Feet of Clay
It was easy enough to imagine an ennobled
Nobbs. Because where Nobby went wrong was in
thinking small. He sidled into places and
pinched things that weren't worth much. If
only he'd sidled into continents and stolen
entire cities, slaughtering many of the
inhabitants in the process, he'd have been a
pillar of the community.
People look down on stuff like geography and
meteorology, and not only because they're
standing on one and being soaked by another.
They don't look like quite like real science
1. But
geography is only physics slowed down and with
a few trees stuck on it, and meteorology is
full of excitingly fashionable chaos and
complexity.
1
That is to say, the sort you can use to give
something three extra legs and then blow it
up.
Death was nonplused. Most people were, after
the initial confusion, somewhat relieved when
they died. A subconscious weight had been
removed. The other cosmic shoe had dropped.
The worst had happened and they could,
metaphorically, get on with their lives. Few
people treated it as a simple annoyance that
might go away if you complained enough.
No more kings. Vimes had difficulty in
articulating why this should be so, why the
concept resonated in his very bones. After
all, a good many of the patricians had been as
bad as any king. But they were... sort of...
bad on equal terms. What set Vimes's
teeth on edge was the idea that kings were a
different kind of human being. A higher life
form.
Royalty was like dandelions. No matter how
many heads you chopped off, the roots were
still there underground, waiting to spring up
again.
It seemed to be a chronic disease. It was as
if even the most intelligent person had this
little blank spot in their heads where someone
had written: "Kings. What a good idea."
Whoever had created humanity had left in a
major design flaw. It was its tendency to bend
at the knees.
In a way, it didn't matter who they were. In
fact, their anonymity was part of the whole
business. They thought themselves part
of the march of history, the tide of progress
and the wave of the future. They were men who
thought The Time Had Come. Regimes can survive
barbarian hordes, crazed terrorists, and
hooded secret societies, but they're in real
trouble when prosperous and anonymous men sit
around a bit table and think thoughts like
that.
Everyone needed their own space, just like
Angua did, and sometimes their space was
inside their heads.
Vetinari had tamed Ankh-Morpork. He'd tamed
it like a dog. He'd taken a minor scavenger
among scavengers and lengthened its teeth and
strengthened its jaws and built up its muscles
and studded its collar and fed it lean steak
and then he'd aimed it at the throat of the
world.
He'd taken all the gangs and squabbling
groups and made them see that a small slice of
the cake on a regular basis was better by far
than a bigger slice with a dagger in it. He'd
made them see that it was better to take a
small slice but enlarge the cake.
The Pax had arisen again, but this time it
said: "If you fight, we'll call in your
mortgages. And incidentally, that's my
pike your pointing at me. I paid for that
shield you're holding. And take my helmet off
when you speak to me, you horrible little
debtor."
"Vole-au-vents and Cream of Rat," said
Gimlet. "All hygienically prepared."
"How do you mean, 'hygienically prepared'?"
said Carrot.
"The chef is under strict orders to wash his
hands afterwards."
The assembled dwarfs nodded. This was
certainly pretty hygienic. You didn't want
people going around with ratty hands.
That's just it. He cares for everyone. He
cares about everything. He cares
indiscriminately. He knows everything about
everyone because everyone interests him, and
the caring is all general and never personal.
He doesn't think personal is the same as
important.
He wasn't going to have another day of
bafflement interspersed with desperately
bright ideas, was he?
Rogers the bulls were angry and bewildered,
which counts as the basic state of mind for a
full-grown bulls.*
*Because of the huge, obtrusive mass of his
forehead, Rogers the bulls' view of the
universe was from two eyes each with their own
non-overlapping hemispherical view of the
world. Since there were two separate visions,
Rogers had reasoned, that meant there must be
two bulls (bulls not having been bread for
much deductive reasoning). Most bulls believe
this, which is why they always keep turning
their head this way and that when they look at
you. They do this because they both want to
see.
