Witches Abroad

She did her best to remove the straw from her hair. Then she unpacked the magic wand.

She wished she had a mirror to inspect herself in.

'I've got the wand,' she said quietly. 'I don't see why I need any help. Desiderata said I was to tell them not to help.'

It crossed her mind to reflect that Desiderata had been very lax on that point. The one thing you could be sure of, if you told Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg not to help, was that they would rush to help if only out of spite. It was quite surprising to Magrat that anyone as clever as Desiderata should have slipped up on that minor point. She'd probably got a psycholology too - whatever that was.

Moving quietly, so as not to wake the other two, she opened the door and stepped lightly into the damp air. Wand at the ready, she was prepared to give the world whatever it wished for.

It would help if this included pumpkins.

Nanny Ogg opened one eye as the door creaked shut.

She sat up and yawned and scratched herself. She fumbled in her hat and retrieved her pipe. She nudged Granny Weatherwax in the ribs.

'I ain't asleep,' said Granny.

'Magrat's gone off somewhere.'

'Hah!'

'And I'm going out to get something to eat,' muttered Nanny. There was no talking to Esme when she was in that kind of mood.

As she stepped out Greebo dropped lightly off a beam and landed on her shoulder.

Nanny Ogg, one of life's great optimists, stepped out to take whatever the future had to offer.

Preferably with rum and bananas in it.

The house wasn't hard to find. Desiderata had made very exact notes.

Magrat's gaze took in the high white walls and ornate metal balconies. She tried to straighten a few wrinkles in her dress, tugged some recalcitrant bits of hay from her hair, and then marched up the driveway and knocked on the door.

The knocker broke off in her hand.

Looking around anxiously lest someone should have noted this vandalism, Magrat tried to wedge it back. It fell off, knocking a lump out of the marble step.

Finally she knocked gently with her knuckle. A fine cloud of paint dust lifted off the door and floated down to the ground. That was the only effect.

Magrat considered her next move. She was pretty sure that fairy godmothers weren't supposed to leave a little card pushed under the door saying something like 'Called today but you were out, please contact the depot for a further appointment.' Anyway, this wasn't the kind of house that got left empty; there would be a score of servants infesting a place like this.

She crunched over the gravel and peered around the side of the house. Maybe the back door . . . witches were generally more at home around back doors . . .

Nanny Ogg always was. She was heading for the one belonging to the palace. It was easy enough to get into; this wasn't a castle like the ones back home, which expressed very clear ideas about inside and outside and were built to keep the two separate. This was, well, a fairytale castle, all icing-sugar battlements and tiny, towering turrets.

Anyway, no-one took much notice of little old ladies. Little old ladies were by definition harmless, although in a string of villages across several thousand miles of continent this definition was currently being updated.

Castles, in Nanny Ogg's experience, were like swans. They looked as if they were drifting regally through the waters of Time, but in fact there was a hell of a lot of activity going on underneath. There'd be a maze of pantries and kitchens and laundries and stables and breweries - she liked the idea of breweries - and people never noticed another old biddy around the place, eating any spare grub that was lying around.

Besides, you got gossip. Nanny Ogg liked gossip, too.

Granny Weatherwax wandered disconsolately along the clean streets. She wasn't looking for the other two. She was quite certain of that. Of course, she might just happen to bump into them, sort of accidentally, and give them a meaningful look. But she certainly wasn't looking for them.

There was a crowd at the end of the street. Working on the reasonable assumption that Nanny Ogg might be in the middle of it, Granny Weatherwax drifted over.

Nanny wasn't there. But there was a raised platform. And a small man in chains. And some bright-uniformed guards. One of them was holding an axe.

You did not have to be a great world traveller to understand that the purpose of this tableau was not to give the chained man a signed testimonial and a collection from everyone at the office.

Granny nudged a bystander.

'What's happening?'

The man looked sideways at her.

'The guards caught him thieving,' he said.

'Ah. Well, he looks guilty enough,' said Granny. People in chains had a tendency to look guilty. 'So what're they going to do to him?'

'Teach him a lesson.'

'How d'they do that, then?'

'See the axe?'

Granny's eyes hadn't left it the whole time. But now she let her attention rove over the crowd, picking up scraps of thought.

An ant has an easy mind to read. There's just one stream of big simple thoughts: Carry, Carry, Bite, Get Into The Sandwiches, Carry, Eat. Something like a dog is more complicated - a dog can be thinking several thoughts at the same time. But a human mind is a great sullen lightning-filled cloud of thoughts, all of them occupying a finite amount of brain processing time. Finding whatever the owner thinks they're thinking in the middle of the smog of prejudices, memories, worries, hopes and fears is almost impossible.

But enough people thinking much the same thing can be heard, and Granny Weatherwax was aware of the fear.

'Looks like it'll be a lesson he won't forget in a hurry,' she murmured.

'I reckon he'll forget it quite quickly,' said the watcher, and then shuffled away from Granny, in the same way that people move away from lightning rods during a thunderstorm.

