Carpe Jugulum Page 9

  “Magnificent!” he croaked as he folded up.

  Perdita pulled herself away and ran over to Nanny Ogg, grabbing the woman’s arm.

  “Nanny, we are leaving!”

  “Are we, dear?” said Nanny calmly, not making a move.

  “And Jason and Darren too!”

  Perdita didn’t read as much as Agnes. She thought books were boring. But now she really needed to know: what did you use against vampires?

  Holy symbols! Agnes prompted from within.

  Perdita looked around desperately. Nothing in the room looked particularly holy. Religion, apart from its use as a sort of cosmic registrar, had never caught on in Lancre.

  “Daylight is always good, my dear,” said the Countess, who must have caught the edge of her thought. “Your uncle always had big windows and easily twitched aside curtains, didn’t he, Count.”

  “Yes indeed,” said the Count.

  “And when it came to running water, he always kept the moat flowing perfectly, didn’t he?”

  “Fed from a mountain stream, I think,” said the Count.

  “And, for a vampire, he always seemed to have so many ornamental items around the castle that could be bent or broken into the shape of some religious symbol, as I recall.”

  “He certainly did. A vampire of the old school.”

  “Yes.” The Countess gave her husband a smile. “The stupid school.” She turned to Perdita and looked her up and down. “So I think you will find we are here to stay, my dear. Although you do seem to have made an impression on my son. Come here, girl. Let me have a good look at you.”

  Even cushioned inside her own head Agnes felt the weight of the vampire’s will hit Perdita like an iron bar, pushing her down. Like the other end of a seesaw, Agnes rose.

  “Where’s Magrat? What have you done with her?” she said.

  “Putting the baby to bed, I believe,” said the Countess, raising her eyebrows. “A lovely child.”

  “Granny Weatherwax is going to hear about this, and you’ll wish you’d never been born…or un-born or re-born or whatever you are!”

  “We look forward to meeting her,” said the Count calmly. “But here we are, and I don’t seem to see this famous lady with us. Perhaps you should go and fetch her? You could take your friends. And when you see her, Miss Nitt, you can tell her that there is no reason why witches and vampires should fight.”

  Nanny Ogg stirred. Jason shifted in his seat. Agnes pulled them upright and toward the stairs.

  “We’ll be back!” she shouted.

  The Count nodded.

  “Good,” he said. “We are famous for our hospitality.”

  It was still dark when Hodgesaargh set out. If you were hunting a phoenix, he reasoned, the dark was probably the best time. Light showed up better in the darkness.

  He’d packed a portable wire cage after considering the charred bars of the window, and he’d also spent some time on the glove.

  It was basically a puppet, made of yellow cloth with some purple and blue rags tacked on. It was not, he conceded, very much like the drawing of the phoenix, but in his experience birds weren’t choosy observers.

  Newly hatched birds were prepared to accept practically anything as their parent. Anyone who’d hatched eggs under a broody hen knew that ducklings could be made to think they were chicks, and poor William the buzzard was a case in point.

  The fact that a young phoenix never saw its parent and therefore didn’t know what it was supposed to look like might be a drawback in getting its trust, but this was unknown territory and Hodgesaargh was prepared to try anything. Like bait, for example. He’d packed meat and grain, although the drawing certainly suggested a hawk-like bird, but in case it needed to eat inflammable materials as well he also put in a bag of moth balls and a pint of fish oil. Nets were out of the question, and bird lime was not to be thought of. Hodgesaargh had his pride. Anyway, they probably wouldn’t work.

  Since anything might be worth trying, he’d also adapted a duck lure, trying to achieve a sound described by a long-dead falconer as “like unto the cry of a buzzard yet of a lower pitch.” He wasn’t too happy about the result but, on the other hand, maybe a young phoenix didn’t know what a phoenix was meant to sound like, either. It might work, and if he didn’t try it, he’d always be wondering.

  He set out.

  Soon a cry like a duck in a power dive was heard among the damp, dark hills.