"That's blasphemy," said the vampire.
He gasped as Vimes shot him a glance like
sunlight. "That's what people say when the
voiceless speak."
"It's not that we're making life, we're
simply giving life a place to live."
Vetinari turned away abruptly. "The Council
of Churches, Temples, Sacred Groves, and Big
Ominous Rocks is demanding... well a number of
things, several of them involving wild horses.
top
The Fifth Elephant
Some younger dwarfs were shyly wearing eye
shadow and declaring that, as a matter of
fact, they didn't like beer.
"This is not a weapon. This is for killing
people," he said.
"Uh...l most weapons are," said Inigo.
"No, they're not. They're so you don't
have to kill people. They're for... for
having. For being seen. For
warning. This isn't one of those. It's for
hiding away until you bring it out and kill
people in the dark.
You left the law behind when you left Lancre,
Your Grace. here it's the lore. What
you keep is what you can. What's yours is what
you fight for. The fittest survive.
You see, a yennork would go off and be a
human or be a wolf but they'd still be
carrying the werewolf... blood, and then
they'd marry and have children... or pups...
and, well, that's where the fairy-tale
monsters come from. People with a bit
of wolf and wolves with that extra capacity
for violence that is so very human.
top
Hogfather
In the endless spaces between the clumsy
seconds Death moved like a witch dancing
through raindrops, never getting wet.
Its all about the sun, master. White snow and
red blood and the sun. Always has been.
top
Interesting Times
There was a tension to the thing, a feeling
of mute straining and striving towards some
distant and incomprehensible goal. As a
wizard, it was something that Ponder had only
before encountered in acorns: a tiny soundless
voice which said, yes, I am but a small,
green, simple object - but I dream about
forests.
He thought: I've done my best with Hex, but
the actual business will be undertaken by a
bunch of wizards whose idea of experimental
procedure is to throw it and then sit down and
argue about where it's going to land.
It has come as a revelation to Lord Hong when
he looked at the problem the Ankh-Morpork way
and realized that it might just possibly be
better to give the job of Auspicious Dog-maker
to some peasant with a fair idea about metal
and explosive earths than to some clerk who'd
got the highest marks in an examination to
find the best poem about iron. In Ankh-Morpork
people did things.
Rincewind hadn't eaten since the leopard. The
inn meant food, but food meant money. He was
hungry, and he had no money.
He chided himself for this kind of negative
thinking. This was not the right approach.
What he should do is go in and order a large,
nourishing meal. Then instead of being hungry
with no money he'd be well fed with no money,
a net gain on his current position.
The Agatean word for foreigner is the same as
the word for ghost.
Ly Tin Wheedle: When many expect a mighty
stallion they will find hooves on an ant.
Ly Tin Wheedle: An ass may do the work of an
ox in a time of no horses.
Grand Viziers were always scheming
megalomaniacs. It was probably in the job
description: "Are you a devious, plotting,
unreliable madman? Ah, good, then you can be
my most trusted minister."
"Three thousand years? That's a bit short,
isn't it? The whole thing? Stars and oceans
and intelligent life evolving from arts
graduates, that sort of thing?"
Oh, no. That's just... stuff. Proper
history started with the founding of the
Empire by One Sun Mirror.
The best thing you can do with the peasants
is leave them alone. Let them get on with it.
When people who can read and write start
fighting on behalf of people who can't, you
just end up with another kind of stupidity. If
you want to help them, build a big library or
something somewhere and leave the door open.
"I'm a barbarian", shouted Cohen. "And the
honor I got, see, is mine. I didn't steal it
off'f someone else."
Rincewind looked at the boots, with
suspicious recollection of the trouble there
had been with the University's prototype Seven
League Boots. Footwear which tried to make you
take steps twenty-one miles long imposed
unfortunate groinal strains.
Perhaps we shouldn't have given you a name.
