realization wandered across his face.

“Ah,” he said. “I knows. I heard them wizards down in Ankh is always accidentally rippin’ holes in this fabric o’ reality they got down there, and you get them horrible things coming out o’ the Dungeon Dimensions. Huge buggers with dozens o’ eyeballs and more legs’n a Morris team.” He gripped his No. 5 hammer. “Don’t you worry, Mum. If they starts poppin’ out here, we’ll soon—”

“No, it ain’t like that,” said Nanny. “Those live outside. But Them lives…over there.”

Jason looked completely lost.

Nanny shrugged. She’d have to tell someone, sooner or later.

“The Lords and Ladies,” she said.

“Who’re they?”

Nanny looked around. But, after all, this was a forge. There had been a forge here long before there was a castle, long before there was even a kingdom. There were horseshoes everywhere. Iron had entered the very walls. It wasn’t just a place of iron, it was a place where iron died and was reborn. If you couldn’t speak the words here, you couldn’t speak ’em anywhere.

Even so, she’d rather not.

“You know,” she said. “The Fair Folk. The Gentry. The Shining Ones. The Star People. You know.”

“What?”

Nanny put her hand on the anvil, just in case, and said the word.

Jason’s frown very gently cleared, at about the same speed as a sunrise.

“Them?” he said. “But aren’t they nice and—?”

“See?” said Nanny. “I told you you’d get it wrong!”

 

“How much?” said Ridcully.

The coachman shrugged.

“Take it or leave it,” he said.

“I’m sorry, sir,” said Ponder Stibbons. “It’s the only coach.”

“Fifty dollars each is daylight robbery!”

“No,” said the coachman patiently. “Daylight robbery,” he said, in the authoritative tones of the experienced, “is when someone steps out into the road with an arrow pointing at us and then all his friends swings down from the rocks and trees and take away all our money and things. And then there’s nighttime robbery, which is like daytime robbery except they set fire to the coach so’s they can see what they’re about. Twilight robbery, now, your basic twilight robbery is—”

“Are you saying,” said Ridcully, “that getting robbed is included in the price?”

“Bandits’ Guild,” said the coachman. “Forty dollars per head, see. It’s a kind of flat rate.”

“What happens if we don’t pay it?” said Ridcully.

“You end up flat.”

The wizards went into a huddle.

“We’ve got a hundred and fifty dollars,” said Ridcully. “We can’t get any more out of the safe because the Bursar ate the key yesterday.”

“Can I try an idea, sir?” said Ponder.

“All right.”

Ponder gave the coachman a bright smile.

“Pets travel free?” he suggested.

“Oook?”

 

Nanny Ogg’s broomstick skimmed a few feet above the forest paths, cornering so fast that her boots scraped through the leaves. She leapt off at Granny Weatherwax’s cottage so quickly that she didn’t switch it off, and it kept going until it stuck in the privy.

The door was open.

“Cooee?”

Nanny glanced into the scullery, and then thumped up the small narrow staircase.

Granny Weatherwax was stretched rigid on her bed. Her face was gray, her skin was cold.

People had discovered her like this before, and it always caused embarrassment. So now she reassured visitors but tempted fate by always holding, in her rigid hands, a small handwritten sign which read:

I ATE’NT DEAD.

The window was propped open with a piece of wood.

“Ah,” said Nanny, far more for her own benefit than for anyone else’s, “I sees you’re out. I’ll, I’ll, I’ll just put the kettle on, shall I, and wait ’til you comes back?”

Esme’s skill at Borrowing unnerved her. It was all very well entering the minds of animals and such, but too many witches had never come back. For several years Nanny had put out lumps of fat and bacon rind for a bluetit that she was sure was old Granny Postalute, who’d gone out Borrowing one day and never came back. Insofar as a witch could consider things uncanny, Nanny Ogg considered it uncanny.

She went back down to the scullery and lowered a bucket down the well, remembering to fish the newts out this time before she boiled the kettle.

Then she watched the garden.

After a while a small shape flittered across it, heading for the upstairs window.

Nanny poured out the tea. She carefully took one spoonful of sugar out of the sugar basin, tipped the rest of the sugar into her cup, put the spoonful back in the basin, put both cups on a tray, and climbed the stairs.

Granny Weatherwax was sitting up in her bed.

Nanny looked around.

There was a large bat hanging upside down from a beam.

Granny Weatherwax rubbed her ears.

“Shove the po under it, will you, Gytha?” she mumbled. “They’re a devil for excusing themselves on the carpet.”

Nanny unearthed the shyest article of Granny Weatherwax’s bedroom crockery and moved it across the rug with her foot.

“I brought you a cup of tea,” she said.

“Good job, too. Mouth tastes of moths,” said Granny.

“Thought you did owls at night?” said Nanny.

“Yeah, but you ends up for days trying to twist your head right round,” said Granny. “At least bats always faces the same way. Tried rabbits first off, but you know what they are for remembering things. Anyway, you know what they thinks about the whole time. They’re famous for it.”

“Grass.”

“Right.”

“Find out anything?” said Nanny.

“Half a dozen people have been going up there. Every full moon!” said Granny. “Gels, by the shape of them. You only see silhouettes, with bats.”

“You done well there,” said Nanny, carefully. “Girls from round here, you reckon?”

“Got to be. They ain’t using broomsticks.”

Nanny Ogg sighed.

“There’s Agnes Nitt, old Threepenny’s daughter,” she said. “And the Tockley girl. And some others.”

Granny Weatherwax looked at her with her mouth open.

“I asked our Jason,” she said. “Sorry.”

The bat burped. Granny genteelly covered her hand with her mouth.

“I’m a silly old fool, ain’t I?” she said, after a while.

“No, no,” said Nanny. “Borrowing’s a real skill. You’re really good at it.”

“Prideful, that’s what I am. Once upon a time I’d of thought of asking people, too, instead of fooling around being a bat.”

“Our Jason wouldn’t have told you. He only told me ’cos I would’ve made ’is life a living hell if he didn’t,” said Nanny Ogg. “That’s what a mother’s for.”

“I’m losing my touch, that’s what it is. Getting old, Gytha.”

“You’re as old as you feel, that’s what I always say.”

“That’s what I mean.”

Nanny Ogg looked worried.

“Supposing Magrat’d been here,” said Granny. “She’d see me being daft.”

“Well, she’s safe in the castle,” said Nanny. “Learning how to be queen.”

“At least the thing about queening,” said Granny, “is that no one notices if you’re doing it wrong. It has to be right ’cos it’s you doing it.”

“S’funny, royalty,” said Nanny. “It’s like magic. You take some girl with a bum like two pigs in a blanket and a head full of air and then she marries a king or a prince or someone and suddenly she’s this radiant right royal princess. It’s a funny old world.”

“I ain’t going to kowtow to her, mind,” said Granny.

“You never kowtow to anyone anyway,” said Nanny Ogg patiently. “You never bowed to the old king. You barely gives young Verence a nod. You never kowtows to anyone ever, anyway.”

“That’s right!” said Granny. “That’s part of being a witch, that is.”

Nanny relaxed a bit. Granny being an old woman made her uneasy. Granny in her normal state of barely controlled anger was far more her old self.

Granny stood up.

“Old Tockley’s girl, eh?”

“That’s right.”

“Her mother was a Keeble, wasn’t she? Fine woman, as I recall.”

“Yeah, but when she died the old man sent her off to Sto Lat to school.”

“Don’t hold with schools,” said Granny Weatherwax. “They gets in the way of education. All them books. Books? What good are they? There’s too much reading these days. We never had time to read when we was young, I know that.”

“We were too busy makin’ our own entertainment.”

“Right. Come on—we ain’t got much time.”

“What d’you mean?”

“It’s not just the girls. There’s something out there, too. Some kind of mind, movin’ around.”

Granny shivered. She’d been aware of it in the same way that a skilled hunter, moving through the hills, is aware of another hunter—by the silences where there should have been noise, by the trampling of a stem, by the anger of the bees.

Nanny Ogg had never liked the idea of Borrowing, and Magrat had always refused even to give it a try. The old witches on the other side of the mountain had too much trouble with inconvenient in-body experiences to cope with the out-of-body kind. So Granny was used to having the mental dimension to herself.

There was a mind moving around in the kingdom, and Granny Weatherwax didn’t understand it.

