The Fool fumbled in his sleeve and produced a rather soiled red and yellow handkerchief embroidered with bells. The duke took it with an expression of pathetic gratitude and blew his nose. Then he held it away from him and gazed at it with demented suspicion.
'Is this a dagger I see before me?' he mumbled.
'Um. No, my lord. It's my handkerchief, you see. You can sort of tell the difference if you look closely. It doesn't have as many sharp edges.'
'Good fool,' said the duke, vaguely.
Totally mad, the Fool thought. Several bricks short of a bundle. So far round the twist you could use him to open wine bottles.
'Kneel beside me, my Fool.'
The Fool did so. The duke laid a soiled bandage on his shoulder.
'Are you loyal, Fool?' he said. 'Are you trustworthy?'
'I swore to follow my lord until death,' said the Fool hoarsely.
The duke pressed his mad face close to the Fool, who looked up into a pair of bloodshot eyes.
'I didn't want to,' he hissed conspiratorially. 'They made me do it. I didn't want—'
The door swung open. The duchess filled the doorway. In fact, she was nearly the same shape.
'Leonal!' she barked.
The Fool was fascinated by what happened to the duke's eyes. The mad red flame vanished, was sucked backwards, and was replaced by the hard blue stare he had come to recognise. It didn't mean, he realised, that the duke was any less mad. Even the coldness of his sanity was madness in a way. The duke had a mind that ticked like a clock and, like a clock, it regularly went cuckoo.
Lord Felmet looked up calmly.
'Yes, my dear?'
'What is the meaning of all this?' she demanded.
'Witches, I suspect,' said Lord Felmet.
'I really don't think—' the Fool began. Lady Felmet's glare didn't merely silence him, it almost nailed him to the wall.
'That is clearly apparent,' she said. 'You are an idiot.'
'A Fool, my lady.'
'As well,' she added, and turned back to her husband.
'So,' she said, smiling grimly. 'Still they defy you?'
The duke shrugged. 'How should I fight magic?' he said.
'With words,' said the Fool, without thinking, and was instantly sorry. They were both staring at him.
'What?' said the duchess.
The Fool dropped his mandolin in his embarrassment.
'In – in the Guild,' said the Fool, 'we learned that words can be more powerful even than magic.'
'Clown!' said the duke. 'Words are just words. Brief syllables. Sticks and stones may break my bones—' he paused, savouring the thought – 'but words can never hurt me.'
'My lord, there are such words that can,' said the Fool. 'Liar! Usurper! Murderer!'
The duke jerked back and gripped the arms of the throne, wincing.
'Such words have no truth,' said the Fool, hurriedly.
'But they can spread like fire underground, breaking out to burn—'
'It's true! It's true!' screamed the duke. 'I hear them, all the time!' He leaned forward. 'It's the witches!' he hissed.
'Then, then, then they can be fought with other words,' said the Fool, 'Words can fight even witches,'
'What words?' said the duchess, thoughtfully.
The Fool shrugged. 'Crone. Evil eye. Stupid old woman.'
The duchess raised one thick eyebrow.
'You are not entirely an idiot, are you,' she said. 'You refer to rumour.'
'Just so, my lady.' The Fool rolled his eyes. What had he got himself into?
'It's the witches,' whispered the duke, to no-one in particular. 'We must tell the world about the witches. They're evil. They make it come back, the blood. Even sandpaper doesn't work.'
There was another tremor as Granny Weatherwax hurried along the narrow, frozen pathways in the forest. A lump of snow slipped off a tree branch and poured over her hat.
This wasn't right, she knew. Never mind about the -whatever it was – but it was unheard of for a witch to go out on Hogswatchnight. It was against all tradition. No-one knew why, but that wasn't the point.
She came out on to the moorland and pounded across the brittle heather, which had been scoured of snow by the wind. There was a crescent moon near the horizon, and its pale glow lit up the mountains that towered over her. It was a different world up there, and one even a witch would rarely venture into; it was a landscape left over from the frosty birth of the world, all green ice and knife-edge ridges and deep, secret valleys. It was a landscape never intended for human beings – not hostile, any more than a brick or cloud is hostile, but terribly, terribly uncaring.
Except that, this time, it was watching her. A mind quite unlike any other she had ever encountered was giving her a great deal of its attention. She glared up at the icy slopes, half expecting to see a mountainous shadow move against the stars.
'Who are you?' she shouted. 'What do you want?'
Her voice bounced and echoed among the rocks. There was a distant boom of an avalanche, high among the peaks.
On the crest of the moor, where in the summer partridges lurked among the bushes like small whirring idiots, was a standing stone. It stood roughly where the witches' territories met, although the boundaries were never formally marked out.
The stone was about the same height as a tall man, and made of bluish tinted rock. It was considered intensely magical because, although there was only one of it, no-one had ever been able to count if, if it saw anyone looking at it speculatively, it shuffled behind them. It was the most self-effacing monolith ever discovered.
It was also one of the numerous discharge points for the magic that accumulated in the Ramtops. The ground around it for several yards was bare of snow, and steamed gently.
The stone began to edge away, and watched her suspiciously from behind a tree.
She waited for ten minutes until Magrat came hurrying up the path from Mad Stoat, a village whose good-natured inhabitants were getting used to ear massage and flower-based homeopathic remedies for everything short of actual decapitation.[7] She was out of breath, and wore only a shawl over a nightdress that, if Magrat had anything to reveal, would have been very revealing.
