Good Omens

“Pendulum of discovery, yes.”

“Thumbscrew?”

Newt swallowed, and patted a pocket.

“Thumbscrew,” he said.

“Firelighters?”

“I really think, Sergeant, that—”

“Firelighters?”

“Firelighters,”28 said Newt sadly. “And matches.”

“Bell, book, and candle?”

Newt patted another pocket. It contained a paper bag inside which was a small bell, of the sort that maddens budgerigars, a pink candle of the birthday cake persuasion, and a tiny book called Prayers for Little Hands. Shadwell had impressed upon him that, although witches were the primary target, a good Witchfinder should never pass up the chance to do a quick exorcism, and should have his field kit with him at all times.

“Bell, book, and candle,” said Newt.

“Pin?”

“Pin.”

“Good lad. Never forget yer pin. It’s the bayonet in yer artillery o’ light.”

Shadwell stood back. Newt noticed with amazement that the old man’s eyes had misted over.

“I wish I was goin’ with ye,” he said. “O’ course, this won’t be anything, but it’d be good to get out and about again. It’s a tryin’ life, ye ken, all this lyin’ in the wet bracken spying on their devilish dancin’. It gets into yer bones somethin’ cruel.”

He straightened up, and saluted.

“Off ye go, then, Private Pulsifer. May the armies o’ glorification march wi’ ye.”

After Newt had driven off Shadwell thought of something, something that he’d never had the chance to do before. What he needed now was a pin. Not a military issue pin, witches, for the use of. Just an ordinary pin, such as you might stick in a map.

The map was on the wall. It was old. It didn’t show Milton Keynes. It didn’t show Harlow. It barely showed Manchester and Birmingham. It had been the army’s HQ map for three hundred years. There were a few pins in it still, mainly in Yorkshire and Lancashire and a few in Essex, but they were almost rusted through. Elsewhere, mere brown stubs indicated the distant mission of a long-ago witchfinder.

Shadwell finally found a pin among the debris in an ashtray. He breathed on it, polished it to a shine, squinted at the map until he located Tadfield, and triumphantly rammed the pin home.

It gleamed.

Shadwell took a step backward, and saluted again. There were tears in his eyes.

Then he did a smart about turn and saluted the display cabinet. It was old and battered and the glass was broken but in a way it was the WA. It contained the Regimental silver (the Interbattalion Golf Trophy, not competed for, alas, in seventy years); it contained the patent muzzle-loading Thundergun of Witchfinder-Colonel Ye-Shall-Not-Eat-Any-Living-Thing-With-The-Blood-Neither-Shall-Ye-Use-Enchantment-Nor-Observe-Times Dalrymple; it contained a display of what were apparently walnuts but were in reality a collection of shrunken headhunter heads donated by Witchfinder CSM Horace “Get them afore they Get You” Narker, who’d traveled widely in foreign parts; it contained memories.

Shadwell blew his nose, noisily, on his sleeve.

Then he opened a tin of condensed milk for breakfast.

IF THE ARMIES OF GLORIFICATION had tried to march with Newt, bits of them would have dropped off. This is because, apart from Newt and Shadwell, they had been dead for quite a long time.

It was a mistake to think of Shadwell (Newt never found out if he had a first name) as a lone nut.

It was just that all the others were dead, in most cases for several hundred years. Once the Army had been as big as it currently appeared in Shadwell’s creatively edited bookkeeping. Newt had been surprised to find that the Witchfinder Army had antecedents as long and almost as bloody as its more mundane counterpart.

The rates of pay for witchfinders had last been set by Oliver Cromwell and never reviewed. Officers got a crown, and the General got a sovereign. It was just an honorarium, of course, because you got ninepence per witch found and first pick of their property.