“Yes, Mum.”
“Nanny?” said Magrat, when Jason had hurried away.
“Yes, dear?”
“A couple of months ago, when Verence suggested that tax on liquor exports, there was a big crowd protesting in the courtyard and he said, ‘oh well, if that’s the will of the people…’”
“Well, it was the will of the people,” said Nanny.
“Oh. Right. Good.”
“Only sometimes they temp’ry forget what their will is,” said Nanny. “Now, you can leave young Esme next door with Jason’s wife…”
“I’m keeping her with me,” said Magrat. “She’s happy enough on my back.”
“You can’t do that!” said Agnes.
“Don’t you dare argue with me, Agnes Nitt,” said Magrat, drawing herself up. “And not a word out of you, Nanny.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” said Nanny. “The Nac mac Feegle always take their babies into battle, too. Mind you, for use as a weapon if it comes to it.”
Magrat relaxed a little. “She said her first word this morning,” she said, looking proud.
“What, at fourteen days?” said Nanny doubtfully.
“Yes. It was ‘blup.’”
“Blup?”
“Yes. It was…more of a bubble than a word, I suppose.”
“Let’s get the stuff together,” said Nanny, standing up. “We’re a coven, ladies. We’re a trio. I miss Granny as much as you do, but we’ve got to deal with things as she would.” She took a few deep breaths. “I can’t be having with this.”
“It sounds better the way she says it,” said Agnes.
“I know.”
Hodgesaargh ate his meal in the servants’ dining room off the kitchen, and ate alone. There were new people around, but Hodge-saargh generally didn’t pay much attention to non-falconers. There were always other people in the castle, and they had jobs to do, and if pressed Hodgesaargh would vaguely acknowledge the fact that if he left his laundry in a sack by the kitchen door every week, it’d be washed and dried two days later. There were his meals. The game he left on the cold slab in the long pantry got dealt with. And so on.
He was returning to the mews when one of the shadows pulled him into the darkness, with a hand clamped over his mouth.
“Mph?”
“It’s me. Mrs. Ogg,” said Nanny. “You all right, Hodgesaargh?”
“Mph,” and by this, Hodgesaargh contrived to indicate that he was fine except for someone’s thumb blocking his breathing.
“Where are the vampires?”
“Mph?”
Nanny released her grip.
“Vampires?” the falconer panted. “They the ones that walk around slowly?”
“No, that’s the…food,” said Nanny. “Any swish-looking buggers about as well? Any soldiers?”
There was a soft thud from somewhere in the shadows, and someone said “Blast, I’ve dropped the nappy bag. Did you see where it rolled?”
“Er, there’s some new ladies and gentlemen,” said Hodge-saargh. “They’re hanging around the kitchens. There’s some men in chain mail, too.”
“Damn!” said Nanny.
“There’s the little door off the main hall,” said Magrat. “But that’s always locked on the inside.”
Agnes swallowed. “All right. I’ll go in and unlock it, then.”
Nanny tapped her on the shoulder. “You’ll be all right?”
“Well, they can’t control me…”
“They can grab you, though.”
Vlad won’t want you hurt, said Perdita. You saw the way he looked at us…
“I…think I’ll be all right,” said Agnes.
“You know your own minds best, I’m sure,” said Nanny. “Got the holy water?”
“Let’s hope it works better than the garlic,” said Agnes.
“Good luck.” Nanny cocked her head. “Sounds like the mob is spontaneously arriving at the gate. Go!”
Agnes ran off into the rain, around the castle to the doors of the kitchen. They were wide open. She made it to the corridor beyond the kitchens when a hand grabbed her shoulder, and then in a blur of speed two young men were standing in front of her.
They were dressed something like the young opera-goers she’d seen in Ankh-Morpork, except that their fancy waistcoats would have been considered far too fast by the staider members of the community, and they wore their hair long like a poet who hopes that romantically flowing locks will make up for a wretched inability to find a rhyme for “daffodil.”
“Why are you in such a hurry, girl?” one said.
