Maskerade d-18

by Terry David John Pratchett

  André gave it a glance, and then stared. “Hey… this is good,” he said.

  “Is it?”

  André looked at another page. “Good heavens!”

  “What? What?” said Bucket.

  “I've just never… I mean, even I can see… tum‑ti TUM tum‑tum…yes… Mr Bucket, you do know this isn't opera? There's music and… yes… dancing and singing all right, but it's not opera. Not opera at all. A long way from opera.”

  “How far? You don't mean…” Bucket hesitated, savouring the idea, “you don't mean that it's just possible that you put music in and you get money out?”

  André hummed a few bars. “This could very well be the case, Mr Bucket.”

  Bucket beamed. He put one arm around André and the other around Walter. “Good!!!!!” he said. “This calls for a very lar… for a medium‑sized mm drink…..

  One by one, or in groups, the singers and dancers left the stage. And the witches and Agnes were left alone.

  “Is that it?” said Agnes.

  “Not quite yet,” said Granny.

  Someone staggered on to the stage. A kindly hand had bandaged Enrico Basilica's head, and presumably another kindly hand had given him the plate of spaghetti he was holding. Mild concussion still seemed to have him in its grip. He blinked at the witches and then spoke like a man who'd lost his hold on immediate events and so was clinging hard to more ancient considerations.

  “Summon give me some 'ghetti,” he said.

  “That's nice,” said Nanny.

  “Hah! “Ghetti is fine for them as likes it… but not me! Hah! Yes!” He turned and peered muzzily at the darkness of the audience.

  “You know what I'm goin' to do? You know what I'm goin' to do now? I'm sayin' goodbye to Enrico Basilica! Oh yes! He's chewed his last tentacle! I'm goin' to go right out now and have eight pints of Turbot's Really Odd. Yes! And probably a sausage in a bun! And then I'm goin' down to the music hall to hear Nellie Stamp sing "A Winkles No Use if You Don't Have a Pin" — and if I sing again here it's goin' to be under the proud old name of Henry Slugg, do you hear‑?”

  There was a shriek from somewhere in the audience. “Henry Slugg?”

  “Er… yes?”

  “I thought it was you! You've grown a beard and stuffed a haystack down your trousers but, I thought, under that little mask, that's my Henry, that was!”

  Henry Slugg shaded his eyes from the footlights' glare.

  “…Angeline?”

  “Oh, no!” said Agnes, wearily. “This sort of thing does not happen.”

  “Happens in the theatre all the time,” said Nanny Ogg.

  “It certainly does,” said Granny. “It's only a mercy he doesn't have a long‑lost twin brother.”

  There was the sound of much scuffling in the audience. Someone was climbing along a row, dragging someone else.

  “Mother!” came a voice from the gloom. “What do you think you are doing?”

  “You just come with me, young Henry!”

  “Mother, we can't go up on the stage…!”

  Henry Slugg frisbeed the plate into the wings, clambered down from the stage and heaved himself over the edge of the orchestra pit, assisted by a couple of violinists.

  They met at the first row of seats. Agnes could just hear their voices.

  “I meant to come back. You know that!”

  “I wanted to wait but, what with one thing and another… especially one thing. Come here, young Henry…”

  “Mother, what is happening?”

  “Son… you know I always said your father was Mr Lawsy the eel juggler?”

  “Yes, of—”

  “Please, both of you, come back to my dressingroom! I can see we've got such a lot to talk about.”

  “Oh, yes. A lot…”

  Agnes watched them go. The audience, who could spot opera even if it wasn't being sung, applauded.

  “All right,” she said. “And now is it the end?”

  “Nearly,” said Granny.

  “Did you do something to everyone's heads?”

  “No, but I felt like smacking a few,” said Nanny.

  “But no one said "thank you" or anything!”

  “Often the case,” said Granny.

  “Too busy thinking about the next performance,” said Nanny. “The show must go on,” she added.

  “That's… that's madness!”