We didn't think about that. It was a joke. But
we should have remembered that names are
important. A thing with a name is a bit more
than a thing.
People understand blood. You just walk in and
take over and no one takes it seriously. But
seas of blood . . . Everyone understands that.
Yes, whenever you comes across a king where
everyone says, 'Oo, he was a good king all
right,' you can bet your sandals he was a
great big bearded bastard who broke heads a
lot and laughed about it. Hey? But some king
who just passed decent little laws and read
books and tried to look intelligent . . .
'Oh,' they say, 'oh, he was all right, a bit
wet, not what I'd call a proper king.' That's
people for you.
Life was, he had heard, like a bird which
flies out of the darkness and across a crowded
hall and then through another window into the
endless night again. In Rincewind's case it
had managed to do something incontinent in his
dinner.
top
The Last Continent
All books are tenuously connected through
L-space and, therefore, the content of any
book ever written or yet to be written
may, in the right circumstances, be deduced
form a sufficiently close study of books
already in existence.
. . .
And that had led to all the trouble with
How to Dynamically Manage People for Dynamic
Results in a Caring Empowering Way in Quite a
Short Time Dynamically.
Whoever had designed the skeletons of
creatures had even less imagination that
whoever had done the outsides. At least the
outside-designer had tried a few novelties in
the spots, wool and stripes department, but
the bone-builder had generally just put a
skull on a ribcage, shoved a pelvis in further
along, stuck on some arms and legs and had the
rest of the day off. Some ribcages were
longer, some legs were shorter, some hands
became wings, but they all seemed to be based
on one design, one size stretched or shrunk to
fit all.
Not to his very great surprise, Ponder seemed
to be the only one around who found this at
all interesting. He'd point out to people that
fish were amazingly fish-shaped, and they'd
look at him as if he'd gone mad.
The alchemists say it is the key to
immortality, but they say that about orange
juice, crusty bread and drinking your own
urine. An alchemist would cut his own head off
if the thought it'd made him live longer.
"And you know what I think about evolution,
Mister Stibbons. If it happens, and frankly
I've always considered it a bit of a fairy
story, it has to happen fast. Look at
lemmings, for one thing."
"Lemmings, sir?"
"Right. The little blighters keep chargin'
over cliffs, right? And how many have ever
changed into birds on the way down, eh? Eh?"
"Well, none, of cou--"
"There's my point," said Ridcully
triumphantly. "And it's no good one of them on
the way down thinking, 'Hey, maybe I should
waggle my claws a bit,' is it? No, what it
ought to do is decide really positively about
growing some real wings."
"I think we've traveled backwards in time.
For thousands of years."
And that was the other side of the odd thing
about wizards. While they were quite capable
of spending half and hour arguing that it
could not possibly be Tuesday, they'd take the
outrageous in their pointy-shoed stride.
"The point, Mister Stibbons, is that you
suddenly seem to think everyone comes over all
fratricidal when they go back in time. Now, if
I'd met my grandfather I'd buy him a
drink and tell him not to assume that snakes
won't bite if you shout at them in a loud
voice, information which he might come to
thank me for in later life."
"Very hard to steer, lightening. Mostly we
waited until a thunderbolt happened to hit
some poor soul and then spake in a voice of
thunder and said it was his fault for being a
sinner. I mean, they were bound to have done
something, weren't they?" The god blew
his nose again. "Quite depressing, really.
Anyway, I suppose the rot set in when I tried
to see if it was possible to breed a more
inflammable cow."
He looked at their questioning expressions.
"Burnt offerings, you see. Cows don't
actually burn all that well. They're naturally
rather soggy creatures and frankly everyone
was running out of wood.
There'd be a bad weather front, a few silly
shepherds would happen to be in the wrong
place at the wrong time, and the next thing
you know it was standing room only on the
sacrificial stones and you couldn't see for
the smoke.