  The pre-dawn light was gray on the horizon and a shower of sleet had made the leaves sparkle when Granny Weatherwax left her cottage. There had been so much to do.

  What she’d chosen to take with her was slung in a sack tied across her back with string. She’d left the broomstick in the corner by the fire.

  She wedged the door open with a stone and then, without once looking back, strode off through the woods.

  Down in the villages, the cocks crowed in response to a sunrise hidden somewhere beyond the clouds.

  An hour later, a broomstick settled gently on the lawn. Nanny Ogg got off and hurried to the back door.

  Her foot kicked something holding it open. She glared at the stone as if it was something dangerous, and then edged around it and into the gloom of the cottage.

  She came out a few minutes later, looking worried.

  Her next move was toward the water butt. She broke the film of ice with her hand and pulled out a piece, looked at it for a moment, and then tossed it away.

  People often got the wrong idea about Nanny Ogg, and she took care to see that they did. One thing they often got wrong was the idea that she never thought further than the bottom of the glass.

  Up in a nearby tree, a magpie chattered at her. She threw a stone at it.

  Agnes arrived half an hour later. She preferred to go on foot whenever possible. She suspected that she overhung too much.

  Nanny Ogg was sitting on a chair just inside the door, smoking her pipe. She took it out of her mouth and nodded.

  “She’s gorn,” she said.

  “Gone? Just when we need her?” said Agnes. “What do you mean?”

  “She ain’t here,” Nanny expanded.

  “Perhaps she’s just out?” said Agnes.

  “Gorn,” said Nanny. “These past two hours, if I’m any judge.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Once—probably even yesterday—Nanny would have alluded vaguely to magical powers. It was a measure of her concern that, today, she got right to the jelly.

  “First thing she does in the mornings, rain or shine, is wash her face in the water butt,” she said. “Someone broke the ice two hours ago. You can see where it’s frozed over again.”

  “Oh, is that all?” said Agnes. “Well…perhaps she’s got business—”

  “You come and see,” said Nanny, standing up.

  The kitchen was spotless. Every flat surface had been scrubbed. The fireplace had been swept and a new fire laid.

  Most of the cottage’s smaller contents had been laid out on the table. There were three cups, three plates, three knives, a cleaver, three forks, three spoons, two ladles, a pair of scissors and three candlesticks. A wooden box was packed with needles and thread and pins…

  If it was possible for anything to be polished, it had been. Someone had even managed to buff up a shine on the old pewter candlesticks.

  Agnes felt the little knot of tension grow inside her. Witches didn’t own much. The cottage owned things. They were not yours to take away.

  This looked like an inventory.

  Behind her, Nanny Ogg was opening and shutting drawers in the ancient dresser.

  “She’s left it all neat,” Nanny said. “She’s even chipped all the rust off the kettle. The larder’s all bare except for some hobnailed cheese and suicide biscuits. It’s the same in the bedroom. Her ‘I ATE’NT DEAD’ card is hanging behind the door. And the guzunda’s so clean you could eat your tea out of it, if the fancy took you that way. And she’s taken the box out of the dresser.”

 
“What box?”

  “Oh, she keeps stuff in it,” said Nanny. “Memororabililia.”

  “Mem—?”

  “You know…keepsakes and whatnot. Stuff that’s hers—”

  “What’s this?” said Agnes, holding up a green glass ball.

  “Oh, Magrat passed that on to her,” said Nanny, lifting up a corner of the rug and peering under it. “It’s a float our Wayne brought back from the seaside once. It’s a buoy for the fishing nets.”

  “I didn’t know buoys had glass balls,” said Agnes.

  She groaned inwardly, and felt the blush unfold. But Nanny hadn’t noticed. It was then she realized how really serious this was. Nanny would normally leap on such a gift like a cat on a feather. Nanny could find an innuendo in “Good morning.” She could certainly find one in “innuendo.” And “buoys with glass balls” should have lasted her all week. She’d be accosting total strangers and saying, “You’ll never guess what Agnes Nitt said…”

  She ventured “I said—”

  “Dunno much about fishing, really,” said Nanny. She straightened up, biting her thumbnail thoughtfully. “Something’s wrong with all this,” she said. “The box…she wasn’t going to leave anything behind…”

  “Granny wouldn’t go, would she?” said Agnes nervously. “I mean, not actually leave. She’s always here.”

