‘Oh, right. Thank you for explaining,’ said Granny. ‘Help me up, will you?’
Oats was having some difficulty with his temper. He’d carried the old bit- biddy for miles, he was frozen to the bone, and now they were here she acted as if she’d somehow done him a favour.
‘What’s the magic word?’ he snarled.
‘Oh, I don’t think a holy man like you should be having with magic words,’ said Granny. ‘But the holy words are: do what I tell you or get smitten. They should do the trick.’
He helped her to her feet, alive with badly digested rage, and supported her as she swayed.
There was a scream from the castle, suddenly cut off.
‘Not female,’ said Granny. ‘I reckon the girls have started. Let’s give ’em a hand, shall we?’
Her arm shook as she raised it. The wowhawk fluttered down and settled on her wrist.
‘Now help get me to the gate.’
‘Don’t mention it, glad to be of service,’ Oats mumbled. He looked at the bird, whose hood swivelled to face him.
‘That’s the . . . other phoenix, isn’t it?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ said Granny, watching the door. ‘A phoenix. You can’t .have just one of anything.’
‘But it looks like a little hawk.’
‘It was born among hawks, so it looks like a hawk. If it was hatched in a hen roost it’d be
a chicken. Stands to reason. And a hawk it’ll remain, until it needs to be a phoenix. They’re shy birds. You could say a phoenix is what it may become. . .’
‘Too much eggshell. . .’
‘Yes, Mister Oats. And when does the phoenix sometimes lay two eggs? When it needs to. Hodgesaargh was right. A phoenix is of the nature of birds. Bird first, myth second.’
The doors were hanging loose, their iron reinforcements twisted out of shape and their timbers smouldering, but some effort had been made to pull them shut. Over what remained of the arch, a bat carved in stone told visitors everything they needed to know about this place.
On Granny’s wrist the hood of the hawk was crackling and smoking. As Oats watched, little flames erupted from the leather again.
‘He knows what they did,’ said Granny. ‘He was hatched knowing. Phoenixes share their minds. And they don’t tolerate evil.’
The head turned to look at Oats with its white hot stare and, instinctively, he backed away and tried to cover his eyes.
‘Use the doorknocker,’ said Granny, nodding to the big iron ring hanging loosely from one splintered door.
‘What? You want me to knock on the door? Of a vampire’s castle?’
‘We’re not going to sneak in, are we? Anyway, you Omnians are good at knocking on doors.’
‘Well, yes,’ said Oats, ‘but normally just for a shared prayer and to interest people in our
pamphlets’ – he let the knocker fall a few times, the boom echoing around the valley – ‘not to have my throat ripped out!’
‘Think of this as a particularly difficult street,’ said Granny. ‘Try again . . . mebbe they’re hidin’ behind the sofa, eh?’
‘Hah!’
‘You’re a good man, Mister Oats?’ said Granny, conversationally, as the echoes died away. ‘Even without your holy book and holy amulet and holy hat?’
‘Er . . . I try to be . . .’ he ventured.
‘Well . . . this is where you find out,’ said Granny. ‘To the fire we come at last, Mister Oats. This is where we both find out.’
Nanny raced up some stairs, a couple of vampires at her heels. The vampires were hampered because they hadn’t got to grips with not being able to fly, but there was something else wrong with them as well.
‘Tea!’ one screamed. ‘I must have . . . tea!’
Nanny pushed open the door to the battlements. They followed her, and tripped over Igor’s leg as he stepped out of the shadows.
He raised two sharpened table legs.
‘How d’you want your thtaketh, boyth?’ he shouted excitedly, as he struck. ‘You thould have thed you liked my thpiderth!’
Nanny leaned against the wall to get her breath back.
‘Granny’s somewhere here,’ she panted. ‘Don’t ask me how. But those two were craving a cup of tea, and I reckon only Esme could mess up someone’s head like that-‘
The sounds of the doorknocker boomed around the courtyard below. At the same time the door at the other end of the battlements opened. Half a dozen vampires advanced.
