Carpe Jugulum (31 page)
From up here the eagle could see for miles across the mountains.
Over Uberwald, the threatened storm had broken. Lightning scribbled across the sky.
Some of it crackled around the highest tower of Don’tgonearthe Castle, and on the rain hat that Igor wore to stop his head rusting. It raised little balls of glowing light on the big telescopic iron spike as, taking care to stand on his portable rubber mat, he patiently wound it upward.
At the foot of the apparatus, which was already humming with high tension, was a bundle wrapped in a blanket.
The spike locked itself in position. Igor sighed, and waited.
D
OWN, BOY!
D
OWN,
I
SAY!
W
ILL YOU STOP—LET GO!
L
ET GO THIS MINUTE!
A
LL RIGHT, LOOK
…F
ETCH?
F
ETCH?
T
HERE WE GO…
Death watched Scraps bound away.
He wasn’t used to this. It wasn’t that people weren’t sometimes glad to see him, because the penultimate moments of life were often crowded and complex and a cool figure in black came as something of a relief. But he’d never encountered quite this amount of enthusiasm or, if it came to it, this amount of flying mucus. It was disconcerting. It made him feel he wasn’t doing his job properly.
T
HERE’S
A SATISFACTORY DOG
. N
OW…DROP. LET GO, PLEASE
. D
ID YOU HEAR ME SAY LET GO
? L
ET GO THIS MINUTE
!
Scraps bounced away. This was far too much fun to end.
There was a soft chiming from within his robe. Death rubbed his hand on the cloth in an effort to get it dry and brought out a lifetimer, its sand all pooled in the bottom bulb. But the glass itself was misshapen, twisted, covered in welts of raised glass and, as Death watched, it filled up with crackling blue light.
Normally, Death was against this sort of thing but, he reasoned as he snapped his fingers, at the moment it looked as though it was the only way he’d get his scythe back.
The lightning hit.
There was a smell of singed wool.
Igor waited awhile and then trudged round to the bundle, trailing molten rubber behind him. Kneeling down, he carefully unwrapped the blanket.
Scraps yawned. A large tongue licked Igor’s hand.
As he smiled with relief there came, from far down below in the castle, the sound of the mighty organ playing “Toccata for Young Women in Underwired Nighdresses.”
The eagle swooped on into the bowl of Lancre.
The long light glowed on the lake, and on the big V-shaped ripple, made up of many small V-shaped ripples, that arrowed through the water toward the unsuspecting island.
The voices echoed around the mountains.
“See you, otter!”
“Taggit, jins ma greely!”
“Wee free men!”
“Nac mac Feegle!”
The eagle passed overhead, dropping fast and steep now. It drifted silently over the shadowy woods, curved over the trees, and landed suddenly on a branch beside a cottage in a clearing.
Granny Weatherwax awoke.
Her body did not move, but her gaze darted this way and that, sharply, and in the gloom her nose looked more hooked than normal. Then she settled back, and her shoulders lost the hunched, perching look.
After a while she stood up, stretched, and went to the doorway.
The night felt warmer. She could feel greenness in the ground, uncoiling. The year was past the edge, heading away from the dark…Of course, dark would come again, but that was in the nature of the world. Many things were beginning.
When at last she’d shut the door she lit the fire, took the box of candles out of the dresser and lit every single one and put them around the room, in saucers.
On the table, the pool of water that had accumulated in the last two days rippled and rose gently in the middle. Then a drip soared upward and plopped into the damp patch in the ceiling.
Granny wound up the clock, and started the pendulum. She left the room for a moment and came back with a square of cardboard attached to a loop of elderly string. She sat down in the rocking chair and reached down into the hearth for a stick of half-burned wood.
The clock ticked as she wrote. Another drop left the table and plunged toward the ceiling.
Then Granny Weatherwax hung the sign around her neck, and lay back with a smile. The chair rocked for a while, a counterpoint to the dripping of the table and the ticking of the clock, and then slowed.
The sign read:
I
still
ATE’NT DEAD
The light faded from can to can’t.
After a few minutes an owl woke up in a nearby tree and sailed out over the forests.
Terry Pratchett’s
novels have sold more than thirty million (give or take a few million) copies worldwide. He lives in England.
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Anne McCaffrey
The Carpet People
The Dark Side of the Sun
Strata
Truckers
Diggers
Wings
Only You Can Save Mankind
Johnny and the Dead
Johnny and the Bomb
The Unadulterated Cat (with Gray Jollife)
Good Omens (with Neil Gaiman)
T
HE
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ISCWORLD
S
ERIES
The Color of Magic*
The Light Fantastic*
Equal Rites*
Mort
Sourcery
Wyrd Sisters
Pyramids
Guards! Guards!
