‘I know.’
‘. . . how often you longed to embrace the dark. . .’
‘Yes.’
‘. . . such strength you could have. . .’
‘Yes.’
‘. . . embrace the dark. . .’
‘No.’
‘. . . give in to me. . .’
‘No.’
‘. . . Lilith Weatherwax did. Alison Weatherwax did. . .’
‘That’s never been proved!’
‘. . . give in to me. . .’
‘No. I know you. I’ve always known you. The Count just let you out to torment me, but I’ve always known you were there. I’ve fought you every day of my life and you’ll get no victory now.’
She opened her eyes and stared into the blackness.
‘I knows who you are now, Esmerelda Weatherwax,’ she said. ‘You don’t scare me no more.’
The last of the light vanished.
Granny Weatherwax hung in the dark for a time she couldn’t measure. It was as if the absolute emptiness had sucked all the time and direction into it. There wasn’t anywhere to go, because there wasn’t any anywhere.
After a length of time without any measure, she began to hear another sound, the faintest of whispers on the borders of hearing. She pushed towards it.
Words were rising through the blackness like little wriggling golden fish.
She fought her way towards them, now that there was a direction.
The slivers of light turned into sounds.
‘-and asketh you in your infinite compassion to see your way clear to possibly intervening here. . .’
Not normally the kind of words she’d associate with light. Perhaps it was the way they were said. But they had a strange echo to them, a second voice, woven in amongst the first voice, glued to every syllable . . .
‘. . . what compassion? How many people prayed at the stake? How foolish I look, kneeling like this. . .’
Ah . . . one mind, split in half. There were more Agneses in the world than Agnes dreamed of, Granny told herself. All the girl had done was give a thing a name, and once you gave a thing a name you gave it a life . . .
There was something else near by, a glimmer a few photons across, which winked out as she looked for it again. She turned her attention away for a moment, then jerked it back. Again, the tiny spark blinked out.
Something was hiding.
The sand stopped rushing. Time was up.
Now to find out what she was.
Granny Weatherwax opened her eyes, and there was light.
The coach swished to a halt on the mountain road. Water poured around its wheels.
Nanny got out and paddled over to Igor, who was standing where the road wasn’t.
Water was foaming where it should have been.
‘Can we get acroth?’ said Igor.
‘Probably, but it’ll be worse down below, where there’s really bad run-off,’ said Nanny. ‘The plains have been cut off all winter before now. . .’
She looked at the other way. The road wound further into the mountains, awash but apparently sound.
‘Where’s the nearest village that way?’ she said. ‘One with a good stone building in it. Slake, isn’t it? There’s a coaching inn up there.’
‘That’th right. Thlake.’
‘Well, we ain’t going anywhere on foot in this weather,’ said Nanny. ‘Slake it’s got to be, then.’
She got back into the coach and felt it turn round.
‘Is there a problem?’ said Magrat, ‘Why are we going uphill?’
‘Road’s washed out,’ said Nanny.
‘We’re heading into Uberwald?’
‘Yes.’
‘But there’s werewolves and vampires and-‘
‘Yes, but not everywhere. We should be safe on the main road. Anyway, there’s not much of a choice.’
‘I suppose you’re right,’ said Magrat reluctantly.
‘And it could be worse,’ said Nanny.
‘How?’
‘Well . . . there could be snakes in here with us.’
* * *
Agnes saw the rocks rush past, looked down and saw the foam of the swollen river.
The world spun around her when Vlad stopped in midair. Water washed over her toes.
‘Let there be . . . lightness,’ he said. ‘You’d like to be as light as the air, wouldn’t you, Agnes?’
‘We – we’ve got broomsticks . . .’ Agnes panted. Her life had just flashed past her eyes and wasn’t it dull? Perdita added.
‘Useless cumbersome stupid things,’ he said. ‘And they can’t do this-‘
The walls of the gorge went past in a blur. The castle dropped away. Clouds drenched her. Then they unrolled as a silver-white fleece, under the silent cold light of the moon.