She Borrowed. You had to be careful. It was like a drug. You could ride the minds of animals and birds, but never bees, steering them gently, seeing through their eyes. Granny Weatherwax had many times flicked through the channels of consciousness around her. It was, to her, part of the heart of witchcraft. To see through other eyes…

…through the eyes of gnats, seeing the slow patterns of time in the fast pattern of one day, their minds traveling rapidly as lightning…

…to listen with the body of a beetle, so that the world is a three-dimensional pattern of vibrations…

…to see with the nose of a dog, all smells now colors…

But there was a price. No one asked you to pay it, but the very absence of demand was a moral obligation. You tended not to swat. You dug lightly. You fed the dog. You paid. You cared; not because it was kind or good, but because it was right. You left nothing but memories, you took nothing but experience.

But this other roving intelligence…it’d go in and out of another mind like a chainsaw, taking, taking, taking. She could sense the shape of it, the predatory shape, all cruelty and cool unkindness; a mind full of intelligence, that’d use other living things and hurt them because it was fun.

She could put a name to a mind like that.

Elf.

 

Branches thrashed high in the trees.

Granny and Nanny strode through the forest. At least, Granny Weatherwax strode. Nanny Ogg scurried.

“The Lords and Ladies are trying to find a way,” said Granny. “And there’s something else. Something’s already come through. Some kind of animal from the other side. Scrope chased a deer into the circle and the thing must have been there, and they always used to say something can come through if something goes the other way—”

“What thing?”

“You know what a bat’s eyesight is like. Just a big shape is all it saw. Something killed old Scrope. It’s still around. Not an…not one o’ the Lords and Ladies,” said Granny, “but something from El…that place.”

Nanny looked at the shadows. There are a lot of shadows in a forest at night.

“Ain’t you scared?” she said.

Granny cracked her knuckles.

“No. But I hope it is.”

“Ooo, it’s true what they say. You’re a prideful one, Esmerelda Weatherwax.”

“Who says that?”

“Well, you did. Just now.”

“I wasn’t feeling well.”

Other people would probably say: I wasn’t myself. But Granny Weatherwax didn’t have anyone else to be.

The two witches hurried on through the gale.

From the shelter of a thorn thicket, the unicorn watched them go.

 

Diamanda Tockley did indeed wear a floppy black velvet hat. It had a veil, too.

Perdita Nitt, who had once been merely Agnes Nitt before she got witchcraft, wore a black hat with a veil too, because Diamanda did. Both of them were seventeen. And she wished she was naturally skinny, like Diamanda, but if you can’t be skinny you can at least look unhealthy. So she wore so much thick white makeup in order to conceal her naturally rosy complexion that if she turned around suddenly her face would probably end up on the back of her head.

They’d done the Raising of the Cone of Power, and some candle magic, and some scrying. Now Diamanda was showing them how to do the cards.

She said they contained the distilled wisdom of the Ancients. Perdita had found herself treacherously wondering who these Ancients were—they clearly weren’t the same as old people, who were stupid, Diamanda said, but she wasn’t quite clear why they were wiser than, say, modern people.

Also, she didn’t understand what the Feminine Principle was. And she wasn’t too clear about this Inner Self business. She was coming to suspect that she didn’t have one.

And she wished she could do her eyes like Diamanda did.

And she wished she could wear heels like Diamanda did.

Amanita DeVice had told her that Diamanda slept in a real coffin.

She wished she had the nerve to have a dagger-and-skull tattoo on her arm like Amanita did, even if it was only in ordinary ink and she had to wash it off every night in case her mother saw it.

A tiny, nasty voice from Perdita’s inner self suggested that Amanita wasn’t a good choice of name.

Or Perdita, for that matter.

And it said that maybe Perdita shouldn’t meddle with things she didn’t understand.

The trouble was, she knew, that this meant nearly everything.

She wished she could wear black lace like Diamanda did.

Diamanda got results.

Perdita wouldn’t have believed it. She’d always known about witches, of course. They were old women who dressed like crows, except for Magrat Garlick, who was frankly mental and always looked as if she was going to burst into tears. Perdita remembered Magrat bringing a guitar to a Hogswatchnight party once and singing wobbly folk songs with her eyes shut in a way that suggested that she really believed in them. She hadn’t been able to play, but this was all right because she couldn’t sing, either. People had applauded because, well, what else could you do?

But Diamanda had read books. She knew about stuff. Raising power at the stones, for one thing. It really worked.

Currently she was showing them the cards.

The wind had got up again tonight. It rattled the shutters and made soot fall down the chimney. It seemed to Perdita that it had blown all the shadows into the corners of the room—

“Are you paying attention, sister?” said Diamanda coldly.

That was another thing. You had to call one another ‘sister,’ out of fraternity.

“Yes, Diamanda,” she said, meekly.

“This is the Moon,” Diamanda repeated, “for those who weren’t paying attention.” She held up the card. “And what do we see here—you, Muscara?”

“Um…it’s got a picture of the moon on it?” said Muscara (née Susan) in a hopeful voice.

“Of course it’s not the moon. It’s a nonmimetic convention, not tied to a conventional referencing system, actually,” said Diamanda.

“Ah.”

A gust rocked the cottage. The door burst open and slammed back against the wall, giving a glimpse of cloud-wracked sky in which a nonmimetic convention was showing a crescent.

Diamanda waved a hand. There was a brief flash of octarine light. The door jerked shut. Diamanda smiled in what Perdita thought of as her cool, knowing way.

She placed the card on the black velvet cloth in front of her.

Perdita looked at it gloomily. It was all very pretty, the cards were colored like little pasteboard jewels, and they had interesting names. But that little traitor voice whispered: how the hell can they know what the future holds? Cardboard isn’t very bright.

On the other hand, the coven was helping people…more or less. Raising power and all that sort of thing. Oh dear, supposing she asks me?

Perdita realized that she was feeling worried. Something was wrong. It had just gone wrong. She didn’t know what it was, but it had gone wrong now. She looked up.

“Blessings be upon this house,” said Granny Weatherwax.

In much the same tone of voice have people said, “Eat hot lead, Kincaid,” and, “I expect you’re wondering after all that excitement whether I’ve got any balloons and lampshades left.”

Diamanda’s mouth dropped open.

“’Ere, you’re doing that wrong. You don’t want to muck about with a hand like that,” said Nanny Ogg helpfully, looking over her shoulder. “You’ve got a Double Onion there.”

“Who are you?”

Suddenly they were there. Perdita thought: one minute there’s shadows, the next minute they were there, solid as anything.

“What’s all the chalk on the floor, then?” said Nanny Ogg. “You’ve got all chalk on the floor. And heathen writing. Not that I’ve got anything against heathens,” she added. She appeared to think about it. “I’m practic’ly one,” she added further, “but I don’t write on the floor. What’d you want to write all on the floor for?” She nudged Perdita. “You’ll never get the chalk out,” she said, “it gets right into the grain.”

“Um, it’s a magic circle,” said Perdita. “Um, hello, Mrs. Ogg. Um. It’s to keep bad influences away…”

Granny Weatherwax leaned forward slightly.

“Tell me, my dear,” she said to Diamanda, “do you think it’s working?”

She leaned forward further.

Diamanda leaned backward.

And then slowly leaned forward again.

They ended up nose to nose.

“Who’s this?” said Diamanda, out of the corner of her mouth.

“Um, it’s Granny Weatherwax,” said Perdita. “Um. She’s a witch, um…”

“What level?” said Diamanda.

Nanny Ogg looked around for something to hide behind. Granny Weatherwax’s eyebrow twitched.

“Levels, eh?” she said. “Well, I suppose I’m level one.”

“Just starting?” said Diamanda.

“Oh dear. Tell you what,” said Nanny Ogg quietly to Perdita, “if we was to turn the table over, we could probably hide behind it, no problem.”

But to herself she was thinking: Esme can never resist a challenge. None of us can. You ain’t a witch if you ain’t got self-confidence. But we’re not getting any younger. It’s like being a hired swordfighter, being a top witch. You think you’re good, but you know there’s got to be someone younger, practicing every day, polishing up their craft, and one day you’re walkin’ down the road and you hears this voice behind you sayin’: go for your toad, or similar.

Even for Esme. Sooner or later, she’ll come up against someone faster on the craftiness than she is.

“Oh, yes,” said Granny, quietly. “Just starting. Every day, just starting.”

Nanny Ogg thought: but it won’t be today.

“You stupid old woman,” said Diamanda, “you don’t frighten me. Oh, yes. I know all about the way you old ones frighten superstitious peasants, actually. Muttering and squinting. It’s all in the mind. Simple psychology. It’s not real witchcraft.”

“I’ll, er, I’ll just go into the scullery and, er, see if I can fill any buckets with water, shall I?” said Nanny Ogg, to no one in particular.

