Verence had stared for half a minute and then fled, wishing that he still had a real stomach so that he could stick his fingers down his throat for forty years and bring up everything he'd eaten.
He'd sought solace in the stables, where his beloved hunting dogs had whined and scratched at the door and had generally been very ill-at-ease at his sensed but unseen presence.
Now he haunted – and how he hated the word – the Long Gallery, where paintings of long-dead kings looked down at him from the dusty shadows. He would have felt a lot more kindly towards them if he hadn't met a number of them gibbering in various parts of the premises.
Verence had decided that he had two aims in death. One was to get out of the castle and find his son, and the other was to get his revenge on the duke. But not by killing him, he'd decided, even if he could find a way, because an eternity in that giggling idiot's company would lend a new terror to death.
He sat under a painting of Queen Bemery (670-722), whose rather stern good looks he would have felt a whole lot happier about if he hadn't seen her earlier that morning walking through the wall.
Verence tried to avoid walking through walls. A man had his dignity.
He became aware that he was being watched.
He turned his head.
There was a cat sitting in the doorway, subjecting him to a slow blink. It was a mottled grey and extremely fat . . .
No. It was extremely big. It was covered with so much scar tissue that it looked like a fist with fur on it. Its ears were a couple of perforated stubs, its eyes two yellow slits of easygoing malevolence, its tail a twitching series of question marks as it stared at him.
Greebo had heard that Lady Felmet had a small white female cat and had strolled up to pay his respects.
Verence had never seen an animal with so much built-in villainy. He didn't resist as it waddled across the floor and tried to rub itself against his legs, purring like a waterfall.
'Well, well,' said the king, vaguely. He reached down and made an effort to scratch it behind the two ragged bits on top of its head. It was a relief to find someone else besides another ghost who could see him, and Greebo, he couldn't help feeling, was a distinctly unusual cat. Most of the castle cats were either pampered pets or flat-eared kitchen and stable habitue's who generally resembled the very rodents they lived on. This cat, on the other hand, was its own animal. All cats give that impression, of course, but instead of the mindless animal self-absorption that passes for secret wisdom in the creatures. Greebo radiated genuine intelligence. He also radiated a smell that would have knocked over a wall and caused sinus trouble in a dead fox.
Only one type of person kept a cat like this.
The king tried to hunker down, and found he was sinking slightly into the floor. He pulled himself together and drifted upwards. Once a man allowed himself to go native in the ethereal world there would be no hope for him, he felt.
Only close relatives and the psychically inclined, Death had said. There weren't many of either in the castle. The duke qualified under the first heading, but his relentless self-interest made him about as psychically useful as a carrot. As for the rest, only the cook and the Fool seemed to qualify, but the cook spent a lot of his time weeping in the pantry because he wasn't being allowed to roast anything more bloody than a parsnip and the Fool was already such a bundle of nerves that Verence had given up his attempts to get through.
A witch, now. If a witch wasn't psychically inclined, then he, King Verence, was a puff of wind. He had to get a witch into the castle. And then . . .
He'd got a plan. In fact, it was more than that; it was a Plan. He spent months over it. He hadn't got anything else to do, except think. Death had been right about that. All that ghosts had were thoughts, and although thoughts in general had always been alien to the king the absence of any body to distract him with its assorted humours had actually given him the chance to savour the joys of cerebration. He'd never had a Plan before, or at least one that went much further than 'Let's find something and kill it'. And here, sitting in front of him washing itself, was the key.
'Here, pussy,' he ventured. Greebo gave him a penetrating yellow stare.
'Cat,' the king amended hastily, and backed away, beckoning. For a moment it seemed that the cat wouldn't follow and then, to his relief, Greebo stood up, yawned, and padded towards him. Greebo didn't often see ghosts, and was vaguely interested in this tall, bearded man with the see-through body.
The king led him along a dusty side corridor and towards a lumber room crammed with crumbling tapestries and portraits of long-dead kings. Greebo examined it critically, and then sat down in the middle of the dusty floor, looking at the king expectantly.
'There's plenty of mice and things in here, d'you see,' said Verence. 'And the rain blows in through the broken window. Plus there's all these tapestries to sleep on.'
'Sorry,' the king added, and turned to the door.
This was what he had been working on all these months. When he was alive he had always taken a lot of care of his body, and since being dead he had taken care to preserve its shape. It was too easy to let yourself go and become all fuzzy around the edges; there were ghosts in the castle who were mere pale blobs. But Verence had wielded iron self-control and exercised – well, had thought hard about exercise – and fairly bulged with spectral muscles. Months of pumping ectoplasm had left him in better shape than he had ever been, apart from being dead.
Then he'd started out small, with dust motes. The first one had nearly killed him[9], but he'd persevered and progressed to sand grains, then whole dried peas; he still didn't dare venture into the kitchens, but he had amused himself by oversalting Felmet's food a pinch at a time until he pulled himself together and told himself that poisoning wasn't honourable, even against vermin.
Now he leaned all his weight on the door, and with every microgramme of his being forced himself to become as heavy as possible. The sweat of auto-suggestion dripped off his nose and vanished before it hit the floor. Greebo watched with interest as ghostly muscles moved on the king's arms like footballs mating.
The door began to move, creaked, then accelerated and hit the doorway with a thump. The latch clicked into place.
It bloody well had to work now, Verence told himself. He'd never be able to lift the latch by himself. But a witch would certainly come looking for her cat – wouldn't she?
In the hills beyond the castle the Fool lay on his stomach and stared into the depths of a little lake. A couple of trout stared back at him.
Somewhere on the Disc, reason told him, there must be someone more miserable than he was. He wondered who it was.