And then there was the castle, seen through a gap in the trees, lit by a flash of lightning. Oats staggered through a clump of thorn bushes, managed to keep upright down a slope of loose boulders, and collapsed on the road with Granny Weatherwax on top of him.
She stirred.
“…holiday from reason…kill them all…can’t be havin’ with this…” she murmured.
The wind blew a branchful of raindrops on her face, and she opened her eyes. For a moment they seemed to Oats to have red pupils, and then the icy blue gaze focused on him.
“Are we here, then?”
“Yes.”
“What happened to your holy hat?”
“It got lost,” said Oats abruptly. Granny peered closer.
“Your magic amulet’s gone too,” she said. “The one with the turtle and the little man on it.”
“It’s not a magic amulet, Mistress Weatherwax! Please! A magic amulet is a symbol of primitive and mechanistic superstition, whereas the Turtle of Om is…is…is…well, it’s not, do you understand?”
“Oh, right. Thank you for explaining,” said Granny. “Help me up, will you?”
Oats was having some difficulty with his temper. He’d carried the old bit—biddy for miles, he was frozen to the bone, and now they were here she acted as if she’d somehow done him a favor.
“What’s the magic word?” he snarled.
“Oh, I don’t think a holy man like you should be having with magic words,” said Granny. “But the holy words are: do what I tell you or get smitten. They should do the trick.”
He helped her to her feet, alive with badly digested rage, and supported her as she swayed.
There was a scream from the castle, suddenly cut off.
“Not female,” said Granny. “I reckon the girls have started. Let’s give ’em a hand, shall we?”
Her arm shook as she raised it. The wowhawk fluttered down and settled on her wrist.
“Now help get me to the gate.”
“Don’t mention it, glad to be of service,” Oats mumbled. He looked at the bird, whose hood swiveled to face him.
“That’s the…other phoenix, isn’t it,” he said.
“Yes,” said Granny, watching the door. “A phoenix. You can’t have just one of anything.”
“But it looks like a little hawk.”
“It was born among hawks, so it looks like a hawk. If it was hatched in a hen roost it’d be a chicken. Stands to reason. And a hawk it’ll remain, until it needs to be a phoenix. They’re shy birds. You could say a phoenix is what it may become…”
“Too much eggshell…”
“Yes, Mister Oats. And when does the phoenix sometimes lay two eggs? When it needs to. Hodgesaargh was right. A phoenix is of the nature of birds. Bird first, myth second.”
The doors were hanging loose, their iron reinforcements twisted out of shape and their timbers smoldering, but some effort had been made to pull them shut. Over what remained of the arch, a bat carved in stone told visitors everything they needed to know about this place.
On Granny’s wrist the hood of the hawk was crackling and smoking. As he watched, little flames erupted from the leather again.
“It knows what they did,” said Granny. “It was hatched knowing. Phoenixes share their minds. And they don’t tolerate evil.”
The head turned to look at Oats with its white-hot stare and, instinctively, he backed away and tried to cover his eyes.
“Use the doorknocker,” said Granny, nodding to the big iron ring hanging loosely from one splintered door.
“What? You want me to knock on the door? Of a vampire’s castle?”
“We’re not going to sneak in, are we? Anyway, you Omnians are good at knocking on doors.”
“Well, yes,” said Oats, “but normally just for a shared prayer and to interest people in our pamphlets—” he let the knocker fall a few times, the boom echoing around the valley “—not to have my throat ripped out!”
“Think of this as a particularly difficult street,” said Granny. “Try again…mebbe they’re hidin’ behind the sofa, eh?”
“Hah!”
“You’re a good man, Mister Oats?” said Granny, conversationally, as the echoes died away. “Even without your holy book and holy amulet and holy hat?”
“Er…I try to be…” he ventured.
“Well…this is where you find out,” said Granny. “To the fire we come at last, Mister Oats. This is where we both find out.”
