'It's true! It's true!' screamed the duke. 'I hear them, all the time!' He leaned forward. 'It's the witches!' he hissed.
'Then, then, then they can be fought with other words,' said the Fool, 'Words can fight even witches,'
'What words?' said the duchess, thoughtfully.
The Fool shrugged. 'Crone. Evil eye. Stupid old woman.'
The duchess raised one thick eyebrow.
'You are not entirely an idiot, are you,' she said. 'You refer to rumour.'
'Just so, my lady.' The Fool rolled his eyes. What had he got himself into?
'It's the witches,' whispered the duke, to no-one in particular. 'We must tell the world about the witches. They're evil. They make it come back, the blood. Even sandpaper doesn't work.'
There was another tremor as Granny Weatherwax hurried along the narrow, frozen pathways in the forest. A lump of snow slipped off a tree branch and poured over her hat.
This wasn't right, she knew. Never mind about the -whatever it was – but it was unheard of for a witch to go out on Hogswatchnight. It was against all tradition. No-one knew why, but that wasn't the point.
She came out on to the moorland and pounded across the brittle heather, which had been scoured of snow by the wind. There was a crescent moon near the horizon, and its pale glow lit up the mountains that towered over her. 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, any more than a brick or cloud is hostile, but terribly, terribly uncaring.
Except that, this time, it was watching her. A mind quite unlike any other she had ever encountered was giving her a great deal of its attention. She glared up at the icy slopes, half expecting to see a mountainous shadow move against the stars.
'Who are you?' she shouted. 'What do you want?'
Her voice bounced and echoed among the rocks. There was a distant boom of an avalanche, high among the peaks.
On the crest of the moor, where in the summer partridges lurked among the bushes like small whirring idiots, was a standing stone. It stood roughly where the witches' territories met, although the boundaries were never formally marked out.
The stone was about the same height as a tall man, and made of bluish tinted rock. It was considered intensely magical because, although there was only one of it, no-one had ever been able to count if, if it saw anyone looking at it speculatively, it shuffled behind them. It was the most self-effacing monolith ever discovered.
It was also one of the numerous discharge points for the magic that accumulated in the Ramtops. The ground around it for several yards was bare of snow, and steamed gently.
The stone began to edge away, and watched her suspiciously from behind a tree.
She waited for ten minutes until Magrat came hurrying up the path from Mad Stoat, a village whose good-natured inhabitants were getting used to ear massage and flower-based homeopathic remedies for everything short of actual decapitation.[7] She was out of breath, and wore only a shawl over a nightdress that, if Magrat had anything to reveal, would have been very revealing.
'You felt it too?' she said.
Granny nodded. 'Where's Gytha?' she said.
They looked down the path that led to Lancre town, a huddle of lights in the snowy gloom.
There was a party going on. Light poured out into the street. A line of people were winding in and out of Nanny Ogg's house, from inside which came occasional shrieks of laughter and the sounds of breaking glass and children grizzling. It was clear that family life was being experienced to its limits in that house. The two witches stood uncertainly in the street.
'Do you think we should go in?' said Magrat diffidently. 'It's not as though we were invited. And we haven't brought a bottle.'
'Sounds to me as if there's a deal too many bottles in there already,' said Granny Weatherwax disapprovingly. A man staggered out of the doorway, burped, bumped into Granny, said, 'Happy Hogswatchnight, missus,' glanced up at her face and sobered up instantly.
'Mss,' snapped Granny.
'I am most frightfully sorry—' he began.
Granny swept imperiously past him. 'Come, Magrat,' she commanded.
The din inside hovered around the pain threshold. Nanny Ogg got around the Hogswatchnight tradition by inviting the whole village in, and the air in the room was already beyond the reach of pollution controls. Granny navigated through the press of bodies by the sound of a cracked voice explaining to the world at large that, compared to an unbelievable variety of other animals, the hedgehog was quite fortunate.
Nanny Ogg was sitting in a chair by the fire with a quart mug in one hand, and was conducting the reprise with a cigar. She grinned when she saw Granny's face.