'A lot of people don't like me as soon as they've met me,' said Oats.
'I suppose that saves time,' said Agnes, and cursed. Perdita had got through on that one, but Oats didn't seem to have noticed. He sighed.
'I'm afraid I have a bit of a difficulty with people,' he went on. 'I fear I'm just not cutout for pastoral work.'
Don't get involved with this twerp, said Perdita. But Agnes said, 'You mean sheep and so on?'
'It all seemed a lot clearer at college,' said Oats, who like many people seldom paid much attention to what others said when he was unrolling his miseries, 'but here, when I tell people some of the more accessible stories from the Book of Om they say things like, "That's not right, mushrooms wouldn't grow in the desert," or, "That's a stupid way to run a vineyard." Everyone here is so very... literal.'
Oats coughed. There seemed to be something preying on his mind. 'Unfortunately, the Old Book of Om is rather unyielding on the subject of witches,' he said.
'Really.'
'Although having studied the passage in question in the original Second Omnian IV text, I have advanced the rather daring theory that the actual word in question translates more accurately as - cockroaches".'
'Yes?'
'Especially since it goes on to say that they can be killed by fire or in "traps of treacle". It also says later on that they bring lascivious dreams.'
'Don't look at me,' said Agnes. 'All you're getting is a walk home.'
To her amazement, and Perdita's crowing delight, he blushed as red as she ever did.
'Er, er, the word in question in that passage might just as easily be read in context as `boiled lobsters",' he said hurriedly.
'Nanny Ogg says Omnians used to burn witches,' said Agnes.
'We used to burn practically everybody,' said Oats gloomily. 'Although some witches did get pushed into big barrels of treacle, I believe.'
He had a boring voice, too. He did appear, she had to admit, to be a boring person. It was almost too perfect a presentation, as if he was trying to make himself seem boring. But one thing had piqued Agnes's curiosity.
'Why did you come to visit Granny Weatherwax?'
'Well, everyone speaks very... highly of her,' said Oats, suddenly picking his words like a man pulling plums from a boiling pot. 'And they said she hadn't turned up last night, which was very strange. And I thought it must be hard for an old lady living by herself. And...'
'Yes?'
'Well, I understand she's quite old and it's never too late to consider the state of your immortal soul,' said Oats. 'Which she must have, of course.'
Agnes gave him a sideways look. 'She's never mentioned it,' she said.
'You probably think I'm foolish.'
'I just think you are an amazingly lucky man, Mr Oats.'
On the other hand... here was someone who'd been told about Granny Weatherwax, and had still walked through these woods that scared him stiff to see her, even though she was possibly a cockroach or a boiled lobster. No one in Lancre ever came to see Granny unless they wanted something. Oh, sometimes they came with little presents (because one day they'd want something again), but they generally made sure she was out first. There was more to Mr Oats than met the eye. There had to be.
A couple of centaurs burst out of the bushes ahead of them and cantered away down the path. Oats grabbed a tree.
'They were running around when I came up!' he said. 'Are they usual?'
'I've never seen them before,' said Agnes. 'I think they're from Uberwald.'
'And the horrible little blue goblins? One of them made a very unpleasant gesture at me!'
'Don't know about them at all.'
'And the vampires? I mean, I knew that things were different here, but really-'
'Vampires?!' shouted Agnes. 'You saw the vampires? Last night?'
'Well, I mean, yes, I studied them at length at the seminary, but I never thought I'd see them standing around talking about drinking blood and things, really, I'm surprised the King allows it-'
'And they didn't... affect your mind?'
'I did have that terrible migraine. Does that count? I thought it was the prawns.'
A cry rang through the woods. It seemed to
have many components, but mostly it sounded as though a turkey was being throttled at the other end of a tin tube.
'And what the heck was that?' shouted Oats.
Agnes looked around, bewildered. She'd grown up in the Lancre woods. Oh, you got strange things sometimes, passing through, but generally they contained nothing more dangerous than other people. Now, in this tarnished light, even the trees were starting to look suspicious.
'Let's at least get down to Bad Ass,' she said, tugging at Oats's hand.