"I just thought, you know, that if you could
find the bit in, say, an oak tree which says
'Be inflammable' and glue it into the bit of
the cow which says 'Be soggy' it's save a lot
of trouble. Unfortunately, that produced a
sort of bush that made distressing noises and
squirted milk, but I could see the
principle was sound.
But there is something hugely unlovable about
a sheep, a kind of mad, eyerolling
brainlessness smelling of damp wool and panic.
The wizards had spent a lot of time in an
atmosphere where a cutting remark did more
damage than a magic sword and, for sheer
malign pleasure, a well structured memo could
do more damage than a fireball every time.
It was simple because something complex had
been rolled up small; as if someone had drawn
trees, and started with the normal green cloud
on a stick, and refined it, and refined it
some more, and looked for the little twists in
a line that said tree and refined
those until there was just one line that
said TREE.
And now when you looked at it you could hear
the wind in the branches.
. . .
There was a sense of something small being
done that was making something happen that was
huge.
"The more geography you've got, the less
hist'ry, ever notice that? More space, less
time.
Wizards had a hard job accepting the term
"clear and pleasant danger." They liked the
kind you could argue about.
top
Jingo
But Carrot really did believe that personal
wasn't the same as important. Of course, Vimes
believed the same thing. You had to hope that
when push came to shove you'd act the right
way. But there was something slightly creepy
about someone who didn't just believe it, but
lived their life by it. It was as unnerving as
meeting a really poor priest.
Theft was the only crime, whether the loot
was gold, innocence, land or life.
We're all changing in the desert, he thought.
It's not like the city, hemming your thoughts
in. You can feel your mind expand to the
horizons. No wonder this is where religions
start.
There was a noise outside the tavern. It was
the sound of many women laughing, which is
always a disquieting noise to men.
top
Maskerade
She could feel a future trying to land on
her.
It was Anges' terrible fate to keep her head
in a crises.
It was only on the subject of Greebo that
Nanny's otherwise keen sense of reality found
itself all twisted. To Nanny Ogg he was merely
a larger version of the little fluffy kitten
he had once been. To everyone else he was a
scarred ball of inventive malignancy.
Granny Weatherwax was firmly against fiction.
Life was hard enough without lies floating
around and changing the way people thought.
And because the theater was fiction made
flesh, she hated the theater most of all. But
that was it -- hate was exactly the
right word. Hate is a force of attraction.
Hate is just love with its back turned.
Like it or not, witches are drawn to the edge
of things, where two states collide.
But is was just close enough to Granny's own
kind of magic to make Granny uneasy. Which
meant she couldn't leave it alone. It was like
scratching an itch.
Nanny didn't so much enter places as
insinuate herself; she had unconsciously taken
a natural talent for liking people and
developed it into an occult science.
He could swagger while asleep. Greebo could,
in fact, commit sexual harassment simply by
sitting very quietly in the next room.
Except as far as the witches were concerned.
To Granny a cat was a damn cat whatever shape
it was, and Nanny Ogg always thought of him as
Mister Fluffy.
Granny Weatherwax had never heard of
psychiatry and would have had no truck with it
even if she had. There are some arts too black
even for a witch. She practiced headology --
practiced, in fact, until she was very good at
it. And though there may be some superficial
similarities between a psychiatrist and a
headologist, there is a huge practical
difference. A psychiatrist, dealing with a man
who fears he is being followed by a large and
terrible monster, will endeavor to convince
him that monsters don't exist. Granny
Weatherwax would simply give him a chair to
stand on and a very heavy stick.
There was something incredibly satisfying in
digging a very deep hole. It was
uncomplicated. You knew where you were
with a hole in the ground.
Some names don't have staying power. Never
pick yourself a name you can't scrub the floor
in.
top
The Science of Discworld
The Moon's surface is rock and rock dust,
with no seas anywhere (water easily escapes
too) -- although in 1997 NASA probes
discovered substantial quantities of water ice
at the Moon's poles, hidden from the warmth of
the Sun by the permanent shadows of crater
walls.