  “It's opera. I noticed that even Mr Bucket's caught it, too,” said Nanny. “And that young André has been rescued from being a policeman, if I'm any judge.”

  “But what about me?”

  “Oh, them as makes the endings don't get them,” said Granny. She brushed an invisible speck of dust off her shoulder.

  “I expect we'd better be gettin' along, Gytha,” she said, turning her back on Agnes. “Early start tomorrow.”

  Nanny walked forward, shading her eyes as she stared out into the dark maw of the auditorium.

  “The audience haven't gone, you know,” she said. “They're still sitting out there.”

  Granny joined her, and peered into the gloom. “I can't imagine why,” she said. “He did say the opera's over…

  They turned and looked at Agnes, who was standing in the centre of the stage and glowering at nothing.

  “Feeling a bit angry?” said Nanny. “Only to be expected.”

  “Yes!”

  “Feeling that everything's happened for other people and not for you?”

  “Yes!”

  “But,” said Granny Weatherwax, “look at it like this: what's Christine got to look forward to? She'll just become a singer. Stuck in a little world. Oh, maybe she'll be good enough to get a little fame, but one day the voice'll crack and that's the end of her life. You have got a choice. You can either be on the stage, just a performer, just going through the lines… or you can be outside it, and know how the script works, where the scenery hangs, and where the trapdoors are. Isn't that better?”

  “No!”

  The infuriating thing about Nanny Ogg and Granny Weatherwax, Agnes thought later, was the way they sometimes acted in tandem, without exchanging a word. Of course, there were plenty of other things — the way they never thought that meddling was meddling if they did it; the way they automatically assumed that everyone else's business was their own; the way they went through life in a straight line; the way, in fact, that they arrived in any situation and immediately started to change it. Compared to that, acting on unspoken agreement was a mere minor annoyance, but it was here and up close.

  They walked towards her, and each laid a hand on her shoulder.

  “Feeling angry?” said Granny.

  “Yes!”

  “I should let it out then, if I was you,” said Nanny.

  Agnes shut her eyes, clenched her fists, opened her mouth and screamed.

  It started low. Plaster dust drifted down from the ceiling. The prisms on the chandelier chimed gently as they shook.

  It rose, passing quickly through the mysterious pitch at fourteen cycles per second where the human spirit begins to feel distinctly uncomfortable about the universe and the place in it of the bowels. Small items around the Opera House vibrated off shelves and smashed on the floor.

  The note climbed, rang like a bell, climbed again. In the Pit, all the violin strings snapped, one by one.

  As the tone rose, the crystal prisms shook in the chandelier. In the bar, champagne corks fired a salvo. Ice jingled and shattered in its bucket. A line of wine‑glasses joined in the chorus, blurred around the rims, and then exploded like hazardous thistledown with attitude.

  There were harmonics and echoes that caused strange effects. In the dressing‑rooms the No. 3 greasepaint melted. Mirrors cracked, filling the ballet school with a million fractured images.

  Dust rose, insects fell. In the stones of the Opera House tiny particles of quartz danced briefly…

  Then there was silence, broken by the occasional thud and tinkle.

  Nanny grinned.

  “Ah,�
� she said, “now the opera's over.”

  Salzella opened his eyes.

  The stage was empty, and dark, and nevertheless brilliantly lit. That is, a huge shadowless light was streaming from some unseen source and yet, apart from Salzella himself, there was nothing for it to illuminate.

  Footsteps sounded in the distance. Their owner took some time to arrive, but when he stepped into the liquid air around Salzella he seemed to burst into flame.

  He wore red: a red suit with red lace, a red cloak, red shoes with ruby buckles, and a broad‑brimmed red hat with a huge red feather. He even walked with a long red stick, bedecked with red ribbons. But for someone who had taken such meticulous trouble with his costume, he'd been remiss in the matter of his mask. It was a crude one of a skull, such as might be bought in any theatrical shop — Salzella could even see the string.

  “Where did everyone go?” Salzella demanded. Unpleasant recent memories were beginning to bubble up in his mind. He couldn't quite recall them clearly at the moment, but the taste of them was bad.