“I ’spect you’d know all about witchcraft,” said Granny Weatherwax.

“I’m studying, yes,” said Diamanda.

Nanny Ogg realized that she had removed her own hat and was biting nervously at the brim.

“I ’spect you’re really good at it,” said Granny Weatherwax.

“Quite good,” said Diamanda.

“Show me.”

She is good, thought Nanny Ogg. She’s been facing down Esme’s stare for more’n a minute. Even snakes generally give up after a minute.

If a fly had darted through the few inches of space between their stares it would have flashed into flame in the air.

“I learned my craft from Nanny Gripes,” said Granny Weatherwax, “who learned it from Goody Heggety, who got it from Nanna Plumb, who was taught it by Black Aliss, who—”

“So what you’re saying is,” said Diamanda, loading the words into the sentence like cartridges in a chamber, “that no one has actually learned anything new?”

The silence that followed was broken by Nanny Ogg saying: “Bugger, I’ve bitten right through the brim. Right through.”

“I see,” said Granny Weatherwax.

“Look,” said Nanny Ogg hurriedly, nudging the trembling Perdita, “right through the lining and everything. Two dollars and curing his pig that hat cost me. That’s two dollars and a pig cure I shan’t see again in a hurry.”

“So you can just go away, old woman,” said Diamanda.

“But we ought to meet again,” said Granny Weatherwax.

The old witch and the young witch weighed one another up.

“Midnight?” said Diamanda.

“Midnight? Nothing special about midnight. Practic’ly anyone can be a witch at midnight,” said Granny Weatherwax. “How about noon?”

“Certainly. What are we fighting for?” said Diamanda.

“Fighting? We ain’t fighting. We’re just showing each other what we can do. Friendly like,” said Granny Weatherwax.

She stood up.

“I’d better be goin’,” she said. “Us old people need our sleep, you know how it is.”

“And what does the winner get?” said Diamanda. There was just a trace of uncertainty in her voice now. It was very faint, on the Richter scale of doubt it was probably no more than a plastic teacup five miles away falling off a low shelf onto a carpet, but it was there.

“Oh, the winner gets to win,” said Granny Weatherwax. “That’s what it’s all about. Don’t bother to see us out. You didn’t see us in.”

The door slammed back.

“Simple psychokinesis,” said Diamanda.

“Oh, well. That’s all right then,” said Granny Weatherwax, disappearing into the night. “Explains it all, that does.”

 

There used to be such simple directions, back in the days before they invented parallel universes—Up and Down, Right and Left, Backward and Forward, Past and Future…

But normal directions don’t work in the multiverse, which has far too many dimensions for anyone to find their way. So new ones have to be invented so that the way can be found.

Like: East of the Sun, West of the Moon.

Or: Behind the North Wind.

Or: At the Back of Beyond.

Or: There and Back Again.

Or: Beyond the Fields We Know.

And sometimes there’s a short cut. A door or a gate. Some standing stones, a tree cleft by lightning, a filing cabinet.

Maybe just a spot on some moorland somewhere…

A place where there is very nearly here.

Nearly, but not quite. There’s enough leakage to make pendulums swing and psychics get nasty headaches, to give a house a reputation for being haunted, to make the occasional pot hurl across a room. There’s enough leakage to make the drones fly guard.

Oh, yes. The drones.

There are things called drone assemblies. Sometimes, on fine summer days, the drones from hives for miles around will congregate in some spot, and fly circles in the air, buzzing like tiny early warning systems, which is what they are.

Bees are sensible. It’s a human word. But bees are creatures of order, and programmed into their very genes is a hatred of chaos.

If some people once knew where such a spot was, if they had experience of what happens when here and there become entangled, then they might—if they knew how—mark such a spot with certain stones.

In the hope that enough daft buggers would take it as a warning, and keep away.

 

“Well, what’d you think?” said Granny, as the witches hurried home.

“The little fat quiet one’s got a bit of natural talent,” said Nanny Ogg. “I could feel it. The rest of ’em are just along for the excitement, to my mind. Playing at witches. You know, ooh-jar boards and cards and wearing black lace gloves with no fingers to ’em and paddlin’ with the occult.”

“I don’t hold with paddlin’ with the occult,” said Granny firmly. “Once you start paddlin’ with the occult you start believing in spirits, and when you start believing in spirits you start believing in demons, and then before you know where you are you’re believing in gods. And then you’re in trouble.”

“But all them things exist,” said Nanny Ogg.

“That’s no call to go around believing in them. It only encourages ’em.”

Granny Weatherwax slowed to a walk.

“What about her?” she said.

“What exactly about her do you mean?”

“You felt the power there?”

“Oh, yeah. Made my hair stand on end.”

“Someone gave it to her, and I know who. Just a slip of a gel with a head full of wet ideas out of books, and suddenly she’s got the power and don’t know how to deal with it. Cards! Candles! That’s not witchcraft, that’s just party games. Paddlin’ with the occult. Did you see she’d got black fingernails?”

“Well, mine ain’t so clean—”

“I mean painted.”

“I used to paint my toenails red when I was young,” said Nanny, wistfully.

“Toenails is different. So’s red. Anyway,” said Granny, “you only did it to appear allurin’.”

“It worked, too.”

“Hah!”

They walked along in silence for a bit.

“I felt a lot of power there,” Nanny Ogg said, eventually.

“Yes. I know.”

“A lot.”

“Yes.”

“I’m not saying you couldn’t beat her,” said Nanny quickly. “I’m not saying that. But I don’t reckon I could, and it seemed to me it’d raise a bit of a sweat even on you. You’ll have to hurt her to beat her.”

“I’m losin’ my judgment, aren’t I?”

“Oh, I—”

“She riled me, Gytha. Couldn’t help myself. Now I’ve got to duel with a gel of seventeen, and if I wins I’m a wicked bullyin’ old witch, and if I loses…”

She kicked up a drift of old leaves.

“Can’t stop myself, that’s my trouble.”

Nanny Ogg said nothing.

“And I loses my temper over the least little—”

“Yes, but—”

“I hadn’t finished talkin’.”

“Sorry, Esme.”

A bat fluttered by. Granny nodded to it.

“Heard how Magrat’s getting along?” she said, in a tone of voice which forced casualness embraced like a corset.

“Settling in fine, our Shawn says.”

“Right.”

They reached a crossroads; the white dust glowed very faintly in the moonlight. One way led into Lancre, where Nanny Ogg lived. Another eventually got lost in the forest, became a footpath, then a track, and eventually reached Granny Weatherwax’s cottage.

“When shall we…two…meet again?” said Nanny Ogg.

“Listen,” said Granny Weatherwax. “She’s well out of it, d’you hear? She’ll be a lot happier as a queen!”

“I never said nothing,” said Nanny Ogg mildly.

“I know you never! I could hear you not saying anything! You’ve got the loudest silences I ever did hear from anyone who wasn’t dead!”

“See you about eleven o’clock, then?”

“Right!”

The wind got up again as Granny walked along the track to her cottage.

She knew she was on edge. There was just too much to do. She’d got Magrat sorted out, and Nanny could look after herself, but the Lords and the Ladies…she hadn’t counted on them.

The point was…

The point was that Granny Weatherwax had a feeling she was going to die. This was beginning to get on her nerves.

 

Knowing the time of your death is one of those strange bonuses that comes with being a true magic user. And, on the whole, it is a bonus.

Many a wizard has passed away happily drinking the last of his wine cellar and incidentally owing very large sums of money.

Granny Weatherwax had always wondered how it felt, what it was that you suddenly saw looming up. And what it turned out to be was a blankness.

People think that they live life as a moving dot traveling from the Past into the Future, with memory streaming out behind them like some kind of mental cometary tail. But memory spreads out in front as well as behind. It’s just that most humans aren’t good at dealing with it, and so it arrives as premonitions, forebodings, intuitions, and hunches. Witches are good at dealing with it, and to suddenly find a blank where these tendrils of the future should be has much the same effect on a witch as emerging from a cloud bank and seeing a team of sherpas looking down on him does on an airline pilot.

She’d got a few days, and then that was it. She’d always expected to have a bit of time to herself, get the garden in order, have a good clean up around the place so that whatever witch took over wouldn’t think she’d been a sloven, pick out a decent burial plot, and then spend some time sitting out in the rocking chair, doing nothing at all except looking at the trees and thinking about the past. Now…no chance.

And other things were happening. Her memory seemed to be playing up. Perhaps this is what happened. Perhaps you just drained away toward the end, like old Nanny Gripes, who ended up putting the cat on the stove and the kettle out for the night.

Granny shut the door behind her and lit a candle.