Nanny raced up some stairs, a couple of vampires at her heels. They were hampered because they hadn’t got to grips with not being able to fly, but there was something else wrong with them as well.
“Tea!” one screamed. “I must have…tea!”
Nanny pushed open the door to the battlements. They followed her, and tripped over Igor’s leg as he stepped out of the shadows.
He raised two sharpened table legs.
“How d’you want your thtaketh, boyth?” he shouted excitedly, as he struck. “You thould have thed you liked my thpiderth!”
Nanny leaned against the wall to get her breath back.
“Granny’s somewhere here,” she panted. “Don’t ask me how. But those two were craving a cup of tea, and I reckon only Esme could mess up someone’s head like that—”
The sounds of the doorknocker boomed around the courtyard below. At the same time the door at the other end of the battlements opened. Half a dozen vampires advanced.
“They’re acting very dumb, aren’t they,” said Nanny. “Give me a couple more stakes.”
“Run out of thtaketh, Nanny.”
“Okay, then, pass me a bottle of holy water…hurry up…”
“None left, Nanny.”
“We’ve got nothing?”
“Got’n orange, Nanny.”
“What for?”
“Run out of lemonth.”
“What good with an orange do if I hit a vampire in the mouth with it?” said Nanny, eyeing the approaching creatures.
Igor scratched his head. “Well, I thuppothe they won’t catch coldth tho eathily…”
The knocking reverberated around the castle again. Several vampires were creeping across the courtyard.
Nanny caught a flicker of light around the edge of the door. Instinct took over. As the vampires began to run, she grabbed Igor and pulled him down.
The arch exploded, every stone and plank drifting away on an expanding bubble of eyeball-searing flame. It lifted the vampires off their feet and they screamed as the fire carried them up.
When the brightness had faded a little Nanny peered carefully into the courtyard.
A bird, house-sized, wings of flame wider than the castle, reared in the broken doorway.
Mightily Oats pushed himself up onto his hands and knees. Hot flames roared around him, thundering like fiercely burning gas. His skin should be blackening already, but against all reason the fire felt no more deadly than a hot desert wind. The air smelled of camphor and spices.
He looked up. The flames wrapped Granny Weatherwax, but they looked oddly transparent, not entirely real. Here and there little gold and green sparks glittered on her dress, and all the time the fire whipped and tore around her.
She looked down at him. “You’re in the wings of the phoenix now, Mister Oats,” she shouted, above the noise, “and you ain’t burned!”
The bird flapping its wings on her wrist was incandescent.
“How can—”
“You’re the scholar! But male birds are always ones for the big display, aren’t they?”
“Males? This is a male phoenix?”
“Yes!”
It leapt. What flew…what flew, as far as Oats could see, was a great bird-shape of pale flame, with the little form of the real bird inside like the head of a comet. He added to himself: if that is indeed the real bird…
It swooped up into the tower. A yell, cut off quickly, indicated that a vampire hadn’t been fast enough.
“It doesn’t burn itself?” Oat
s said, weakly.
“Shouldn’t think so,” said Granny, stepping over the wreckage. “Wouldn’t be much point.”
“Then it must be magical fire…”
“They say that whether it burns you or not is up to you,” said Granny. “I used to watch them as a kid. My granny told me about ’em. Some cold nights you see them dancin’ in the sky over the Hub, burnin’ green and gold…”
“Oh, you mean the aurora coriolis,” said Oats, trying to make his voice sound matter-of-fact. “But actually that’s caused by magic particles hitting the—”
“Dunno what it’s caused by,” said Granny sharply, “but what it is, is the phoenix dancin’.” She reached out. “I ought to hold your arm.”
“In case I fall over?” said Oats, still watching the burning bird.
“That’s right.”
As he took her weight the phoenix above them flung back its head and screamed at the sky.
“And to think I thought it was an allegorical creature,” said the priest.
“Well? Even allegories have to live,” said Granny Weatherwax.
