Hodgesaargh picked them up and carried them into the crowded little room at the end of the mews which served as workshop and bedroom. He balanced the flame on a saucer. In here, where it was quieter, he could hear it making a slight sizzling noise.
In the dim glow he looked along the one crowded bookshelf over his bed and pulled down a huge ragged volume on the cover of which someone had written, centuries ago, the word ‘Burds’.
The book was a huge ledger. The spine had been cut and widened inexpertly several times so that more pages could be pasted in.
The falconers of Lancre knew a lot about birds. The kingdom was on a main migratory route between the Hub and the Rim. The hawks had brought down many strange species over the centuries and the falconers had, very painstakingly, taken notes. The pages were thick with drawings and closely spaced writing, the entries copied and re-copied and updated over the years. The occasional feather carefully glued to a page had added to the thickness of the thing.
No one had ever bothered with an index, but some past falconer had considerately arranged many of the entries into alphabetical order.
Hodgesaargh glanced again at the flame burning steadily in its saucer, and then, handling the crackling pages with care, turned to ‘F’.
After some browsing, he eventually found what he was looking for under ‘P’.
Back in the mews, in the deepest shadow, something cowered.
There were three shelves of books in Agnes’s cottage. By witch standards, that was a giant library.
Two very small blue figures lay on top of the books, watching the scene with interest.
Nanny Ogg backed away, waving the poker.
‘It’s all right,’ said Agnes. ‘It’s me again, Agnes Nitt, but . . . She’s here but. . . I’m sort of holding on. Yes! Yes! All right! All right, just shut up, will y- Look, it’s my body, you’re just a figment of my imagina- Okay! Okay! Perhaps it’s not quite so clear c- Let me just talk to Nanny, will you?’
‘Which one are you now?’ said Nanny Ogg.
‘I’m still Agnes, of course.’ She rolled her eyes up. ‘All right! I’m Agnes currently being advised by Perdita, who is also me. In a way. And I’m not too fat, thank you so very much!’
‘How many of you are there in there?’ said Nanny.
‘What do you mean, “room for ten”?’ shouted Agnes. ‘Shut up! Listen, Perdita says there were vampires at the party. The Magpyr family, she says. She can’t understand how we acted. They were putting a kind of . . . ‘fluence over everyone. Including me, which is why she was able to break thr- Yes, all right, I’m telling it, thank you!’
‘Why not her, then?’ said Nanny.
‘Because she’s got a mind of her own! Nanny, can you remember anything they actually said?’
‘Now you come to ‘ mention it, no. But they seemed nice enough people.’
‘And you remember talking to Igor?’
‘Who’s Igor?’
The tiny blue figures watched, fascinated, for the next half hour.
Nanny sat back at the end of it and stared at the ceiling for a while.
‘Why should we believe her?’ she said eventually.
‘Because she’s me.’
‘They do say that inside every fat girl is a thin girl and-‘ Nanny began.
‘Yes,’ said Agnes bitterly. ‘I’ve heard it. Yes. She’s the thin girl. I’m the lot of chocolate.’
Nanny leaned towards Agnes’s ear and raised her voice. ‘How’re you gettin’ on in there? Everything all right, is it? Treatin’ you all right, is she?’
‘Haha, Nanny. Very funny.’
‘They were saying all this stuff about drinkin’ blood and killin’ people and everyone was just noddin’ and sayin’, ‘Well, well, how very fascinatin”?’
‘Yes!’
‘And eatin’ garlic?’
‘Yes!’
‘That can’t be right, can it?’
‘I don’t know, perhaps we used the wrong sort of garlic!’
Nanny rubbed her chin, torn between the vampiric revelation and prurient curiosity about Perdita.
‘How does Perdita work, then?’ she said.
Agnes sighed. ‘Look, you know the part of you that wants to do all the things you don’t dare do, and thinks the thoughts you don’t dare think?’
Nanny’s face stayed blank. Agnes floundered. ‘Like . . . maybe . . . rip off all your clothes and run naked in the rain?’ she hazarded.
