The duchess raised one thick eyebrow.
‘You are not entirely an idiot, are you,’ she said. ‘You refer to rumour.’
‘Just so, my lady.’ The Fool rolled his eyes. What had he got himself into?
‘It’s the witches,’ whispered the duke, to no-one in particular. ‘We must tell the world about the witches. They’re evil. They make it come back, the blood. Even sandpaper doesn’t work.’
There was another tremor as Granny Weatherwax hurried along the narrow, frozen pathways in the forest. A lump of snow slipped off a tree branch and poured over her hat.
This wasn’t right, she knew. Never mind about the – whatever it was – but it was unheard of for a witch to go out on Hogswatchnight. It was against all tradition. No-one knew why, but that wasn’t the point.
She came out on to the moorland and pounded across the brittle heather, which had been scoured of snow by the wind. There was a crescent moon near the horizon, and its pale glow lit up the mountains that towered over her. It was a different world up there, and one even a witch would rarely venture into; it was a landscape left over from the frosty birth of the world, all green ice and knife-edge ridges and deep, secret valleys. It was a landscape never intended for human beings – not hostile, any more than a brick or cloud is hostile, but terribly, terribly uncaring.
Except that, this time, it was watching her. A mind quite unlike any other she had ever encountered was giving her a great deal of its attention. She glared up at the icy slopes, half expecting to see a mountainous shadow move against the stars.
‘Who are you?’ she shouted. ‘What do you want?’
Her voice bounced and echoed among the rocks. There was a distant boom of an avalanche, high among the peaks.
On the crest of the moor, where in the summer partridges lurked among the bushes like small whirring idiots, was a standing stone. It stood roughly where the witches’ territories met, although the boundaries were never formally marked out.
The stone was about the same height as a tall man, and made of bluish tinted rock. It was considered intensely magical because, although there was only one of it, no-one had ever been able to count it; if it saw anyone looking at it speculatively, it shuffled behind them. It was the most self-effacing monolith ever discovered.
It was also one of the numerous discharge points for the magic that accumulated in the Ramtops. The ground around it for several yards was bare of snow, and steamed gently.
The stone began to edge away, and watched her suspiciously from behind a tree.
She waited for ten minutes until Magrat came hurrying up the path from Mad Stoat, a village whose good-natured inhabitants were getting used to ear massage and flower-based homeopathic remedies for everything short of actual decapitation.7 She was out of breath, and wore only a shawl over a nightdress that, if Magrat had anything to reveal, would have been very revealing.
‘You felt it too?’ she said.
Granny nodded. ‘Where’s Gytha?’ she said.
They looked down the path that led to Lancre town, a huddle of lights in the snowy gloom.
There was a party going on. Light poured out into the street. A line of people were winding in and out of Nanny Ogg’s house, from inside which came occasional shrieks of laughter and the sounds of breaking glass and children grizzling. It was clear that family life was being experienced to its limits in that house.
The two witches stood uncertainly in the street.
‘Do you think we should go in?’ said Magrat diffidently. ‘It’s not as though we were invited. And we haven’t brought a bottle.’
‘Sounds to me as if there’s a deal too many bottles in there already,’ said Granny Weatherwax disapprovingly. A man staggered out of the doorway, burped, bumped into Granny, said, ‘Happy Hogswatchnight, missus,’ glanced up at her face and sobered up instantly.
‘Mss,’ snapped Granny.
‘I am most frightfully sorry—’ he began.
Granny swept imperiously past him. ‘Come, Magrat,’ she commanded.
The din inside hovered around the pain threshold. Nanny Ogg got around the Hogswatchnight tradition by inviting the whole village in, and the air in the room was already beyond the reach of pollution controls. Granny navigated through the press of bodies by the sound of a cracked voice explaining to the world at large that, compared to an unbelievable variety of other animals, the hedgehog was quite fortunate.
Nanny Ogg was sitting in a chair by the fire with a quart mug in one hand, and was conducting the reprise with a cigar. She grinned when she saw Granny’s face.
