by The Wit
‘Yessir?’ said Shufti, rigid with instant panic.
‘Can you find me a dress, do you think?’
‘Sir, are you telling us … you’re going to try to get in dressed as a woman?’
‘Well, I’m clearly the only one who’s had any practice,’ said Blouse, rubbing his hands together. ‘At my old school we were in and out of skirts all the time.’
He looked around at the circle of absolutely expressionless faces.
‘Theatricals, you see?’ he said brightly. ‘No gels at our boarding school, of course. But we didn’t let that stop us. Why, my Lady Spritely in A Comedy of Cuckolds is still talked about. No, if we need a woman, I’m your man.’
ELEYEN-year-old Tiffany Aching wants to be a real witch. But a real witch doesn’t casually step out of her body, leaving it empty. Tiffany does - and there’s something just waiting for a handy body to take over. Something ancient and horrible, which can’t die. Now Tiffany’s got to learn to be a real witch really quickly, with the help of arch-witch Mistress Weatherwax and the truly amazing Miss Level.
‘Crivens! And us!’
Oh, yes. And the Nac Mac Feegle - the rowdiest, toughest, smelliest bunch of fairies ever to be thrown out of Fairyland for having been drunk at two in the afternoon. They’ll fight anything …
The Nac Mac Feegle are the most dangerous of the fairy races, particularly when drunk. They love drinking, fighting and stealing, and will in fact steal anything that is not nailed down. If it is nailed down, they will steal the nails as well.
*
The origin of the Nac Mac Feegle is lost in the famous Mists of Time. They say that they were thrown out of Fairyland by the Queen of the Fairies because they objected to her spiteful and tyrannical rule. Others say they were just thrown out for being drunk.
*
Little is known about their religion, if any, save for one fact: they think they are dead. They like our world, with its sunshine and mountains and blue skies and things to fight. An amazing world like this couldn’t be open to just anybody, they say. It must be some kind of a heaven or Valhalla, where brave warriors go when they are dead. So, they reason, they have already been alive somewhere else, and then died and were allowed to come here because they have been so good.
This is a quite incorrect and fanciful notion because, as we know, the truth is exactly the other way around.
*
The new boots were all wrong. They were stiff and shiny. Shiny boots! That was disgraceful. Clean boots, that was different. There was nothing wrong with putting a bit of a polish on boots to keep the wet out. But boots had to work for a living. They shouldn’t shine.
Witches were a bit like cats..
They didn’t much like one another’s company, but they did like to know where all the other witches were, just in case they needed them.
People in the chalk country didn’t trust witches. They thought they danced around on moonlit nights without their drawers on. (Tiffany had made enquiries about this, and had been slightly relieved to find out that you didn’t have to do this to be a witch. You could if you wanted to, but only if you were certain where all the nettles, thistles and hedgehogs were.)
*
If there’s one thing a Feegle likes more than a party, it’s a bigger party, and if there’s anything better than a bigger party, it’s a bigger party with someone else paying for the drink.
*
If you want to upset a witch you don’t have to mess around with charms and spells, you just have to put her in a room with a picture that’s hung slightly crooked and watch her squirm.
*
Rob Anybody had mastered the first two rules of writing, as he understood them.
1)Steal some paper.
2)Steal a pencil.
Unfortunately there was more to it than that.
*
Twoshirts was just a bend in the road, with a name. There was nothing there but an inn for the coaches, a blacksmith’s shop, and a small store with the word SOUVENIRS written optimistically on a scrap of cardboard in the window. And that was it. Around the place, separated by fields and scraps of woodland, were the houses of people for whom Twoshirts was, presumably, the big city. Every world is full of places like Twoshirts. They are places for people to come from, not go to.
*
The wood was about half an hour’s walk away. It was nothing special, as woods go, being mostly full-grown beech, although once you know that beech drips unpleasant poisons on the ground beneath it to keep it clear it’s not quite the timber you thought it was.