The current hypothesis was that most Change
spells unraveled the victim's morphic field
down to some very basic level and then
'bounced' back. A frog was quite simple, so
they wouldn't have to bounce far. An ape,
being quite human in many respects, would mean
a very long return journey indeed. You
couldn't turn someone into a tree because
there was no way to get there from here, but a
pumpkin could be turned into a wooden coach
because it was quite close to it in vegetable
space.
The other really strange thing about the K/T
extinction is which creatures survived
it. In the sea, the ammonites all died out, as
did the other shelled forms like belemnites --
unrolled ammonites -- but the nautilus came
through, as did the cuttlefish, squids, and
octopuses. Amazingly the crocodiles survived
the K/T event with little loss of diversity.
The earliest fossils that can definitely be
identified as mammals come from 210 million
years ago -- creatures rejoicing in the name
'morganucodontids'. These were shrews,
probably nocturnal, probably insect-eaters,
probably egg-layers. Darwin's detractors
objected to having apes as their ancestors:
heaven knows what they would have thought
about bug-eating egg-laying shrews.
The morganucodontids made a major
breakthrough in tooth design: teeth that
interlocked when the jaws were brought
together, very effective at cutting bits off
meat or insects. They also paid a heavy price
for their teeth, one that we still pay today.
Reptiles continually produce new teeth: as old
ones wear down, they get replaced. We produce
just two sets of teeth: milk teeth as children
and the real thing as adults. When our adult
teeth wear out, the only replacements
available are artificial. Blame the
morganucodontids for this: if you want to take
advantage of precisely interlocking teeth, you
have to maintain that precision, which is
impractical if you keep discarding teeth and
growing new ones. So they grew only two sets
of teeth, and we have to do likewise.
But what the kings didn't realize, to start
with, is that when they put their rights and
obligations down on paper, they were
implicitly constraining their own actions.
The citizens could read what was on the paper
too. They could tell if their king was
suddenly assuming rights or obligations that
were not on that piece of paper. The
whole effect of law on human society started
to change when you could write the law down,
and anyone who could read could see what the
law was.
Small Gods
Now consider the tortoise and the eagle.
The tortoise is a ground-living creature. It
is impossible to live nearer the ground
without being under it. Its horizons are a few
inches away. It has about as good a turn of
speed as you need to hunt down a lettuce. It
has survived while the rest of evolution
flowed past it by being, on the whole, no
threat to anyone and too much trouble to eat.
And then there is the eagle. A creature of
the air and high places, whose horizons go all
the way to the edge of the world. Eyesight
keen enough to spot the rustle of some small
and squeaky creature half a mile away. All
power, all control. Lightning death on wings.
Talons and claws enough to make a meal of
anything smaller than it is and at least take
a hurried snack out of anything bigger.
. . .
There's good eating on a tortoise but,
considering the effort involved, there's much
better eating on practically anything else.
It's simply the delight of eagles to torment
tortoises.
They are the small gods - the spirits of
places where two ant trails cross, the gods of
microclimates down between the grass roots.
And most of them stay that way.
Because what they lack is belief.
A handful, though, go on to greater things.
Anything may trigger it. A shepherd, seeking a
lost lamb, finds it among the briars and takes
a minutes or two to build a small cairn of
stones in general thanks to whatever spirits
might be around the place. Or a peculiarly
shaped tree becomes associated with a cure for
disease. Or someone carves a spiral on an
isolated stone. Because what gods need is
belief, and what humans want is gods.
The trouble with being a god is that you've
got no one to pray to.
"The devils of infinity fill your living
bones with sulpher!" he screamed.
And it all meant this: that there are hardly
any excesses of the most crazed psychopath
that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal,
kindly family man who just comes in to work
every day and has a job to do.
Brother Preptil, the master of the music, had
described Brutha's voice as putting him in
mind of a disappointed vulture arriving too
late at the dead donkey.
