Witches Abroad

"Yeah? Fu

They watched the door, their breath forming three little clouds in the darkening air. Magrat peered at the stone door.

"I didn't see any invisible runes," she said.

" ‘Corse not," said Na

"Yeah," said Gra

The door swung open again.

"I spoke to the King," said the voice.

"And what did he say?" said Gra

"He said, "Oh, no! Not on top of everything else!"'

Gra

In the same way that there are a thousand Kings of the Gypsies, so there are a thousand Kings of the Dwarfs. The term means something like ‘senior engineer'. There aren't any Queens of the Dwarfs. Dwarfs are very reticent about revealing their sex, which most of them don't consider to be very important compared to things like metallurgy and hydraulics.

This king was standing in the middle of a crowd of shouting miners. He looked up at the witches with the expression of a drowning man looking at a drink of water.

"Are you really any good?" he said.

Na

"I think ‘e's talking to you, Magrat," said Gra

"Only we've had a big fall in gallery nine," said the King. "It looks bad. A very promising vein of gold-bearing quartz is irretrievably trapped."

One of the dwarfs beside him muttered something.

"Oh, yeah. And some of the lads," said the King vaguely. "And then you turn up. So the way I look at it, it's probably fate."

Gra

She was impressed, despite herself. You didn't often see proper dwarf halls these days. Most dwarfs were off earning big money in the cities down in the lowlands, where it was much easier to be a dwarf - for one thing, you didn't have to spend most of your time underground hitting your thumb with a hammer and worrying about fluctuations in the international metal markets. Lack of respect for tradition, that was the trouble these days. And take trolls. There were more trolls in Ankh-Morpork now than in the whole mountain range. Gra

"You'd better show us where the problem is," she said. "Lots of rocks fallen down, have they?"

"Pardon?" said the King.

It's often said that eskimos have fifty words for snow.

This is not true.

It's also said that dwarfs have two hundred words for rock.

They don't. They have no words for rock, in the same way that fish have no words for water. They do have words for igneous rock, sedimentary rock, metamorphic rock, rock underfoot, rock dropping on your helmet from above, and rock which looked interesting and which they could have sworn they left here yesterday. But what they don't have is a word meaning ‘rock'. Show a dwarf a rock and he sees, for example, an inferior piece of crystalline sulphite of barytes.

Or, in this case, about two hundred tons of lowgrade shale. When the witches arrived at the disaster site dozens of dwarfs were working feverishly to prop the cracked roof and cart away the debris. Some of them were in tears.

"It's terrible... terrible," muttered one of them. "A terrible thing."

Magrat lent him her handkerchief. He blew his nose noisily.

"Could mean a big slippage on the fault line and then we've lost the whole seam," he said, shaking his head. Another dwarf patted him on the back.

"Look on the bright side," he said. "We can always drive a horizontal shaft off gallery fifteen. We're bound to pick it up again, don't you worry."

"Excuse me," said Magrat, "there are dwarfs behind all that stuff, are there?"

"Oh, yes," said the King. His tone suggested that this was merely a regrettable side-effect of the disaster, because getting fresh dwarfs was only a matter of time whereas decent gold-bearing rock was a finite resource.

Gra

"We shall have to have everyone out of here," she said. "This is goin' to have to be private."

"I know how it is," said the King. "Craft secrets, I expect?"

"Something like that," said Gra

The King shooed the other dwarfs out of the tu

"Hmm," said Gra

"You've gone and done it now," said Na

"Anything's possible if you set your mind to it," said Gra

"Then you'd better set yours good and hard, Esme. If the Creator had meant us to shift rocks by witchcraft, he wouldn't have invented shovels. Knowing when to use a shovel is what being a witch is all about. And put down that wheelbarrow, Magrat. You don't know nothing about machinery."

"All right, then," said Magrat. "Why don't we try the wand?"

Gra

"If I was stuck behind a load of rocks under a mountain I'd want to hear of one," said Magrat hotly.

Na

"I don't trust that wand," said Gra

"Oh, come on," said Magrat, "generations of fairy godmothers have used it."

Gra

"All right, all right, all right," she snapped. "Go ahead! Make yourself look daft!"

Magrat took the wand out of her bag. She'd been dreading this moment.

It was made of some sort of bone or ivory; Magrat hoped it wasn't ivory. There had been markings on it once, but generations of plump fairy godmotherly hands had worn them almost smooth. Various gold and silver rings were set into the wand. Nowhere were there any instructions. Not so much as a rune or a sigil anywhere on its length indicated what you were supposed to do with it.

"I think you're supposed to wave it," said Na

Gra

Magrat gave the wand an experimental wave. Nothing happened.

"Perhaps you have to say something?" said Na

Magrat looked panicky.

"What do fairy godmothers say?" she wailed.

"Er," said Na

"Huh!" said Gra

Na

"Nothing!"

Na

"Just do your best, then," she said.

Magrat stared at the pile of rocks. She shut her eyes. She took a deep breath. She tried to make her mind a serene picture of cosmic harmony. It was all very well for monks to go on about cosmic harmony, she reflected, when they were nicely tucked away on snowy mountains with only yetis to worry about. They never tried seeking i

She waved the wand in a vague way and tried to put pumpkins out of her mind.

She felt the air move. She heard Na

She said, "Has anything happened?"

After a while Na

And Gra

Magrat opened her eyes.

There was still a heap, but it wasn't rock any more.

"There's a, wait for it, there's a bit of a squash in here," said Na

Magrat opened her eyes wider.

"Still pumpkins?"

"Bit of a squash. Squash," said Na

The top of the heap moved. A couple of small pumpkins rolled down almost to Magrat's feet, and a small dwarfish face appeared in the hole.