‘What ho, my old boiler,’ she screeched above the din. ‘See you turned up, then. Have a drink. Have two. Wotcher, Magrat. Pull up a chair and call the cat a bastard.’
Greebo, who was curled up in the inglenook and watching the festivities with one slit yellow eye, flicked his tail once or twice.
Granny sat down stiffly, a ramrod figure of decency.
‘We’re not staying,’ she said, glaring at Magrat, who was tentatively reaching out towards a bowl of peanuts. ‘I can see you’re busy. We just wondered whether you might have noticed – anything. Tonight. A little while ago.’
Nanny Ogg wrinkled her forehead.
‘Our Darron’s eldest was sick,’ she said. ‘Been at his dad’s beer.’
‘Unless he was extremely ill,’ said Granny, ‘I doubt if it was what I was referring to.’ She made a complex occult sign in the air, which Nanny totally ignored.
‘Someone tried to dance on the table,’ she said. ‘Fell into our Reet’s pumpkin dip. We had a good laugh.’
Granny waggled her eyebrows and placed a meaningful finger alongside her nose.
‘I was alluding to things of a different nature,’ she hinted darkly.
Nanny Ogg peered at her.
‘Something wrong with your eye, Esme?’ she hazarded.
Granny Weatherwax sighed.
‘Extremely worrying developments of a magical tendency are even now afoot,’ she said loudly.
The room went quiet. Everyone stared at the witches, except for Darron’s eldest, who took advantage of the opportunity to continue his alcoholic experiments. Then, swiftly as they had fled, several dozen conversations hurriedly got back into gear.
‘It might be a good idea if we can go and talk somewhere more private,’ said Granny, as the comforting hubbub streamed over them again.
They ended up in the washhouse, where Granny tried to give an account of the mind she had encountered.
‘It’s out there somewhere, in the mountains and the high forests,’ she said. ‘And it is very big.’
‘I thought it was looking for someone,’ said Magrat. ‘It put me in mind of a large dog. You know, lost. Puzzled.’
Granny thought about this. Now she came to think of it . . .
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Something like that. A big dog.’
‘Worried,’ said Magrat.
‘Searching,’ said Granny.
‘And getting angry,’ said Magrat.
‘Yes,’ said Granny, staring fixedly at Nanny.
‘Could be a troll,’ said Nanny Ogg. ‘I left best part of a pint in there, you know,’ she added reproachfully.
‘I know what a troll’s mind feels like, Gytha,’ said Granny. She didn’t snap the words out. In fact it was the quiet way she said them that made Nanny hesitate.
‘They say there’s really big trolls up towards the Hub,’ said Nanny slowly. ‘And ice giants, and big hairy wossnames that live above the snowline. But you don’t mean anything like that, do you?’
‘No.’
‘Oh.’
Magrat shivered. She told herself that a witch had absolute control over her own body, and the goose-pimples under her thin nightdress were just a figment of her own imagination. The trouble was, she had an excellent imagination.
Nanny Ogg sighed.
‘We’d better have a look, then,’ she said, and took the lid off the copper.
Nanny Ogg nev
er used her washhouse, since all her washing was done by the daughters-in-law, a tribe of grey-faced, subdued women whose names she never bothered to remember. It had become, therefore, a storage place for dried-up old bulbs, burnt-out cauldrons and fermenting jars of wasp jam. No fire had been lit under the copper for ten years. Its bricks were crumbling, and rare ferns grew around the firebox. The water under the lid was inky black and, according to rumour, bottomless; the Ogg grandchildren were encouraged to believe that monsters from the dawn of time dwelt in its depths, since Nanny believed that a bit of thrilling and pointless terror was an essential ingredient of the magic of childhood.
In summer she used it as a beer cooler.
‘It’ll have to do. I think perhaps we should join hands,’ she said. ‘And you, Magrat, make sure the door’s shut.’
‘What are you going to try?’ said Granny. Since they were on Nanny’s territory, the choice was entirely up to her.
‘I always say you can’t go wrong with a good Invocation,’ said Nanny. ‘Haven’t done one for years.’