Vampires are not naturally cooperative creatures. It’s not in their nature. Every other vampire is a rival for the next meal. In fact, the ideal situation for a vampire is a world in which every other vampire has been killed off and no one seriously believes in vampires anymore. They are by nature as cooperative as sharks.
Vampyres are just the same, the only real difference being that they can’t spell properly.
The remnant of the clan scurried through the keep and headed for a door that for some reason had been left ajar.
The bucket containing a cocktail of waters blessed by a Knight of Offler, a High Priest of Io and a man so generically holy that he hadn’t cut his hair or washed for seventy years, landed on the first two to run through.
They did not include the Count and his family, who had moved as one into a side tower. There’s no point in having underlings if you don’t let them be the first to go through suspicious doors.
“How could you have been so—” Lacrimosa began, and to her shock got a slap across the face from her father.
“All we need to do is remain calm,” said the Count. “There’s no need to panic.”
“You struck me!”
“And most satisfying it was, too,” said the Count. “Careful thought is what will save us. That is why we will survive.”
“It’s not working!” said Lacrimosa. “I’m a vampire! I’m supposed to crave blood! And all I can think about is a cup of tea with three sugars in it, whatever the hell that is! That old woman’s doing something to us, can’t you see?”
“Not possible,” said the Count. “Oh, she’s sharp for a human, but I don’t reckon there’s any way she could get into your head or mine—”
“You’re even talkin’ like her!” shouted Lacrimosa.
“Be resolute, my dear,” said the Count. “Remember—that which does not kill us can only make us stronger.”
“And that which does kill us leaves us dead!” snarled Lacri-mosa. “You saw what happened to the others! You got your fingers burned!”
“A moment’s lapse of concentration,” said the Count. “That old witch is not a threat. She’s a vampire. Subservient to us. She’ll be seeing the world differently—”
“Are you mad? Something killed Cryptopher.”
“He let himself be frightened.”
The rest of the family looked at the Count. Vlad and Lacrimosa exchanged a glance.
“I am supremely confident,” said the Count. His smile looked like a death mask, waxen and disturbingly tranquil. “My mind is like a rock. My nerve is firm. A vampire with his wits about him, or her, of course, can never be defeated. Didn’t I teach you this? What’s this one?”
His hand flew from his pocket, holding a square of white cardboard.
“Oh, Father this is really no time for—” Lacrimosa froze, then jerked her arm in front of her face. “Put it away! Put it away! It’s the Agatean Chlong of Destiny!”
“Exactly, which is merely three straight lines and two curved lines pleasantly arranged which—”
“—I’d never have known about if you hadn’t told me, you old fool!” screamed the girl, backing away.
The Count turned to his son.
“And do you—” he began. Vlad sprang back, putting his hand over his eyes.
“It hurts!” he shouted.
“Dear me, the two of you haven’t been practicing—” the Count began, and turned the card around so that he could look at it.
He screwed up his eyes and turned his face away.
“What have you done to us?!” Lacrimosa screamed. “You’ve taught us how to see hundreds of the damned holy things! They’re everywhere! Every religion has a different one! You taught us that, you stupid bastard! Lines and crosses and circles…oh my…” She caught sight of the stone wall behind her astonished brother, and shuddered. “Everywhere I look I see something holy! You’ve taught us to see patterns!” She snarled at her father, teeth exposed.
“It’ll be dawn soon,” said the Countess nervously. “Will it hurt?”
“It won’t! Of course it won’t!” shouted Count Magpyr, as the others glanced up at the pale light coming through a high window. “It’s a learned psychochromatic reaction! A superstition! It’s all in the mind!”
“What else is in our minds, Father?” said Vlad coldly.
The Count was circling, trying to keep an eye on Lacrimosa. The girl was flexing her fingers and snarling.
“I said—”
“Nothing’s in our minds that we didn’t put there!” the Count roared. “I saw that old witch’s mind! It’s weak. She relies on trickery! She couldn’t possibly find a way in! I wonder if there are other agendas here?”
