A young man obediently went to the fireplace, pulled on a glove, lifted the lid of a big saucepan and held up a head by its hair.
'That's not Vlad,' said Agnes, swallowing. No, said Perdita, Vlad was taller.
'They'll be heading back to their castle,' said Piotr. 'On foot! You should see them trying to fly! It's like watching chickens panicking.'
'The castle...'said Agnes.
'They'll have to make it before cock-crow,' said Piotr, with some satisfaction. 'And they can't cut through the woods, 'cos of the werewolves.'
'What? I thought werewolves and vampires would get along fine,' said Agnes.
'Oh, maybe it looks like that,' said Piotr. 'But they're watching one another all the time to see who's going to be the first to blink.' He looked around the room. 'We don't mind the werewolves,' he went on, to general agreement. 'They leave us alone most of the time because we don't run fast enough to be interesting.'
He looked Agnes up and down.
'What was it you did to the vampires?' he said.
'Me? I didn't do- I don't know,' said Agnes.
'They couldn't even bite us properly.'
'And they were squabbling like kids when they left,' said the man with the mallet.
'You've got a pointy hat,' said Piotr. 'Did you put a spell on them?'
'I- I don't know. I really don't.' And then natural honesty met witchcraft. One aspect of witchcraft is the craftiness, and it's seldom unwise to take the credit for unexplained but fortuitous events. 'I may have done,' she added.
'Well, we're going after them,' said Piotr.
'Won't they have got well away?'
'We can cut through the woods.'
Blood tinted the rain that ran off the wound on Jason Ogg's shoulder. He dabbed at it with a cloth.
'Reckon I'll be hammerin' left-handed for a week or two,' he said, wincing.
'They got very good fields of fire,' said Shawn, who had taken refuge behind the beer barrel used so recently to wet the baby's head. 'I mean, it's a castle. A frontal attack simply won't work.'
He sighed, and shielded his guttering candle to keep the wind from blowing it out. They'd tried a frontal attack nevertheless, and the only reason no one had been killed was that the drink seemed to be flowing freely within the keep. As it was, one or two people would be limping for a while. Then they'd tried what Jason persisted in referring to as a backal attack, but there were arrow slots even over the kitchens. One man creeping up to the walls very slowly - a sidle attack, as Shawn had thought of it - had worked, but since all the doors were very solidly barred this had just meant that he'd stood there feeling like a fool.
He was trying to find some help in the ancient military journals of General Tacticus, whose intelligent campaigning had been so successful that he'd lent his very name to the detailed prosecution of martial endeavour, and had actually found a section headed What to Do If One Army Occupies a Well-fortified and Superior Ground and the Other Does Not, but since the first sentence read 'Endeavour to be the one inside' he'd rather lost heart.
The rest of the Lancre militia cowered behind buttresses and upturned carts, waiting for him to lead them.
There was a respectful clang as Big Jim Beef, who was acting as cover for two other part-time soldiers, saluted his commander.
'I reckon,' he ventured, 'dat if we got big fires goin' in frun' of the doors we could smoke dem out.'
'Good idea,' said Jason.
'That's the King's door,' Shawn protested. 'He's already been a bit sharp with me for not cleaning the privy pit this week-' 'He can send Mum the bill.'
'That's seditious talk, Jason! I could have you arr- I could arr- Mum would have something to say about you talking like that!'
'Where is the King, anyway?' said Darren Ogg. 'Sittin' back and lettin' Mum sort everything out while we get shot at?'
'You know he's got a weak chest,' said Shawn. 'He does very well considering he-'