‘Oh, yes. Right,’ said Nanny.
‘Well . . . I suppose Perdita is that part of me.’
‘Really? I’ve always been that part of me,’ said Nanny. ‘The important thing is to remember where you left your clothes.’
Agnes remembered too late that Nanny Ogg was in many ways a very uncomplicated personality.
‘Mind you, I think I know what you mean,’ Nanny went on in a more thoughtful voice. ‘There’s times when I’ve wanted to do things and stopped meself . . .’ She shook her head. ‘But . . . vampires . . . Verence wouldn’t be so stupid as to send an invitation to vampires, would he?’ She paused for thought. ‘Yes, he would. Prob’ly think of it as offering the hand of friendship.’
She stood up. ‘Right, they won’t have left yet. Let’s get straight to the jelly. You get extra garlic and a few stakes, I’ll round up Shawn and Jason and the lads.’
‘It won’t work, Nanny. Perdita saw what they can do. The moment you get near them you’ll forget all about it. They do something to your mind, Nanny.’
Nanny hesitated. ‘Can’t say I know that much about vampires,’ she said.
‘Perdita thinks they can tell what you’re thinking, too.’
‘Then this is Esme’s type of stuff,’ said Nanny. ‘Messing with minds and so on. It’s meat and drink to her.’
‘Nanny, they were talking about staying! We have to do something!’
‘Well, where is she?’ Nanny almost wailed. ‘Esme ought to be sortin’ this out!’
‘Maybe they’ve got to her first?’
‘You don’t think so, do you?’ said Nanny, now looking quite panicky. ‘I can’t think about a vampire getting his teeth into Esme.’
‘Don’t worry, dog doesn’t eat dog.’ It was Perdita who blurted it out, but it was Agnes who got the blow. It wasn’t a ladylike slap of disapproval. Nanny Ogg had reared some strapping sons; the Ogg forearm was a power in its own right.
When Agnes looked up from the hearthrug Nanny was rubbing some life back into her hand. She gave Agnes a solemn look.
‘We’ll say no more about that, shall we?’ she commanded. ‘I ain’t gen’rally given to physicality of that nature but it saves a lot of arguing. Now, we’re goin’ back to the castle. We’re going to sort this out right now.’
Hodgesaargh shut the book and looked at the flame. It was true, then. There’d even been a picture of one just like it in the book, painstakingly drawn by another royal falconer two hundred years before. He wrote that he’d found the thing up on the high meadows, one spring. It’d burned for three years and then he’d lost it somewhere.
If you looked at it closely, you could even see the detail. It was not exactly a flame. It was more like a bright feather . . .
Well, Lancre was on one of the main migration routes, for birds of all sorts. It was only a matter of time.
So . . . the new hatchling was around. They needed time to grow, it said in the book. Odd that it should lay an egg here, because it said in the book that it always hatched in the burning deserts of Klatch.
He went and looked at the birds in the mews. They were still very alert.
Yes, it all made sense. It had flown in here, among the comfort of other birds, and laid its egg, just like it said it did in the book, and then it had burned itself up to hatch the new bird.
If Hodgesaargh had a fault, it lay in his rather utilitarian view of the bird world. There were birds that you hunted, and there were birds you hunted with. Oh, there were other sorts, tweeting away in the bushes, but they didn’t really count. It occurred to him that if ever there was a bird you could hunt with, it’d be the phoenix.
Oh, yes. It’d be weak, and young, and it wouldn’t have gone far.
Hmm . . . birds tended to think the same way, after all.
It would have helped if there was one picture in the book. In fact, there were several, all carefully drawn by ancient falconers who claimed it was a firebird they’d seen.
Apart from the fact that they all had wings and a beak, no two were remotely alike. One looked very much like a heron. Another looked like a goose. One, and he scratched his head about this, appeared to be a sparrow. Bit of a puzzle, he decided, and left it at that and selected a drawing that looked at least slightly foreign.