The arch exploded, every stone and plank drifting away on an expanding bubble of eyeball-searing flame. It lifted the vampires off their feet and they screamed as the fire carried them up.
When the brightness had faded a little Nanny peered carefully into the courtyard.
A bird, house-sized, wings of flame wider than the castle, reared in the broken doorway.
Mightily Oats pushed himself up on to his hands and knees. Hot flames roared around him, thundering like fiercely burning gas. His skin should have been blackening already, but against all reason the fire felt no more deadly than a hot desert wind. The air smelled of camphor and spices.
He looked up. The flames wrapped Granny Weatherwax, but they looked oddly transparent, not entirely real. Here and there little gold and green sparks glittered on her dress, and all the time the fire whipped and tore around her.
She looked down at him. 'You're in the wings of the phoenix now, Mister Oats,' she shouted, above the noise, 'and you ain't burned!'
The bird flapping its wings on her wrist was incandescent.
'How can-'
'You're the scholarl But male birds are always ones for the big display, aren't they?'
'Males? This is a male phoenix?'
'Yes!'
It leapt. What flew... what flew, as far as Oats could see, was a great bird-shape of pale flame, with the little form of the real bird inside like the head of a comet. He added to himself: if that is indeed the real bird ...
It swooped up into the tower. A yell, cut off quickly, indicated that a vampire hadn't been fast enough. 'It doesn't burn itself?' Oats said weakly.
'Shouldn't think so,' said Granny, stepping over the wreckage. 'Wouldn't be much point.'
'Then it must be magical fire...'
'They say that whether it burns you or not is up to you,' said Granny. 'I used to watch them as a kid. My granny told me about 'em. Some cold nights you see them dancin' in the sky over the Hub, burnin' green and gold...'
'Oh, you mean the aurora coriolis,' said Oats, trying to make his voice sound matter of fact. 'But actually that's caused by magic particles hitting the-'
'Dunno what it's caused by,' said Granny sharply, 'but what it is is the phoenix dancin'.' She reached out. 'I ought to hold your arm.'
'In case I fall over?' said Oats, still watching the burning bird.
'That's right.'
As he took her weight the phoenix above them flung back its head and screamed at the sky.
'And to think I thought it was an allegorical creature,' said the priest.
'Well? Even allegories have to live,' said Granny Weatherwax.
Vampires are not naturally co-operative creatures. It's not in their nature. Every other vampire is a rival for the next meal. In fact, the ideal situation for a vampire is a world in which every other vampire has been killed off and no one seriously believes in vampires any more. They are by nature as co-operative as sharks.
Vampyres are just the same, the only real difference being that they can't spell properly.
The remnant of the clan scurried through the keep and headed for a door that for some reason had been left ajar.
The bucket containing a cocktail of waters blessed by a Knight of Offler, a High Priest of Io and a man so generically holy that he hadn't cut his hair or washed for seventy years, landed on the first two to run through.
They did not include the Count and his family, who had moved as one into a side tower. There's no point in having underlings if you don't let them be the first to go through suspicious doors.
'How could you have been so-' Lacrimosa began, and to her shock got a slap across the face from her father.
'All we need to do is remain calm,' said the Count. 'There's no need to panic.'