Wyrd Sisters Part 13

Verence had stared for half a minute and then fled, wishing that he still had a real stomach so that he could stick his fingers down his throat for forty years and bring up everything he'd eaten.

He'd sought solace in the stables, where his beloved hunting dogs had whined and scratched at the door and had generally been very ill-at-ease at his sensed but unseen presence.

Now he haunted-and how he hated the word-the Long Gallery, where paintings of long-dead kings looked down at him from the dusty shadows. He would have felt a lot more kindly toward them if he hadn't met a number of them gibbering in various parts of the premises.

Verence had decided that he had two aims in death. One was to get out of the castle and find his son, and the other was to get his revenge on the duke. But not by killing him, he'd decided, even if he could find a way, because an eternity in that giggling idiot's company would lend a new terror to death.

He sat under a painting of Queen Bemery (670-722), whose rather stern good looks he would have felt a whole lot happier about if he hadn't seen her earlier that morning walking through the wall.

Verence tried to avoid walking through walls. A man had his dignity.

He became aware that he was being watched.

He turned his head.

There was a cat sitting in the doorway, subjecting him to a slow blink. It was a mottled gray and extremely fat...

No. It was extremely big big. It was covered with so much scar tissue that it looked like a fist with fur on it. Its ears were a couple of perforated stubs, its eyes two yellow slits of easy-going malevolence, its tail a twitching series of question marks as it stared at him.

Greebo had heard that Lady Felmet had a small white female cat and had strolled up to pay his respects.

Verence had never seen an animal with so much built-in villainy. He didn't resist as it waddled across the floor and tried to rub itself against his legs, purring like a waterfall.

"Well, well," said the king, vaguely. He reached down and made an effort to scratch it behind the two ragged bits on top of its head. It was a relief to find someone else besides another ghost who could see him, and Greebo, he couldn't help feeling, was a distinctly unusual cat. Most of the castle cats were either pampered pets or flat-eared kitchen and stable habitues who generally resembled the very rodents they lived on. This cat, on the other hand, was its own animal. All cats give that impression, of course, but instead of the mindless animal self-absorption that pa.s.ses for secret wisdom in the creatures, Greebo radiated genuine intelligence. He also radiated a smell that would have knocked over a wall and caused sinus trouble in a dead fox.

Only one type of person kept a cat like this.

The king tried to hunker down, and found he was sinking slightly into the floor. He pulled himself together and drifted upward. Once a man allowed himself to go native in the ethereal world there would be no hope for him, he felt.

Only close relatives and the psychically inclined, Death had said. There weren't many of either in the castle. The duke qualified under the first heading, but his relentless self-interest made him about as psychically useful as a carrot. As for the rest, only the cook and the Fool seemed to qualify, but the cook spent a lot of his time weeping in the pantry because he wasn't being allowed to roast anything more b.l.o.o.d.y than a parsnip and the Fool was already such a bundle of nerves that Verence had given up his attempts to get through.

A witch, now. If a witch wasn't psychically inclined, then he, King Verence, was a puff of wind. He had to get a witch into the castle. And then...

He'd got a plan. In fact, it was more than that; it was a Plan. He spent months over it. He hadn't got anything else to do, except think. Death had been right about that. All that ghosts had were thoughts, and although thoughts in general had always been alien to the king the absence of any body to distract him with its a.s.sorted humors had actually given him the chance to savor the joys of cerebration. He'd never had a Plan before, or at least one that went much further than "Let's find something and kill it." And here, sitting in front of him washing itself, was the key.

"Here, p.u.s.s.y," he ventured. Greebo gave him a penetrating yellow stare.

"Cat," the king amended hastily, and backed away, beckoning. For a moment it seemed that the cat wouldn't follow and then, to his relief, Greebo stood up, yawned, and padded toward him. Greebo didn't often see ghosts, and was vaguely interested in this tall, bearded man with the see-through body.

The king led him along a dusty side corridor and toward a lumber room crammed with crumbling tapestries and portraits of long-dead kings. Greebo examined it critically, and then sat down in the middle of the dusty floor, looking at the king expectantly.

"There's plenty of mice and things in here, d'you see," said Verence. "And the rain blows in through the broken window. Plus there's all these tapestries to sleep on.

"Sorry," the king added, and turned to the door.

This was what he had been working on all these months. When he was alive he had always taken a lot of care of his body, and since being dead he had taken care to preserve its shape. It was too easy to let yourself go and become all fuzzy around the edges; there were ghosts in the castle who were mere pale blobs. But Verence had wielded iron self-control and exercised-well, had thought hard about exercise-and fairly bulged with spectral muscles. Months of pumping ectoplasm had left him in better shape than he had ever been, apart from being dead.