He bared his teeth at Lacrimosa.
The Countess fanned herself desperately. “Well, I think we’re all getting a little bit overexcited,” she said. “I think we should all settle down and have a nice cup of…a nice…of tea…a cup of…”
“We’re vampires!” Lacrimosa shouted.
“Then let’s act like them!” screamed the Count.
Agnes opened her eyes, kicked up, and the man with the hammer and stake lost all interest in vampires and in consciousness as well.
“Whsz—” Agnes removed from her mouth what was, this time, a fig. “Can you get it into your stupid heads that I’m not a vampire? And this isn’t a lemon. It’s a fig. And I’d watch that bloke with the stake. He’s altogether too keen on it, I reckon there’s some psychology there—”
“I wouldn’t have let him use it,” said Piotr, close by her ear. “But you did act very odd and then you just collapsed. So we thought we’d better see what woke up.”
He stood up. The citizens of Escrow stood watching among the trees, their faces gaunt in the flickering torchlight.
“It’s all right, she’s still not one,” he said. There was some general relaxation.
You really have changed, said Perdita.
“You’re not affected?” said Agnes. She felt as if she was on the end of a string with someone jerking the other end.
No. I’m the bit of you that watches, remember?
“What?” said Piotr.
“I really, really hope this wears off,” said Agnes. “I keep tripping over my own feet! I’m walking wrong! My whole body feels wrong!”
“Er…can we go on to the castle?” said Piotr.
“She’s already there,” said Agnes. “I don’t know how, but—”
She stopped, and looked at the worried faces, and for a moment she found herself thinking in the way Granny Weatherwax thought.
“Yes,” she said, more slowly. “I reckon…I mean, I think we ought to get there right away. People have to kill their own vampires.”
Nanny hurried down the steps again.
“I told you!” she said. “That’s Esme Weatherwax down there, that is. I told you! I knew she was just biding her time! Hah, I’d like to
see the bloodsucker who could put one over on her!”
“I wouldn’t,” said Igor, fervently.
Nanny stepped over a vampire who hadn’t noticed, in the shadows, a cunning combination of a tripwire, a heavy weight and a stake, and opened a door into the courtyard.
“Coo-ee, Esme!”
Granny Weatherwax pushed Oats away and stepped forward.
“Is the baby all right?” she said.
“Magrat and Es…young Esme are locked up in the crypt. It’s a very strong door,” said Nanny.
“And Thcrapth ith guarding them,” said Igor. “He’th a wonderful guard dog.”
Granny raised her eyebrows and looked Igor up and down.
“I don’t think I know this…these gentlemen,” she said.
“Oh, this is Igor,” said Nanny. “A man of many parts.”
“So it seems,” said Granny.
Nanny glared at Mightily Oats. “What did you bring him for?” she said.
“Couldn’t seem to shake him off,” said Granny.
“I always try hiding behind the sofa, myself,” said Nanny. Oats looked away.
There was a scream from somewhere on the battlements. The phoenix had spotted another vampire.
“All over now bar sweeping up the dust, then,” said Nanny. “They didn’t seem very smart—”
“The Count’s still here,” said Granny flatly.
“Oh, I vote we just set fire to the place and go home,” said Nanny. “It’s not as though he’ll be coming back to Lancre in a hurry—”
“There’th a crowd coming,” said Igor.
“I can’t hear anything,” said Nanny.
“I’ve got very good ear’th,” said Igor.
“Ah, well, of course some of us don’t get to choose,” said Nanny.
There was a clattering of footsteps across the bridge and people were suddenly swarming over the rubble.
“Isn’t that Agnes?” said Nanny. Normally, there’d be no mistaking the figure advancing across the courtyard, but there was something about the walk, the way every foot thudded down as though the boots were not on speaking terms with the earth. And the arms, too, swung in a way—
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