*
First Thoughts are the everyday thoughts. Everyone has those. Second Thoughts are the thoughts you think about the way you think. People who enjoy thinking have those. Third Thoughts are thoughts that watch the world and think all by themselves. They’re rare, and often troublesome. Listening to them is part of witchcraft.
*
She had a dobby stone, which was supposed to be lucky because it had a hole in it. (She’d been told that when she was seven, and had picked it up. She couldn’t quite see how the hole made it lucky, but since it had spent a lot of time in her pocket, and then safe and sound in the box, it probably was more fortunate than most stones, which got kicked around and run over by carts and so on.)
*
Every kitchen drawer Tiffany had ever seen might have been meant to be neat but over the years had been crammed with things that didn’t quite fit, like big ladles and bent bottle openers, which meant that they always stuck unless you knew the trick of opening them.
*
‘Have you ever been to a circus?’
Once, Tiffany admitted. It hadn’t been much fun. Things that try too hard to be funny often aren’t. There had been a moth-eaten lion with practically no teeth, a tight-rope walker who was never more than a few feet above the ground, and a knife-thrower who threw a lot of knives at an elderly woman in pink tights on a big spinning wooden disc and completely failed to hit her every time. The only real amusement was afterwards, when a cart ran over the clown.
*
‘He’s always talking about … his funeral.’
‘Well, it’s important to him. Sometimes old people are like that. They’d hate people to think that they were too poor to pay for their own funeral. Mr Weavall’d die of shame if he couldn’t pay for his own funeral.’
*
‘We do what can be done,’ said Miss Level. ‘Mistress Weatherwax said you’ve got to learn that witchcraft is mostly about doing quite ordinary things.’
‘And you have to do what she says?’ said Tiffany.
‘I listen to her advice,’ said Miss Level, coldly.
‘Mistress Weatherwax is the head witch, then, is she?’
‘Oh no!’ said Miss Level, looking shocked. ‘Witches are all equal. We don’t have things like head witches. That’s quite against the spirit of witchcraft.’
‘Oh, I see,’ said Tiffany.
‘Besides,’ Miss Level added, ‘Mistress Weatherwax would never allow that sort of thing.’
*
Tiffany couldn’t help noticing that Petulia had jewellery everywhere; later she found that it was hard to be around Petulia for any length of time without having to unhook a bangle from a necklace or, once, an earring from an ankle bracelet (nobody ever found out how that one happened). Petulia couldn’t resist occult jewellery. Most of the stuff was to magically protect her from things, but she hadn’t found anything to protect her from looking a bit silly.
*
You had to remember that pictsies weren’t brownies. In theory, brownies would do the housework for you if you left them a saucer of milk.
The Nac Mac Feegle … wouldn’t.
*
In truth, most witches could get through their whole life without having to do serious, undeniable magic (making shambles and curse-nets and dreamcatchers didn’t really count, being rather more like arts-and-crafts, and most of the rest of it was practical medicine, common sense and the a
bility to look stern in a pointy hat). But being a witch and wearing the big black hat was like being a policeman. People saw the uniform, not you. When the mad axeman was running down the street you weren’t allowed to back away muttering ‘Could you find someone else? Actually, I mostly just do, you know, stray dogs and road safety …’ You were there, you had the hat, you did the job. That was a basic rule of witchery: It’s up to you.
*
‘How many fingers am I holdin’ up?’ he said.
‘Five,’ whispered Miss Level.
‘Am I? Ah, well, ye could be right, ye’d have the knowin’ o’ the countin’,’ said Rob.
*
The Feegle way of reading:
‘Worrds,’ said Rob Anybody.
‘Yes, they say—’ Billy began.
