Discworld 06 wyrd sist.., p.29
Discworld 06 - Wyrd Sisters,
p.29
Granny carefully scuffed over the remains of the fire.
“When shall we three meet again?” she said. “Hmm?”
The witches looked at one another sheepishly.
“I’m a bit busy next month,” said Nanny. “Birthdays and such. Er. And the work has really been piling up with all this hurly-burly. You know. And there’s all the ghosts to think about.”
“I thought you sent them back to the castle,” said Granny.
“Well, they didn’t want to go,” said Nanny vaguely. “To be honest, I’ve got used to them around the place. They’re company of an evening. They hardly scream at all, now.”
“That’s nice,” said Granny. “What about you, Magrat?”
“There always seems to be such a lot to do at this time of year, don’t you find?” said Magrat.
“Quite,” said Granny Weatherwax, pleasantly. “It’s no good getting yourself tied down to appointments all the time, is it? Let’s just leave the whole question open, shall we?”
They nodded. And, as the new day wound across the landscape, each one busy with her own thoughts, each one a witch alone, they went home.[*]
THE END
About the Author
Terry Pratchett lives in England, an island off the coast of France, where he spends his time writing Discworld novels in accordance with the Very Strong Anthropic Principle, which holds that the entire purpose of the Universe is to make possible a being that will live in England, an island off the coast of France, and spend his time writing Discworld novels. Which is exactly what he does. Which proves the whole business true. Any questions?
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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.
WYRD SISTERS. Copyright © 1988 by Terry and Lyn 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.
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[*]Quaffing is like drinking, but you spill more.
[*]Whatever that was. He’d never found anyone prepared to explain it to him. But it was definitely something a feudal lord ought to have and, he was pretty sure, it needed regular exercise. He imagined it was some kind of large hairy dog. He was definitely going to get one, and damn well exercise it.
[*]Written by wizards, who are celibate and get some pretty funny ideas around four o’clock in the morning.
[*]She did nothing, although sometimes when she saw him in the village she’d smile in a faint, puzzled way. After three weeks of this the suspense was too much for him and he took his own life; in fact he took it all the way across the continent, where he became a reformed character and never went home again.
[*]All of them, unfortunately, unprintable.
[*]The vermine is a small black and white furry creature, much famed for its pelt. It is a more careful relative of the lemming; it only throws itself over small pebbles.
[*]They worked. Witches’ remedies generally did, regardless of the actual form of delivery.
[*]A killing insult in Dwarfish, but here used as a term of endearment. It means “lawn ornament.”
[*]In a manner of speaking.
[*]Someone has to do it. It’s all very well calling for eye of newt, but do you mean Common, Spotted or Great Crested? Which eye, anyway? Will tapioca do just as well? If we substitute egg white will the spell a) work b) fail or c) melt the bottom out of the cauldron? Goodie Whemper’s curiosity about such things was huge and insatiable. Nearly insatiable. It was probably satiated in her last flight to test whether a broomstick could survive having its bristles pulled out one by one in midair. According to the small black raven she had trained as a flight recorder, the answer was almost certainly no.
[*]Witches never curtsy.
[*]No one knows why men say things like this. Any minute now he is probably going to say he likes a girl with spirit.
[*]They always do, everywhere. No one sees them arrive. The logical explanation is that the franchise includes the stall, the paper hat and a small gas-powered time machine.
[*]Involving a red hot poker, a privy, ten pounds of live eels, a three mile stretch of frozen river, a butt of wine, a couple of tulip bulbs, a number of poisoned eardrops, an oyster and a large man with a mallet. King Murune didn’t make friends easily.
[*]Possibly the first attempt at the in-flight re-fuelling of a broomstick.
[*]An explanation may be needed at this point. The Librarian of the magic library at Unseen University, the Disc’s premier college of wizardry, had been turned into an orangutan some years previously by a magical accident in that accident-prone academy, and since then had strenuously resisted all well-meaning efforts to turn him back. For one thing, longer arms and prehensile toes made getting around the higher shelves a whole lot easier, and being an ape meant you didn’t have to bother with all this angst business. He had also been rather pleased to find that his new body, although looking deceptively like a rubber sack full of water, gave him three times the strength and twice the reach of his old one.
[*]The Shades is an ancient part of Ankh-Morpork considered considerably more unpleasant and disreputable than the rest of the city. This always amazes visitors.
[*]Ankh-Morpork’s enviable system of licensed criminals owes much to the current Patrician, Lord Vetinari. He reasoned that the only way to police a city of a million inhabitants was to recognize the various gangs and robber guilds, give them professional status, invite the leaders to large dinners, allow an acceptable level of street crime and then make the guild leaders responsible for enforcing it, on pain of being stripped of their new civic honors along with large areas of their skins. It worked. Criminals, it turned out, made a very good police force; unauthorized robbers soon found, for example, that instead of a night in the cells they could now expect an eternity at the bottom of the river. However, there was the problem of apportioning the crime statistics, and so there arose a complex system of annual budgeting, chits and allowances to see that a) the members could make a reasonable living and b) no citizen was robbed or assaulted more than an agreed number of times. Many foresighted citizens in fact arranged to get an acceptable minimum of theft, assault, etc, over at the beginning of the financial year, often in the privacy and comfort of their own homes, and thus be able to walk the streets quite safely for the rest of the year. It all ticked over extremely peacefully and efficiently, demonstrating once again that compared to the Patrician of Ankh, Machiavelli could not have run a whelk stall.
[*]Because of the way time was recorded among the various states, kingdoms and cities. After all, when over an area of a hundred square miles the same year is variously the Year of the Small Bat, and Anticipated Monkey, the Hunting Cloud, Fat Cows, Three Bright Stallions and at least nine numbers recording the time since (The calendar of the Theocracy of Muntab counts down, not up. No one knows why, but it might not be a good idea to hang around and find out.) assorted kings, prophets, and strange events were either crowned, born or happened, and each year has a different number of months, and some of them don’t have weeks, and one of them refuses to accept the day as a measure of time, the only thing it is possible to be sure of is that good sex doesn’t last long enough except for the Zabingo tribe of the Great Nef, of course.
[*]The observant will realize that this was because the king was already seated there. It was not because the man had used the phrase “commence to start” in cold blood. But it ought to have been.
[*]Like Bognor.
[*]At least, of supervising the loading. Actual physical assistance was a little difficult because he had, the day before, slipped on something and broken his leg.
[*]There is a school of thought that says that witches and wizards can never go home. They went, though, just the same.
Terry Pratchett, Discworld 06 - Wyrd Sisters