Then he'd started out small, with dust motes. The first one had nearly killed him,* but he'd persevered and progressed to sand grains, then whole dried peas; he still didn't dare venture into the kitchens, but he had amused himself by oversalting Felmet's food a pinch at a time until he pulled himself together and told himself that poisoning wasn't honorable, even against vermin. but he'd persevered and progressed to sand grains, then whole dried peas; he still didn't dare venture into the kitchens, but he had amused himself by oversalting Felmet's food a pinch at a time until he pulled himself together and told himself that poisoning wasn't honorable, even against vermin.

Now he leaned all his weight on the door, and with every microgramme of his being forced himself to become as heavy as possible. The sweat of auto-suggestion dripped off his nose and vanished before it hit the floor. Greebo watched with interest as ghostly muscles moved on the king's arms like footb.a.l.l.s mating.

The door began to move, creaked, then accelerated and hit the doorway with a thump. The latch clicked into place.

It b.l.o.o.d.y well had to work now, Verence told himself. He'd never be able to lift the latch by himself. But a witch would certainly come looking for her cat-wouldn't she?

In the hills beyond the castle the Fool lay on his stomach and stared into the depths of a little lake. A couple of trout stared back at him.

Somewhere on the Disc, reason told him, there must be someone more miserable than he was. He wondered who it was.

He hadn't asked to be a Fool, but it wouldn't have mattered if he had, because he couldn't recall anyone in his family ever listening to anything he said after Dad ran away.

Certainly not Grandad. His earliest memory was of Grandad standing over him making him repeat the jokes by rote, and hammering home every punchline with his belt; it was thick leather, and the fact that it had bells on didn't improve things much.

Grandad was credited with seven official new jokes. He'd won the honorary cap and bells of the Grand Prix des Idiots Blithering at Ankh-Morpork four years in a row, which no one else had ever done, and presumably they made him the funniest man who ever lived. He had worked hard at it, you had to give him that.

The Fool recalled with a shudder how, at the age of six, he'd timidly approached the old man after supper with a joke he'd made up. It was about a duck.

It had earned him the biggest thrashing of his life, which even then must have presented the old joker with a bit of a challenge.

"You will learn, my lad-" he recalled, with every sentence punctuated by jingling cracks-"that there is nothing more serious than jesting. From now on you will never-" the old man paused to change hands-"never, never, ever utter a joke that has not been approved by the Guild. Who are you to decide what is amusing? Marry, let the untutored giggle at unskilled banter; it is the laughter of the ignorant. Never. Never. Never let me catch you joculating again."

After that he'd gone back to learning the three hundred and eighty-three Guild-approved jokes, which was bad enough, and the glossary, which was a lot bigger and much worse.

And then he'd been sent to Ankh, and there, in the bare, severe rooms, he'd found there were books other than the great heavy bra.s.s-bound Monster Fun Book Monster Fun Book. There was a whole circular world out there, full of weird places and people doing interesting things, like...

Singing. He could hear singing.

He raised his head cautiously, and jumped at the tinkle of the bells on his cap. He gripped the hated things hurriedly.

The singing went on. The Fool peeped cautiously through the drift of meadowsweet that was providing him with perfect concealment.

The singing wasn't particularly good. The only word the singer appeared to know was "la," but she was making it work hard. The general tune gave the impression that the singer believed that people were supposed to sing "lalala" in certain circ.u.mstances, and was determined to do what the world expected of her.

The Fool risked raising his head a little further, and saw Magrat for the first time.

She had stopped dancing rather self-consciously through the narrow meadow and was trying to plait some daisies in her hair, without much success.

The Fool held his breath. On long nights on the hard flagstones he had dreamed of women like her. Although, if he really thought about it, not much like her; they were better endowed around the chest, their noses weren't so red and pointed, and their hair tended to flow more. But the Fool's libido was bright enough to tell the difference between the impossible and the conceivably attainable, and hurriedly cut in some filter circuits.

Magrat was picking flowers and talking to them. The Fool strained to hear.

"Here's Woolly Fellwort," she said. "And Treacle Wormseed, which is for inflammation of the ears..."

Even Nanny Ogg, who took a fairly cheerful view of the world, would have been hard put to say anything complimentary about Magrat's voice. But it fell on the Fool's ears like blossom.

"...and Five-leaved False Mandrake, sovereign against fluxes of the bladder. Ah, and here's Old Man's Frogbit. That's for constipation."

