The Disc rolled into winter.
Winter in the Ramtops could not honestly be described as a magical frosty wonderland, each twig laced with confections of brittle ice. 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 idea that Winter could actually be enjoyable would never have occurred to Ramtop people, who had eighteen different words for snow.[5]
The ghost of King Verence prowled the battlements, bereft and hungry, and stared out across his beloved forests and waited his chance.
It was a winter of portents. Comets sparkled against the chilled skies at night. Clouds shaped mightily like whales and dragons drifted over the land by day. In the village of Razorback a cat gave birth to a two-headed kitten, but since Greebo, by dint of considerable effort, was every male ancestor for the last thirty generations this probably wasn't all that portentous.
However, in Bad Ass a cockerel laid an egg and had to put up with some very embarrassing personal questions. In Lancre town a man swore he'd met a man who had actually seen with his own eyes a tree get up and walk. There was a short sharp shower of shrimps. There were odd lights in the sky. Geese walked backwards. Above all of this flared the great curtains of cold fire that were the Aurora Coriolis, the Hublights, whose frosty tints illuminated and coloured the midnight snows.
There was nothing the least unusual about any of this. 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.
Hogswatchnight came round, marking the start of another year. And, with alarming suddenness, nothing happened.
The skies were clear, the snow deep and crisped like icing sugar.
The freezing forests were silent and smelled of tin. The only things that fell from the sky were the occasional fresh showers of snow.
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.
Granny Weatherwax heard it now as she lay snug under a pile of quilts in her freezing bedroom. Hogswatchnight is, traditionally, the one night of the Disc's long year when witches are expected to stay at home, and she'd had an early night in the company of a bag of apples and a stone hotwater bottle. But something had awoken her from her doze.
An ordinary person would have crept downstairs, possibly armed with a poker. Granny simply hugged her knees and let her mind wander.
It hadn't been in the house. She could feel the small, fast minds of mice, and the fuzzy minds of her goats as they lay in their cosy flatulence in the outhouse. A hunting owl was a sudden dagger of alertness as it glided over the rooftops.
Granny concentrated harder, until her mind was full of the tiny chittering of the insects in the thatch and the woodworm in the beams. Nothing of interest there.
She snuggled down and let herself drift out into the forest, which was silent except for the occasional muffled thump as snow slid off a tree. Even in midwinter the forest was full of life, usually dozing in burrows or hibernating in the middle of trees.
All as usual. She spread herself further, to the high moors and secret passes where the wolves ran silently over the frozen crust; she touched their minds, sharp as knives. Higher still, and there was nothing in the snowfields but packs of vermine.[6]
Everything was as it should be, with the exception that nothing was right. There was something – yes, there was something alive out there, something young and ancient and . . .
Granny turned over the feeling in her mind. Yes. That was it. Something forlorn. Something lost. And . . .
Feelings were never simple, Granny knew. Strip them away and there were others underneath . . .
Something that, if it didn't stop feeling lost and forlorn very soon, was going to get angry.
And still she couldn't find it. She could feel the tiny minds of chrysalises down under the frozen leafmould. She could sense the earthworms, which had migrated below the frost line. She could even sense a few people, who were hardest of all – human minds were thinking so many thoughts all at the same time that they were nearly impossible to locate; it was like trying to nail fog to the wall.
Nothing there. Nothing there. The feeling was all around her, and there was nothing to cause it. She'd gone down about as far as she could, to the smallest creature in the kingdom, and there was nothing there.
Granny Weatherwax sat up in bed, lit a candle and reached for an apple. She glared at her bedroom wall.
She didn't like being beaten. There was something out there, something drinking in magic, something growing, something dial seemed so alive it was all around the house, and she couldn't find it.
She reduced the apple to its core and placed it carefully in the tray of the candlestick. Then she blew out the candle.
The cold velvet of the night slid back into the room.
Granny had one last try. Perhaps she was looking in the wrong way . . .
A moment later she was lying on the floor with the pillow clasped around her head.
And to think she had expected it to be small . . .