'You what?'
Agnes sighed. 'It's the nearest village.'
'Bad Ass?'
'Look, there was a donkey, and it stopped in the middle of the river, and it wouldn't go backwards or forwards,' said Agnes, as patiently as possible. Lancre people got used to explaining this. 'Bad Ass. See? Yes, I know that "Disobedient Donkey" might have been more... acceptable, but-'
The horrible cry echoed around the woods again. Agnes thought of all the things that were rumoured to be in the mountains, and dragged Oats after her like a badly hitched cart.
Then the sound was right in front of them and, at a turn in the lane, a head emerged from a bush.
Agnes had seen pictures of an ostrich.
So... start with one of them, but make the head and neck in violent yellow, and give the head a huge ruff of red and purple feathers and two big round eyes, the pupils of which jiggled drunkenly as the head moved back and forth...
'Is that some sort of local chicken?' warbled Oats.
'I doubt it,' said Agnes. One of the long feathers had a tartan pattern.
The cry started again, but was strangled halfway through when Agnes stepped forward, grabbed the thing's neck and pulled.
A figure rose from the undergrowth, dragged up by his arm.
'Hodgesaargh?'
He quacked at her.
'Take that thing out of your mouth,' said Agnes. 'You sound like Mr Punch.'
He removed the whistle. 'Sorry, Miss Nitt.'
'Hodgesaargh, why - and I realize I might not like the answer - why are you hiding in the woods with your arm dressed up like Hetty the Hen and making horrible noises through a tube?'
'Trying to lure the phoenix, miss.'
'The phoenix? That's a mythical bird, Hodgesaargh.'
'That's right, miss. There's one in Lancre, miss. It's very young, miss. So I thought I might be able to attract it.'
She looked at the brightly coloured glove. Oh, yes - if you raised chicks, you had to let them know what kind of bird they were, so you used a sort of glove-puppet. But...
'Hodgesaargh?'
'Yes, miss?'
'I'm not an expert, of course, but I seem to recall that according to the commonly accepted legend of the phoenix it would never see its parent. You can only have one phoenix at a time. It's automatically an orphan. You see?'
'Um, may I add something?' said Oats. 'Miss Nitt is right, I have to say. The phoenix builds a nest and bursts into flame and the new bird arises from the ashes. I've read that. Anyway, it's an allegory.'
Hodgesaargh looked at the puppet phoenix on his arm and then looked bashfully at his feet.
'Sorry about that, miss.'
'So, you see, a phoenix can never see another phoenix,' said Agnes.
'Wouldn't know about that, miss,' said Hodgesaargh, still staring at his boots.
An idea struck Agnes. Hodgesaargh was always out of doors. 'Hodgesaargh?'
'Yes, miss?'
'Have you been out in the woods all morning?'
'Oh, yes, miss.'
'Have you seen Granny Weatherwax?'
'Yes, miss.'
'You have?'
'Yes, miss.'
'Where?'
'Up in the woods over towards the border, miss. At first light, miss.'
'Why didn't you tell me?'
'Er... did you want to know, miss?'
'Oh. Yes, sorry... What were you doing up there?'
Hodgesaargh blew a couple of quacks on his phoenix lure by way of explanation.
Agnes grabbed the priest again.
'Come on, let's get to the road and find Nanny-'
Hodgesaargh was left with his glove puppet and his lure and his knapsack and a deeply awkward feeling. He'd been brought up.to respect witches, and Miss Nitt was a witch. The man with her hadn't been a witch, but his manner fitted him into that class of people Hodgesaargh mentally pigeonholed as 'my betters', although in truth this was quite a large category. He wasn't about to disagree with his betters. Hodgesaargh was a one-man feudal system.
On the other hand, he thought, as he packed up and prepared to move on, books that were all about the world tended to be written by people who knew all about books rather than all about the world. All that stuff about birds hatching from ashes must have been written by someone who didn't know anything about birds. As for there only ever being one phoenix, well, that'd obviously been written down by a man who ought to get out in the fresh air more and meet some ladies. Birds came from eggs. Oh, the phoenix was one of those creatures that had learned to use magic, had built it right into its very existence, but magic was tricky stuff and nothing used any more of it than it needed to. So there'd be an egg, definitely. And eggs needed warmth, didn't they?