Granny Weatherwax frowned. Magrat said, ‘Oh, but you can’t. Not here. You need a cauldron, and a magic sword. And an octogram. And spices, and all sorts of stuff.’
Granny and Nanny exchanged glances.
‘It’s not her fault,’ said Granny. ‘It’s all them grimmers she was bought.’ She turned to Magrat.
‘You don’t need none of that,’ she said. ‘You need headology.’ She looked around the ancient washroom.
‘You just use whatever you’ve got,’ she said.
She picked up the bleached copper stick, and weighed it thoughtfully in her hand.
‘We conjure and abjure thee by means of this—’ Granny hardly paused – ‘sharp and terrible copper stick.’
The waters in the boiler rippled gently.
‘See how we scatter—’ Magrat sighed – ‘rather old washing soda and some extremely hard soap flakes in thy honour. Really, Nanny, I don’t think—’
‘Silence! Now you, Gytha.’
‘And I invoke and bind thee with the balding scrubbing brush of Art and the washboard of Protection,’ said Nanny, waving it. The wringer attachment fell off.
‘Honesty is all very well,’ whispered Magrat, wretchedly, ‘but somehow it isn’t the same.’
‘You listen to me, my girl,’ said Granny. ‘Demons don’t care about the outward shape of things. It’s what you think that matters. Get on with it.’
Magrat tried to imagine that the bleached and ancient bar of lye soap was the rarest of scented whatever, ungulants or whatever they were, from distant Klatch. It was an effort. The gods alone knew what kind of demon would respond to a summoning like this.
Granny was also a little uneasy. She didn’t much care for demons in any case, and all this business with incantations and implements whiffed of wizardry. It was pandering to the things, making them feel important. Demons ought to come when they were called.
But protocol dictated that the host witch had the choice, and Nanny quite liked demons, who were male, or apparently so.
At this point Granny was alternately cajoling and threatening the nether world with two feet of bleached wood. She was impressed at her own daring.
The waters seethed a little, became very still and then, with a sudden movement and a little popping noise, mounded up into a head. Magrat dropped her soap.
It was a good-looking head, maybe a little cruel around the eyes and beaky about the nose, but nevertheless handsome in a hard kind of way. There was nothing surprising about this; since the demon was only extending an image of itself into this reality, it might as well make a good job of it. It turned slowly, a gleaming black statue in the fitful moonlight.
‘Well?’ it said.
‘Who’re you?’ said Granny, bluntly.
The head revolved to face her.
‘My name is unpronounceable in your tongue, woman,’ it said.
‘I’ll be the judge of that,’ warned Granny, and added, ‘Don’t you call me woman.’
‘Very well. My name is WxrtHltl-jwlpklz,’ said the demon smugly.
‘Where were you when the vowels were handed out? Behind the door?’ said Nanny Ogg.
‘Well, Mr—’ Granny hesitated only fractionally – ‘WxrtHltl-jwlpklz, I expect you’re wondering why we called you here tonight.’
‘You’re not supposed to say that,’ said the demon. ‘You’re supposed to say—’
‘Shut up. We have the sword of Art and the octogram of Protection, I warn you.’
‘Please yourself. They look like a washboard and a copper stick to me,’ sneered the demon.
Granny glanced sideways. The corner of the washroom was stacked with kindling wood, with a big heavy sawhorse in front of it. She stared fixedly at the demon and, without looking, brought the stick down hard across the thick timber.
The dead silence that followed was broken only by the two perfectly-sliced halves of the sawhorse teetering backwards and forwards and folding slowly into the heap of kindling.
The demon’s face remained impassive.
‘You are allowed three questions,’ it said.
‘Is there something strange at large in the kingdom?’ said Granny.
It appeared to think about it.
‘And no lying,’ said Magrat earnestly. ‘Otherwise it’ll be the scrubbing brush for you.’
‘You mean stranger than usual?’
‘Get on with it,’ said Nanny. ‘My feet are freezing out here.’
‘No. There is nothing strange.’
‘But we felt it—’ Magrat began.