‘They’re acting very dumb, aren’t they?’ said Nanny. ‘Give me a couple more stakes.’
‘Run out of thtaketh, Nanny.’
‘Okay, then, pass me a bottle of holy water . . . Hurry up. . .’
‘None left, Nanny.’
‘We’ve got nothing?’
‘Got’n orange, Nanny.’
‘What for?’
‘Run out of lemonth.’
‘What good will an orange do if I hit a vampire in the mouth with it?’ said Nanny, eyeing the approaching creatures.
Igor scratched his head. ‘Well, I thuppothe they won’t catch coldth tho eathily . . .’
The knocking reverberated around the castle again. Several vampires were creeping across the courtyard.
Nanny caught a flicker of light around the edge of the door. Instinct took over. As the vampires began to run, she grabbed Igor and pulled him down.
The arch exploded, every stone and plank drifting away on an expanding bubble of eyeball-searing flame. It lifted the vampires off their feet and they screamed as the fire carried them up.
When the brightness had faded a little Nanny peered carefully into the courtyard.
A bird, house-sized, wings of flame wider than the castle, reared in the broken doorway.
Mightily Oats pushed himself up on to his hands and knees. Hot flames roared around him, thundering like fiercely burning gas. His skin should have been blackening already, but against all reason the fire felt no more deadly than a hot desert wind. The air smelled of camphor and spices.
He looked up. The flames wrapped Granny Weatherwax, but they looked oddly transparent, not entirely real. Here and there little gold and green sparks glittered on her dress, and all the time the fire whipped and tore around her.
She looked down at him. ‘You’re in the wings of the phoenix now, Mister Oats,’ she shouted, above the noise, ‘and you ain’t burned!’
The bird flapping its wings on her wrist was incandescent.
‘How can-‘
‘You’re the scholar! But male birds are always ones for the big display, aren’t they?’
‘Males? This is a male phoenix?’
‘Yes!’
It leapt. What flew . . . what flew, as far as Oats could see, was a great bird-shape of pale flame, with the little form of the real bird inside like the head of a comet. He added to himself: if that is indeed the real bird . . .
It swooped up into the tower. A yell, cut off quickly, indicated that a vampire hadn’t been fast enough.
‘It doesn’t burn itself?’ Oats said weakly.
‘Shouldn’t think so,’ said Granny, stepping over the wreckage. ‘Wouldn’t be much point.’
‘Then it must be magical fire. . .’
‘They say that whether it burns you or not is up to you,’ said Granny. ‘I used to watch them as a kid. My granny told me about ’em. Some cold nights you see them dancin’ in the sky over the Hub, burnin’ green and gold. . .’
‘Oh, you mean the aurora coriolis,’ said Oats, trying to make his voice sound matter of fact. ‘But actually that’s caused by magic particles hitting the-‘
‘Dunno what it’s caused by,’ said Granny sharply, ‘but what it is is the phoenix dancin’.’ She reached out. ‘I ought to hold your arm.’
‘In case I fall over?’ said Oats, still watching the burning bird.
‘That’s right.’
As he took her weight the phoenix above them flung back its head and screamed at the sky.
‘And to think I thought it was an allegorical creature,’ said the priest.
‘Well? Even allegories have to live,’ said Granny Weatherwax.
Vampires are not naturally co-operative creatures. It’s not in their nature. Every other vampire is a rival for the next meal. In fact, the ideal situation
for a vampire is a world in which every other vampire has been killed off and no one seriously believes in vampires any more. They are by nature as co-operative as sharks.
Vampyres are just the same, the only real difference being that they can’t spell properly.
The remnant of the clan scurried through the keep and headed for a door that for some reason had been left ajar.
The bucket containing a cocktail of waters blessed by a Knight of Offler, a High Priest of Io and a man so generically holy that he hadn’t cut his hair or washed for seventy years, landed on the first two to run through.
They did not include the Count and his family, who had moved as one into a side tower. There’s no point in having underlings if you don’t let them be the first to go through suspicious doors.