Hodgesaargh had been thinking about this a lot during the morning, as he tramped through damp bushes making the acquaintance of several disappointed ducks. He'd never bothered much about history, except the history of falconry, but he did know that there were once places - and in some cases still were - with a very high level of background magic, which made them rather exciting and not a good place to raise your young.
Maybe the phoenix, whatever it really looked like, was simply a bird who'd worked out a way of making incubation work very, very fast.
Hodgesaargh had actually got quite a long way, and if he'd had a bit more time he'd have worked out the next step, too.
It was well after noon before Granny Weatherwax came off the moor, and a watcher might have wondered why it took such a long time to cross a little patch of moorland.
They'd have wondered even more about the little stream. It had cut a rock-studded groove in the peat that a healthy woman could have leapt across, but someone had placed a broad stone across it for a bridge.
She looked at it for a while and then reached into her sack. She took out a long piece of black material and blindfolded herself. Then she walked out across the stone, taking tiny steps with her arms flung. out wide for balance. Halfway across she fell on to her hands and knees and stayed there, panting, for several minutes. Then she crawled forward again, by inches.
A few feet below, the peaty stream rattled happily over the stones.
The sky glinted. It was a sky with blue patches and bits of cloud, but it had a strange look, as though a picture painted on glass had been fractured and then the shards reassembled wrongly. A drifting cloud disappeared against some invisible line and began to emerge in another part of the sky altogether.
Things were not what they seemed. But then, as Granny always said, they never were.
Agnes practically had to pull Oats into Nanny Ogg's house, which was in fact so far away from the concept of a witch's cottage that it, as it were, approached it from the other side. It tended towards jolly clashing colours rather than black, and smelled of polish. There were no skulls or strange candles, apart from the pink novelty one that Nanny had once bought in Ankh-Morpork and only brought out to show to guests with the right sense of humour. There were lots of tables, mainly in order to display the vast number of drawings and iconographs of the huge Ogg clan. At first sight these looked randomly placed, until you worked out the code. In reality, pictures were advanced or retarded around the room as various family members temporarily fell in or out of favour, and anyone ending up on the small wobbly table near the cat's bowl had some serious spadework to do. What made it worse was that you could fall down the pecking order not because you'd done something bad, but because everyone else had done something better. This was why what space wasn't taken up with family pictures was occupied by ornaments, because no Ogg who travelled more than ten miles from Ankh-Morpork would dream of returning without a present. The Oggs loved Nanny Ogg and, well, there were even worse places than the wobbly table. A distant cousin had once ended up in the hall.
Most of the ornaments were cheapjack stuff bought from fairs, but Nanny Ogg never minded, provided they were colourful and shiny. So there were a lot of cross-eyed dogs, pink shepherdesses and mugs with badly spelled slogans like 'To the Wordl's Best Mum' and 'We Luove Our Nanny'. A huge gilded china beer stein that played 'Ich Bin Ein Rattarsedschwein' from The Student Horse was locked in a glass-fronted cabinet as a treasure too great for common display, and had earned Shirl Ogg's picture a permanent place on the dresser.
Nanny Ogg had already cleared a space on the table for the green ball. She looked up sharply when Agnes entered.
'You were a long time. Been dallyin'?' she said, in an armour-piercing voice.
'Nanny, Granny would have said that,' said Agnes reproachfully.
Nanny shivered. 'You're right, gel,' she said. 'Let's find her quickly, eh? I'm too cheerful to be a crone.'
'There's odd creatures everywhere!' said Agnes. 'There's loads of centaurs! We had to dive into the ditch!'
'Ah, I did notice you'd got grass and leaves on your dress,' said Nanny. 'But I was too polite to mention it.'
'Where're they all coming from?'
'Down out of the mountains, I suppose. Why did you bring Soapy Sam back with you?'
'Because he's covered in mud, Nanny,' said Agnes sharply, 'and I said he could have a wash down here.'
