Wyrd Sisters (Discworld #6)

'Well, I'm going to curse him anyway,' said Nanny. 'Under my breath, like. I could of caught my death in that dungeon for all he cared.'

'We ain't going to curse him,' said Granny. 'We're going to replace him. What did you do with the old king?'

'I left the rock on the kitchen table,' said Nanny. 'I couldn't stand it any more.'

'I don't see why,' said Magrat. 'He seemed very pleasant. For a ghost.'

'Oh, he was all right. It was the others,' said Nanny.

'Others?'

' “Pray carry a stone out of the palace so's I can haunt it, good mother,” he says,' said Nanny Ogg. ' “It's bloody boring in here, Mistress Ogg, excuse my Klatchian,” he says, so of course I did. I reckon they was all listening. Ho yes, they all thinks, all aboard, time for a bit of a holiday. I've nothing against ghosts. Especially royal ghosts,' she added loyally. 'But my cottage isn't the place for them. I mean, there's some woman in a chariot yelling her head off in the washhouse. I ask you. And there's a couple of little kiddies in the pantry, and men without heads all over the place, and someone screaming under the sink, and there's this little hairy man wandering around looking lost and everything. It's not right.'

'Just so long as he's not here,' said Granny. 'We don't want any men around.'

'He's a ghost, not a man,' said Magrat.

'We don't have to go into details,' Granny said icily.

'But you can't put the old king back on the throne,' said Magrat. 'Ghosts can't rule. You'd never get the crown to stay on. It'd drop through.'

'We're going to replace him with his son,' said Granny. 'Proper succession.'

'Oh, we've been through all that,' said Nanny, dismissively. 'In about fifteen years' time, perhaps, but—'

'Tonight,' said Granny.

'A child on the throne? He wouldn't last five minutes.'

'Not a child,' said Granny quietly. 'A grown man. Remember Aliss Demurrage?'

There was silence. Then Nanny Ogg sat back.

'Bloody hell,' she whispered. 'You ain't going to try that, are you?'

'I mean to have a go.'

'Bloody hell,' said Nanny again, very quietly, and added. 'You've been thinking about this, have you?'

'Yes.'

'See here, Esme. I mean, Black Aliss was one of the best. I mean, you're very good at, well, headology and thinking and that. I mean, Black Aliss, well, she just upped and went at it.'

'You saying I couldn't do it, are you?'

'Excuse me,' said Magrat.

'No. No. Of course not,' said Nanny, ignoring her.

'Right.'

'Only . . . well, she was a, you know, a hoyden of witches, like the king said.'

'Doyenne,' said Granny, who had looked it up. 'Not hoyden.'

'Excuse me,' said Magrat, louder this time. 'Who was Black Aliss? And,' she added quickly, 'none of this exchanging meaningful glances and talking over my head. There's three witches in this coven, remember?'

'She was before your time,' said Nanny Ogg. 'Before mine, really. She lived over Skunid way. Very powerful witch.'

'If you listen to rumour,' said Granny.

'She turned a pumpkin into a royal coach once,' said Nanny.

'Showy,' said Granny Weatherwax. 'That's no help to anyone, turning up at a ball smelling like a pie. And that business with the glass slipper. Dangerous, to my mind.'

'But the biggest thing she ever did,' said Nanny, ignoring the interruption, 'was to send a whole palace to sleep for a hundred years until. . .' She hesitated. 'Can't remember. Was there rose bushes involved, or was it spinning wheels in that one? I think some princess had to finger . . . no, there was a prince. That was it.'

'Finger a prince?' said Magrat, uneasily.

'No . . .he had to kiss her. Very romantic, Black Aliss was. There was always a bit of romance in her spells. She liked nothing better than Girl meets Frog.'

'Why did they call her Black Aliss?'

'Fingernails,' said Granny.

'And teeth,' said Nanny Ogg. 'She had a sweet tooth. Lived in a real gingerbread cottage. Couple of kids shoved her in her own oven at the end. Shocking.'

'And you're going to send the castle to sleep?' said Magrat.

'She never sent the castle to sleep,' said Granny. 'That's just an old wives' tale,' she added, glaring at Nanny. 'She just stirred up time a little. It's not as hard as people think. Everyone does it all the time. It's like rubber, is time. You can stretch it to suit yourself.'

Magrat was about to say, that's not right, time is time, every second lasts a second, that's what it's for, that's its job . . .

And then she recalled weeks that had flown past and afternoons that had lasted forever. Some minutes had lasted hours, some hours had gone past so quickly she hadn't been aware they'd gone past at all . . .

'But that's just people's perception,' she said. 'Isn't it?'

'Oh, yes,' said Granny, 'of course it is. It all is. What difference does that make?'

'A hundred years'd be over-egging it, mind,' said Nanny.

'I reckon fifteen'd be a nice round number,' said Granny. 'That means the lad will be eighteen at the finish. We just do the spell, go and fetch him, he can manifest his destiny, and everything will be nice and neat.'

Magrat didn't comment on this, because it had occurred to her that destinies sounded easy enough when you talked about them but were never very bankable where real human beings were concerned. But Nanny Ogg sat back and tipped another generous measure of apple brandy in her tea.

'Could work out nice,' she said. 'A bit of peace and quiet for fifteen years. If I recall the spell, after you say it you have to fly around the castle before cock crow.'

