The duke backed away, very carefully, fumbling behind him for the window catch. He stepped carefully into the room, shut the windows and hurriedly pulled the curtains across.
'I am the king,' he repeated, quietly. He looked at the Fool, who felt that something was expected of him.
The man is my lord and master, he thought. I have eaten his salt, or whatever all that business was. They told me at Guild school that a Fool should be faithful to his master until the very end, after all others have deserted him. Good or bad doesn't come into it. Every leader needs his Fool. There is only loyalty. That's the whole thing. Even if he is clearly three-parts bonkers, I'm his Fool until one of us dies.
To his horror he realised the duke was weeping.
cles 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.
Such a one was Hwel. Enough inspirations to equip a complete history of the performing arts poured continuously into a small heavy skull designed by evolution to do nothing more spectacular than be remarkably resistant to axe blows.
He licked his quill and looked bashfully around the camp. No-one was watching. He carefully lifted up the Wizard and revealed another stack of paper.
It was another potboiler. Every page was stained with sweat and the words themselves scrawled across the manuscript in a trellis of blots and crossings-out and tiny scribbled insertions. Hwel stared at it for a moment, alone in a world that consisted of him, the next blank page and the shouting, clamouring voices that haunted his dreams.
He began to write.
Free of Hwel's never-too-stringent attention. Tomjon pushed open the lid of the props hamper and, in the methodical way of the very young, began to unpack the crowns.
The dwarf stuck out his tongue as he piloted the errant quill across the ink-speckled page. He'd found room for the star-crossed lovers, the comic gravediggers and me hunchback king. It was the cats and the roller skates that were currently giving him trouble . . .
A gurgle made him look up.
'For goodness sake, lad,' he said. 'It hardly fits. Put it back.'
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.