‘Hold on, hold on,’ said Granny. Her lips moved soundlessly. Demons were like genies or philosophy professors – if you didn’t word things exactly right, they delighted in giving you absolutely accurate and completely misleading answers.
‘Is there something in the kingdom that wasn’t there before?’ she hazarded.
‘No.’
Tradition said that there could be only three questions. Granny tried to formulate one that couldn’t be deliberately misunderstood. Then she decided that this was playing the wrong kind of game.
‘What the hell’s going on?’ she said carefully. ‘And no mucking about trying to wriggle out of it, otherwise I’ll boil you.’
The demon appeared to hesitate. This was obviously a new approach.
‘Magrat, just kick that kindling over here, will you?’ said Granny.
‘I protest at this treatment,’ said the demon, its voice tinged with uncertainty.
‘Yes, well, we haven’t got time to bandy legs with you all night,’ said Granny. ‘These word games might be all right for wizards, but we’ve got other fish to fry.’
‘Or boil,’ said Nanny.
‘Look.’ said the demon, and now there was a whine of terror in its voice. ‘We’re not supposed to volunteer information just like that. There are rules, you know.’
‘There’s some old oil in the can on the shelf, Magrat,’ said Nanny.
‘If I simply tell you—’ the demon began.
‘Yes?’ said Granny, encouragingly.
‘You won’t let on, will you?’ it implored.
‘Not a word,’ promised Granny.
‘Lips are sealed,’ said Magrat.
‘There is nothing new in the kingdom,’ said the demon, ‘but the land has woken up.’
‘What do you mean?’ said Granny.
‘It’s unhappy. It wants a king that cares for it.’
‘How—’ Magrat began, but Granny waved her into silence.
‘You don’t mean people, do you?’ she said. The glistening head shook. ‘No, I didn’t think so.’
‘What—’ Nanny began. Granny put a finger to her lips.
She turned and walked to the washhouse’s window, a dusty spiderweb graveyard of faded butterfly wings and last summer’s bluebottles. A faint glow beyond the frosted panes suggested that, against all reason, a new day would soon dawn.
‘Can you tell us why?�
� she said, without turning round. She’d felt the mind of a whole country . . .
She was rather impressed.
‘I’m just a demon. What do I know? Only what is, not the why and how of it.’
‘I see.’
‘May I go now?’
‘Um?’
‘Please?’
Granny jerked upright again.
‘Oh. Yes. Run along,’ she said distractedly. ‘Thank you.’
The head didn’t move. It hung around, like a hotel porter who has just carried fifteen suitcases up ten flights of stairs, shown everyone where the bathroom is, plumped up the pillows, and feels he has adjusted all the curtains he is going to adjust.
‘You wouldn’t mind banishing me, would you?’ said the demon, when no-one seemed to be taking the hint.
‘What?’ said Granny, who was thinking again.
‘Only I’d feel better for being properly banished. “Run along” lacks that certain something,’ said the head.
‘Oh. Well, if it gives you any pleasure. Magrat!’
‘Yes?’ said Magrat, startled.
Granny tossed the copper stick to her.
‘Do the honours, will you?’ she said.
Magrat caught the stick by what she hoped Granny was imagining as the handle, and smiled.
‘Certainly. Right. OK. Um. Begone, foul fiend, unto the blackest pit—’
The head smiled contentedly as the words rolled over it. This was more like it.
It melted back into the waters of the copper like candlewax under a flame. Its last contemptuous comment, almost lost in the swirl, was, ‘Run aaaa-longgg . . .’
Granny went home alone as the cold pink light of dawn glided across the snow, and let herself into her cottage.
The goats were uneasy in their outhouse. The starlings muttered and rattled their false teeth under the roof. The mice were squeaking behind the kitchen dresser.
She made a pot of tea, conscious that every sound in the kitchen seemed slightly louder than it ought to be. When she dropped the spoon into the sink it sounded like a bell being hit with a hammer.
She always felt uncomfortable after getting involved in organized magic or, as she would put it, out of sorts with herself. She found herself wandering around the place looking for things to do and then forgetting them when they were half-complete. She paced back and forth across the cold flagstones.
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