Maskerade

Terry Pratchett

Maskerade

DEDICATION

My thanks to the people who showed me that opera was stranger than I could imagine. I can best repay their kindness by not mentioning their names here.

The 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 we... two... meet again?'

Thunder rolled.

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

Na

'Sorry, Esme. I was just doing it for... you know... old time's sake... Doesn't roll off the tongue, though.'

'I'd just got it nice and brown, too.'

'Sorry.'

'Anyway, you didn't have to shout.'

'Sorry.'

'I mean, I ain't deaf. You could've just asked me in a normal voice. And I'd have said, "Next Wednesday." '

'Sorry, Esme.'

'Just you cut me another slice.'

Na

'Hah!' said Gra

There was no sound for a while but the roar of the wind and the sound of Na

'I thought it'd cheer you up, coming up here,' she said after a while.

'Really.' It wasn't a question.

'Take you out of yourself, sort of thing...' Na

'Mm?' said Gra

Oh dear, thought Na

The point was... well, the point was that Na

She knew it happened, with the really powerful ones. And Gra

But Aliss, up until that terrible day, had terrorized the Ramtops. She'd become so good at magic that there wasn't room in her head for anything else.

They said weapons couldn't 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 witch's 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, towards the end. It always was, when a witch went bad.

Sometimes, of course, they didn't go bad. They just went... somewhere.

Gra

One day, almost certainly, she wouldn't bother to come back... and 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.

Na

She coughed.

'Saw Magrat the other day,' she ventured, looking sidelong at Gra

There was no reaction.

'She's looking well. Queening suits her.'

'Hmm?'

Na

Na

Three was a natural number for witches.

And they'd lost one. Well, not lost, exactly. Magrat was queen now, and queens were hard to mislay. But... that 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 there'd been a row. Magrat had been good for that. Without Magrat, Na

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

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

Na

As a witch, she naturally didn't 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 the... other one.

There. She'd put words around it.

Of course, it was nothing but an old superstition and belonged to the unenlightened days when 'maiden' or 'mother' or... the other one... encompassed 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 Na

Even so... it was an old superstition–older than books, older than writing–and 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 least‑ Na

Of course, Gra

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 Gra