  The figure said nothing.

  “Where's the orchestra? What happened to the audience?”

  There was a barely perceptible shrug from the tall red figure.

  Salzella began to notice other details. What he had thought was the stage seemed slightly gritty underfoot. The ceiling above him was a long way away, perhaps as far away as anything could be, and was filled with cold, hard points of light.

  “I asked you a question!”

  THREE QUESTIONS, IN FACT.

  The words turned up on the inside of Salzella's ears with no suggestion that they had had to travel like normal sound.

  “You didn't answer me!”

  SOME THINGS YOU HAVE TO WORK OUT FOR YOURSELF, AND THIS IS ONE OF THEM, BELIEVE ME.

  “Who are you? You're not a member of the cast, I know that! Take off that mask!”

  AS YOU WISH. I DO LIKE TO GET INTO THE SPIRIT OF THE THING.

  The figure removed its mask.

  “And now take off that other mask!” said Salzella, as the frozen fingers of dread rose through him.

  Death touched a secret spring on the stick. A blade shot out, so thin that it was transparent, its edge glittering blue as air molecules were sliced into their component atoms.

  AH, he said, raising the scythe. THERE I THINK YOU HAVE ME.

  It was dark in the cellars, but Nanny Ogg had walked alone in the strange caverns under Lancre and through the night‑time forests with Granny Weatherwax. Darkness held no fears for an Ogg.

  She struck a match.

  “Greebo?”

  People had been tramping to and fro for hours. The darkness wasn't private any more. It had taken quite a lot of people to carry all the money, for a start. Up until the end of the opera, there had been something mysterious about these cellars. Now they were just… well… damp underground rooms. Something that had lived here had moved on.

  Her foot rattled a piece of pottery.

  She grunted as she went down on one knee. Spilt mud and shards of broken pot littered the floor. Here and there, unrooted and snapped, were some unheeded pieces of dead twig.

  Only some kind of fool would have stuck bits of wood in pots of mud far underground and expected anything to happen.

  Nanny picked one up and sniffed it tentatively. It smelled of mud. And nothing else.

  She'd have liked to have‑known how it had been done. Just professional interest, of course. And she knew she never would, now. Walter was a busy man now, up in the light. And, for something to begin, other things had to end.

  “We all wears a mask of one sort or another,” she said to the damp air. “No sense in upsetting things now, eh…”

  The coach didn't leave until seven o'clock in the morning. By Lancre standards that was practically midday. The witches got there early.

  “I was hoping to shop for a few souvenirs,” said Nanny, stamping her feet on the cobbles to keep warm. “For the kiddies.”

  “No time,” said Granny Weatherwax.

  “Not that it would have made any difference on account of me not having any money to buy 'em with,” Nanny went on.

  “Not my fault if you fritter your money away,” said Granny.

  “I don't recall having a single chance to frit.”

  “Money's only useful for the things it can do.”

  “Well, yes. I could've done with having some new boots, for a start.”

  Nanny jiggled up and down a bit, and whistled around her tooth.

  “Nice of Mrs Palm to let us stay there gratis,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “O' course, I helped out playin' the piano and tellin' jokes.”

  “An added bonus,” said Granny, nodding.

  “An' of course there was all those little nibbles I prepared. With the Special Party Dip.”

  “Yes indeed,” said Granny, poker‑faced. “Mrs Palm was saying only this morning that she's thinking of retiring next year.”

  Nanny looked up and down the street again.

  “I 'spect young Agnes'll be turning up any minute now,” she said.

  “I really couldn't say,” said Granny haughtily.

  “Not as though there's much for her here, after all.”

  Granny sniffed. “That's up to her, I'm sure.”

  “Everyone was very impressed, I reckon, when you caught that sword in your hand…”

  Granny sighed. “Hah! Yes, I expect they were. They didn't think clearly, did they? People're just lazy. They never think: maybe she had something in her hand, a bit of metal or something. They don't think for a minute it was just a trick. They don't think there's always a perfectly good explanation if you look for it. They probably think it was some kind of magic.”