Eric (with Josh Kirby)
Moving Pictures
Reaper Man
Witches Abroad
Small Gods*
Lords and Ladies*
Men at Arms*
Soul Music*
Feet of Clay*
Interesting Times*
Maskerade*
Hogfather*
Jingo*
The Last Continent*
Carpe Jugulum*
Mort: A Discworld Big Comic
(with Graham Higgins)
The Streets of Ankh-Morpork (with Stephen Briggs)
The Discworld Companion (with Stephen Briggs)
The Discworld Mapp (with Stephen Briggs)
A
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ARDCOVER
The Fifth Elephant*
*Published by HarperCollins
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
CARPE JUGULUM
. Copyright © 1998 by Terry Pratchett. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © AUGUST 2007 ISBN: 9780061807862
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*
Which presumably mean that some are virulent and deadly, and others just make you walk in a funny way and avoid fruit.
*
Sometimes, of course, to say, “please stop doing it.”
*
It struck people as odd that, while Lancre people refused pointblank to have any truck with democracy, on the basis that governing was what the king ought to do and they’d be sure to tell him if he went wrong, they didn’t make very good servants. Oh, they could cook and dig and wash and footle and buttle and did it very well but could never quite get the hang of the serving mentality. King Verence was quite understanding about this, and put up with Shawn ushering guests into the dining room with a cry of “Lovely grub, get it while it’s hot!”
*
Apart from the ones containing small postal orders attached to letters which, generally, said pretty much the same thing: Dear Mum and Dad, I am doing pretty well in Ankh-Morpork and this week I earned a whole seven dollars…
*
When there was nothing much else to occupy her time Granny Weatherwax sent her mind Borrowing, letting it piggyback inside the heads of other creatures. She was widely accepted as the most skilled exponent of the art that the Ramtops had seen for centuries, being practically able to get inside the minds of things that didn’t even
have
minds. The practice meant, among other things, that Lancre people were less inclined toward the casual cruelty to animals that is a general feature of the rural idyll, on the basis that the rat you throw a brick at today might turn out to be the witch you need some toothache medicine from tomorrow.
It also meant that people calling on her unexpectedly would find her stretched out apparently cold and lifeless, heart and pulse barely beating. The sign had saved a lot of embarrassment.
*
It was obvious to King Verence that even if every adult were put under arms the kingdom of Lancre would still have a very small and insignificant army, and he’d therefore looked for other ways to put it on the military map. Shawn had come up with the idea of the Lancrastrian Army Knife, containing a few essential tools and utensils for the soldier in the field, and research and development work had been going on for some months now. One reason for the slow progress was that the king himself was taking an active interest in the country’s only defense project, and Shawn was receiving little notes up to three times every day with further suggestions for improvement. Generally they were on the lines of: “A device, possibly quite small, for finding things that are lost,” or “A curiously shaped hook-like thing of many uses.” Shawn diplomatically added some of them but lost as many notes as he dared, lest he design the only pocket knife on wheels.
*
The leitmotif of the Guild of Barber-Surgeons
*
On the rare maps on the Ramtops that existed, it was spelled Überwald. But Lancre people had never got the hang of accents and certainly didn’t agree with trying to balance two dots on another letter, where they’d only roll off and cause unnecessary punctuation.
*
Lancre people considered that anything religious that wasn’t said in some ancient and incomprehensible speech probably wasn’t the genuine article.
*
This was because Lancre people had a fresh if somewhat sideways approach to names, generally just picking a sound they liked. Sometimes there was a logic to it, but only by accident. There’d be a Chlamydia Weaver toddling around today if her mother hadn’t suddenly decided that Sally was easier to spell.
*
King Verence was very keen that someone should compose a national anthem for Lancre, possibly referring to its very nice trees, and had offered a small reward. Nanny Ogg reasoned that it would be easy money because national anthems only ever have one verse or, rather, all have the same second verse, which goes “nur…hnur…mur…nur nur, hnur…nur…nur, hnur” at some length until everyone remembers the last line of the first verse and sings it as loudly as they can.
*
In a society that had progressed beyond the privy and the earth closet she would have said “pulling my chain.”
*
The role of the lower intestine in the efforts to built a better nation is one that is often neglected by historians.
*
Igor had two thumbs on his right hand. If something was useful, he always said, you may as well add another.