There was a box in the dresser drawer. She opened it on the kitchen table and took out the carefully folded piece of paper. There was a pen and ink in there, too.

After some thought, she picked up where she had left off:

…and to my friend Gytha Ogg I leave my bedde and the rag rugge the smith in Bad Ass made for me, and the matchin jug and basin and wosfname sett she always had her eye on, and my broomstick what will be Right as Rain with a bit of work.

To Magrat Garlick I leave the Contentes elsewhere in this box, my silver tea service with the milk jug in the shape of a humerous cow what is an Heir Loom, also the Clocke what belonged to my mother, but I charge her alwayes to keep it wound, for when the clocke stops—

There was a noise outside.

If anyone else had been in the room with her Granny Weatherwax would have thrown open the door boldly, but she was by herself. She picked up the poker very carefully, moved surprisingly soundlessly to the door given the nature of her boots, and listened intently.

There was something in the garden.

It wasn’t much of a garden. There were the Herbs, and the soft fruit bushes, a bit of lawn and, of course, the beehives. And it was open to the woods. The local wildlife knew better than to invade a witch’s garden.

Granny opened the door carefully.

The moon was setting. Pale silver light turned the world into monochrome.

There was a unicorn on the lawn. The stink of it hit her.

Granny advanced, holding the poker in front of her. The unicorn backed away, and pawed at the ground.

Granny saw the future plain. She already knew the when. Now she was beginning to apprehend the how.

“So,” she said, under her breath, “I knows where you came from. And you can damn well get back there.”

The thing made a feint at her, but the poker swung toward it.

“Can’t stand the iron, eh? Well, just you trot back to your mistress and tell her that we know all about iron in Lancre. And I knows about her. She’s to keep away, understand? This is my place!”

 

Then it was moonlight. Now it was day.

There was quite a crowd in what passed for Lancre’s main square. Not much happened in Lancre anyway, and a duel between witches was a sight worth seeing.

Granny Weatherwax arrived at a quarter to noon. Nanny Ogg was waiting on a bench by the tavern. She had a towel around her neck, and was carrying a bucket of water in which floated a sponge.

“What’s that for?” said Granny.

“Half time. And I done you a plate of oranges.”

She held up the plate. Granny snorted.

“You look as if you could do with eating something, anyway,” said Nanny. “You don’t look as if you’ve had anything today…”

She glanced down at Granny’s boots, and the grubby hem of her long black dress. There were scraps of bracken and bits of heather caught on it.

“You daft old besom!” she hissed. “What’ve you been doing!”

“I had to—”

“You’ve been up at the Stones, haven’t you! Trying to hold back the Gentry.”

“Of course,” said Granny. Her voice wasn’t faint. She wasn’t swaying. But her voice wasn’t faint and she wasn’t swaying, Nanny Ogg could see, because Granny Weatherwax’s body was in the grip of Granny Weatherwax’s mind.

“Someone’s got to,” she added.

“You could have come and asked me!”

“You’d have talked me out of it.”

Nanny Ogg leaned forward.

“You all right, Esme?”

“Fine! I’m fine! Nothing wrong with me, all right?”

“Have you had any sleep at all?” she said.

“Well—”

“You haven’t, have you? And then you think you can just stroll down here and confound this girl, just like that?”

“I don’t know,” said Granny Weatherwax.

Nanny Ogg looked hard at her.

“You don’t, do you?” she said, in a softer tone of voice. “Oh, well…you better sit down here, before you fall down. Suck an orange. They’ll be here in a few minutes.”

“No she won’t,” said Granny. “She’ll be late.”

“How d’you know?”

“No good making an entrance if everyone isn’t there to see you, is it? That’s headology.”

In fact the young coven arrived at twenty past twelve, and took up station on the steps of the market pentangle on the other side of the square.

“Look at ’em,” said Granny Weatherwax. “All in black, again.”

“Well, we wear black too,” said Nanny Ogg the reasonable.

“Only ’cos it’s respectable and serviceable,” said Granny morosely. “Not because it’s romantic. Hah. The Lords and Ladies might as well be here already.”

After some eye contact, Nanny Ogg ambled across the square and met Perdita in the middle. The young would-be witch looked worried under her makeup. She held a black lace handkerchief in her hands, and was twisting it nervously.

“Morning, Mrs. Ogg,” she said.

“Afternoon, Agnes.”

“Um. What happens now?”

Nanny Ogg took out her pipe and scratched her ear with it.

“Dunno. Up to you, I suppose.”

“Diamanda says why does it have to be here and now?”

“So’s everyone can see,” said Nanny Ogg. “That’s the point, ain’t it? Nothing hole and corner about it. Everyone’s got to know who’s best at witchcraft. The whole town. Everyone sees the winner win and the loser lose. That way there’s no argument, eh?”

Perdita glanced toward the tavern. Granny Weatherwax had dozed off.

“Quietly confident,” said Nanny Ogg, crossing her fingers behind her back.

“Um, what happens to the loser?” said Perdita.

“Nothing, really,” said Nanny Ogg. “Generally she leaves the place. You can’t be a witch if people’ve seen you beat.”

“Diamanda says she doesn’t want to hurt the old lady too much,” said Perdita. “Just teach her a lesson.”

“That’s nice. Esme’s a quick learner.”

“Um. I wish this wasn’t happening, Mrs. Ogg.”

“That’s nice.”

“Diamanda says Mistress Weatherwax has got a very impressive stare, Mrs. Ogg.”

“That’s nice.”

“So the test is…just staring, Mrs. Ogg.”

Nanny put her pipe in her mouth.

“You mean the old first-one-to-blink-or-look-away challenge?”

“Um, yes.”

“Right.” Nanny thought about it, and shrugged.

 

“Right. But we’d better do a magic circle first. Don’t want anyone else getting hurt, do we?”

“Do you mean using Skorhian Runes or the Triple Invocation octogram?” said Perdita.

Nanny Ogg put her head on one side.

“Never heard of them things, dear,” she said. “I always does a magic circle like this…”

She sidled crabwise away from the fat girl, dragging one toe in the dust. She edged around in a rough circle about fifteen feet across, still dragging her boot, until she backed into Perdita.

“Sorry. There. Done it.”

“That’s a magic circle?”

“Right. People can come to harm else. All kinds of magic zipping around the place when witches fight.”

“But you didn’t chant or anything.”

“No?”

“There has to be a chant, doesn’t there?”

“Dunno. Never done one.”

“Oh.”

“I could sing you a comic song if you likes,” said Nanny helpfully.

“Um, no. Um.” Perdita had never heard Nanny sing, but news gets around.

“I like your black lace hanky,” said Nanny, not a bit abashed. “Very good for not showing the bogies.”

Perdita stared at the circle as though hypnotized. “Um. Shall we start, then?”

“Right.”

Nanny Ogg scurried back to the bench and elbowed Granny in the ribs.

“Wake up!”

Granny opened an eye.

“I weren’t asleep, I was just resting me eyes.”

“All you’ve got to do is stare her down!”

“At least she knows about the importance of the stare, then. Hah! Who does she think she is? I’ve been staring at people all my life!”

“Yes, that’s what’s bothering me—aaahh…who’s Nana’s little boy, then?”

The rest of the Ogg clan had arrived.

Granny Weatherwax personally disliked young Pewsey. She disliked all small children, which is why she got on with them so well. In Pewsey’s case, she felt that no one should be allowed to wander around in just a vest even if they were four years old. And the child had a permanently runny nose and ought to be provided with a handkerchief or, failing that, a cork.

Nanny Ogg, on the other hand, was instant putty in the hands of any grandchild, even one as sticky as Pewsey.

“Want sweetie,” growled Pewsey, in that curiously deep voice some young children have.

“Just in a moment, my duck, I’m talking to the lady,” Nanny Ogg fluted.

“Want sweetie now.”

“Bugger off, my precious, Nana’s busy right this minute.”

Pewsey pulled hard on Nanny Ogg’s skirts.

“Now sweetie now!”

Granny Weatherwax leaned down until her impressive nose was about level with Pewsey’s gushing one.

“If you don’t go away,” she said gravely, “I will personally rip your head off and fill it with snakes.”

“There!” said Nanny Ogg. “There’s lots of poor children in Klatch that’d be grateful for a curse like that.”

Pewsey’s little face, after a second or two of uncertainty, split into a pumpkin grin.

“Funny lady,” he said.

“Tell you what,” said Nanny, patting Pewsey on the head and then absentmindedly wiping her hand on her dress, “you see them young ladies on the other side of the square? They’ve got lots of sweeties.”