'I wasn't thinking about that,' said Granny. 'It wouldn't be right. Felmet would still be king all that time. The kingdom would still get sick. No, what I was thinking of doing was moving the whole kingdom.'

She beamed at them.

'The whole of Lancre?' said Nanny.

'Yes.'

'Fifteen years into the future?'

'Yes.'

Nanny looked at Granny's broomstick. It was a well-made thing, built to last, apart from the occasional starting problem. But there were limits.

'You'll never do it,' she said. 'Not around the whole kingdom in that. That's all the way up to Powderknife and down to Drumlin's Fell. You just couldn't carry enough magic.'

'I've thought of that,' said Granny.

She beamed again. It was terrifying.

She explained the plan. It was dreadful.

A minute later the moor was deserted, as the witches hurried to their tasks. It was silent for a while, apart from the squeak of bats and the occasional rustle of the wind in the heather.

Then there was a bubbling from the nearby peat bog. Very slowly, crowned with a thicket of sphagnum moss, the standing stone surfaced and peered around the landscape with an air of deep distrust.

Greebo was really enjoying this. At first he thought his new friend was taking him to Magrat's cottage, but for some reason he'd wandered off the path in the dark and was taking a stroll in the forest. In one of the more interesting bits, Greebo had always felt. It was a hummocky area, rich in hidden potholes and small, intense swamps, full of mist even in fine weather. Greebo often came up here on the offchance that a wolf was lying up for the day.

'I thought cats could find their own way home,' the Fool muttered.

He cursed himself under his breath. It would have been easy to take this wretched creature back to Nanny Ogg's house, which was only a few streets away, almost in the shadow of the castle. But then he'd had the idea of delivering it to Magrat. It would impress her, he thought. Witches were very keen on cats. And then she'd be bound to ask him in, for a cup of tea or something . . .

He put his foot in another water-filled hole. Something wriggled underneath it. The Fool groaned, and stepped back on to a tumescent mushroom.

'Look, cat,' he said. 'You've got to come down, right? And then you can find your way home and I'll follow you. Cats are good at seeing in the dark and finding their own way home,' he added hopefully.

He reached up. Greebo sank his claws into his arm as a friendly warning, and found to his surprise that this had no effect on chain mail.

'There's a good cat,' said the Fool, and lowered him to the ground. 'Go on, find your way home. Any home will do.'

Greebo's grin gradually faded, until there was nothing left but the cat. This was nearly as spooky as the opposite way round.

He stretched and yawned to hide his embarrassment. Being called a good cat in the middle of one of his favourite stalking grounds wasn't going to do anything for his prowl-credibility. He disappeared into the undergrowth.

The Fool peered into the gloom. It dawned on him that while he liked forests, he liked them at one remove, as it were; it was nice to know that they were there, but the forests of the mind were not quite the same as real forests that, for example, you got lost in. They had more mighty oaks and fewer brambles. They also tended to be viewed in daylight, and the trees didn't have malevolent faces and long scratchy branches. The trees of the imagination were proud giants of the forest. Most of the trees here appeared to be vegetable gnomes, mere trellises for fungi and ivy.

The Fool was vaguely aware that you could tell which direction the Hub lay by seeing which side of the trees the moss grew on. A quick inspection of the nearby trunks indicated that, in defiance of all normal geography, the Hub lay everywhere.

Greebo had vanished.

The Fool sighed, removed his chain mail protection, and tinkled gently through the night in search of high ground. High ground seemed a good idea. The ground he was on at the moment appeared to be trembling. He was sure it shouldn't do that.

Magrat hovered on her broomstick several hundred feet above the Turnwise borders of Lancre, looking down on a sea of mist through which the occasional treetop poked like a seaweed-covered rock at high tide. A bulging moon floated above her, probably gibbous again. Even a decent thin crescent would have been better, she felt. More appropriate.

She shivered, and wondered where Granny Weatherwax was at this moment.

The old witch's broomstick was known and feared throughout the skies of Lancre. Granny had been introduced to flying quite late in life, and after some initial suspicion had taken to it like a bluebottle to an ancient fish-head. A problem, however, was that Granny saw every flight simply as a straight line from A to B and was unable to get alongside the idea that other users of the air might have any rights whatsoever; the flight migration patterns of an entire continent had been changed because of that simple fact. High-speed evolution among local birds had developed a generation that flew on their backs, so that they could keep a watchful eye on the skies.

Granny's implicit belief that everything should get out of her way extended to other witches, very tall trees and, on occasion, mountains.

Granny had also browbeaten the dwarfs who lived under the mountains and in fear of their lives into speeding the thing up. Many an egg had been laid in mid-air by unsuspecting fowls who had suddenly glimpsed Granny bearing down on them, scowling over the top of the broomstick.

'Oh dear,' thought Magrat. 'I hope she hasn't happened to someone.'

A midnight breeze turned her gently around in the air, like an unsupported weathercock. She shivered and squinted at the moonlit mountains, the high Ramtops, whose freezing crags and ice-green chasms acknowledged no king or cartographer. Only on the Rim ward side was Lancre open to the world; the rest of its borders looked as jagged as a wolfs mouth and far more impassable. From up here it was possible to see the whole kingdom . . .

There was a ripping noise in the sky above her, a blast of wind that spun her around again, and a Doppler-distorted cry of, 'Stop dreaming, girl!'