Agnes sagged. “Look,” she said, “I’m very busy. Can we speed this up? Can we dispense with all the leers and ‘I like a girl with spirit’ stuff? Can we get right to the bit where I twist out of your grip and kick you in the—”
One of them struck her hard across the face.
“No,” he said.
“I’ll tell Vlad of you!” Perdita screamed in Agnes’s voice.
The other vampire hesitated.
“Hah! Yes, he knows me!” said Agnes and Perdita together. “Hah!”
One of the vampires looked her up and down.
“What, you?” he said.
“Yes, her,” said a voice.
Vlad strolled toward them, thumbs hooked into the pockets of his waistcoat.
“Demone? Crimson? To me, please?”
The two went and stood meekly in front of him. There was a blur, and then his thumbs were back in his waistcoat and the two vampires were in mid-crumple and sinking to the floor.
“This is the kind of thing we don’t do to our guests,” said Vlad, stepping over Demone’s twitching body and holding out his hands to Agnes. “Did they hurt you? Say the word, and I’ll turn them over to Lacrimosa. She’s just discovered you have a torture chamber here. And to think we thought Lancre was backward!”
“Oh, that old thing,” said Agnes, weakly. Crimson was making bubbling noises. I didn’t even see his hands move, said Perdita. “Er…it’s been there for centuries…”
“Oh really? She did say there weren’t enough straps and buckles. Still, she is…inventive. Just say the word.”
Say the word, Perdita prompted, That’d be two less of them.
“Er…no,” said Agnes. Ah…moral cowardice from the fat girl. “Er…who are they?”
“Oh, we brought some of the clan in on the carts. They can make themselves useful, Father said.”
“Oh? They’re relatives?” Granny Weatherwax would’ve said yes, Perdita whispered.
Vlad coughed gently. “By blood,” he said. “Yes. In a way. But…subservient. Do come this way.”
He gently took her arm and led her back up the passage, treading heavily on Crimson’s twitching hand as he did do.
“You mean vampirism is like…pyramid selling?” said Agnes. She was alone with Vlad. Admittedly, this had the edge over being alone with the other two, but somehow at a time like this it seemed vital to hear the sound of her own voice, if only to remind herself that she was alive.
“I’m sorry?” said Vlad. “Who sells pyramids?”
“No, I mean…you bite five necks, and in two months’ time you get a lake of blood of your very own?”
He smiled, but a little cautiously. “I can see we will have a lot to learn,” he said. “I understood every word in that sentence, but not the sentence itself. I’m sure there is a lot you could teach me. And, indeed, I could teach you…”
“No,” said Agnes, flatly.
“But when we—Oh, what is that moron doing now?”
A cloud of dust was advancing from the direction of the kitchens. In the middle of it, holding a bucket and a shovel, was Igor.
“Igor!”
“Yeth, marthter?”
“You’re putting down dust again, aren’t you…”
“Yeth, marthter.”
“And why are you putting down dust, Igor?” said Vlad icily.
“You’ve got to have dutht, marthter. It’th tradi—
“Igor, Mother told you. We don’t want dust. We don’t want huge candlesticks. We don’t want eyeholes cut in all the pictures, and we certainly don’t want your wretched box of damn spiders and your stupid little whip!”
In the ringing, red-hot silence Igor looked down at his feet.
“…thpiderth webth ith what people ecthpect, marthter…” he mumbled.
“We don’t want them!”
“…the old Count liked my thpiderth…” said Igor, his voice like some little insect that would nevertheless not be squashed.
“It’s ridiculous, Igor.”
“…he uthed to thay, ‘good webth today, Igor…’”
“Look, just…just go away, will you? See if you can’t sort out that dreadful smell from the garderobe. Mother says it makes her eyes water. And stand up straight and walk properly!” Vlad called after him. “No one’s impressed by the limp!”
Agnes saw Igor’s retreating back pause for a moment, and she expected him to say something. But then he continued his wobbly walk.
“He’s such a big baby,” said Vlad, shaking his head. “I’m sorry you had to see that.”