'You felt it too?' she said.
Granny nodded. 'Where's Gytha?' she said.
They looked down the path that led to Lancre town, a huddle of lights in the snowy gloom.
There was a party going on. Light poured out into the street. A line of people were winding in and out of Nanny Ogg's house, from inside which came occasional shrieks of laughter and the sounds of breaking glass and children grizzling. It was clear that family life was being experienced to its limits in that house. The two witches stood uncertainly in the street.
'Do you think we should go in?' said Magrat diffidently. 'It's not as though we were invited. And we haven't brought a bottle.'
'Sounds to me as if there's a deal too many bottles in there already,' said Granny Weatherwax disapprovingly. A man staggered out of the doorway, burped, bumped into Granny, said, 'Happy Hogswatchnight, missus,' glanced up at her face and sobered up instantly.
'Mss,' snapped Granny.
'I am most frightfully sorry—' he began.
Granny swept imperiously past him. 'Come, Magrat,' she commanded.
The din inside hovered around the pain threshold. Nanny Ogg got around the Hogswatchnight tradition by inviting the whole village in, and the air in the room was already beyond the reach of pollution controls. Granny navigated through the press of bodies by the sound of a cracked voice explaining to the world at large that, compared to an unbelievable variety of other animals, the hedgehog was quite fortunate.
Nanny Ogg was sitting in a chair by the fire with a quart mug in one hand, and was conducting the reprise with a cigar. She grinned when she saw Granny's face.
'What ho, my old boiler,' she screeched above the din. 'See you turned up, then. Have a drink. Have two. Wotcher, Magrat. Pull up a chair and call the cat a bastard.'
Greebo, who was curled up in the inglenook and watching the festivities with one slit yellow eye, flicked his tail once or twice.
Granny sat down stiffly, a ramrod figure of decency.
'We're not staying,' she said, glaring at Magrat, who was tentatively reaching out towards a bowl of peanuts. 'I can see you're busy. We just wondered whether you might have noticed – anything. Tonight. A little while ago.'
Nanny Ogg wrinkled her forehead.
'Our Darron's eldest was sick,' she said. 'Been at his dad's beer.'
'Unless he was extremely ill,' said Granny, 'I doubt if it was what I was referring to.' She made a complex occult sign in the air, which Nanny totally ignored.
'Someone tried to danee on the table,' she said. 'Fell into our Reet's pumpkin dip. We had a good laugh.'
Granny waggled her eyebrows and placed a meaningful finger alongside her nose.
'I was alluding to things of a different nature,' she hinted darkly.
Nanny Ogg peered at her.
'Something wrong with your eye, Esme?' she hazarded.
Granny Weatherwax sighed.
'Extremely worrying developments of a magical tendency are even now afoot,' she said loudly.
The room went quiet. Everyone stared at the witches, except for Darron's eldest, who took advantage of the opportunity to continue his alcoholic experiments. Then, swiftly as they had fled, several dozen conversations hurriedly got back into gear.
'It might be a good idea if we can go and talk somewhere more private,' said Granny, as the comforting hubbub streamed over them again.
They ended up in the washhouse, where Granny tried to give an account of the mind she had encountered.
'It's out there somewhere, in the mountains and the high forests,' she said. 'And it is very big.'
'I thought it was looking for someone,' said Magrat. 'It put me in mind of a large dog. You know, lost. Puzzled.'
Granny thought about this. Now she came to think of it . . .
'Yes,' she said. 'Something like that. A big dog.'
'Worried,' said Magrat.
'Searching,' said Granny.
'And getting angry,' said Magrat.
'Yes,' said Granny, staring fixedly at Nanny.
'Could be a troll,' said Nanny Ogg. 'I left best part of a pint in there, you know,' she added reproachfully.
'I know what a troll's mind feels like, Gytha,' said Granny. She didn't snap the words out. In fact it was the quiet way she said them that made Nanny hesitate.
'They say there's really big trolls up towards the Hub,' said Nanny slowly. 'And ice giants, and big hairy woss-names that live above the snowline. But you don't mean anything like that, do you?'
'No.'
'Oh.'
Magrat shivered. She told herself that a witch had absolute control over her own body, and the goosepimples under her tun nightdress were just a figment of her own imagination. The trouble was, she had an excellent imagination.
Nanny Ogg sighed.
'We'd better have a look, then,' she said, and took the lid off the copper.
Nanny Ogg never used her washhouse., since all her washing was done by the daughers-in-law, a tribe of grey-faced, subdued women whose names she never bothered to remember. It had become, therefore, a storage place for dried-up old bulbs, burnt-out cauldrons and fermenting jars of wasp jam. No fire had been lit under the copper for ten years. Its bricks were crumbling, and rare ferns grew around the firebox. The water under the lid was inky black and, according to rumour, bottomless; the Ogg grandchildren were encouraged to believe that monsters from the dawn of time dwelt in its depths, since Nanny believed that a bit of thrilling and pointless terror was an essential ingredient of the magic of childhood.
In summer she used it as a beer cooler.
'It'll have to do. I think perhaps we should join hands,' she said. 'And you, Magrat, make sure the door's shut.'