Witches Abroad (Discworld 12)
Oh, well. Just twist the first thing you can grab, as the High Priest said to the vestal virgin.*
Nanny Ogg spat on her hands, gripped the largest cogwheel, and twisted.
It carried on turning, pulling her with it.
Blimey. Oh, well . . .
Then she did what neither Granny Weatherwax nor Magrat would have dreamed of doing in the circumstances. But Nanny Ogg's voyages on the sea of inter-sexual dalliance had gone rather further than twice around the lighthouse, and she saw nothing demeaning in getting a man to help her.
She simpered at Casanunda.
'Things would be a lot more comfortable in our little pie-de-terre if you could just push this little wheel around a bit,' she said. 'I'm sure you could manage it,' she added.
'Oh, no problejn, good lady,' said Casanunda. He reached up with one hand. Dwarfs are immensely strong for their size. The wheel seemed to offer him no resistance at all.
Somewhere in the mechanism something resisted for a
* This is the last line of a Discworld joke lost, alas, to posterity.
moment and then went clonk. Big wheels turned reluctantly. Little wheels screamed on their axles. A small important piece flew out and pinged off Casanunda's small bullet head.
And, much faster than nature had ever intended, the hands sped round the face.
A new noise right overhead made Nanny Ogg look up.
Her self-satisfied expression faded. The hammer that struck the hours was swinging slowly backwards. It struck Nanny that she was standing right under the bell at the same time as the bell, too, was struck.
Bong . . .
'Oh, bugger!'
. . . bong. . .
. . . bong. . .
. . . bong. . .
Mist rolled through the swamp. And shadows moved with it, their shapes indistinct on this night when the difference between the living and the dead was only a matter of time.
Mrs Gogol could feel them among the trees. The homeless. The hungry. The silent people. Those forsaken by men and gods. The people of the mists and the mud, whose only strength was somewhere on the other side of weakness, whose beliefs were as rickety and homemade as their homes. And the people from the city — not the ones who lived in the big white houses and went to balls in fine coaches, but the other ones. They were the ones that stories are never about. Stories are not, on the whole, interested in swineherds who remain swineherds and poor and humble shoe-makers whose destiny is to die slightly poorer and much humbler.
These people were the ones who made the magical kingdom work, who cooked its meals and swept its floors and carted its night soil and were its faces in the crowd and whose wishes and dreams, undemanding as they were, were of no consequence. The invisibles.
And me out here, she thought. Building traps for gods.
There are various forms of voodoo in the multiverse, because it's a religion that can be put together from any ingredients that happen to be lying around. And all of them try, in some way, to call down a god into the body of a human being.
That was stupid, Mrs Gogol thought. That was dangerous.
Mrs Gogol's voodoo worked the other way about. What was a god? A focus of belief. If people believed, a god began to grow. Feebly at first, but if the swamp taught anything, it taught patience. Anything could be the focus of a god. A handful of feathers with a red ribbon around them, a hat and coat on a couple of sticks . . . anything. Because when all people had was practically nothing, then anything could be almost everything. And then you fed it, and lulled it, like a goose heading for pate, and let the power grow very slowly, and when the time was ripe you opened the path . . . backwards. A human could ride the god, rather than the other way around. There would be a price to pay later, but there always was. In Mrs Gogol's experience, everyone ended up dying.
She took a pull of rum and handed the jug to Saturday.
Saturday took a mouthful, and passed the jug up to something that might have been a hand.
'Let it begin,' said Mrs Gogol.
The dead man picked up three small drums and began to beat out a rhythm, heartbeat fast.