Witches Abroad (Discworld 12)

'And the hat,' she said.

It was tall, and round, and black. It glistened.

The piece of mirror gleamed between the darkness of the hat and the coat.

'Will it work?' he said.

'Yes,' she said. 'Even mirrors have their reflection. We got to fight mirrors with mirrors.' She glared up through the trees to a slim white tower in the distance. 'We've got to find her reflection.'

'It'll have to reach out a long way, then.'

'Yes. We need all the help we can get.'

She looked around the clearing.

She had called upon Mister Safe Way, Lady Bon Anna, Hotaloga Andrews and Stride Wide Man. They probably weren't very good gods.

But they were the best she'd been able to make.

This is a story about stories.

Or what it really means to be a fairy godmother.

But it's also, particularly, about reflections and mirrors.

All across the multiverse there are backward tribes* who distrust mirrors and images because, they say, they steal a bit of a person's soul and there's only so much of a person to go around. And the people who wear more clothes say this is just superstition, despite the fact that other people who spend their lives appearing in images of one sort or another seem to develop a thin quality. It's put down to over-work and, tellingly, over-exposure instead.

Just superstition. But a superstition doesn't have to be wrong.

* Considered backward, that is, by people who wear more clothes than they do.

A mirror can suck up a piece of soul. A mirror can contain the reflection of the whole universe, a whole skyful of stars in a piece of silvered glass no thicker than a breath.

Know about mirrors and you nearly know everything.

Look into the mirror . . .

. . . further . . .

... to an orange light on a cold mountaintop, thousands of miles from the vegetable warmth of that swamp . . .

Local people called it the Bear Mountain. This was because it was a bare mountain, not because it had a lot of bears on it. This caused a certain amount of profitable confusion, though; people often strode into the nearest village with heavy duty crossbows, traps and nets and called haughtily for native guides to lead them to the bears. Since everyone locally was making quite a good living out of this, what with the sale of guide books, maps of bear caves, ornamental cuckoo-clocks with bears on them, bear walking-sticks and cakes baked in the shape of a bear, somehow no-one had time to go and correct the spelling.*

It was about as bare as a mountain could be.

Most of the trees gave out about halfway to the top, only a few pines hanging on to give an effect very similar to die couple of pathetic strands teased across his scalp by a baldie who won't own up.

It was a place where witches met.

Tonight a fire gleamed on the very crest of the hill. Dark figures moved in the flickering light.

* Bad spelling can be lethal. For example, the greedy Seriph of Al-Ybi was once cursed by a badly-educated deity and for some days everything he touched turned to Glod, which happened to be the name of a small dwarf from a mountain community hundreds of miles away who found himself magically dragged to the kingdom and relentlessly duplicated. Some two thousand Glods later the spell wore off. These days, the people of Al-Ybi are renowned for being unusually short and bad-tempered.

The moon coasted across a lacework of clouds. Finally, a tall, pointy-hatted figure said, 'You mean everyone brought potato salad?'

There was one Ramtop witch who was not attending the sabbat. Witches like a night out as much as anyone else but, in this case, she had a more pressing appointment. And it wasn't the kind of appointment you can put off easily.

Desiderata Hollow was making her will.