Equal Rites (Discworld 3)

Granny was in the garden, among the beehives, the early morning wind whipping at her skirts. She went from hive to hive, tapping on their roofs. Then, in the thickets of borage and beebalm that she had planted around them, she stood with her arms outstretched in front of her and sang something in tones so high that no normal person could have heard them.

But a roar went up from the hives, and then the air was suddenly thick with the heavy, big-eyed, deep-voiced shapes of drone bees. They circled over her head, adding their own bass humming to her chant.

Then they were gone, soaring into the growing light over the clearing and streaming away over the trees.

It is well known- at least, it is well known to witches - that all colonies of bees are, as it were, just one part of the creature called the Swarm, in the same way that individual bees are component cells of the hivemind. Granny didn't mingle her thoughts with the bees very often, partly because insect minds were strange, alien things that tasted of tin, but mostly because she suspected that the Swarm was a good deal more intelligent than she was.

She knew that the drones would soon reach the wild bee colonies in the deep forest, and within hours every corner of the mountain meadows would be under very close scrutiny indeed. All she could do was wait.

At noon the drones returned, and Granny read in the sharp acid thoughts of the hivemind that there was no sign of Esk.

She went back into the cool of the cottage and sat down in the rocking chair, staring at the doorway.

She knew what the next step was. She hated the very idea of it. But she fetched a short ladder, climbed up creakily on to the roof, and pulled the staff from its hiding place in the thatch.

It was icy cold. It steamed.

“Above the snowline, then,” said Granny.

She climbed down, and rammed the staff into a flowerbed. She glared at it. She had a nasty feeling that it was glaring back.

“Don't think you've won, because you haven't,” she snapped. “It's just that I haven't got the time to mess around. You must know where she is. I command you to take me to her!”

The staff regarded her woodenly.

“By -” Granny paused, her invocations were a little rusty, “- by stock and stone I order it!”

Activity, movement, liveliness - all these words would be completely inaccurate descriptions of the staff's response.

Granny scratched her chin. She remembered the little lesson all children get taught: what's the magic word?

“Please?” she suggested.

The staff trembled, rose a little way out of the ground, and turned in the air so that it hung invitingly at waist height.

Granny had heard that broomsticks were once again very much the fashion among younger witches, but she didn't hold with it. There was no way a body could look respectable while hurtling through the air aboard a household implement. Besides, it looked decidedly draughty.

But this was no time for respectability. Pausing only to snatch her hat from its hook behind the door she scrambled up on to the staff and perched as best she could, sidesaddle of course, and with her skirts firmly gripped between her knees.

“Right,” she said. “Now wha-aaaaaaaaa -”

Across the forest animals broke and scattered as the shadow passed overhead, crying and cursing. Granny clung on with whitened knuckles, her thin legs kicking wildly as, high above the treetops, she learned important lessons about centres of gravity and air turbulence. The staff shot onwards, heedless of her yells.

By the time it had come out over the upland meadows she had come to terms with it somewhat, which meant that she could just about hang on with knees and hands provided she didn't mind being upside down. Her hat, at least, was useful, being aerodynamically shaped.

The staff plunged between black cliffs and along high bare valleys where, it was said, rivers of ice had once flowed in the days of the ice Giants. The air became thin and sharp in the throat.

They came to an abrupt halt over a snowdrift. Granny fell off, and lay panting in the snow while she tried to remember why she was going through all this.

There was a bundle of feathers under an overhang a few feet away. As Granny approached it a head rose jerkily, and the eagle glared at her with fierce, frightened eyes. It tried to fly, and toppled over. When she reached out to touch it, it took a neat triangle of flesh out of her hand.

“I see,” said Granny quietly, to no one in particular. She looked around, and found a boulder of about the right size. She disappeared behind it for a few seconds, fox the sake of respectability, and reappeared with a petticoat in her hand. The bird thrashed around, ruining several weeks of meticulous petitpoint embroidery, but she managed to bundle it up and hold it so that she could avoid its sporadic lunges.

Granny turned to the staff, which was now upright in the snowdrift.

“I shall walk back,” she told it coldly.

It turned out that they were in a spur valley overlooking a drop of several hundred feet on to sharp black rocks.