Terry Pratchett - Maskerade

T he wind howled. The storm crackled on the mountains. Lightning prodded the crags like an old man trying to get an elusive blackberry pip out of his false teeth.

Among the hissing furze bushes a fire blazed, the flames driven this way and that by the gusts.

An eldritch voice shrieked: When shall wetwomeet again?

Thunder rolled.

A rather more ordinary voice said: Whatd you go and shout that for? You made me drop my toast in the fire.

Nanny Ogg sat down again.

Sorry, Esme. I was just doing it foryou knowold times sakeDoesnt roll off the tongue, though.

Id just got it nice and brown, too.

Sorry.

Anyway, you didnt have to shout.

Sorry.

I mean, I aint deaf. You couldve just asked me in a normal voice. And Id have said, Next Wednesday.

Sorry, Esme.

Just you cut me another slice.

Nanny Ogg nodded, and turned her head. Magrat, cut Granny anooh. Mind wandering there for a minute. Ill do it myself, shall I?

Hah! said Granny Weatherwax, staring into the fire.

There was no sound for a while but the roar of the wind and the sound of Nanny Ogg cutting bread, which she did with about as much efficiency as a man trying to chainsaw a mattress.

I thought itd cheer you up, coming up here, she said after a while.

Really. It wasnt a question.

Take you out of yourself, sort of thing Nanny went on, watching her friend carefully.

Mm? said Granny, still staring moodily at the fire.

Oh dear, thought Nanny. I shouldntve said that .

The point waswell, the point was that Nanny Ogg was worried. Very worried. She wasnt at all sure that her friend wasntwellgoingwell, sort ofin a manner of speakingwellblack

She knew it happened, with the really powerful ones. And Granny Weatherwax was pretty damn powerful. She was probably an even more accomplished witch now than the infamous Black Aliss, and everyone knew what had happened to her at the finish. Pushed into her own stove by a couple of kids, and everyone said it was a damn good thing, even if it took a whole week to clean the oven.

But Aliss, up until that terrible day, had terrorized the Ramtops. Shed become so good at magic that there wasnt room in her head for anything else.

They said weapons couldnt pierce her. Swords bounced off her skin. They said you could hear her mad laughter a mile off, and of course, while mad laughter was always part of a witchs stock-in-trade in necessary circumstances, this was insane mad laughter, the worst kind. And she turned people into gingerbread and had a house made of frogs. It had been very nasty, toward the end. It always was, when a witch went bad.

Sometimes, of course, they didnt go bad. They just wentsomewhere.

Grannys intellect needed something to do . She did not take kindly to boredom. Shed take to her bed instead and send her mind out Borrowing, inside the head of some forest creature, listening with its ears, seeing with its eyes. That was all very well for general purposes, but she was too good at it. She could stay away longer than anyone Nanny Ogg had ever heard of.

One day, almost certainly, she wouldnt bother to come backand this was the worst time of the year, with the geese honking and rushing across the sky every night, and the autumn air crisp and inviting. There was something terribly tempting about that.

Nanny Ogg reckoned she knew what the cause of the problem was.

She coughed.

Saw Magrat the other day, she ventured, looking sidelong at Granny.

There was no reaction.

Shes looking well. Queening suits her.

Hmm?

Nanny groaned inwardly. If Granny couldnt even be bothered to make a nasty remark, then she was really missing Magrat.

Nanny Ogg had never believed it at the start, but Magrat Garlick, wet as a sponge though she was half the time, had been dead right about one thing.

Three was a natural number for witches.

And theyd lost one. Well, not lost, exactly. Magrat was queen now, and queens were hard to mislay. Butthat meant that there were only two of them instead of three.

When you had three, you had one to run around getting people to make up when thered been a row. Magrat had been good for that. Without Magrat, Nanny Ogg and Granny Weatherwax got on one anothers nerves. With her, all three had been able to get on the nerves of absolutely everyone else in the whole world, which had been a lot more fun.

And there was no having Magrat backat least, to be precise about it, there was no having Magrat back yet .

Because, while three was a good number for witchesit had to be the right sort of three. The right sort of types .

Nanny Ogg found herself embarrassed even to think about this, and this was unusual because embarrassment normally came as naturally to Nanny as altruism comes to a cat.

As a witch, she naturally didnt believe in any occult nonsense of any sort. But there were one or two truths down below the bedrock of the soul which had to be faced, and right in among them was this business of, well, of the maiden, the mother and theother one.

There. Shed put words around it.

Of course, it was nothing but an old superstition and belonged to the unenlightened days when maiden or mother orthe other oneencompassed every woman over the age of twelve or so, except maybe for nine months of her life. These days, any girl bright enough to count and sensible enough to take Nannys advice could put off being at least one of them for quite some time.

Even soit was an old superstitionolder than books, older than writingand beliefs like that were heavy weights on the rubber sheet of human experience, tending to pull people into their orbit.

And Magrat had been married for three months. That ought to mean she was out of the first category. At leastNanny twitched her train of thought on to a branch lineshe probably was. Oh, surely . Young Verence had sent off for a helpful manual. It had pictures in it, and numbered parts. Nanny knew this because she had sneaked into the royal bedroom while visiting one day, and had spent an instructive ten minutes drawing mustaches and spectacles on some of the figures. Surely even Magrat and Verence could hardly fail toNo, they must have worked it out, even though Nanny had heard that Verence had been seen inquiring of people where he might buy a couple of false mustaches. Itd not be long before Magrat was eligible for the second category, even if they were both slow readers.

Of course, Granny Weatherwax made a great play of her independence and self-reliance. But the point about that kind of stuff was that you needed someone around to be proudly independent and self-reliant at . People who didnt need people needed people around to know that they were the kind of people who didnt need people.

It was like hermits. There was no point freezing your nadgers off on top of some mountain while communing with the Infinite unless you could rely on a lot of impressionable young women to come along occasionally and say Gosh.

They needed to be three again. Things got exciting, when there were three of you. There were rows, and adventures, and things for Granny to get angry about, and she was only happy when she was angry. In fact, it seemed to Nanny, she was only Granny Weatherwax when she was angry.

Yes. They needed to be three.

Or elseit was going to be gray wings in the night, or the clang of the oven door