  “Yeah, but… you didn't have anything in your hand, did you?”

  “That's not the point. I might have done.” Granny looked up and down the square. “Besides, you can't magic iron.

  “That's very true. Not iron. Now, someone like ole Black Aliss, they could make their skin tougher than steel… but that's just an ole legend, I expect…”

  “She could do it all right,” said Granny. “But you can't go round messin' with cause and effect. That's what sent her mad, come the finish. She thought she could put herself outside of things like cause and effect. Well, you can't. You grab a sharp sword by the blade, you get hurt. World'd be a terrible place if people forgot that.”

  “You weren't hurt.”

  “Not my fault. I didn't have time.”

  Nanny blew on her hands. “One good thing, though,” she said. “It's a blessing the chandelier never came down. I was worried about that soon as I saw it. Looks too dramatic for its own good, I thought. First thing I'd smash, if I was a loony.”

  “Yes.”

  “Haven't been able to find Greebo since last night.”

  “Good.”

  “He always turns up, though.”

  “Unfortunately.”

  There was a clatter as the coach swung around the corner.

  It stopped.

  Then the coachman tugged on the reins and it did a U-turn and disappeared again.

  “Esme?” said Nanny, after a while.

  “Yes?”

  “There's a man and two horses peering at us around the corner.” She raised her voice. “Come on, I know you're there! Seven o'clock, this coach is supposed to leave! Did you get the tickets, Esme?”

  “Me?”

  “Ah,” said Nanny uncertainly. “So… we haven't got eighty dollars for the tickets, then?”

  “What've you got stuffed up your elastic?” said Granny as the coach advanced cautiously.

  “Nothin' that is legal tender for travellin' purposes, I fear.”

  “Then… no, we can't afford tickets.”

  Nanny sighed. “Oh, well, I'll just have to use charm.”

  “It's going to be a long walk,” said Granny.

  The coach pulled up. Nanny looked up at the driver, and smiled innocently. �
�Good morning, my good sir!”

  He gave her a slightly frightened but mainly suspicious look. “Is it?”

  “We are desirous of travelling to Lancre but unfortunately we find ourselves a bit embarrassed in the knicker department.”

  “You are?”

  “But we are witches and could prob'ly pay for our travel by, e.g., curing any embarrassing little ailments you may have.”

  The coachman frowned. “I ain't carrying you for nothing, old crone. And I haven't got any embarrassing little ailments!”

  Granny stepped forward.

  “How many would you like?” she said.

  Rain rolled over the plains. It wasn't an impressive Ramtops thunderstorm but a lazy, persistent, low-cloud rain, like a fat fog. It had been following them all day.

  The witches had the coach to themselves. Several people had opened the door while it had been waiting to leave, but for some reason had suddenly decided that today's travel plans didn't include a coach ride.

  “Making good time,” said Nanny, opening the curtains and peering out of the window.

  “I expect the driver's in a hurry.”

  “Yes, I 'spect he is.”

  “Shut the window, though. It's getting wet in here.”

  “Righty‑ho.”

  Nanny grabbed the strap and then suddenly poked her head out into the rain.

  “Stop! Stop! Tell the man to stop!”

  The coach slewed to a halt in a sheet of mud.

  Nanny threw open the door. “I don't know, trying to walk home, and in this weather too! You'll catch your death!”

  Rain and fog rolled in through the open doorway. Then a bedraggled shape pulled itself over the sill and slunk under the seats, leaving small puddles behind it.

  “Tryin' to be independent,” said Nanny. “Bless 'im.”

  The coach got under way again. Granny stared out at the endless darkening fields and the relentless drizzle, and saw another figure toiling along in the mud by the road that would, eventually, reach Lancre. As the coach swept past, it drenched the walker in thin slurry.

  “Yes, indeed. Being independent's a fine ambition,” she said, drawing the curtains.