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November 13 - December 15, 2022
get our Nev to run up to Poorchick’s and say Mrs. Ogg presents her compliments and we want half a dozen big cheeses and ten dozen eggs, and tell Mrs. Carter will she be so good as to let us have a big jar of those pickled onions she does so well.
a poet who hopes that romantically flowing locks will make up for a wretched inability to find a rhyme for “daffodil.”
She’s just discovered you have a torture chamber here. And to think we thought Lancre was backward!”
Ah . . . moral cowardice from the fat girl.
“You mean vampirism is like . . . pyramid selling?”
“Look at this waistcoat! Will you look at this waistcoat? Do you know what water does to silk? You just never get it out! No matter what you do, there’s always a mark.”
“You’re just saying that in exchange for not actually being evil you’ll simply be bad, is that it?”
Vlad is trying to get to know me better!” “Good plan,” said Nanny. “See if he talks in his sleep.”
right now he wished, he really wished that they’d found time to tell him, for example, exactly where the heart was and how much force you needed to drive a stake through it.
The blood is the life . . . vampires are subservient to the one who turned them into a vampire
After four years of theological college he wasn’t at all certain of what he believed, and this was partly because the Church had schismed so often that occasionally the entire curriculum would alter in the space of one afternoon. But also— They had been warned about it. Don’t expect it, they’d said. It doesn’t happen to anyone except the prophets. Om doesn’t work like that. Om works from inside.
—but he’d hoped that, just once, that Om would make himself known in some obvious and unequivocal way that couldn’t be mistaken for wind or a guilty conscience.
It wasn’t that he’d lacked faith. But faith wasn’t enough. He’d wanted knowledge.
He’d found knowledge, and knowledge hadn’t helped.
But a part of him also couldn’t forget reading about the tiny little creatures that caused the rare red tides off the coast of Urt and the effect this apparently had on local sea life, and about the odd wind cycle that sometimes kept rainclouds away from Smale for years at a time.
the seeker after truth had found truths instead.
On one shelf alone he found forty-three remarkably similar accounts of a great flood, and in every single one of them a man very much like Bishop Horn had saved the elect of mankind by building a magical boat.
Of course these stories in the chronicles of other religions were mere folktales and myth, while the voyage detailed in the Book of Cena was holy truth. But, nevertheless . . .
The hammering of clerics as they nailed their own versions of the truth of Om on the temple doors was deafening, and for a brief while he’d even contemplated buying a roll of paper and a hammer of his own and putting his name on the waiting list for the doors, but he’d overruled himself. Because he was, he knew, in two minds about everything.
He called the voices the Good Oats and the Bad Oats. The trouble was, each of them agreed with the terminology but applied it in different ways. Even when he was small there’d been a part of him that thought the temple was a silly boring place, and tried to make him laugh when he was supposed to be listening to sermons. It had grown up with him. It was the Oats that read avidly and always remembered those passages which cast doubt on the literal truth of the Book of Om—and nudged him and said, if this isn’t true, what can you believe?
The Church schismed all the time these days, and this was surely the ultimate one, starting a war inside one’s head.
This was not according to the proper narrative tradition. Although the people of Lancre were technically new to all this, down at genetic level they knew that when the mob is at the gate the mobee should be screaming defiance in a burning laboratory or engaged in a cliffhanger struggle with some hero on the battlements. He shouldn’t be lighting a cigar.
No, lending her self to the baby did have a sort of rightness to it, a folklore touch, a romantic ring, and that’s why Nanny and Magrat would probably believe it and that was why Granny wouldn’t do it. Granny had no romance in her soul, Agnes thought. But she did have a very good idea of how to manipulate the romance in other people. So . . . where else was she? Something had happened. She’d put the essence of herself somewhere for safety, and no matter what she’d told the Count she couldn’t have put it very far away. It had to be in something alive, but if it was in a human the owner wouldn’t
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That seemed to be that. Provided they didn’t touch his birds, Hodgesaargh didn’t much mind who ran the castle.
Now, you just follow me and act snooty. You must’ve learned that, bein’ a queen. Never let ’em even think you haven’t got a right to be where you are.”
it’th a pleathure to be commanded in a clear, firm authoritative voithe,
“I was, er, saying a short prayer,” said Oats. “Will that help?” said Agnes. “Er . . . it helps me. The Prophet Brutha said that Om helps those who help one another.” “And does he?” “To be honest, there are a number of opinions of what was meant.” “How many?” “About one hundred and sixty, since the Schism of ten-thirty A.M., February twenty-third.
Sects maniacs, said Perdita.
“The Prophet Brutha said ‘Let there be ten thousand voices,’” said the priest. “Sometimes I think he meant that it was better to argue amongst ourselves than go out putting unbelievers to fire and the sword.
“There are a hundred pathways to Om. Unfortunately, I sometimes think someone left a rake lying across a lot of them.
What do you really . . . believe? What did you . . . think it was all about? Singing songs? Sooner or later . . . it’s all down to . . . the blood . . .”
“’s not my job to understand this sort of thing,” said the falconer. “I wasn’t trained. Probably takes a lot of training, understanding this. That’s your job. And her job. Can you understand what’s going on when a bird’s been trained and’ll make a kill and still come back to the wrist?”
The old woman had been burning up and in pain, and now . . . the iron was getting hot, as if the pain and the heat had been moved away.
She was really still. Oats had only seen stillness like that when movement was no longer an option.
“Na one’s got tha’ much guts, right eno’.”
Y’canna’ cross a hag.”
Granny hadn’t just told her to go away. The command had hit her brain like a bucket of ice. Even Perdita had felt it. There was no question of not obeying.
Nanny Ogg radiated a perpetual field of It’ll-be-all-rightness.
Most people put up with most things,
you are not one of the . . . cattle. I expect that no witch is. You people tend to know your own mind.”
This was a test. Everything was a test. Everything was a competition. Life put them in front of you every day. You watched yourself all the time. You had to make choices. You never got told which ones were right. Oh, some of the priests said you got given marks afterward, but what was the point of that?
ANOTHER CHOICE, ESMERELDA WEATHERWAX. “Light and dark? It’s never as simple as that, you know, even for you.” Death sighed. NOT EVEN FOR ME. Granny tried to line up her thoughts. Which light and which dark?
was the light the way in, or the way out?
Not normally the kind of words she’d associate with light. Perhaps it was the way they were said. But they had a strange echo to them, a second voice, woven in amongst the first voice, glued to every syllable . . .
Ah . . . one mind, split in half. There were more Agneses in the world than Agnes dreamed of, Granny told herself. All the girl had done was give a thing a name, and once you gave a thing a name you gave it a life . . .
The sand stopped rushing. Time was up.
Her life had just flashed past her eyes and wasn’t it dull?
small fangs and a terrible taste in waistcoats,
The Lancrastians didn’t go digging themselves, reckoning in their uncomplicated country way that it was bad luck to have your head torn off by a vengeful underground spirit.
It looked exactly like the little figurines back in the days of ice and mammoths, when what men really looked for in a woman was quantity.
