Lords and Ladies (Discworld #14) 7

She slipped out of bed, using the edge of the blanket to grasp the door handle, and opened the door.

Shawn Ogg was standing very nearly to attention.

Currently he was guarding the castle and Seeing How Long He Could Stand On One Leg.

Then it occurred to him that this wasn't a proper activity for a martial artist, and he turned it into No. 19, the Flying Chrysanthemum Double Drop Kick.

After a while he realized that he had been hearing something. It was vaguely rhythmical, and put him in mind of a grasshopper chirruping. It was coming from inside the castle.

He turned carefully, keeping alert in case the massed armies of Foreign Parts tried to invade while his back was turned.

This needed working out. He wasn't on guard from things inside the castle, was he? “On guard” meant things outside. That was the point of castles. That's why you had all the walls and things. He'd got the big poster they gave away free with Jane's All the World's Siege Weapons. He knew what he was talking about.

Shawn was not the quickest of thinkers, but his thoughts turned inexorably to the elf in the dungeon. But that was locked up. He'd locked the door himself. And there was iron all over the place, and Mum had been very definite about the iron.

Nevertheless. . .

He was methodical about it. He raised the drawbridge and dropped the portcullis and peered over the wall for good measure, but there was just the dusk and the night breeze.

He could feel the sound now. It seemed to be coming out of the stone, and had a saw-toothed edge to it that grated on his nerves.

It couldn't have got out, could it? No, it stood to reason. People hadn't gone around building dungeons you could get out of.

The sound swung back and forth across the scale.

Shawn leaned his rusty pike against the wall and drew his sword. He knew how to use it. He practiced for ten minutes every day, and it was one sorry hanging sack of straw when he'd finished with it.

He slipped into the keep by the back door and sidled along the passages toward the dungeon. There was no one else around. Of course, everyone was at the Entertainment. And they'd be back any time now, carousing all over the place.

The castle felt big, and old, and cold.

Any time now.

Bound to.

The noise stopped.

Shawn peered around the comer. There were the steps, there was the open doorway to the dungeons.

“Stop!” shouted Shawn, just in case.

The sound echoed off the stones.

“Stop! Or . . . or . . . or . . . Stop!”

He eased his way down the steps and looked through the

archway

"I warn you! I'm learning the Path of the Happy Jade

Lotus!"

There was the door to the cell, standing ajar. And a

white-clad figure next to it. Shawn blinked. “Aren't you Miss Tockley?”

She smiled at him. Her eyes glowed in the dim light. “You're wearing chain-mail, Shawn,” she said. “What, miss?” He glanced at the open door again. "That's terrible. You must take it off, Shawn. How can

you hear with all that stuff around your ears?"

Shawn was aware of the empty space behind him. But

he daren't look around.

“I can hear fine, miss,” he said, trying to ease himself around so that his back was against a wall.

“But you can't hear truly,” said Diamanda, drifting forward. “The iron makes you deaf.”

Shawn was not yet used to thinly clad young women approaching him with a dreamy look on their faces. He fervently wished he could take the Path of the Retreating Back.

He glanced sideways.

There was a tall skinny shape outlined in the open cell doorway. It was standing very carefully, as if it wanted to keep as far away from its surroundings as possible.

Diamanda was smiling at him in a funny way.

He ran.

Somehow, the woods had changed. Ridcully was certain that in his youth they'd been full of bluebells and primroses and - and bluebells and whatnot and so on. Not bloody great briars all over the place. They snagged at his robe and once or twice some tree-climbing equivalent knocked his hat off.

What made it worse was that Esme Weatherwax seemed to avoid all of them.

“How do you manage that?”

“I just know where I am all the time,” said Granny.

“Well? I know where I am, too.”

“No you don't. You just happen to be present. That's not the same.”

“Well, do you happen to know where a proper path is?”

“This is a short cut.”

“Between two places where you're not lost, d'you mean?”

“I keep tellin' you, I ain't lost! I'm . . . directionally challenged.”

“Hah!”

But it was a fact about Esme Weatherwax, he had to admit. She might be lost, and he had reason to suspect this was the case now, unless there were in this forest two trees with exactly the same arrangement of branches and a strip of his robe caught on one of them, but she did have a quality that in anyone not wearing a battered pointy hat and an antique black dress might have been called poise. Absolute poise. It would be hard to imagine her making an awkward movement unless she wanted to.

He'd seen that years ago, although of course at the time he'd just been amazed at the way her shape fitted perfectly into the space around it. And-

He'd got caught up again.

“Wait a minute!”

“Entirely the wrong sort of clothes for the country!”

“I wasn't expecting a hike through the woods! This is ceremonial damn costume!”

“Take it off, then.”

“Then how will anyone know I'm a wizard?”

“I'll be sure to tell them!”

