Wyrd Sisters (Discworld, #6; Witches, #2)

by Terry Pratchett

Though some of its inhabitants are witches, dwarfs, wizards and even policemen, their stories are fundamentally about people being people.

LIGHTNING stabbed at the earth erratically, like an inefficient assassin.

As the cauldron bubbled an eldritch voice shrieked: “When shall we three meet again?” There was a pause. Finally another voice said, in far more ordinary tones: “Well, I can do next Tuesday.”

tiny sun and moon spin around them, on a complicated orbit to induce seasons, so probably nowhere else in the multiverse is it sometimes necessary for an elephant to cock a leg to allow the sun to go past.

In fact no gods anywhere play chess. They haven’t got the imagination. Gods prefer simple, vicious games, where you Do Not Achieve Transcendence but Go Straight To Oblivion; a key to the understanding of all religion is that a god’s idea of amusement is Snakes and Ladders with greased rungs.

Magic glues the Discworld together—magic generated by the turning of the world itself, magic wound like silk out of the underlying structure of existence to suture the wounds of reality.

Raw magic crackles invisibly from peak to peak and earths itself in the mountains. It is the Ramtops that supply the world with most of its witches and wizards. In the Ramtops the leaves on the trees move even when there is no breeze. Rocks go for a stroll of an evening. Even the land, at times, seems alive . . .

It was a good storm. There was quite effective projection and passion there, and critics agreed that if it would only learn to control its thunder it would be, in years to come, a storm to watch. The woods roared their applause and were full of mists and flying leaves.

On nights such as these the gods, as has already been pointed out, play games other than chess with the fates of mortals and the thrones of kings. It is important to remember that they always cheat, right up to the end . . .

On nights such as this, evil deeds are done. And good deeds, of course. But mostly evil, on the whole.

“Witches are abroad!” The porter was about to come back with, “Good time of year for it,” or “Wish I was, too,” but stopped when he saw the man’s face. It wasn’t the face of a man who would enter into the spirit of the thing. It was the look of someone who had seen things a decent man shouldn’t wot of . . .

“It’s true, is that,” said Nanny Ogg, earnestly. “How many times have you thrown a magic ring into the deepest depths of the ocean and then, when you get home and have a nice bit of turbot for your tea, there it is?” They considered this in silence. “Never,” said Granny irritably. “And nor have you.

It was a rich and wonderful voice, with every diphthong gliding beautifully into place. It was a golden brown voice. If the Creator of the multiverse had a voice, it was a voice such as this. If it had a drawback, it was that it wasn’t a voice you could use, for example, for ordering coal. Coal ordered by this voice would become diamonds.

It apparently belonged to a large fat man who had been badly savaged by a mustache. Pink veins made a map of quite a large city on his cheeks; his nose could have hidden successfully in a bowl of strawberries. He wore a ragged jerkin and holey tights with an aplomb that nearly convinced you that his velvet-and-vermine robes were in the wash just at the moment.

Granny could feel the shape of the future, and it had knives in it.

Gods, he hated this kingdom. It was so small, only forty miles long and maybe ten miles wide, and nearly all of it was cruel mountains with ice-green slopes and knife-edge crests, or dense huddled forests. A kingdom like that shouldn’t be any trouble. What he couldn’t quite fathom was this feeling that it had depth. It seemed to contain far too much geography.

Back down on the plains, if you kicked people they kicked back. Up here, when you kicked people they moved away and just waited patiently for your leg to fall off. How could a king go down in history ruling a people like that? You couldn’t oppress them any more than you could oppress a mattress.

A year went past. The days followed one another patiently. Right back at the beginning of the multiverse they had tried all passing at the same time, and it hadn’t worked.

Particles of raw inspiration sleet through the universe all the time. Every once in a while one of them hits a receptive mind, which then invents DNA or the flute sonata form or a way of making light bulbs wear out in half the time. But most of them miss. Most people go through their lives without being hit by even one. Some people are even more unfortunate. They get them all.