Its shell was badly chipped. It had one beady
eye - the other had fallen to one of the
thousands of dangers that attend any
slow-moving creature which lives an inch from
the ground.
It's trampling infidels. You can't trample
infidels when you're a tortoise. I mean, all
you could do is give them a meaningful look.
The people who really run organizations are
usually found several levels down, where it's
still possible to get things done.
And one of [the brain's] functions is to make
the miraculous seem ordinary and turn the
unusual into the usual.
Because if this was not the case, then human
beings, faced with the daily wondrousness of
everything, would go around wearing big stupid
grins, similar to those worn by certain remote
tribesmen who occasionally get raided by the
authorities and have the contents of their
plastic greenhouses very seriously inspected.
They'd say 'Wow!' a lot. And no one would do
much work.
"A lantern that doesn't shine for a man that
doesn't see?"
Yeah. Worked perfectly. And of course it's
very philosophical."
Belief shifts. People start out
believing in the god and end up believing in
the structure.
A desert. After death, a desert.
The memory stole over him: a desert is what
you think it is. And now, you can think
clearly...
There were no lies here. All fancies fled
away. That's what happened in all deserts. It
was just you, and what you believed.
Koomi's theory was largely based on the good
old Gnostic heresy, which tends to turn up all
over the multiverse whenever men get up off
their knees and start thinking for two minutes
together, although the shock of the sudden
altitude tends to mean the thinking is a
little whacked.
You had to have a mind like Vorbis' to plan
your retaliation before your attack.
Simony's eyes gleamed with the gleam of a man
who had seen the future and found it covered
with armor.
It's a funny thing, but why is it that the
heathens and the barbarians seem to have the
best places to go when they die?
Accompanied by the ghosts of dolphins, the
ghost of a ship sailed on . . .
There's bones everywhere!
Well? What did you expect? This is a desert!
People die here! It's a very popular
occupation in the vicinity!
No! You can't do that to people just because
they're helpless!
You know, I can't think of a better time?
Desert lions, it has been said, are not like
the lions of the veldt. They had been, when
the great desert had been verdant woodland
(i.e., before the inhabitants had let goats
graze everywhere. Nothing makes desert like a
goat.)Then there had been time to lie around
for most of the day, looking majestic, in
between regular meals of goat. But the
woodland had become scrubland, and the goats
and the people and, eventually, even the
cities, went away.
the lions stayed. There's always something to
eat, if you're hungry enough. People still had
to cross the desert. There were lizards. There
were snakes. It wasn't much of an ecological
niche, but the lions were hanging on to it
like grim death, which was what happened to
most people who met a desert lion.
Lions drink in the holy places . . .
Om, bumping along in Brutha's pack, began to
feel the acute depression that steals over
every realist in the presence of an optimist.
top
The Thief of Time
"'Scuse me," said the raven, "but how come
Miss Ogg became Mrs. Ogg? Sounds a bit of a
rural arrangement, if you catch my meaning."
WITCHES ARE MATRILINEAL, said Death. THEY
FIND IT MUCH EASIER TO CHANGE MEN THAN TO
CHANGE NAMES.
Jeremy tried to be an interesting
person. The trouble was that he was the kind
of person, who, having decided to be an
interesting person, would first of all try to
find a book called How to Be an Interesting
Person and then see whether there were any
courses available.
The story ended with a moral: Large
Enterprises Depend Upon Small Details. Jeremy
couldn't see why it couldn't have just as well
been: It's Wrong To Trap Nonexistent Women in
Clocks, or: It Would Have Worked With A Glass
Spring.
It was hard to deal with people when a tiny
part of you saw them as a temporary collection
of atoms that would not be around in another
few decades.
"Thorry, thur, but Igorth do not 'tetht the
printhiple.' Thtrap it to the bench and put a
good thick bolt of lightening, that'th our
motto. That'th how you tetht
thomething."
