Lords and Ladies (Discworld 14)

It was still alive. Elves were skilled at leaving things alive, often for weeks.

“From out of the circle?”

“Yes, lady!”

“It's weakening. Did I not tell you?”

“How long? How long?”

“Soon. Soon. What went through the other way?”

The elf tried to avoid her face.

“Your . . . pet, lady.”

“No doubt it won't go far.” The Queen laughed. “No doubt it will have an amusing time. . .”

It rained briefly at dawn.

There's nothing nastier to walk through than shoulder-high wet bracken. Well, there is. There are an uncountable number of things nastier to walk through, especially if they're shoulder-high. But here and now, thought Nanny Ogg, it was hard to think of more than one or two.

They hadn't landed inside the Dancers, of course. Even birds detoured rather than cross that airspace. Migrating spiders on gossamer threads floating half a mile up curved around it. Clouds split in two and flowed around it.

Mist hung around the stones. Sticky, damp mist.

Nanny hacked vaguely at the clinging bracken with her sickle.

“You there, Esme?” she muttered.

Granny Weatherwax's head rose from a clump of bracken a few feet away.

“There's been things going on,” she said, in a cold and deliberate tone.

“Like what?”

“All the bracken and weeds is trampled around the stones. I reckon someone's been dancing.”

Nanny Ogg gave this the same consideration as would a nuclear physicist who'd just been told that someone was banging two bits of sub-critical uranium together to keep warm.

“They never,” she said.

“They have. And another thing. . .” It was hard to imagine what other thing there could be, but Nanny Ogg said “Yes?” anyway.

“Someone got killed up here.”

“Oh, no,” moaned Nanny Ogg. “Not inside the circle too.”

“Nope. Don't be daft. It was outside. A tall man. He had one leg longer'n the other. And a beard. He was probably a hunter.”

“How'd you know all that?”

“I just trod on 'im.”

The sun rose through the mists.

The morning rays were already caressing the ancient stones of Unseen University, premier college of wizardry, five hundred miles away.

Not that many wizards were aware of this. For roost of the wizards of Unseen University their lunch was the first meal of the day. They were not, by and large, breakfast people. The Archchancellor and the Librarian were the only two who knew what the dawn looked like from the front, and they tended to have the entire campus to themselves for several hours.