“Yes, I think I’m sorry too,” said Agnes.
“He’s going to be replaced. Father’s only been keeping him on out of sentiment. I’m afraid he came with the old castle, along with the creaking roof and the strange smell halfway up the main stairs which, I have to say, is not as bad as the one we’ve noticed here. Oh dear…look at this, will you? We turn our back for five minutes…”
There was a huge and very dribbly candle burning in a tall black candlestick.
“King Verence had all those oil lamps put in, a lovely modern light, and Igor’s been going around replacing them with candles again! We don’t even know where he gets them from. Lacci thinks he saves his earwax…”
They were in the long room beside the great hall now. Vlad lifted the candlestick up so that the flame’s glow lit the wall.
“Ah, they’ve put the pictures up. You ought to get to know the family…”
The light fell on a portrait of a tall, thin, gray-haired man in evening dress and a red-lined cloak. He looked quite distinguished in a distant, aloof sort of way. There was the glimmer of a lengthened canine on his lower lip.
“My great-uncle,” said Vlad. “The last…incumbent.”
“What’s the sash and star he’s wearing?” said Agnes. She could hear the sounds of the mob, far off but growing louder.
“The Order of Gvot. He built our family home. Don’tgonearthe Castle, we call it. I don’t know whether you’ve heard of it?”
“It’s a strange name.”
“Oh, he used to laugh about it. The local coachmen used to warn visitors, you see. ‘Don’t go near the castle,’ they’d say. ‘Even if it means spending a night up a tree, never go up there to the castle,’ they’d tell people. ‘Whatever you do, don’t set foot in that castle.’ He said it was marvelous publicity. Sometimes he had every bedroom full by nine P.M. and people would be hammering on the door to get in. Travelers would go miles out of their way to see what all the fuss was about. We won’t see his like again, with any luck. He did rather play to the crowd, I’m afraid. Rose from the grave so often that he had a coffin with a revolving lid. Ah…Aunt Carmilla…”
Agnes stared at a very severe woman in a figure-hugging black dress and deep-plum lipstick.
“She was said to bathe in the blood of up to two hundred virgins at a time,” Vlad said. “I don’t believe that. Use more than eighty virgins and even quite a large bath will overflow, Lacrimosa tells me.”
“These little details are important,” said Agnes, buoyed up by the excitement of terror. “And, of course, it is so hard to find the soap.”
“Killed by a mob, I’m afraid.”
“People can be so ungrateful.”
“And this…” the light passed along the hall “…is my grandfather…”
A bald head. Dark-rimmed, staring eyes. Two teeth like needles, two ears like batwings, fingernails that hadn’t been trimmed for years…
“But half the picture’s just bare canvas,” said Agnes.
“The family story is that old Magyrato got hungry,” said Vlad. “A very direct approach to things, my grandfather. See the reddish-brown stains just here? Very much in the old style. And here…well, some distant ancestor, that’s all I know.”
This picture was mostly dark varnish. There was a suggestion of a beak on a hunched figure.
Vlad turned away, quickly. “We’ve come a long way, of course,” he said. “Evolution, Father says.”
“They look very…powerful,” said Agnes.
“Oh yes. So very powerful, and yet so very, very dumb,” said Vlad. “My father thinks stupidity is somehow built into vampirism, as if the desire for fresh blood is linked to being as thick as a plank. Father is a very unusual vampire. He and Mother raised us…differently.”
“Differently,” said Agnes.
“Vampires aren’t very family orientated. Father says that’s natural. Humans are raising their successors, you see, but we live for a very long time so a vampire is raising competitors. There’s not a lot of family feeling, you could say.”
“Really.” In the depths of her pocket, Agnes’s fingers closed around the bottle of holy water.