Granny Weatherwax was getting rattled. She was also, despite everything that she'd said, getting lost. But the point was that you couldn't get lost between the weir at the bottom of the Lancre rapids and Lancre town itself. It was uphill all the way Besides, she'd walked through the local forests all her life. They were her forests.

She was pretty sure they'd passed the same tree twice. There was a bit of Ridcully's robe hanging on it.

It was like getting lost in her own garden.

She was also sure she'd seen the unicorn a couple of times. It was tracking them. She'd tried to get into its mind. She might as well have tried to climb an ice wall.

It wasn't as if her own mind was tranquil. But now at least she knew she was sane.

When the walls between the universes are thin, when the parallel strands of If bunch together to pass through the Now, then certain things leak across. Tiny signals, perhaps, but audible to a receiver skilled enough.

In her head were the faint, insistent thoughts of a thousand Esme Weatherwaxes.

Magrat wasn't sure what to pack. Most of her original clothes seemed to have evaporated since she'd been in the castle, and it was hardly good manners to take the ones Verence had bought for her. The same applied to the engagement ring. She wasn't sure if you were allowed to keep it.

She glared at herself in the mirror.

She'd have to stop thinking like this. She seemed to have spent her whole life trying to make herself small, trying to be polite, apologizing when people walked over her, trying to be good-mannered. And what had happened? People had treated her as if she was small and polite and good-mannered.

She'd stick the, the, the damn letter on the mirror, so they'd all know why she'd gone.

She'd a damn good mind to go off to one of the cities and become a courtesan.

Whatever that was.

And then she heard the singing.

It was, without a doubt, the most beautiful sound Magrat had ever heard. It flowed straight through the ears and into the hindbrain, into the blood, into the bone . . .

A silk camisole dropped from her fingers on to the floor.

She wrenched at the door, and a tiny part of her mind still capable of rational thought remembered about the key.

The song filled the passageway. She gripped some folds of the wedding dress to make running easier and hurried toward the stairs . . .

Something bulleted out of another doorway and bore her to the floor.

It was Shawn Ogg. Through the chromatic haze she could see his worried face peering out from its hood of rusty-

-iron.

The song changed while staying the same. The complex harmonies, the fascinating rhythm did not alter but suddenly grated, as if she was hearing the song through different ears.

She was dragged into the doorway.

“Are you all right. Miss Queen?”

“What's happening?”

“Dunno, Miss Queen. But I think we've got elves.”

“Elves?”

“And they've got Miss Tockley. Um. You know you took the iron away-”

“What are you talking about, Shawn?”

Shawn's face was white.

“That one down the dungeons started singing, and they'd put their mark on her, so she's doing what they want-”

“Shawn!”

“And Mum said they don't kill you, if they can help it. Not right away. You're much more fun if you're not dead.”

Magrat stared at him.

“I had to run away! She was trying to get my hood off! I had to leave her, miss! You understand, miss?”

“Elves?”

“You got to hold on to something iron, miss! They hate iron!”

She slapped his face, hurting her fingers on the mail.

“You're gabbling, Shawn!”

“They're out there, miss! I heard the drawbridge go down! They're out there and we're in here and they don't kill you, they keep you alive-”

“Stand to attention, soldier!”

It was all she could think of. It seemed to work. Shawn pulled himself together.

“Look,” said Magrat, “everyone knows there really aren't any elves any mo . . . ” Her voice faded. Her eyes narrowed. “Everyone but Magrat Garlick knows different, yes?”

Shawn shook. Magrat grabbed his shoulders.

“Me mum and Mistress Weatherwax said you wasn't to know!” Shawn wailed. “They said it was witch business!”

“And where are they now, when they've got some witch business to mind?” said Magrat. “I don't see them, do you? Are they behind the door? No! Are they under the bed? How strange, they're not . . . there's just me, Shawn Ogg. And if you don't tell me everything you know right now I'll make you regret the day I was born.”

Shawn's Adam's apple bobbed up and down as he considered this. Then he shook himself free of Magrat's grasp and listened at the door.

The singing had stopped. For a moment Magrat thought she heard footsteps outside the door, hurrying away.

“Well, Miss Queen, our mum and Mistress Weatherwax was up at the Dancers-”

Magrat listened.

Finally she said, “And where's everyone now?”

“Dunno, miss. All gone to the Entertainment . . . but they ought to've been back by now.”

“Where's the Entertainment?”

“Dunno, miss. Miss?”

“Yes?”

“Why've you got your wedding dress on?”

“Never you mind.”

“It's unlucky for the groom to see the bride in her dress before the wedding,” said Shawn, taking refuge in run-of-the-mill idiocies to relieve his terror.

“It will be for him if I see him first,” snarled Magrat.

“Miss?”

“Yes?”

“I'm feared about what's happened to everyone. Our Jason said they'd be back in an hour or so, and that was hours ago.”