  “Like I told you last night, she’s been herself lately,” said Nanny, vaguely. She sat down in the rocking chair.

  “You mean she’s not been herself, don’t you?” said Agnes.

  “I knows exactly what I means, girl. When she’s herself she snaps at people and sulks and makes herself depressed. Ain’t you ever heard of taking people out of themselves? Now shut up, ’cos I’m thinkin’.”

  Agnes looked down at the green ball in her hands. A glass fishing float, five hundred miles from the sea. An ornament, like a shell. Not a crystal ball. You could use it like a crystal ball but it wasn’t a crystal ball…and she knew why that was important.

  Granny was a very traditional witch. Witches hadn’t always been popular. There might even be times—there had been times, long ago—when it was a good idea not to advertise what you were, and that was why all these things on the table didn’t betray their owner at all. There was no need for that anymore, there hadn’t been in Lancre for hundreds of years, but some habits get passed down in the blood.

  In fact things now worked the other way. Being a witch was an honorable trade in the mountains, but only the young ones invested in real crystal balls and colored knives and dribbly candles. The old ones…they stuck with simple kitchen cutlery, fishing floats, bits of wood, whose very ordinariness subtly advertised their status. Any fool could be a witch with a runic knife, but it took skill to be one with an apple-corer.

  A sound she hadn’t been hearing stopped abruptly, and the silence echoed.

  Nanny glanced up.

  “Clock’s stopped,” she said.

  “It’s not even telling the right time,” said Agnes, turning to look at it.

  “Oh, she just kept it for the tick,” said Nanny.

  Agnes put down the glass ball.

  “I’m going to look around some more,” she said.

  She learned to look around when she visited someone’s home, because in one way it was a piece of clothing and had grown to fit their shape. It might show not just what they’d been doing, but what they’d been thinking. You might be visiting someone who expected you to know everything about everything, and in those circumstances you took every advantage you could get.

  Someone had told her that a witch’s cottage was her second face. Come to think of it, it had been Granny.

  It should be easy to read this place. Granny’s thoughts had the strength of hammer blows and they’d pounded her personality into the walls. If her cottage had been any more organic it would have had a pulse.

  Agnes wandered through to the dank little scullery. The copper wash pot had been scoured. A fork and a couple of shining spoons lay beside it, along with the washboard and scrubbing brush. The slop bucket gleamed, although the fragments of a broken cup in the bottom said that the recent intensive housework hadn’t been without its casualties.

  She pushed open the door into the old goat shed. Granny was not keeping goats at the moment, but her homemade beekeeping equipment was neatly laid out on a bench. She’d never needed much. If you needed smoke and a veil to deal with your bees, what was the point of being a witch?

  Bees…

  A moment later she was out in the garden, her ear pressed against a beehive.

  There were no bees flying this early in the day, but the sound inside was a roar.

  “They’ll know,” said a voice behind her. Agnes stood up so quickly she bumped her head on the hive roof.

  “But they won’t say,” Nanny added. “She’d have told ’em. Well done for thinkin’ about ’em, though.”

  Something chattered at them from a nearby branch. It was a magpie.

  “Good morning, Mister Magpie,” said Agnes automatically.

  “Bugger off, you bastard,” said Nanny, and reached down for a stick to throw. The bird swooped off to the other side of the clearing.

  “That’s bad luck,” said Agnes.

  “It will be if I get a chance to aim,” said Nanny. “Can’t stand those maggoty-pies.”

  “‘One for sorrow,’” said Agnes, watching the bird hop along a branch.

  “I always take the view there’s prob’ly going to be another one along in a minute,” said Nanny, dropping a stick.