The Fool stood up sheepishly, in a carillon of jingles. To Magrat it was as if the meadow, hitherto supporting nothing more hazardous than clouds of pale blue b.u.t.terflies and a few self-employed b.u.mblebees, had sprouted a large red-and-yellow demon.

It was opening and shutting its mouth. It had three menacing horns.

An urgent voice at the back of her mind said: You should run away now, like a timid gazelle; this is the accepted action in these circ.u.mstances.

Common sense intervened. In her most optimistic moments Magrat would not have compared herself to a gazelle, timid or otherwise. Besides, it added, the basic snag about running away like a timid gazelle was that in all probability she would easily out-distance him.

"Er," said the apparition.

Uncommon sense, which, despite Granny Weatherwax's general belief that Magrat was several sticks short of a bundle, she still had in sufficiency, pointed out that few demons tinkled pathetically and appeared to be quite so breathless.

"Hallo," she said.

The Fool's mind was also working hard. He was beginning to panic.

Magrat shunned the traditional pointed hat, as worn by the other witches, but she still held to one of the most fundamental rules of witchcraft. It's not much use being a witch unless you look like one. In her case this meant lots of silver jewelry with octograms, bats, spiders, dragons and other symbols of everyday mysticism; Magrat would have painted her fingernails black, except that she didn't think she would be able to face Granny's withering scorn.

It was dawning on the Fool that he had surprised a witch.

"Whoops," he said, and turned to run for it.

"Don't-" Magrat began, but the Fool was already pounding down the forest path that led back to the castle.

Magrat stood and stared at the wilting posy in her hands. She ran her fingers through her hair and a shower of wilted petals fell out.

She felt that an important moment had been allowed to slip out of her grasp as fast as a greased pig in a narrow pa.s.sageway.

She felt an overpowering urge to curse. She knew a great many curses. Goodie Whemper had been really imaginative in that department; even the creatures of the forest used to go past her cottage at a dead run.

She couldn't find a single one that fully expressed her feelings.

"Oh, b.u.g.g.e.r," she said.

It was a full moon again that night, and most unusually all three witches arrived at the standing stone early; it was so embarra.s.sed by this that it went and hid in some gorse bushes.

"Greebo hasn't been home for two days," said Nanny Ogg, as soon as she arrived. "It's not like him. I can't find him anywhere."

"Cats can look after themselves," said Granny Weatherwax. "Countries can't. I have intelligence to report. Light the fire, Magrat."

"Mmm?"

"I said, light the fire, Magrat."

"Mmm? Oh. Yes."

The two old women watched her drift vaguely across the moorland, tugging absently at dried-up whin clumps. Magrat seemed to have her mind on something.

"Doesn't seem to be her normal self," said Nanny Ogg.

"Yes. Could be an improvement," said Granny shortly, and sat down on a rock. "She should of got it lit before we arrived. It's her job."

"She means well," said Nanny Ogg, studying Magrat's back reflectively.

"I used to mean well when I was a girl, but that didn't stop the sharp end of Goodie Filter's tongue. Youngest witch serves her time, you know how it is. We had it tougher, too. Look at her. Doesn't even wear the pointy hat. How's anyone going to know know?"

"You got something on your your mind, Esme?" said Nanny. mind, Esme?" said Nanny.

Granny nodded gloomily.

"Had a visit yesterday," she said.

"Me too."

Despite her worries, Granny was slightly annoyed at this. "Who from?" she said.

"The mayor of Lancre and a bunch of burghers. They're not happy about the king. They want a king they can trust."

"I wouldn't trust any king a burgher could trust," said Granny.

"Yes, but it's not good for anyone, all this taxing and killing folk. The new sergeant they've got is a keen man when it comes to setting fire to cottages, too. Old Verence used to do it too, mind, but...well..."

"I know, I know. It was more personal," said Granny. "You felt he meant meant it. People like to feel they're valued." it. People like to feel they're valued."

"This Felmet hates the kingdom," Nanny went on. "They all say it. They say when they go to talk to him he just stares at them and giggles and rubs his hand and twitches a bit."

Granny scratched her chin. "The old king used to shout at them and kick them out of the castle, mind. He used to say he didn't have time for shopkeepers and such," she added, with a note of personal approval.

"But he was always very gracious about it," said Nanny Ogg. "And he-"

"The kingdom is worried," said Granny.

"Yes, I already said."

"I didn't mean the people, I meant the kingdom."

Granny explained. Nanny interrupted a few times with brief questions. It didn't occur to her to doubt anything she heard. Granny Weatherwax never made things up.

At the end of it she said, "Well."

"My feelings exactly."

"Fancy that."