Pewsey waddled off.

“That’s germ warfare, that is,” said Granny Weatherwax.

“Come on,” said Nanny. “Our Jason’s put a couple of chairs in the circle. You sure you’re all right?”

“I’ll do.”

Perdita Nitt traipsed across the road again.

“Er…Mrs. Ogg?”

“Yes, dear?”

“Er. Diamanda says you don’t understand, she says they won’t be trying to outstare one another…”

 

Magrat was bored. She’d never been bored when she was a witch. Permanently bewildered and overworked yes, but not bored.

She kept telling herself it’d probably be better when she really was queen, although she couldn’t quite see how. In the meantime she wandered aimlessly through the castle’s many rooms, the swishing of her dress almost unheard above the background roar of the turbines of tedium:

—humdrumhumdrumhumdrum—

She’d spent the whole morning trying to learn to do tapestry, because Millie assured her that’s what queens did, and the sampler with its message “Gods bless this Hosue” was even now lying forlornly on her chair.

In the Long Gallery were huge tapestries of ancient battles, done by previous bored regal incumbents; it was amazing how all the fighters had been persuaded to stay still long enough. And she’d looked at the many, many paintings of the queens themselves, all of them pretty, all of them well-dressed according to the fashion of their times, and all of them bored out of their tiny well-shaped skulls.

Finally she went back to the solar. This was the big room on top of the main tower. In theory, it was there to catch the sun. It did. It also caught the wind and the rain. It was a sort of drift net for anything the sky happened to throw.

She yanked on the bellpull that in theory summoned a servant. Nothing happened. After a couple of further pulls, and secretly glad of the exercise, she went down to the kitchen. She would have liked to spend more time there. It was always warm and there was generally someone to talk to. But nobblyess obligay—queens had to live Above Stairs.

Below Stairs there was only Shawn Ogg, who was cleaning the oven of the huge iron stove and reflecting that this was no job for a military man.

“Where’s everyone gone?”

Shawn leapt up, banging his head on the stove.

“Ow! Sorry, miss! Um! Everyone’s…everyone’s down in the square, miss. I’m only here because Mrs. Scorbic said she’d have my hide if I didn’t get all the yuk off.”

“What’s happening in the square, then?”

“They say there’s a couple of witches having a real set-to, miss.”

“What? Not your mother and Granny Weatherwax!”

“Oh no, miss. Some new witch.”

“In Lancre? A new witch?”

“I think that’s what Mum said.”

“I’m going to have a look.”

“Oh, I don’t think that’d be a good idea, miss,” said Shawn.

Magrat drew herself up regally.

“We happen to be Queen,” she said. “Nearly. So you don’t tell one one can’t do things, or one’ll have you cleaning the privies!”

“But I does clean the privies,” said Shawn, in a reasonable voice. “Even the garderobe—”

“And that’s going to go, for a start,” said Magrat, shuddering. “One’s seen it.”

“Doesn’t bother me, miss, it’ll give me Wednesday afternoons free,” said Shawn, “but what I meant was, you’ll have to wait till I’ve gone down to the armory to fetch my horn for the fanfare.”

“One won’t need a fanfare, thank you very much.”

“But you got to have a fanfare, miss.”

“One can blow my own trumpet, thank you.”

“Yes, miss.”

“Miss what?”

“Miss Queen.”

“And don’t you forget it.”

 

Magrat arrived at as near to a run as was possible in the queen outfit, which ought to have had castors.

She found a circle of several hundred people and, near the edge, a very pensive Nanny Ogg.

“What’s happening, Nanny?”

Nanny turned.

“Oops, sorry. Didn’t hear no fanfare,” she said. “I’d curtsy, only it’s my legs.”

Magrat looked past her at the two seated figures in the circle.

“What’re they doing?”

“Staring contest.”

“But they’re looking at the sky.”

“Bugger that Diamanda girl! She’s got Esme trying to outstare the sun,” said Nanny Ogg. “No looking away, no blinking…”

“How long have they been doing it?”

“About an hour,” said Nanny gloomily.

“That’s terrible!”

“It’s bloody stupid is what it is,” said Nanny. “Can’t think what’s got into Esme. As if power’s all there is to witching! She knows that. Witching’s not power, it’s how you harness it.”

There was a pale gold haze over the circle, from magical fallout.

“They’ll have to stop at sunset,” said Magrat.

“Esme won’t last until sunset,” said Nanny. “Look at her. All slumped up.”

“I suppose you couldn’t use some magic to—” Magrat began.

“Talk sense,” said Nanny. “If Esme found out, she’d kick me round the kingdom. Anyway, the others’d spot it.”

“Perhaps we could create a small cloud or something?” said Magrat.

“No! That’s cheating!”

“Well, you always cheat.”

“I cheat for myself. You can’t cheat for other people.”

Granny Weatherwax slumped again.

“I could have it stopped,” said Magrat.

“You’d make an enemy for life.”

“I thought Granny was my enemy for life.”

“If you think that, my girl, you’ve got no understanding,” said Nanny. “One day you’ll find out Esme Weatherwax is the best friend you ever had.”

“But we’ve got to do something! Can’t you think of anything?”

Nanny Ogg looked thoughtfully at the circle. Occasionally a little wisp of smoke curled up from her pipe.

 

The magical duel was subsequently recorded in Bird-whistle’s book Legendes and Antiquities of the Ramptops and went as follows:

“The duel beinge ninety minutes advanced, a small boy child upon a sudden ran across the square and stept within the magic circle, whereup he fell down with a terrible scream also a flash. The olde witche looked around, got out of her chair, picked him up, and carried him to his grandmother, then went back to her seat, whilom the young witch never averted her eyes from the Sunne. But the other young witches stopped the duel averring, Look, Diamanda has wonne, the reason being, Weatherwax looked away. Whereupon the child’s grandmother said in a loude voice, Oh yes? Pulle the other onne, it have got bells on. This is not a conteft about power, you stupid girls, it is a contest about witchcraft, do you not even begin to know what being a witch IS?

“Is a witch someone who would look round when she heard a child scream?

“And the townspeople said, Yess!”

 

“That was wonderful,” said Mrs. Quarney, the storekeeper’s wife. “The whole town cheered. A true miffic quality.”

They were in the tavern’s back room. Granny Weatherwax was lying on a bench with a damp towel over her face.

“Yes, it was, wasn’t it?” said Magrat.

“That girl was left without a leg to stand on, everyone says.”

“Yes,” said Magrat.

“Strutted off with her nose in a sling, as they say.”

“Yes,” said Magrat.

“Is the little boy all right?”

They all looked at Pewsey, who was sitting in a suspicious puddle on the floor in the corner with a bag of sweets and a sticky ring around his mouth.

“Right as rain,” said Nanny Ogg. “Nothing worse’n a bit of sunburn. He screams his head off at the least little thing, bless him,” she said proudly, as if this was some kind of rare talent.

“Gytha?” said Granny, from under the towel.

“Yes?”

“You knows I don’t normally touch strong licker, but I’ve heard you mention the use of brandy for medicinal purposes.”

“Coming right up.”

Granny raised her towel and focused one eye on Magrat.

“Good afternoon, your pre-majesty,” she said. “Come to be gracious at me, have you?”

“Well done,” said Magrat, coldly. “Can one have a word with you, Na—Mrs. Ogg? Outside?”

“Right you are, your queen,” said Nanny.

In the alley outside Magrat spun around with her mouth open.

“You—”

Nanny held up her hand.

“I know what you’re going to say,” she said. “But there wasn’t any danger to the little mite.”

“But you—”

“Me?” said Nanny. “I hardly did anything. They didn’t know he was going to run into the circle, did they? They both reacted just like they normally would, didn’t they? Fair’s fair.”

“Well, in a way, but—”

“No one cheated,” said Nanny.

Margrat sagged into silence. Nanny patted her on the shoulder.

“So you won’t be telling anyone you saw me wave the bag of sweets at him, will you?” she said.

“No, Nanny.”

“There’s a good going-to-be-queen.”

“Nanny?”

“Yes, dear?”

Magrat took a deep breath.

“How did Verence know when we were coming back?”

It seemed to Magrat that Nanny thought for just a few seconds too long.

“Couldn’t say,” she said at last. “Kings are a bit magical, mind. They can cure dandruff and that. Probably he woke up one morning and his royal prerogative gave him a tickle.”

The trouble with Nanny Ogg was that she always looked as if she was lying. Nanny Ogg had a pragmatic attitude to the truth; she told it if it was convenient and she couldn’t be bothered to make up something more interesting.