‘I ken weel what they say!’ snapped Rob Anybody. ‘I ha’ the knowin’ of the readin’! They say—’
He looked up again. ‘OK, they say … that’s the snake, an’ that’s the kinda like a gate letter, an’ the comb on its side, two o’ that, an’ the fat man standin’ still, an’ the snake again, and then there’s whut we calls a “space” and then there’s the letter like a saw’s teeth, and two o’ the letters that’s roound like the sun, and the letter that’s a man sittin’ doon, and onna next line we ha’ … the man wi’ his arms oot, and the letter that’s you, an’ ha, the fat man again but noo he’s walkin’, an’ next he’s standin’ still again, an’ next is the comb, an’ the up-an’-doon ziggy-zaggy letter, and the man’s got his arms oot, and then there’s me, and that ziggy-zaggy and we end the line with the comb again … an’ on the next line we starts wi’ the bendy hook, that’s the letter roound as the sun, them’s twa men sittin’ doon, there’s the letter reaching ooot tae the sky, then there’s a space ‘cos there’s nae letter, then there’s the snaky again, an’ the letter like a hoose frame, and then there’s the letter that’s me, aye, an’ another fella sitting doon, an’ another big roound letter, and, ha, oor ol’ friend, the fat man walkin’! The End!’
He stood back, hands on hips, and demanded: ‘There! Is that readin’ I just did, or wuz it no’?’
(And the words were: SHEEP’S WOOL, TURPENTINE, JOLLY SAILOR.)
*
Everyone in the mountains had heard of Mistress Weatherwax. If you didn’t have respect, she said, you didn’t have anything.
They were treated like royalty -not the sort who get dragged off to be beheaded or have something nasty done with a red-hot poker, but the other sort, when people walk away dazed saying, ‘She actually said hello to me, very graciously! I will never wash my hand again!’
*
‘Let’s get moving.’
‘We haven’t even had anything to eat!’ said Tiffany, running after her.
‘I had a lot of voles last night,’ said Mistress Weatherwax over her shoulder.
‘Yes, but you didn’t actually eat them, did you?’ said Tiffany. ‘It was the owl that actually ate them.’
‘Technic’ly yes,’ Mistress Weatherwax admitted. ‘But if you think you’ve been eating voles all night you’d be amazed how much you don’t want to eat anything next morning.’
For an old woman Mistress Weatherwax could move quite fast. She strode over the moors as if distance was a personal insult.
There were no judges, and no prizes. The Witch Trials weren’t like that, as Petulia had said. The point was to show what you could do, to show what you’d become, so that people would go away thinking things like ‘That Caramella Bottlethwaite, she’s coming along nicely’. It wasn’t a competition, honestly. No one won.
And if you believed that you’d believe that the moon is pushed around the sky by a goblin called Wilberforce.
*
‘If you don’t know when to be a human being, you don’t know when to be a witch. And if you’re too afraid of goin’ astray, you won’t go anywhere.’
*
‘I’m clever enough to know how you manage not to think of a pink rhinoceros if someone says “pink rhinoceros”,’ she managed to say aloud.
‘Ah, that’s deep magic, that is,’ said Granny Weatherwax.
‘No. It’s not. You don’t know what a rhinoceros looks like, do you?’
Sunlight filled the clearing as the old witch laughed, as clear as a downland stream.
‘That’s right!’ she said.
MOIST von Lipwig is a con artist on …
… an and a fraud and a man faced with a life choice: be hanged, or put Ankh-Morpork’s ailing postal service back on its feet.
It’s a tough decision.
But he’s got to see that the mail gets through, come rain, hail, sleet, dog the Post Office Workers’ Friendly and Benevolent Society, the evil chairman of the Grand Trunk Semaphore Company, and a midnight killer killer.
Getting a date with Adora Belle Dearheart would be nice, too.
They say that the prospect of being hanged in the morning concentrates a man’s mind wonderfully; unfortunately, what the mind inevitably concentrates on is that it is in a body that, in the morning, is going to be hanged.
*
‘I’d get some rest if I was you, sir, ‘cos we’re hanging you in half an hour,’ said Mr Wilkinson.
‘Hey, don’t I get breakfast?’
‘Breakfast isn’t until seven o’clock, sir.’