Winter in the Ramtops didn’t mess about; it was a gateway straight through to the primeval coldness that lived before the creation of the world. Winter in the Ramtops was several yards of snow, the forests a mere collection of shadowy green tunnels under the drifts. Winter meant the coming of the lazy wind, which couldn’t be bothered to blow around people and blew right through them instead.

The Ramtops, which as it were lay across the Disc’s vast magical standing wave like an iron bar dropped innocently across a pair of subway rails, were so saturated with magic that it was constantly discharging itself into the environment. People would wake up in the middle of the night, mutter, “Oh, it’s just another bloody portent,” and go back to sleep.

A man walked across the moors from Razorback to Lancre town without seeing a single marshlight, headless dog, strolling tree, ghostly coach or comet, and had to be taken in by a tavern and given a drink to unsteady his nerves. The stoicism of the Ramtoppers, developed over the years as a sovereign resistance to the thaumaturgical chaos, found itself unable to cope with the sudden change. It was like a noise which isn’t heard until it stops.

The Fool was fascinated by what happened to the duke’s eyes. The mad red flame vanished, was sucked backward, and was replaced by the hard blue stare he had come to recognize. It didn’t mean, he realized, that the duke was any less mad. Even the coldness of his sanity was madness in a way. The duke had a mind that ticked like a clock and, like a clock, it regularly went cuckoo.

It was a different world up there, and one even a witch would rarely venture into; it was a landscape left over from the frosty birth of the world, all green ice and knife-edge ridges and deep, secret valleys. It was a landscape never intended for human beings—not hostile, anymore than a brick or cloud is hostile, but terribly, terribly uncaring.

The water under the lid was inky black and, according to rumor, bottomless; the Ogg grandchildren were encouraged to believe that monsters from the dawn of time dwelt in its depths, since Nanny believed that a bit of thrilling and pointless terror was an essential ingredient of the magic of childhood.

Tradition said that there could be only three questions. Granny tried to formulate one that couldn’t be deliberately misunderstood. Then she decided that this was playing the wrong kind of game. “What the hell’s going on?” she said carefully. “And no mucking about trying to wriggle out of it, otherwise I’ll boil you.” The demon appeared to hesitate. This was obviously a new approach. “Magrat, just kick that kindling over here, will you?” said Granny. “I protest at this treatment,” said the demon, its voice tinged with uncertainty.

Animals had minds. People had minds, although human minds were vague foggy things. Even insects had minds, little pointy bits of light in the darkness of non-mind. Granny considered herself something of an expert on minds. She was pretty certain things like countries didn’t have minds. They weren’t even alive, for goodness sake. A country was, well, was—

She’d often thought of the forest as a sprawling creature, but only metterforically, as a wizard would put it; drowsy and purring with bumblebees in the summer, roaring and raging in autumn gales, curled in on itself and sleeping in the winter. It occurred to her that in addition to being a collection of other things, the forest was a thing in itself. Alive, only not alive in the way that, say, a shrew was alive. And much slower.

“I believe I heard a voice that took my doggerel and shaped it and fired it back through my ears and straight into my heart,” said Hwel simply. “I believe I heard a voice that got behind the crude shape of the words and said the things I had meant them to say, but had not the skill to achieve. Who knows where such things come from?”

his relentless self-interest made him about as psychically useful as a carrot.

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.

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 circumstances. 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.

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, bugger,” she said.

She stood up, took her pointed hat from its hook behind the door and, glaring into the mirror, skewered it in place with a number of ferocious hatpins. They slid on one by one, as unstoppable as the wrath of God.

Whether any of these preparations did anything for her is debatable, but they did mean that a thin veneer of confidence overlaid her trembling heart.