And at this point Granny picked up the discordant note in the orchestra of thought. In the middle of it were two minds that were not human.

Their shape was as simple, clean and purposeful as a naked blade. She'd felt minds like that before, and had never cherished the experience.

She scanned the crowd and found the minds' owners. They were staring unblinkingly at the figures on the platform.

The watchers were women, or at least currently the same shape as women; taller than she was, slender as sticks, and wearing broad hats with veils that covered their faces. Their dresses shimmered in the sunlight - possibly blue, possibly yellow, possibly green. Possibly patterned. It was impossible to tell. The merest movement changed the colours.

She couldn't make out their faces.

There were witches in Genua all right. One witch, anyway.

A sound from the platform made her turn.

And she knew why people in Genua were quiet and nice.

There were countries in foreign parts, Granny had heard, where they chopped off the hands of thieves so that they wouldn't steal again. And she'd never been happy with that idea.

They didn't do that in Genua. They cut their heads off so they wouldn't think of stealing again.

Granny knew exactly where the witches were in Genua now.

They were in charge.

Magrat reached the house's back door. It was ajar.

She pulled herself together again.

She knocked, in a polite, diffident sort of way.

'Er - ' she said.

A bowlful of dirty water hit her full in the face. Through the tidal roaring of a pair of ears full of suds, she heard a voice say, 'Gosh, I'm sorry. I didn't know anyone was standing there.'

Magrat wiped the water out of her eyes, and tried to focus on the dim figure in front of her. A kind of narrative certainty rose in her mind.

'Is your name Ella?' she said.

'That's right. Who're you?'

Magrat looked her new-found god-daughter up and down. She was the most attractive young woman Magrat had ever seen - skin as brown as a nut, hair so blonde as to be almost white, a combination not totally unusual in such an easygoing city as Genua had once been.

What were you supposed to say at a time like this?

She removed a piece of potato peel from her nose.

'I'm your fairy godmother,' she said. 'Funny thing, it sounds silly now I come to tell someone - '

Ella peered at her.

'You?'

'Um. Yes. I've got the wand, and everything.' Magrat waggled the wand, in case this helped. It didn't.

Ella put her head on one side.

'I thought you people were supposed to appear in a shower of glittering little lights and a twinkly noise,' she said suspiciously.

'Look, you just get the wand,' said Magrat desperately. 'You don't get a whole book of instructions.'

Ella gave her another searching look. Then she said, 'I suppose you'd better come in, then. You're just in time. I was making a cup of tea, anyway.'

The iridescent women got into an open-topped carriage. Beautiful as they were, Granny noted, they walked awkwardly.

Well, they would. They wouldn't be used to legs.

She also noticed the way people didn't look at the carriage. It wasn't that they didn't see it. It was simply that they wouldn't let their gaze dwell on it, as if merely recognizing it would lead them into trouble.

And she noticed the coach horses. They had better senses than the humans did. They knew what was behind them, and they didn't like it at all.

She followed them as they trotted, flat-eared and wild-eyed, through the streets. Eventually they were driven into the driveway of a big and dilapidated house near the palace.

Granny lurked by the wall and noted the details. Plaster was dropping off the house walls, and even the knocker had fallen off the door.

Granny Weatherwax did not believe in atmospheres.

She did not believe in psychic auras. Being a witch, she'd always thought, depended more on what you didn't believe. But she was prepared to believe that there was something very unpleasant in that house. Not evil. The two not-exactly-women weren't evil, in the same way that a dagger or a sheer cliff isn't evil. Being evil means being able to make choices. But the hand wielding a dagger or pushing a body over a cliff could be evil, and something like that was going on.

She really wished that she didn't know who was behind it.

People like Nanny Ogg turn up everywhere. It's as if there's some special morphic generator dedicated to the production of old women who like a laugh and aren't averse to the odd pint, especially of some drink normally sold in very small glasses. You find them all over the place, often in pairs.*

They tend to attract one another. Possibly they broadcast inaudible signals indicating that here is someone who could be persuaded to go 'Ooo' at pictures of other people's grandchildren.

Nanny Ogg had found a friend. Her name was Mrs Pleasant, she was a cook, and she was the first black person Nanny had ever spoken to.* She was also a cook of that very superior type who spends most of the time holding court in a chair in the centre of the kitchen, apparently taking very little heed of the activity going on around her.

Occasionally she'd give an order. And they'd only need to be occasionally, because she'd seen to it over the years

* Always in front of you in any queue, for a start.

* Racism was not a problem on the Discworld, because - what with trolls and dwarfs and so on - speciesism was more interesting. Black and white lived in perfect harmony and ganged up on green.

that people either did things her way or not at all. Once or twice, with some ceremony, she'd get up, taste something, and maybe add a pinch of salt.

Such people are always ready to chat to any wandering pedlars, herbalists, or little old women with cats on their shoulders. Greebo rode on Nanny's shoulder as though he'd just eaten the parrot.