'Er... is this really a witch's cottage?' said Oats, staring at the assembled ranks of Oggery.
'Oh dear,' said Nanny.
'Pastor Melchio said they are sinks of depravity and sexual excess.' The young man took a nervous step backwards, knocking against a small table and causing a blue clockwork ballerina to begin a jerky pirouette to the tune of 'Three Blind Mice'.
'Well, we've got a sink all right,' said Nanny. 'What's your best offer?'
'I suppose we should be grateful that was a Nanny Ogg comment,' said Agnes. 'Don't wind him up, Nanny. It's been a busy morning.'
'Er, which way's the pump?' said Oats. Agnes pointed. He hurried out, gratefully.
'Wetter than a thunderstorm sandwich,' said Nanny, shaking her head.
'Granny was seen up above the long lake,' said Agnes, sitting down at the table.
Nanny looked up sharply. 'On that bit of moor?' she said.
'Yes.'
'That's bad. That's gnarly country up there.'
'Gnarly?'
'All scrunched up.'
'What? I've been up there. It's just heather and gorse and there's a few old caves at the end of the valley.'
'Oh, really? Looked up at the clouds, did you? Oh well, let's have a go...'
When Oats came back, scrubbed and shining, they were arguing. They looked rather embarrassed when they saw him.
'I said it'd need three of us,' said Nanny, pushing the glass ball aside. 'Especially if she's up there. Gnarly ground plays merry hell with scrying. We just ain't got the power.'
'I don't want to go back to the castle!'
'Magrat's good at this sort of thing.'
'She's got a little baby to look after, Nanny!'
'Yeah, in a castle full of vampires. Think about that. No knowing when they'll get hungry again. Better for 'em both to be out of it.'
'But-'
'You get her out now. I'd come myself, but you said I just sit there grinnin'.'
Agnes suddenly pointed a finger at Oats. 'You!'
'Me?' he quavered.
'You said you could see they were vampires, didn't you?'
'I did?'
'You did.'
'That's right, I did. Er... and?'
'You didn't find your mind becoming all pink and happy?'
'I don't think my mind has ever been pink and happy,' said Oats.
'So why didn't they get through to you?'
Oats smiled uneasily and fished in his jacket.
'I am protected by the hand of Om,' he said.
Nanny inspected the pendant. It showed a figure trussed across the back of a turtle.
'You say?' she said. 'That's a good wheeze, then.'
'Just as Om reached out his hand to save the prophet Brutha from the torture, so will he spread his wings over me in my time of trial,' said Oats, but he sounded as though he was trying to reassure himself rather than Nanny. He went on: 'I've got a pamphlet if you would like to know more,' and this time the tone was much more positive, as if the existence of Om was a little uncertain whereas the existence of pamphlets was obvious to any open-minded, rational-thinking person.
'Don't,' said Nanny. She let the medallion go. 'Well, Brother Perdore never needed any magic jewellery for fighting off people, that's all I can say.'
'No, he just used to breathe alcohol all over them,' said Agnes. 'Well, you're coming with me, Mr Oats. I'm not facing Prince Slime again alone! And you can shut up!'
'Er, I didn't say anything-'
'I didn't mean you, I meant- Look, you said you've studied vampires, didn't you? What's good for vampires?'
Oats thought for a moment. 'Er... a nice dry coffin, er, plenty of fresh blood, er, overcast skies...' His voice trailed off when he saw her expression. 'Ah... well, it depends exactly where they're from, I remember. Uberwald is a very big place. Er, cutting off the head and staking them in the heart is generally efficacious.'
'But that works on everyone,' said Nanny.
'Er... in Splintz they die if you put a coin in their mouth and cut their head off...'
'Not like ordinary people, then,' said Nanny, taking out a notebook.
'Er... in Klotz they die if you stick a lemon in their mouth-'
'Sounds more like it.'
'-after you cut their head off. I believe that in Glitz you have to fill their mouth with salt, hammer a carrot into both ears, and then cut off their head.'
'I can see it must've been fun finding that out.'