  “‘Two for joy’?” said Agnes.

  “It’s ‘two for mirth.’”

  “Same thing, I suppose.”

  “Dunno about that,” said Nanny. “I was joyful when our Jason was born, but I can’t say I was laughin’ at the time. Come on, let’s have another look.”

  Two more magpies landed on the cottage’s antique thatch.

  “That’s ‘three for a girl—’” said Agnes nervously.

  “‘Three for a funeral’ is what I learned,” said Nanny. “But there’s lots of magpie rhymes. Look, you take her broomstick and have a look over toward the mountains, and I’ll—”

  “Wait,” said Agnes.

  Perdita was screaming at her to pay attention. She listened.

  Threes…

  Three spoons. Three knives. Three cups.

  The broken cup thrown away.

  She stood still, afraid that if she moved or breathed something awful would happen.

  The clock had stopped…

  “Nanny?”

  Nanny Ogg was wise enough to recognize that something was happening and didn’t waste time on daft questions.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “Go in and tell me what time the clock stopped at, will you?”

  Nanny nodded and trotted off.

  The tension in Agnes’s head stretched out thin and made a noise like a plucked string. She was amazed that the whine from it couldn’t be heard all round the garden. If she moved, if she tried to force things, it’d snap.

  Nanny returned.

  “Three o’clock?” said Agnes, before she opened her mouth.

  “Just after.”

  “How much after?”

  “Two or three minutes…”

  “Two or three?”

  “Three, then.”

  The three magpies landed together in another tree and chased one another through the branches, chattering loudly.

  “Three minutes after three,” said Agnes, and felt the tension ease and the words form. “Threes, Nanny. She was thinking in threes. There was another candlestick out in the goat shed, and some cutlery too. But she only put out threes.”

  “Some things were in ones and twos,” said Nanny, but her voice was edged with doubt.

  “Then she’d only got one or two of them,” said Agnes. “There were more spoons and things out in the scullery that she’d missed. I mean that for some reason she wasn’t putting out more than three.”<
br />
  “I know for a fact she’s got four cups,” said Nanny.

  “Three,” said Agnes. “She must’ve broken one. The bits are in the slop bucket.”

  Nanny Ogg stared at her. “She’s not clumsy, as a rule,” she mumbled. She looked to Agnes as though she was trying to avoid some huge and horrible thought.

  A gust shook the trees. A few drops of rain spattered across the garden.

  “Let’s get inside,” Agnes suggested.

  Nanny shook her head. “It’s chillier in there than out here,” she said. Something skimmed across the leaves and landed on the lawn. It was a fourth magpie. “‘Four for a birth,’” she added, apparently to herself. “That’d be it, sure enough. I hoped she wouldn’t realize, but you can’t get anything past Esme. I’ll tan young Shawn’s hide for him when I get home! He swore he’d delivered that invite!”

  “Perhaps she took it away with her?”

  “No! If she’d got it she’d have been there last night, you can bet on it!” snapped Nanny.

  “What wouldn’t she realize?” said Agnes.

  “Magrat’s daughter!”

  “What? Well, I should think she would realize! You can’t hide a baby! Everyone in the kingdom knows about it.”

  “I mean Magrat’s got a daughter! She’s a mother!” said Nanny

  “Well, yes! That’s how it works! So?”

  They were shouting at one another, and they both realized it at the same time.

  It was raining harder now. Drips were flying off Agnes’s hat every time she moved her head.

  Nanny recovered a little. “All right, I s’pose between us we’ve got enough sense to get in out of the rain.”

  “And at least we can light the fire,” said Agnes, as they stepped into the chill of the kitchen. “She’s left it all laid—”

  “No!”

  “There’s no need to shout again!”

  “Look, don’t light the fire, right?” said Nanny. “Don’t touch anything more than you have to!”

  “I could easily get more kindling in, and—”

  “Be told! That fire wasn’t laid for you to light! And leave that door alone!”

  Agnes stopped in the act of pushing away the stone.