“Keeping busy up there, are you?” she said.

“One’s doing very well, thank you,” said Magrat, with what she hoped was queenly hauteur.

“Which one?” said Nanny.

“Which one what?”

“Which one’s doing very well?”

“Me!”

“You should have said,” said Nanny, her face poker straight. “So long as you’re keeping busy, that’s the important thing.”

“He knew we were coming back,” said Magrat firmly. “He’d even got the invitations sorted out. Oh, by the way…there’s one for you—”

“I know, one got it this morning,” said Nanny. “Got all that fancy nibbling on the edges and gold and everything. Who’s Ruservup?”

Magrat had long ago got a handle on Nanny Ogg’s world-view.

“RSVP,” she said. “It means you ought to say if you’re coming.”

“Oh, one’ll be along all right, catch one staying away,” said Nanny. “Has one’s Jason sent one his invite yet? Thought not. Not a skilled man with a pen, our Jason.”

“Invitation to what?” said Magrat. She was getting fed up with ones.

“Didn’t Verence tell one?” said Nanny. “It’s a special play that’s been written special for you.”

“Oh, yes,” said Magrat. “The Entertainment.”

“Right,” said Nanny. “It’s going to be on Midsummer’s Eve.”

 

“It’s got to be special, on Midsummer’s Eve,” said Jason Ogg.

The door to the smithy had been bolted shut. Within were the eight members of the Lancre Morris Men, six times winners of the Fifteen Mountains All-Comers Morris Championship,* now getting to grips with a new art form.

“I feel a right twit,” said Bestiality Carter, Lancre’s only baker. “A dress on! I just hope my wife doesn’t see me!”

“Says here,” said Jason Ogg, his enormous forefinger hesitantly tracing its way along the page, “that it’s a beaut-i-ful story of the love of the Queen of the Fairies—that’s you, Bestiality—”

“—thank you very much—”

“—for a mortal man. Plus a hum-our-rus int-ter-lude with Comic Artisans…”

“What’s an artisan?” said Weaver the thatcher.

“Dunno. Type of well, I reckon.” Jason scratched his head. “Yeah. They’ve got ’em down on the plains. I repaired a pump for one once. Artisan wells.”

“What’s comic about them?”

“Maybe people fall down ’em in a funny way?”

“Why can’t we do a Morris like normal?” said Obidiah Carpenter the tailor.*

“Morris is for every day,” said Jason. “We got to do something cultural. This come all the way from Ankh-Morpork.”

“We could do the Stick and Bucket Dance,” volunteered Baker the weaver.

“No one is to do the Stick and Bucket Dance ever again,” said Jason. “Old Mr. Thrum still walks with a limp, and it were three months ago.”

Weaver the thatcher squinted at his copy of the script.

“Who’s this bugger Exeunt Omnes?” he said.

“I don’t think much of my part,” said Carpenter, “it’s too small.”

“It’s his poor wife I feel sorry for,” said Weaver, automatically.

“Why?” said Jason.†

“And why’s there got to be a lion in it?” said Baker the weaver.

“’Cos it’s a play!” said Jason. “No one’d want to see it if it had a…a donkey in it! Oi can just see people comin’ to see a play ’cos it had a donkey in it. This play was written by a real playsmith! Hah, I can just see a real playsmith putting donkeys in a play! He says he’ll be very interested to hear how we get on! Now just you all shut up!”

“I don’t feel like the Queen of the Fairies,” moaned Bestiality Carter.*

“You’ll grow into it,” said Weaver.

“I hope not.”

“And you’ve got to rehearse,” said Jason.

“There’s no room,” said Thatcher the carter.

“Well, I ain’t doin’ it where anyone else can see,” said Bestiality. “Even if we go out in the woods somewhere, people’ll be bound to see. Me in a dress!”

“They won’t recognize you in your makeup,” said Weaver.

“Makeup?”

“Yeah, and your wig,” said Tailor the other weaver.

“He’s right, though,” said Weaver. “If we’re going to make fools of ourselves, I don’t want no one to see me until we’re good at it.”

“Somewhere off the beaten track, like,” said Thatcher the carter.

“Out in the country,” said Tinker the tinker.

“Where no one goes,” said Carter.

Jason scratched his cheese-grater chin. He was bound to think of somewhere.

“And who’s going to play Exeunt Omnes?” said Weaver. “He doesn’t have much to say, does he?”

 

The coach rattled across the featureless plains. The land between Ankh-Morpork and the Ramtops was fertile, well-cultivated and dull, dull, dull. Travel broadens the mind. This landscape broadened the mind because the mind just flowed out from the ears like porridge. It was the kind of landscape where, if you saw a distant figure cutting cabbages, you’d watch him until he was out of sight because there was simply nothing else for the eye to do.

“I spy,” said the Bursar, “with my little eye, something beginning with…H.”

“Oook.”

“No.”

“Horizon,” said Ponder.

“You guessed!”

“Of course I guessed. I’m supposed to guess. We’ve had S for Sky, C for Cabbage, O for…for Ook, and there’s nothing else.”

“I’m not going to play anymore if you’re going to guess.” The Bursar pulled his hat down over his ears and tried to curl up on the hard seat.

“There’ll be lots to see in Lancre,” said the Archchancellor. “The only piece of flat land they’ve got up there is in a museum.”

Ponder said nothing.

“Used to spend whole summers up there,” said Ridcully. He sighed. “You know…things could have been very different.”

Ridcully looked around. If you’re going to relate an intimate piece of personal history, you want to be sure it’s going to be heard.

The Librarian looked out at the jolting scenery. He was sulking. This had a lot to do with the new bright blue collar around his neck with the word “PONGO” on it. Someone was going to suffer for this.

The Bursar was trying to use his hat like a limpet uses its shell.

“There was this girl.”

Ponder Stibbons, chosen by a cruel fate to be the only one listening, looked surprised. He was aware that, technically, even the Archchancellor had been young once. After all, it was just a matter of time. Common sense suggested that wizards didn’t flash into existence aged seventy and weighing nineteen stone. But common sense needed reminding.

He felt he ought to say something.

“Pretty, was she, sir?” he said.

“No. No, I can’t say she was. Striking. That’s the word. Tall. Hair so blond it was nearly white. And eyes like gimlets, I tell you.”

Ponder tried to work this out.

“You don’t mean that dwarf who runs the delicatessen in—” he began.

“I mean you always got the impression she could see right through you,” said Ridcully, slightly more sharply than he had intended. “And she could run…”

He lapsed into silence again, staring at the newsreels of memory.

“I would’ve married her, you know,” he said.

Ponder said nothing. When you’re a cork in someone else’s stream of consciousness, all you can do is spin and bob in the eddies.

“What a summer,” murmured Ridcully. “Very like this one, really. Crop circles were bursting like raindrops. And…well, I was having doubts, you know. Magic didn’t seem to be enough. I was a bit…lost. I’d have given it all up for her. Every blasted octogram and magic spell. Without a second thought. You know when they say things like ‘she had a laugh like a mountain stream’?”

“I’m not personally familiar with it,” said Ponder, “but I have read poetry that—”

“Load of cobblers, poetry,” said Ridcully. “I’ve listened to mountain streams and they just go trickle, trickle, gurgle. And you get them things in them, you know, insect things with little…anyway. Doesn’t sound like laughter at all, is my point. Poets always get it wrong. ’S’like ‘she had lips like cherries.’ Small, round, and got a stone in the middle? Hah!”

He shut his eyes. After a while Ponder said, “So what happened, sir?”

“What?”

“The girl you were telling me about.”

“What girl?”

“This girl.”

“Oh, that girl. Oh, she turned me down. Said there were things she wanted to do. Said there’d be time enough.”

There was another pause.

“What happened then?” Ponder prompted.

“Happened? What d’you think happened? I went off and studied. Term started. Wrote her a lot of letters but she never answered ’em. Probably never got ’em, they probably eat the mail up there. Next year I was studying all summer and never had time to go back. Never did go back. Exams and so on. Expect she’s dead now, or some fat old granny with a dozen kids. Would’ve wed her like a shot. Like a shot.” Ridcully scratched his head. “Hah…just wish I could remember her name…”

He stretched out with his feet on the Bursar.

“’S’funny, that,” he said. “Can’t even remember her name. Hah! She could outrun a horse—”

“Kneel and deliver!”

The coach rattled to a halt.

Ridcully opened an eye.

“What’s that?” he said.

Ponder jerked awake from a reverie of lips like mountain streams and looked out of the window.

“I think,” he said, “it’s a very small highwayman.”