“But Father said self-help was the only way out. Break the cycle of stupidity, he said. Little traces of garlic were put into our food to get us used to it. He tried early exposure to various religious symbols—oh dear, we must have had the oddest nursery wallpaper in the world, never mind the jolly frieze of Gertie the Dancing Garlic—and I have to say that their efficacy isn’t that good in any case. He even made us go out and play during the day. That which does not kill us, he’d say, makes us strong—”
Agnes’s arm whirled out. The holy water spiraled out of the bottle and hit Vlad full in the chest.
He threw his arms wide and screamed as water cascaded down and poured into his shoes.
She’d never expected it to be this easy.
He raised his head and winked at her.
“Look at this waistcoat! Will you look at this waistcoat? Do you know what water does to silk? You just never get it out! No matter what you do, there’s always a mark.” He looked at her frozen expression, and sighed.
“I suppose we’d better get some things off our chest, hadn’t we?” he said. He looked up at the wall, and took down a very large and spiky ax. He thrust it at her.
“Take this and cut my head off, will you?” he said. “Look, I’ll loosen my cravat. Don’t want blood on it, do we? There. See?”
“Are you trying to tell me that you were brought up with this, too?” she said hotly. “What was it, a little light hatchet practice after breakfast? Cut your head off a little bit every day and the real thing won’t hurt?”
Vlad rolled his eyes. “Everyone knows that cutting off a vampire’s head is internationally acceptable,” he said. “I’m sure Nanny Ogg would be swinging right now. Come along, there’s a lot of muscle in those rather thick arms, I’m—”
She swung.
He reached around from behind her and whisked the ax out of her arms.
“—sure,” he finished. “We are also very, very fast.”
He tested the blade with his thumb. “Blunt, I notice. My dear Miss Nitt, it may just be more trouble than it’s worth to try to get rid of us, do you see? Now, old Magyrato there would not have made the kind of offer we are making to Lancre. Dear me, no. Are we ravaging across the country? No? Forcing our way into bedrooms? Certainly not. What’s a little blood, for the good of the community? Of course Verence will have to be demoted a little but, let’s face it, the man is rather more of a clerk than a king. And…our friends may find us grateful. What is the point of resisting?”
“Are vampires ever grateful?”
“We can learn.”
“You’re just saying that in exchange for not actually being evil you’ll simply be bad, is that it?”
<
br /> “What we are saying, my dear, is that our time has come,” said a voice behind them.
They both turned.
The Count had stepped into the gallery. He was wearing a smoking jacket. There was an armed man strolling on either side of him.
“Oh dear, Vlad…playing with your food? Good evening, Miss Nitt. We appear to have a mob at the gates, Vlad.”
“Really? That’s exciting. I’ve never seen a real mob.”
“I wish your first could have been a better one,” said the Count, and sniffed. “There’s no passion in it. Still, it’d be too tiresome to let it go on all through dinner. I shall tell them to go away.”
The doors of the hall swung open without apparent aid.
“Shall we go and watch?” said Vlad.
“Er, I think I’ll go and powder my, I’ll just go and…I’ll just be a minute,” said Agnes, backing away.
She darted down the little corridor that led to the small door, and drew the bolts.
“About time,” said Nanny, hurrying in. “It’s really clammy out here.”
“They’ve gone to look at the mob. But there’s other vampires here, not just the guards! The rest must’ve come in on the carts! They’re like…not quite servants but they take orders.”
“How many are there?” said Magrat.
“I haven’t found out! Vlad is trying to get to know me better!”
“Good plan,” said Nanny. “See if he talks in his sleep.”
“Nanny!”
“Let’s see his lordship in action, shall we?” said Nanny. “We can nip into the old guardroom alongside the door and look through the squint.”
“I want to get Verence!” said Magrat.
“He’s not going anywhere,” said Nanny, striding into the little room by the door. “And I don’t reckon they’re planning to kill him. Anyway, he’s got some protection now.”
“I think these really are new vampires,” said Agnes. “They really aren’t like the old sort.”
“Then we face ’em here and now,” said Nanny. “That’s what Esme would do, sure enough.”
“But are we strong enough?” said Agnes. Granny wouldn’t have asked, said Perdita.
Carpe Jugulum Page 17