*
‘I’m offering you a job, Mr Lipwig, that of Postmaster General of the Ankh-Morpork Post Office. The job, Mr Lipwig, involves the refurbishment and running of the city’s postal service, preparation of the international packets, maintenance of Post Office property, et cetera, et cetera—’
‘If you stick a broom up my arse I could probably sweep the floor, too,’ said Moist.
Lord Vetinari gave him a long, long look.
‘Well, if you wish,’ he said, and turned to a hovering clerk. ‘Drumknott, does the housekeeper have a store cupboard on this floor, do you know?’
*
‘I believe in freedom, Mr Lipwig. Not many people do, although they will of course protest otherwise. And no practical definition of freedom would be complete without the freedom to take the consequences. Indeed, it is the freedom upon which all the others are based.’
*
The world was blessedly free of honest men, and wonderfully full of people who believed they could tell the difference between an honest man and a crook.
He had a beard of the short bristled type that suggested that its owner had been interrupted halfway through eating a hedgehog.
A large black and white cat had walked into the room.
‘That’s Mr Tiddles, sir,’ said Groat.
‘Tiddles?’ said Moist. ‘You mean that really is a cat’s name? I thought it was just a joke.’
‘Not so much a name, sir, more of a description,’ said Groat.
*
Before you could sell glass as diamonds you had to make people really want to see diamonds. That was the trick, the trick of all tricks. You changed the way people saw the world. You let them see it the way they wanted it to be …
*
Being an absolute ruler today was not as simple as people thought. At least, it was not simple if your ambitions included being an absolute ruler tomorrow. There were subtleties. Oh, you could order men to smash down doors and drag people off to dungeons without trial, but too much of that sort of thing lacked style and anyway was bad for business, habit-forming and very, very dangerous for your health. A thinking tyrant, it seemed to Vetinari, had a much harder job than a ruler raised to power by some idiot vote-yourself-rich system like democracy. At least they could tell the people he was their fault.
*
‘Looks like you’re genuine after all, then,’ the old man said. ‘One of the dark clerks wouldn’t have [done] that. We thought you was one of his lordship’s special gentlemen, see. No offence, but you’ve got a bit more colour than the average penpusher.’
‘Dark clerks?’ said Moist, and then recollection dawned. ‘Oh … do
you mean those stocky little men in black suits and bowler hats?’
‘The very same. Scholarship boys at the Assassins’ Guild, some of ‘em. I heard that they can do some nasty things when they’ve a mind.’
‘I thought you called them pen-pushers?’
Yeah, but I didn’t say where, hee-hee.’
*
Mr Pump, a golem, points out to conman Moist von Lipwig the downstream consequences of what had seemed to Moist to be harmless scams to separate fools from their money:
You can’t just go around killing people!’ shouted Moist.
‘Why Not? You Do.’
‘What? I do not! Who told you that?’
‘I Worked It Out. You Have Killed Two Point Three Three Eight People,’ said the golem calmly.
‘I have never laid a finger on anyone in my life, Mr Pump. I may be -all the things you know I am, but I am not a killer! I have never so much as drawn a sword!’
‘No, You Have Not. But You Have Stolen, Embezzled, Defrauded And Swindled Without Discrimination, Mr Lipvig. You Have Ruined Businesses
And Destroyed Jobs. When Banks Fail, It Is Seldom Bankers Who Starve. Your Actions Have Taken Money From Those Who Had Little Enough To Begin With. In A Myriad Small Ways You Have Hastened The Deaths Of Many. You Do Not Know Them. You Did Not See Them Bleed. But You Snatched Bread From Their Mouths And Tore Clothes From Their Backs. For Sport, Mr Lipvig. For Sport. For The Joy Of The Game.’
Moist’s mouth had dropped open. It shut. It opened again. It shut again. You can never find repartee when you need it.
‘I Have Read The Details Of Your Many Crimes, Mr Lipvig. You Took From Others Because You Were Clever And They Were Stupid.’
‘Hold on, most of the time they thought they were swindling me!’
‘You Set Out To Trap Them, Mr Lipvig.’
People in Ankh-Morpork
always paid attention to people on rooftops, in case there was a chance of an interesting suicide.