Lords and Ladies (Discworld #14) 7

The door was open.

“Cooee?”

Nanny glanced into the scullery, and then thumped up the small narrow staircase.

Granny Weatherwax was stretched rigid on her bed. Her face was grey, her skin was cold.

People had discovered her like this before, and it always caused embarrassment. So now she reassured visitors but tempted fate by always holding, in her rigid hands, a small handwritten sign which read:

I ATE'NT DEAD.

The window was propped open with a piece of wood.

“Ah,” said Nanny, far more for her own benefit than for anyone else's, “I sees you're out. I'll, I'll, I'll just put the kettle on, shall I, and wait 'til you comes back?”

Esme's skill at Borrowing unnerved her. It was all very well entering the minds of animals and such, but too many witches had never come back. For several years Nanny had put out lumps of fat and bacon rind for a bluetit that she was sure was old Granny Postalute, who'd gone out Borrowing one day and never came back. Insofar as a witch could consider things uncanny. Nanny Ogg considered it uncanny.

She went back down to the scullery and lowered a bucket down the well, remembering to fish the newts out this time before she boiled the kettle.

Then she watched the garden.

After a while a small shape flittered across it, heading for the upstairs window.

Nanny poured out the tea. She carefully took one spoonful of sugar out of the sugar basin, tipped the rest of the sugar into her cup, put the spoonful back in the basin, put both cups on a tray, and climbed the stairs.

Granny Weatherwax was sitting up in her bed.

Nanny looked around.

There was a large bat hanging upside down from a beam.

Granny Weatherwax rubbed her ears.

“Shove the po under it, will you, Gytha?” she mumbled. “They're a devil for excusing themselves on the carpet.”

Nanny unearthed the shyest article of Granny Weatherwax's bedroom crockery and moved it across the rug with her foot.

“I brought you a cup of tea,” she said.

“Good job, too. Mouth tastes of moths,” said Granny.

“Thought you did owls at night?” said Nanny.

“Yeah, but you ends up for days trying to twist your head right round,” said Granny. “At least bats always faces the same way. Tried rabbits first off, but you know what they are for remembering things. Anyway, you know what they thinks about the whole time. They're famous for it.”

“Grass.”

“Right.”

“Find out anything?” said Nanny

“Half a dozen people have been going up there. Every full moon!” said Granny. “Gels, by the shape of them. You only see silhouettes, with bats.”

“You done well there,” said Nanny, carefully. “Girls from round here, you reckon?”

“Got to be. They ain't using broomsticks.”

Nanny Ogg sighed.

“There's Agnes Nitt, old Threepenny's daughter,” she said. “And the Tockley girl. And some others.”

Granny Weatherwax looked at her with her mouth open.

“I asked our Jason,” she said. “Sorry.”

The bat burped. Granny genteelly covered her hand with her mouth.

“I'm a silly old fool, ain't I?” she said, after a while.

“No, no,” said Nanny. “Borrowing's a real skill. You're really good at it.”

“Prideful, that's what I am. Once upon a time I'd of thought of asking people, too, instead of fooling around being a bat.”

“Our Jason wouldn't have told you. He only told me 'cos I would've made 'is life a living hell if he didn't,” said Nanny Ogg. “That's what a mother's for.”

“I'm losing my touch, that's what it is. Getting old, Gytha.”

“You're as old as you feel, that's what I always say.”

“That's what I mean.”

Nanny Ogg looked worried.

“Supposing Magrat'd been here,” said Granny. “She'd see me being daft.”

“Well, she's safe in the castle,” said Nanny. “Learning how to be queen.”

“At least the thing about queening,” said Granny, “is that no one notices if you're doing it wrong. It has to be right 'cos it's you doing it.”

“S'funny, royalty,” said Nanny. “It's like magic. You take some girl with a bum like two pigs in a blanket and a head full of air and then she marries a king or a prince or someone and suddenly she's this radiant right royal princess. It's a funny old world.”

“I ain't going to kowtow to her, mind,” said Granny.

“You never kowtow to anyone anyway,” said Nanny Ogg patiently. “You never bowed to the old king. You barely gives young Verence a nod. You never kowtows to anyone ever, anyway.”

“That's right!” said Granny. “That's part of being a witch, that is.”

Nanny relaxed a bit. Granny being an old woman made her uneasy. Granny in her normal state of barely controlled anger was far more her old self.

Granny stood up.

“Old Toekley's girl, eh?”

“That's right.”

“Her mother was a Keeble, wasn't she? Fine woman, as I recall.”

“Yeah, but when she died the old man sent her off to Sto Lat to school.”

“Don't hold with schools,” said Granny Weatherwax. “They gets in the way of education. All them books. Books? What good are they? There's too much reading these days. We never had time to read when we was young, I know that.”

“We were too busy makin' our own entertainment.”

“Right. Come on - we ain't got much time.”

“What d'you mean?”

