Witches Abroad (Discworld 12)

'You've broken their window!'

- not a sound in the -

'You'll have to offer to pay for it, you know.'

The castle gate swung open slowly. Nanny Ogg peered around it at the other two witches, while pulling thorns and burrs from her hair.

'It's bloody disgusting in here,' she said. 'There's people asleep all over the place with spiders' webs all over 'em. You were right, Esme. There's been magic going on.'

The witches pushed their way through the overgrown castle. Dust and leaves had covered the carpets. Young sycamores were making a spirited attempt to take over the courtyard. Vines festooned every wall.

Granny Weatherwax pulled a slumbering soldier to his feet. Dust billowed off his clothes.

'Wake up,' she demanded.

'Fzhtft,' said the soldier, and slumped back.

' It's like that everywhere,' said Magrat, fighting her way through a thicket of bracken that was growing up from the kitchen regions. 'There's the cooks all snoring and nothing but mould in the pots! There's even mice asleep in the pantry!'

'Hmm,' said Granny. 'There'll be a spinning wheel at the bottom of all this, you mark my words.'

'A Black Aliss job?' said Nanny Ogg.

'Looks like it,' said Granny. Then she added, quietly, 'Or someone like her.'

'Now there was a witch who knew how stories worked,' said Nanny. 'She used to be in as many as three of 'em at once.'

Even Magrat knew about Black Aliss. She was said to have been the greatest witch who ever lived - not exactly bad, but so powerful it was sometimes hard to tell the difference. When it came to sending palaces to sleep for a hundred years or getting princesses to spin straw into Glod,* no-one did it better than Black Aliss.

'I met her once,' said Nanny, as they climbed the castle's main staircase, which was a cascade of Old Man's Trousers. 'Old Deliria Skibbly took me to see her once, when I was a girl. Of course, she was getting pretty . . . eccentric by then. Gingerbread houses, that kind of thing.' She spoke sadly, as one might talk about an elderly relative who'd taken to wearing her underwear outside her clothes.

'That must have been before those two children shut her up in her own oven?' said Magrat, untangling her sleeve from a briar.

'Yeah. Sad, that. I mean, she didn't really ever eat anyone,' said Nanny. 'Well. Not often. I mean, there was talk, but. . .'

'That's what happens,' said Granny. 'You get too involved with stories, you get confused. You don't know what's really real and what isn't. And they get you in the end. They send you weird in the head. I don't like stories. They're not real. I don't like things that ain't real.'

She pushed open a door.

'Ah. A chamber,' she said sourly. 'Could even be a bower.'

'Doesn't the stuff grow quickly!' said Magrat.

'Part of the time spell,' said Granny. 'Ah. There she is. Knew there'd be someone somewhere.'

There was a figure lying on a bed, in a thicket of rose bushes.

'And there's the spinning wheel,' said Nanny, pointing

* Black Aliss wasn't very good with words either. They had to give her quite a lot of money to go away and not make a scene.

to a shape just visible in a clump of ivy.

'Don't touch it!' said Granny.

'Don't worry, I'll pick it up by the treadle and pitch it out of the window.'

'How do you know all this?' said Magrat.