 

The coachman peered down at the figure in the road. It was hard to see much from this angle, because of the short body and the wide hat. It was like looking at a well-dressed mushroom with a feather in it.

“I do apologize for this,” said the very small highwayman. “I find myself a little short.”

The coachman sighed and put down the reins. Properly arranged holdups by the Bandits’ Guild were one thing, but he was blowed if he was going to be threatened by an outlaw that came up to his waist and didn’t even have a crossbow.

“You little bastard,” he said. “I’m going to knock your block off.”

He peered closer.

“What’s that on your back? A hump?”

“Ah, you’ve noticed the stepladder,” said the low highwayman. “Let me demonstrate—”

“What’s happening?” said Ridcully, back in the coach.

“Um, a dwarf has just climbed up a small stepladder and kicked the coachman in the middle of the road,” said Ponder.

“That’s something you don’t see every day,” said Ridcully. He looked happy. Up to now, the journey had been quite uneventful.

“Now he’s coming toward us.”

“Oh, good.”

The highwayman stepped over the groaning body of the driver and marched toward the door of the coach, dragging his stepladder behind him.

He opened the door.

“Your money or, I’m sorry to say, your—”

A blast of octarine fire blew his hat off.

The dwarf’s expression did not change.

“I wonder if I might be allowed to rephrase my demands?”

Ridcully looked the elegantly dressed stranger up and down or, rather, down and further down.

“You don’t look like a dwarf,” he said, “apart from the height, that is.”

“Don’t look like a dwarf apart from the height?”

“I mean, the helmet and iron boots department is among those you are lacking in,” said Ridcully.

The dwarf bowed and produced a slip of pasteboard from one grubby but lace-clad sleeve.

“My card,” he said.

It read:

Ponder peered over Ridcully’s shoulder.

“Are you really an outrageous liar?”

“No.”

“Why are you trying to rob coaches, then?”

“I am afraid I was waylaid by bandits.”

“But it says here,” said Ridcully, “that you are a finest swordsman.”

“I was outnumbered.”

“How many of them were there?”

“Three million.”

“Hop in,” said Ridcully.

Casanunda threw his stepladder into the coach and then peered into the gloom.

“Is that an ape asleep in there?”

“Yes.”

The Librarian opened one eye.

“What about the smell?”

“He won’t mind.”

“Hadn’t you better apologize to the coachman?” said Ponder.

“No, but I could kick him again harder if he likes.”

“And that’s the Bursar,” said Ridcully, pointing to Exhibit B, who was sleeping the sleep of the near-terminally overdosed on dried frog pills. “Hey, Bursar? Bursssaaar? No, he’s out like a light. Just push him under the seat. Can you play Cripple Mr. Onion?”

“Not very well.”

“Capital!”

Half an hour later Ridcully owed the dwarf $8,000.

“But I put it on my visiting card,” Casanunda pointed out. “Outrageous liar. Right there.”

“Yes, but I thought you were lying!”

Ridcully sighed and, to Ponder’s amazement, produced a bag of coins from some inner recess. They were large coins and looked suspiciously realistic and golden.

Casanunda might have been a libidinous soldier of fortune by profession but he was a dwarf by genetics, and there are some things dwarfs know.

“Hmm,” he said. “You don’t have ‘outrageous liar’ on your visiting card, by any chance?”

“No!” said Ridcully excitedly.

“It’s just that I can recognize chocolate money when I see it.”

“You know,” said Ponder, as the coach jolted along a canyon, “this reminds me of that famous logical puzzle.”

“What logical puzzle?” said the Archchancellor.

“Well,” said Ponder, gratified at the attention, “it appears that there was this man, right, who had to choose between going through two doors, apparently, and the guard on one door always told the truth and the guard on the other door always told a lie, and the thing was, behind one door was certain death, and behind the other door was freedom, and he didn’t know which guard was which, and he could only ask them one question and so: what did he ask?”

The coach bounced over a pothole. The Librarian turned over in his sleep.

“Sounds like Psychotic Lord Hargon of Quirm to me,” said Ridcully, after a while.

“That’s right,” said Casanunda. “He was a devil for jokes like that. How many students can you get in an Iron Maiden, that kind of thing.”

“So this was at his place, then, was it?” said Ridcully.

“What? I don’t know,” said Ponder.

“Why not? You seem to know all about it.”

“I don’t think it was anywhere. It’s a puzzle.”

“Hang on,” said Casanunda, “I think I’ve worked it out. One question, right?”

“Yes,” said Ponder, relieved.

“And he can ask either guard?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, right. Well, in that case he goes up to the smallest guard and says, ‘Tell me which is the door to freedom if you don’t want to see the color of your kidneys and incidentally I’m walking through it behind you, so if you’re trying for the Mr. Clever Award just remember who’s going through it first.’”

“No, no, no!”

“Sounds logical to me,” said Ridcully. “Very good thinking.”

“But you haven’t got a weapon!”

“Yes I have. I wrested it from the guard while he was considering the question,” said Casanunda.

“Clever,” said Ridcully. “Now that, Mr. Stibbons, is logical thought. You could learn a lot from this man—”

“—dwarf—”

“—sorry, dwarf. He doesn’t go on about parasite universes all the time.”

“Parallel!” snapped Ponder, who had developed a very strong suspicion that Ridcully was getting it wrong on purpose.

“Which ones are the parasite ones, then?”

“There aren’t any! I mean, there aren’t any, Archchancellor.* Parallel universes, I said. Universes where things didn’t happen like—” He hesitated. “Well, you know that girl?”

“What girl?”

“The girl you wanted to marry?”

“How’d you know that?”

“You were talking about her just after lunch.”

“Was I? More fool me. Well, what about her?”

“Well…in a way, you did marry her,” said Ponder.

Ridcully shook his head. “Nope. Pretty certain I didn’t. You remember that sort of thing.”

“Ah, but not in this universe—”

The Librarian opened one eye.

“You suggestin’ I nipped into some other universe to get married?” said Ridcully.

“No! I mean, you got married in that universe and not in this universe,” said Ponder.

“Did I? What? A proper ceremony and everything?”

“Yes!”

“Hmm.” Ridcully stroked his beard. “You sure?”

“Certain, Archchancellor.”

“My word! I never knew that.”

Ponder felt he was getting somewhere.

“So—”

“Yes?”

“Why don’t I remember it?”

Ponder had been ready for this.

“Because the you in the other universe is different from the you here,” he said. “It was a different you that got married. He’s probably settled down somewhere. He’s probably a great-grandad by now.”

“He never writes, I know that,” said Ridcully. “And the bastard never invited me to the wedding.”

“Who?”

“Him.”

“But he’s you!”

“Is he? Huh! You’d think I’d think of me, wouldn’t you? What a bastard!”

It wasn’t that Ridcully was stupid. Truly stupid wizards have the life expectancy of a glass hammer. He had quite a powerful intellect, but it was powerful like a locomotive, and ran on rails and was therefore almost impossible to steer.

There are indeed such things as parallel universes, although parallel is hardly the right word—universes swoop and spiral around one another like some mad weaving machine or a squadron of Yossarians with middle-ear trouble.

And they branch. But, and this is important, not all the time. The universe doesn’t much care if you tread on a butterfly. There are plenty more butterflies. Gods might note the fall of a sparrow but they don’t make any effort to catch them.

Shoot the dictator and prevent the war? But the dictator is merely the tip of the whole festering boil of social pus from which dictators emerge; shoot one, and there’ll be another one along in a minute. Shoot him too? Why not shoot everyone and invade Poland? In fifty years’, thirty years’, ten years’ time the world will be very nearly back on its old course. History always has a great weight of inertia.

Almost always…

At circle time, when the walls between this and that are thinner, when there are all sorts of strange leakages…Ah, then choices are made, then the universe can be sent careening down a different leg of the well-known Trousers of Time.

But there are also stagnant pools, universes cut off from past and future. They have to steal pasts and futures from other universes; their only hope is to batten on to the dynamic universes as they pass through the fragile period, as remora fish hang on to a passing shark. These are the parasite universes and, when the crop circles burst like raindrops, they have their chance…

 

Lancre castle was far bigger than it needed to be. It wasn’t as if Lancre could have been bigger at one time; inhospitable mountains crowded it on three sides, and a more or less sheer drop occupied where the fourth side would have been if a sheer drop hadn’t been there. As far as anyone knew, the mountains didn’t belong to anyone. They were just mountains.

The castle rambled everywhere. No one even knew how far the cellars went.

These days everyone lived in the turrets and halls near the gate.

“I mean, look at the crenellations,” said Magrat.

“What, m’m?”

