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.
After a while something tapped Mrs Gogol on the shoulder and handed her the jug. It was empty.
Might as well begin …
‘Lady Bon Anna smile on me. Mister Safe Way protect me. Stride Wide Man guide me. Hotaloga Andrews catch me.
‘I stand between the light and the dark, but that no matter, because I am between.
‘Here is rum for you. Tobacco for you. Food for you. A home for you.
‘Now you listen to me good …’
… bong.
For Magrat it was like waking from a dream into a dream. She’d been idly dreaming that she was dancing with the most handsome man in the room, and … she was dancing with the most handsome man in the room.
Except that he wore two circles of smoked glass over his eyes.
Although Magrat was soft-hearted, a compulsive daydreamer and, as Granny Weatherwax put it, a wet hen, she wouldn’t be a witch if she didn’t have certain instincts and the sense to trust them. She reached up and, before his hands could move, tweaked the things away.
Magrat had seen eyes like that before, but never on something walking upright.
Her feet, which a moment before had been moving gracefully across the floor, tripped over themselves.
‘Er …’ she began.
And she was aware that his hands, pink and well-manicured, were also cold and damp.
Magrat turned and ran, knocking the couples aside in her madness to get away. Her legs tangled in the dress. The stupid shoes skittered on the floor.
A couple of footmen blocked the stairs to the hall.
Magrat’s eyes narrowed. Getting out was what mattered.
‘Hai!’
‘Ouch!’
And then she ran on, slipping at the top of the stairs. A glass slipper slithered across the marble.
‘How the hell’s anyone supposed to move in these things?’ she screamed at the world in general. Hopping frantically on one foot, she wrenched the other shoe off and ran into the night.
The Prince walked slowly to the top of the steps and picked up the discarded slipper.
He held it. The light glittered off its facets.
Granny Weatherwax leaned against the wall in the shadows. All stories had a turning point, and it had to be close.
She was good at getting into other people’s minds, but now she had to get into hers. She concentrated. Down deeper … past everyday thoughts and minor concerns, faster, faster … through layers of deep cogitation … deeper … past things sealed off and crusted over, old guilts and congealed regrets, but there was no time for them now … down … and there … the silver thread of the story. She’d been part of it, was part of it, so it had to be a part of her.
It poured past. She reached out.
She hated everything that predestined people, that fooled them, that made them slightly less than human.
The story whipped along like a steel hawser. She gripped it.
Her eyes opened in shock. Then she stepped forward.
‘Excuse me, Your Highness.’
She snatched the shoe from the Duc’s hands, and raised it over her head.
Her expression of evil satisfaction was terrible to behold.
Then she dropped the shoe.
It smashed on the stairs.
A thousand glittering fragments scattered across the marble.
Coiled as it was around the length of turtle-shaped space-time known as the Discworld, the story shook. One broken end flapped loose and flailed through the night, trying to find any sequence to feed on …
In the clearing the trees moved. So did the shadows. Shadows shouldn’t be able to move unless the light moves. These did.
The drumming stopped.
In the silence there was the occasional sizzle as power crackled across the hanging coat.
Saturday stepped forward. Green sparks flew out to his hands as he gripped the jacket and put it on.
His body jerked.
Erzulie Gogol breathed out.
‘You are here,’ she said. ‘You are still yourself. You are exactly yourself.’
Saturday raised his hands, with his fists clenched. Occasionally an arm or leg would jerk as the power inside him squirrel-caged around in its search for freedom, but she could see that he was riding it.
‘It will become easier,’ she said, more gently now.
Saturday nodded.
With the power flowing inside him he had, she thought, the fire he’d had when he was alive. He had not been a particularly good man, she knew. Genua had not been a model of civic virtue. But at least he’d never told people that they wanted him to oppress them, and that everything he did was for their own good.
Around the circle, the people of New Genua – the old New Genua – knelt or bowed.
He hadn’t been a kind ruler. But he’d fitted. And when he’d been arbitrary or arrogant or just plain wrong, he’d never suggested that this was justified by anything other than the fact that he was bigger and stronger and occasionally nastier than other people. He’d never suggested that it was because he was better. And he’d never told people they ought to be happy, and imposed a kind of happiness on them. The invisible people knew that happiness is not the natural state of mankind, and is never achieved from the outside in.
Saturday nodded again, this time in satisfaction. When he opened his mouth, sparks flashed between his teeth. And when he waded through the swamp, the alligators fought to get out of his way.
It was quiet in the palace kitchens now. The huge trays of roast meat, the pigs’ heads with apples in their mouths, the multi-layered trifles had long ago been carried upstairs. There was a clattering from the giant sinks at the far end, where some of the maids were making a start on the washing up.
Mrs Pleasant the cook had made herself a plate of red stripefish in crawfish sauce. She wasn’t the finest cook in Genua – no-one got near Mrs Gogol’s gumbo, people would almost come back from the dead for a taste of Mrs Gogol’s gumbo – but the comparison was as narrow as that between, say, diamonds and sapphires. She’d done her best to cook up a good banquet, because she had her professional pride, but there wasn’t much she felt she was able to do with lumps of meat.