'And in the valley of the Ah they believe it's best to cut off the head and boil it in vinegar.'
'You're going to need someone to carry all this stuff, Agnes,' said Nanny Ogg.
'But in Kashncari they say you should cut off their toes and drive a nail through their neck.'
'And cut their head off?'
'Apparently you don't have to.'
'Toes is easy,' said Nanny. 'Old Windrow over in Bad Ass cut off two of his with a spade and he weren't even trying.'
'And then, of course, you can defeat them by stealing their left sock,' said Oats.
'Sorry?' said Agnes. 'I think I misheard you there.'
'Um, they're pathologically meticulous, you see. Some of the gypsy tribes in Borogravia say that if you steal their sock and hide it somewhere they'll spend the rest of eternity looking for it. They can't abide things to be out of place or missing.'
'I wouldn't have put this down as a very widespread belief,' said Nanny.
'Oh, they say in some villages that you can even slow them down by throwing poppyseed at them,' said Oats. 'Then they'll have a terrible urge to count every seed. Vampires are very analretentive, you see?'
'I shouldn't like meeting one that was the opposite,' said Nanny.
'Yes, well, I don't think we're going to have time to ask the Count for his precise address,' said Agnes quickly. 'We're going to go in, fetch Magrat and get back here, all right? Why are you such a vampire expert, Oats?'
'I told you, I studied this sort of thing at college. We have to know the enemy if we're to combat evil forces... vampires, demons, wit-' He stopped.
'Do go on,' said Nanny Ogg, as sweet as arsenic.
'But with witches I'm just supposed to show them the error of their ways.' Oats coughed nervously.
'That's something to look forward to, then,' said Nanny. 'What with me not havin' my fireproof corsets on. Off you go, then... all three of you.'
'There's three of us?' said Oats.
Agnes felt her left arm tremble. Against every effort of will her wrist bent, her palm curled up and she felt two fingers straining to unfold. Only Nanny Ogg noticed.
'Like having your own chaperon all the time, ain't it?' she said.
'What was she talking about?' said Oats, as they headed for the castle.
'Her mind's wandering,' said Agnes, loudly.
There were covered ox-carts rumbling up the street to the castle. Agnes and Oats stood to one side and watched them.
The drivers didn't seem interested in the bystanders. They wore drab, ill-fitting clothing, but an unusual touch was the scarf each one had wrapped around his neck so tightly that it might have been a bandage.
'Either there's a plague of sore throats in Uberwald or there will be nasty little puncture wounds under those, I'll bet,' said Agnes.
'Er... I do know a bit about the way they're supposed to control people,' said Oats.
'Yes?'
'It sounds silly, but it was in an old book.'
'Well?'
'They find single-minded people easier to control.'
'Single-minded?' said Agnes suspiciously. More carts rolled past.
'It doesn't sound right, I know. You'd think strongminded people would be harder to affect. I suppose a big target is easier to hit. In some of the villages, apparently, vampire hunters get roaring drunk first. Protection, you see? You can't punch fog.'
So we're fog? said Perdita. So's he, by the look of him...
Agnes shrugged. There was a certain bucolic look to the faces of the cart drivers. Of course, you got that in Lancre too, but in Lancre it was overlaid by a mixture of guile, common sense and stubborn rock-headedness. Here the eyes behind the faces had a switched-off look.
Like cattle, said Perdita.
'Yes,' said Agnes.
'Pardon?' said Oats.
'Just thinking aloud...'
And she thought of the way one man could so easily control a herd of cows, any one of which could have left him as a small damp depression in the ground had it wanted to. Somehow, they never got around to thinking about it.
Supposing they are better than us, she thought. Supposing that, compared to them, we're just-
You're too close to the castle! snapped Perdita. You're thinking cow thoughts.
Then Agnes realized that there was a squad of men marching behind the carts. They didn't look at all like the carts' drivers.
And these, said Perdita, are the cattle prods.