“The cut-out bits on top of the walls. You could hold off an army here.”

“That’s what a castle’s for, isn’t it, m’m?”

Magrat sighed. “Can we stop the ‘m’m’, please? It makes you sound uncertain.”

“Mm, m’m?”

“I mean, who is there to fight up here? Not even trolls could come over the mountains, and anyone coming up the road is asking for a rock on the head. Besides, you only have to cut down Lancre bridge.”

“Dunno, m’m. Kings’ve got to have castles, I s’pose.”

“Don’t you ever wonder about anything, you stupid girl?”

“What good does that do, m’m?”

I called her a stupid girl, thought Magrat. Royalty is rubbing off on me.

“Oh, well,” she said, “where’ve we got to?”

“We’re going to need two thousand yards of the blue chintz material with the little white flowers,” said Millie.

“And we haven’t even measured half the windows yet,” said Magrat, rolling up the tape measure.

She looked down the length of the Long Gallery. The thing about it, the thing that made it so noticeable, the first thing anyone noticed about it, was that it was very long. It shared certain distinctive traits with the Great Hall and the Deep Dungeons. Its name was a perfectly accurate description. And it would be, as Nanny Ogg would say, a bugger to carpet.

“Why? Why a castle in Lancre?” she said, mainly to herself, because talking to Millie was like talking to yourself. “We’ve never fought anyone. Apart from outside the tavern on a Saturday night.”

“Couldn’t say, I’m sure, m’m,” said Millie.

Magrat sighed.

“Where’s the king today?”

“He’s opening Parliament, m’m.”

“Hah! Parliament!”

Which had been another of Verence’s ideas. He’d tried to introduce Ephebian democracy to Lancre, giving the vote to everyone, or at least everyone “who be of good report and who be male and hath forty years and owneth a hosue* worth more than three and a half goats a year,” because there’s no sense in being stupid about things and giving the vote to people who were poor or criminal or insane or female, who’d only use it irresponsibly. It worked, more or less, although the Members of Parliament only turned up when they felt like it and in any case no one ever wrote anything down and, besides, no one ever disagreed with whatever Verence said because he was King. What’s the point of having a king, they thought, if you have to rule yourself? He should do his job, even if he couldn’t spell properly. No one was asking him to thatch roofs or milk cows, were they?

“I’m bored, Millie. Bored, bored, bored. I’m going for a walk in the gardens.”

“Shall I fetch Shawn with the trumpet?”

“Not if you want to live.”

Not all the gardens had been dug up for agricultural experiments. There was, for example, the herb garden. To Magrat’s expert eye it was a pretty poor herb garden, since it just contained plants that flavored food. And at that Mrs. Scorbic’s repertoire stopped short at mint and sage. There wasn’t a sprig of vervain or yarrow or Old Man’s Trousers anywhere in it.

And there was the famous maze or, at least, it would be a famous maze. Verence had planted it because he’d heard that stately castles should have a maze and everyone agreed that, once the bushes were a bit higher than their current height of about one foot, it would indeed be a very famous maze and people would be able to get lost in it without having to shut their eyes and bend down.

Magrat drifted disconsolately along the gravel path, her huge wide dress leaving a smooth trail.

There was a scream from the other side of the hedge, but Magrat recognized the voice. There were certain traditions in Lancre castle which she had learned.

“Good morning, Hodgesaargh,” she said.

The castle falconer appeared around the corner, dab-bing at his face with a handkerchief. On his other arm, claws gripping like a torture instrument, was a bird. Evil red eyes glared at Magrat over a razor-sharp beak.

“I’ve got a new hawk,” said Hodgesaargh proudly. “It’s a Lancre crowhawk. They’ve never been tamed before. I’m taming it. I’ve already stopped it pecking myooooow—”

He flailed the hawk madly against the wall until it let go of his nose.

Strictly speaking, Hodgesaargh wasn’t his real name. On the other hand, on the basis that someone’s real name is the name they introduce themselves to you by, he was definitely Hodgesaargh.

This was because the hawks and falcons in the castle mews were all Lancre birds and therefore naturally possessed of a certain “sod you” independence of mind. After much patient breeding and training Hodgesaargh had managed to get them to let go of someone’s wrist, and now he was working on stopping them viciously attacking the person who had just been holding them, i.e., invariably Hodgesaargh. He was nevertheless a remarkably optimistic and good-natured man who lived for the day when his hawks would be the finest in the world. The hawks lived for the day when they could eat his other ear.

“I can see you’re doing very well,” said Magrat. “You don’t think, do you, that they might respond better to cruelty?”

“Oh, no, miss,” said Hodgesaargh, “you have to be kind. You have to build up a bond, you see. If they don’t trust you theyaaaagh—”

“I’ll just leave you to get on with it then, shall I?” said Magrat, as feathers filled the air.

Magrat had been gloomily unsurprised to learn that there was a precise class and gender distinction in falconry—Verence, being king, was allowed a gyrfalcon, whatever the hell that was, any earls in the vicinity could fly a peregrine, and priests were allowed sparrowhawks. Commoners were just about allowed a stick to throw.* Magrat found herself wondering what Nanny Ogg would be allowed—a small chicken on a spring, probably.

There was no specific falcon for a witch but, as a queen, the Lancre rules of falconry allowed her to fly the wowhawk or Lappet-faced Worrier. It was small and shortsighted and preferred to walk everywhere. It fainted at the sight of blood. And about twenty wowhawks could kill a pigeon, if it was a sick pigeon. She’d spent an hour with one on her wrist. It had wheezed at her, and eventually it had dozed off upside down.

But at least Hodgesaargh had a job to do. The castle was full of people doing jobs. Everyone had something useful to do except Magrat. She just had to exist. Of course, everyone would talk to her, provided she talked to them first. But she was always interrupting something important. Apart from ensuring the royal succession, which Verence had sent off for a book about, she—

“You just keep back there, girl. You don’t want to come no further,” said a voice.

Magrat bridled.

“Girl? One happens to be very nearly of the royal blood by marriage!”

“Maybe, but the bees don’t know that,” said the voice.

Magrat stopped.

She’d stepped out beyond what were the gardens from the point of view of the royal family and into what were the gardens from the point of view of everyone else—beyond the world of hedges and topiary and herb gardens and into the world of old sheds, piles of flowerpots, compost and, just here, beehives.

One of the hives had the lid off. Beside it, in the middle of a brown cloud, smoking his special bee pipe, was Mr. Brooks.

“Oh,” she said, “it’s you, Mr. Brooks.”

Technically, Mr. Brooks was the Royal Beekeeper. But the relationship was a careful one. For one thing, although most of the staff were called by their last names Mr. Brooks shared with the cook and the butler the privilege of an honorific. Because Mr. Brooks had secret powers. He knew all about honey flows and the mating of queens. He knew about swarms, and how to destroy wasps’ nests. He got the general respect shown to those, like witches and blacksmiths, whose responsibilities are not entirely to the world of the humdrum and everyday—people who, in fact, know things that others don’t about things that others can’t fathom. And he was generally found doing something fiddly with the hives, ambling across the kingdom in pursuit of a swarm, or smoking his pipe in his secret shed which smelled of old honey and wasp poison. You didn’t offend Mr. Brooks, not unless you wanted swarms in your privy while he sat cackling in his shed.

He carefully replaced the lid on the hive and walked away. A few bees escaped from the gaping holes in his beekeeping veil.

“Afternoon, your ladyship,” he conceded.

“Hello, Mr. Brooks. What’ve you been doing?”

Mr. Brooks opened the door of his secret shed, and rummaged about inside.

“They’re late swarming,” said the beekeeper. “I was just checking up on ’em. Fancy a cup of tea, girl?”

You couldn’t stand on ceremony with Mr. Brooks. He treated everyone as an equal, or more often as a slight inferior; it probably came of ruling thousands, every day. And at least she could talk to him. Mr. Brooks had always seemed to her as close to a witch as it was possible to be while still being male.

The shed was stuffed full of bits of hive, mysterious torture instruments for extracting honey, old jars, and a small stove on which a grubby teapot steamed next to a huge saucepan.

He took her silence for acceptance, and poured out two mugs.

“Is it herbal?” she quavered.

“Buggered if I know. It’s just brown leaves out of a tin.”

Magrat looked uncertainly into a mug which pure tannin was staining brown. But she rallied. One thing you had to do when you were queen, she knew, was Put Commoners at their Ease. She cast around for some easeful question.

“It must be very interesting, being a beekeeper,” she said.

“Yes. It is.”

“One’s often wondered—”

“What?”

“How do you actually milk them?”