'I knows who you are now, Esmerelda Weatherwax,' she said. 'You don't scare me no more.'
The last of the light vanished.
Granny Weatherwax hung in the dark for a time she couldn't measure. It was as if the absolute emptiness had sucked all the time and direction into it. There wasn't anywhere to go, because there wasn't any anywhere.
After a length of time without any measure, she began to hear another sound, the faintest of whispers on the borders of hearing. She pushed towards it.
Words were rising through the blackness like little wriggling golden fish.
She fought her way towards them, now that there was a direction.
The slivers of light turned into sounds.
'-and asketh you in your infinite compassion to see your way clear to possibly intervening here...'
Not normally the kind of words she'd associate with light. Perhaps it was the way they were said. But they had a strange echo to them, a second voice, woven in amongst the first voice, glued to every syllable.. .
'... what compassion? How many people prayed at the stake? How foolish I look, kneeling like this...'
Ah... one mind, split in half. There were more Agneses in the world than Agnes dreamed of, Granny told herself. All the girl had done was give a thing a name, and once you gave a thing a name you gave it a life...
There was something else near by, a glimmer a few photons across, which winked out as she looked for it again. She turned her attention away for a moment, then jerked it back. Again, the tiny spark blinked out.
Something was hiding.
The sand stopped rushing. Time was up.
Now to find out what she was.
Granny Weatherwax opened her eyes, and there was light.
The coach swished to a halt on the mountain road. Water poured around its wheels.
Nanny got out and paddled over to Igor, who was standing where the road wasn't.
Water was foaming where it should have been.
'Can we get acroth?' said Igor.
'Probably, but it'll be worse down below, where there's really bad run-off,' said Nanny. 'The plains have been cut off all winter before now...'
She looked at the other way. The road wound further into the mountains, awash but apparently sound.
'Where's the nearest village that way?' she said. 'One with a good stone building in it. Slake, isn't it? There's a coaching inn up there.'
'That'th right. Thlake.'
'Well, we ain't going anywhere on foot in this weather,' said Nanny. 'Slake it's got to be, then.'
She got back into the coach and felt it turn round.
'Is there a problem?' said Magrat, 'Why are we going uphill?'
'Road's washed out,' said Nanny.
'We're heading into Uberwald?'
'Yes.'