They had uniforms, of a sort, with the black and white crest of the Magpyrs, but they weren't a body of men that looked smart in a uniform. They looked very much like men who killed other people for money, and not even for a lot of money. They looked, in short, like men who'd cheerfully eat a puppy sandwich. Several of them leered at Agnes when they went past, but it was only a generic leer that was simply leered on the basis that she had a dress on.
More wagons came up behind them.
'Nanny Ogg says you must take time by the foreskin,' Agnes said, and darted forward as the last wagon rumbled past.
'She does?'
'I'm afraid so. You get used to it.'
She caught the back of the cart and pulled herself up, beckoning him hastily to follow.
'Are you trying to impress me?' he said as she hauled him on board.
'Not you,' she said. And realized, at this point, that what she was sitting on was a coffin.
There were two of them in the back of the cart, packed around with straw.
'Are they moving the furniture in?' said Oats.
'Er... I think... it might... be occupied,' said Agnes.
She almost shrieked when he removed the lid. The coffin was empty.
'You idiot! Supposing there was someone in there!'
'Vampires are weak during the day. Everyone knows that,' said Oats reproachfully.
'I can... feel them here... somewhere,' said Agnes. The rattling of the cart changed as it rumbled on to the cobblestones of the courtyard.
'Get off the other one and I'll have a look.'
'But supposing-'
He pushed her off and raised the lid before she could protest further. 'No, no vampire in here, either,' he said.
'Supposing one'd just reached out and grabbed you by the throat!'
'Om is my shield,' said Oats.
'Really? That's nice.'
'You may chortle-'
'I didn't chortle.'
'You can if you want to. But I'm sure we are doing the right thing. Did not Sonaton defeat the Beast of Batrigore in its very cave?'
'I don't know.'
'He did. And didn't the prophet Urdure vanquish the Dragon of Sluth on the Plain of Gidral after three days' fighting?'
'I don't know that we've got that much time-'
'And wasn't it true that the Sons of Exequial beat the hosts of Myrilom?'
'Yes?'
'You've heard of that?'
'No. Listen, we've stopped. I don't particularly want us to be found, do you? Not right now. And not by those guards. They didn't look like nice men at all.'
They exchanged a meaningful glance over the coffins, concerning a certain inevitability about the immediate future.
'They'll notice they're heavier, won't they?' said Oats.
'Those people driving the carts didn't look as though they notice anything very much.'
Agnes stared at the coffin beside her. There was some dirt in the bottom, but it was otherwise quite clean and had a pillow at the head end. There were also some side pockets in the lining.
'It's the easiest way in,' she said. 'You get into this one, I'll get into that one. And, look... those people you just told me about... Were they real historical characters?'
'Certainly. They-'
'Well, don't try to imitate them yet, all right? Otherwise you'll be a historical character too.'
She shut the lid, and still felt there was a vampire around.
Her hand touched the side pocket. There was something soft yet spiky there. Her fingers explored it in fascinated horror and discovered it to be a ball of wool with a couple of long knitting needles stuck through it, suggesting either a very domesticated form of voodoo or that someone was knitting a sock.
Who knitted socks in a coffin? On the other hand, perhaps even vampires couldn't sleep sometimes, and tossed and turned all day.
She braced herself as the coffin was picked up and tried to occupy her mind by working out where it was being taken. She heard the sound of footsteps on the cobbles, and then the ring of the flagstones on the main steps, echoing in the great hall, a sudden dip
That meant the cellars. Logical, really, but not good.
You're doing this to impress me, said Perdita. You're doing it to try to be extrovert and dynamic.
Shut up, Agnes thought.
A voice outside said, 'Put them down there and puth off.'
That was the one who called himself Igor.
Agnes wished she'd thought of- a weapon.
'Get rid of me, would they?' the voice went on, against a background of disappearing footsteps. 'Thith ith all going to end in tearth. It'th all very well for them, but who hath to go and thweep up the dutht, eh? That'th what I'd like to know. Who'th it hath to pull their headth out of the pickle jarth? Who'th it hath to find them under the ithe? I mutht've pulled out more thtaketh than I've had wriggly dinnerth...'
Light flooded in as the coffin lid was removed.
Igor stared at Agnes. Agnes stared at Igor.