She turned to her worktable and examined what she rather self-consciously, and never in Granny’s hearing, called her Tools of the Craft. There was the white-handled knife, used in the preparation of magical ingredients. There was the black-handled knife, used in the magical workings themselves; Magrat had carved so many runes into its handle it was in constant danger of falling in half. They were undoubtedly powerful, but . . . Magrat shook her head regretfully, went over to the kitchen dresser and took out the breadknife. Something told her that at times like these a good sharp breadknife was probably the best friend a girl could have.

The Fool moved slowly. He hadn’t expected any of this. Torturing people hadn’t been on his mental agenda. Hurting old ladies in cold blood wasn’t his cup of tea, and actually hurting witches in blood of any temperature whatsoever failed to be an entire twelve-course banquet.

Magrat had used a lot of powder to make her face pale and interesting. It combined with the lavishly applied mascara to give the guard the impression that he was looking at two flies that had crashed into a sugar bowl. He found his fingers wanted to make a sign to ward off the evil eyeshadow.

Like most small men the Fool relied on the initial mad rush to secure an advantage and was at a loss for a follow-through, and it would probably have gone hard with him if Hron hadn’t suddenly become aware that a breadknife was pressed to his neck.

“You’re wondering whether I really would cut your throat,” panted Magrat. “I don’t know either. Think of the fun we could have together, finding out.”

Normally what she had in mind would require a day’s planning and a bagful of exotic ingredients. At least, so she’d always believed. Now she was prepared to doubt it. If you could conjure demons out of washtubs, you could do anything.

The old oak planks had been down here in the darkness all these years, away from the clock of the seasons . . . On the other hand . . . Granny had said that somehow all trees were one tree, or something like that. Magrat thought she understood it, although she didn’t know exactly what it meant. And it was springtime up there. The ghost of life that still lived in the wood must know that. Or if it had forgotten, it must be told.

And then, without warning, the hammer that can drive a marshmallow-soft toadstool through six inches of solid pavement or an eel across a thousand miles of hostile ocean to a particular pond in an upland field, struck up through her and into the door.

Granny stared at him. She hadn’t faced anything like this before. The man was clearly mad, but at the heart of his madness was a dreadful cold sanity, a core of pure interstellar ice in the center of the furnace. She’d thought him weak under a thin shell of strength, but it went a lot further than that. Somewhere deep inside his mind, somewhere beyond the event horizon of rationality, the sheer pressure of insanity had hammered his madness into something harder than diamond.

Ninety percent of true love is acute, ear-burning embarrassment.

It was probably some wonderful organization on the part of Nature to protect itself. It saw to it that everyone with any magical talent was about as ready to cooperate as a she-bear with toothache, so all that dangerous power was safely dissipated as random bickering and rivalry.

Granny Weatherwax considered herself totally unsusceptible to buttering up, but the king was expertly applying the equivalent of the dairy surplus of quite a large country. Bowing was a particularly good touch.

“Exactly how,” she said, eventually, “does one go about knocking over the houses of people one does not like?” “Urban clearance,” said the Fool. “I was thinking of burning them down.” “Hygienic urban clearance,” the Fool added promptly. “And sowing the ground with salt.” “Marry, I suspect that is hygienic urban clearance and a program of environmental improvements. It might be a good idea to plant a few trees as well.” “No more trees!” shouted Felmet. “Oh, it’s all right. They won’t survive. The important thing is to have planted them.”

The storm was resting. It didn’t want to be, but it was. It had spent a fortnight understudying a famous anticyclone over the Circle Sea, turning up every day, hanging around in the cold front, grateful for a chance to uproot the occasional tree or whirl a farmhouse to any available emerald city of its choice. But the big break in the weather had never come. It consoled itself with the thought that even the really great storms of the past—the Great Gale of 1789, for example, of Hurricane Zelda and Her Amazing Raining Frogs—had gone through this sort of thing at some stage in their career.

If weather was people, this storm would be filling in time wearing a cardboard hat in a hamburger hell.