Vlad wasn’t beside her. Agnes slowed in her rise, flung out her arms to grip what wasn’t there, and began to fall back
He appeared, laughing, and grabbed her around the waist.
‘-can they?’ he said.
Agnes couldn’t speak. Her life passing in front of her eyes one way had met it passing in front of her eyes going in the opposite direction, and words would fail her now until she could decide when now was.
‘And you haven’t seen anything yet,’ said Vlad. Wisps of cloud coiled behind them as he raced forward.
The clouds vanished under them. They might have been as thin as smoke but their presence, their imitation of groundness, had been a comfort. Now they were a departing edge,
and far below were the moonlit plains.
‘Ghjgh,’ gurgled Agnes, too tense and terrified even to scream. Wheee! crowed Perdita, inside.
‘See that?’ said Vlad, pointing. ‘See the light all around the Rim?’
Agnes stared, because anything now was better than looking down.
The sun was under the Disc. Around the dark Rim, though, it found its way up through the endless waterfall, creating a glowing band between the night-time ocean and the stars. It was, indeed, beautiful, but Agnes felt that beauty was even more likely to be in the eye of the beholder if the feet of the beholder were on something solid. At ten thousand feet up, the eye of the beholder tends to water.
Perdita thought it was beautiful. Agnes wondered if, should Agnes end up as a circle of pink splash marks on the rocks, Perdita would still be there.
‘Everything you want,’ whispered Vlad. ‘For ever.’
‘I want to get down,’ said Agnes.
He let go.
There was this about Agnes’s shape. It was a good one for falling. She turned automatically belly down, hair streaming behind her, and floated in the rushing wind.
Oddly enough, the terror had gone. That had been fear of a situation out of her control. Now, arms outspread, skirts whipping her legs, eyes streaming in the freezing air, she could at least see what the future held even if it was not big enough to hold very much.
Perhaps she could hit a snow bank, or deep water-
It might have been worth a try, said Perdita. He doesn’t seem entirely bad.
‘Shut up.’
It’d just be nice if you could stop looking as though you were wearing saddlebags under your skirt. . .
‘Shut up.’
And it’d be nice if you didn’t hit the rocks like a balloon full of water . . .
‘Shut up. Anyway, I can see a lake. I think I can sort of angle across towards it.’
At this speed it will be like hitting the ground.
‘How do you know that? I don’t know that. So how do you know?’
Everyone knows that.
Vlad appeared alongside Agnes, lounging on the air as though it were a sofa.
‘Enjoying it?’ he said.
‘It’s fine so far,’ said Agnes, not looking at him.
She felt him touch her wrist. There was no real sense of pressure, but the fall stopped. She felt as light as the air again.
‘Why are you doing this?’ she said. ‘If you’re going to bite me, then get it over with!’
‘Oh, but I couldn’t be having with that!’
‘You did it to Granny!’ said Agnes.
‘Yes, but when it’s against someone’s will . . . well, they end up so . . . compliant. Little more than thinking food. But someone who embraces the night of their own volition . . . ah, that’s another thing entirely, my dear Agnes. And you’re far too interesting to be a slave.’
‘Tell me,’ said Agnes, as a mountaintop floated by, ‘have you had many girlfriends?’
He shrugged. ‘One or two. Village girls. Housemaids.’
‘And what happened to them, may I ask?’
‘Don’t look at me like that. We still find employment for them in the castle.’
Agnes loathed him. Perdita merely hated him, which is the opposite pole to love and just as attractive .
. . . but Nanny said if the worst came to the worst . . . and then he’ll trust you . . . and they’ve already got Granny . . .
‘If I’m a vampire,’ she said, ‘I won’t know good from evil.’
‘That’s a bit childish, isn’t it? They’re only ways of looking at the same thing. You don’t always have to do what the rest of the world wants you to do.’