“It's not just the girls. There's something out there, too. Some kind of mind, movin' around.”

Granny shivered. She'd been aware of it in the same way that a skilled hunter, moving through the hills, is aware of another hunter - by the silences where there should have been noise, by the trampling of a stem, by the anger of the bees.

Nanny Ogg had never liked the idea of Borrowing, and Magrat had always refused even to give it a try. The old witches on the other side of the mountain had too much trouble with inconvenient in-body experiences to cope with the out-of-body kind. So Granny was used to having the mental dimension to herself.

There was a mind moving around in the kingdom, and Granny Weatherwax didn't understand it.

She Borrowed. You had to be careful. It was like a drug. You could ride the minds of animals and birds, but never bees, steering them gently, seeing through their eyes. Granny Weatherwax had many times flicked through the channels of consciousness around her. It was, to her, part of the heart of witchcraft. To see through other eyes . . .

. . . through the eyes of gnats, seeing the slow patterns of time in the fast pattern of one day, their minds travelling rapidly as lightning . . .

. . . to listen with the body of a beetle, so that the world is a three-dimensional pattern of vibrations . . .

. . . to see with the nose of a dog, all smells now colours . . .

But there was a price. No one asked you to pay it, but the very absence of demand was a moral obligation. You tended not to swat. You dug lightly. You fed the dog. You paid. You cared; not because it was kind or good, but because it was right. You left nothing but memories, you took nothing but experience.

But this other roving intelligence . . . it'd go in and out of another mind like a chainsaw, taking, taking, taking. She could sense the shape of it, the predatory shape, all cruelty and cool unkindness; a mind full of intelligence, that'd use other living things and hurt them because it was fun.

She could put a name to a mind like that.

Elf.

Branches thrashed high in the trees.

Granny and Nanny strode through the forest. At least, Granny Weatherwax strode. Nanny Ogg scurried.

“The Lords and Ladies are trying to find a way,” said Granny. “And there's something else. Something's already come through. Some kind of animal from the other side. Scrope chased a deer into the circle and the thing must have been there, and they always used to say something can come through if something goes the other way-”

“What thing?”

“You know what a bat's eyesight is like. Just a big shape is all it saw. Something killed old Scrope. It's still around. Not an . . . not one o' the Lords and Ladies,” said Granny, “but something from El . . . that place.”

Nanny looked at the shadows. There are a lot of shadows in a forest at night.

•“Ain't you scared?” she said.

Granny cracked her knuckles.

“No. But I hope it is.”

“Ooo, it's true what they say. You're a prideful one, Esmerelda Weatherwax.”

“Who says that?”

“Well, you did. Just now.”

“I wasn't feeling well.”

Other people would probably say: I wasn't myself. But Granny Weatherwax didn't have anyone else to be.

The two witches hurried on through the gale.

From the shelter of a thorn thicket, the unicorn watched them go.

Diamanda Tockley did indeed wear a floppy black velvet hat. It had a veil, too.

Perdita Nitt, who had once been merely Agnes Nitt before she got witchcraft, wore a black hat with a veil too, because Diamanda did. Both of them were seventeen. And she wished she was naturally skinny, like Diamanda, but if you can't be skinny you can at least look unhealthy. So she wore so much thick white make-up in order to conceal her naturally rosy complexion that if she turned around suddenly her face would probably end up on the back of her head.

They'd done the Raising of the Cone of Power, and some candle magic, and some scrying. Now Diamanda was showing them how to do the cards.

She said they contained the distilled wisdom of the Ancients. Perdita had found herself treacherously wondering who these Ancients were - they clearly weren't the same as old people, who were stupid, Diamanda said, but she wasn't quite clear why they were wiser than, say, modem people.

Also, she didn't understand what the Feminine Principle was. And she wasn't too clear about this Inner Self business. She was coming to suspect that she didn't have one.

And she wished she could do her eyes like Diamanda did.

And she wished she could wear heels like Diamanda did.

Amanita DeVice had told her that Diamanda slept in a real coffin.

She wished she had the nerve to have a dagger-and-skull tattoo on her arm like Amanita did, even if it was only in ordinary ink and she had to wash it off every night in case her mother saw it.

A tiny, nasty voice from Perdita's inner self suggested that Amanita wasn't a good choice of name.

Or Perdita, for that matter.

And it said that maybe Perdita shouldn't meddle with things she didn't understand.

The trouble was, she knew, that this meant nearly everything.

She wished she could wear black lace like Diamanda did.

Diamanda got results.

Perdita wouldn't have believed it. She'd always known about witches, of course. They were old women who dressed like crows, except for Magrat Garlick, who was frankly mental and always looked as if she was going to burst into tears. Perdita remembered Magrat bringing a guitar to a Hogswatchnight party once and singing wobbly folk songs with her eyes shut in a way that suggested that she really believed in them. She hadn't been able to play, but this was all right because she couldn't sing, either. People had applauded because, well, what else could you do?