That was the thing about the sea. It just
stayed big and wet. It had always been big and
wet, it would always be big and wet. Oh, maybe
fishermen would start to dredge up strange
whiskery fish that they'd only ever seen
before as fossils, but who cared what happened
to a bunch of codfish?
There were lots of places like the warehouse.
There always are, in every old city, no matter
how valuable the building land is. Sometimes,
space just gets lost.
A workshop is built, and then another beside
it. Factories and storerooms and sheds and
temporary lean-tos crawl toward one another,
meet, and merge. Spaces between outside walls
are roofed with tar paper. Odd-shaped bits of
ground are colonized by someone's nailing up a
bit of wall and cutting a doorway. Old
doorways are masked by piles of lumber or new
tool racks. The old men who knew what was
where move on and die... And so there are
spaces like this, a small warehouse with a
crusted skylight that no fewer than four
factory owners think is owned by one of the
other three, when they think about it at all.
In fact, each of them own one wall, and
certainly no one now recalls who roofed the
space.
You had to hand it to human beings. They had
one of the strangest powers in the universe.
Even her grandfather had remarked upon it. No
other species anywhere in the world had
invented boredom. Perhaps it was
boredom, not intelligence, that had propelled
them up the evolutionary ladder. Trolls and
dwarfs had it, too, that strange ability to
look at the universe and think "oh, the same
as yesterday, how dull. I wonder what happens
if I bang this rock on that head?"
"Cheese," said Mr. Indigo Violet smartly. "It
is rotted bovine lactation."
IN ORDER TO HAVE A CHANGE OF FORTUNE AT TE
LAST MINUTE YOU HAVE TO TAKE YOUR FORTUNE TO
THE LAST MINUTE, said Death. WE MUST DO WHAT
WE CAN.
Can you imagine what it is like? For an
intellect a billion years old, in a body which
is an ape on the back of a rat that grew out
of a lizard? Can you imagine what comes out of
the dark places, uncontrolled?
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The Truth
We've nothing against words being nailed down
properly. But words that can be taken apart
and used to make other words... well, that's
downright dangerous.
"It'll end in trouble, my lord."
Lord Vetinari sighed. "In my experience,
practically everything does," he said. "That
is the nature of things. All we can do is sing
as we go."
An engraved page was an engraved page,
complete and unique. But if you took the
leaden letters that had previously been used
to set the words of a god, and then used them
to set a cookery book, what did that do to the
holy wisdom? For that matter, what would it do
to the pie?
Mr. Tulip had turned anger into an art.
It was not anger at anything. It was
just pure, platonic anger from somewhere in
the reptilian depths of the soul, a fountain
of never-ending red-hot grudge; Mr. Tulip
lived his life on that thin line most people
occupy just before they haul off and hit
someone repeatedly with a wrench. For Mr.
Tulip, anger was the ground state of being.
there is very little, however disgusting,
that isn't used somewhere in some industry.
There are people out there who want
large quantities of ammonia and saltpeter. If
you can't sell it to the alchemists then the
farmers probably want it. If even the farmers
don't want it then there is nothing,
nothing, however gross, that you can't
sell to the tanners.
Sacharissa looked a little disappointed.
She'd been a respectable young woman for some
time. In certain people, that means there's a
lot of damned-up disreputability just waiting
to burst out.
Damn. I wish they didn't leave me to deal
with this sort of thing, Death sighed. You
believe, but you don't believe in
anything.
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The Wee Free Men
"Oh, puh-lease," said Miss Tick. "Yes, yes, I
am a witch. I have a talking animal, a
tendency to correct other people's
pronunciation -- it's pun, by the way,
not 'pune' -- and a fascination for poking my
nose into other people's affairs, and yes,
a pointy hat."
Huge, knobbly flints still turned up in the
village gardens. Sometimes they were larger
than a man's head. THey often looked like
heads, too. They were so melted and twisted
and curved that you could look at a flint and
see almost anything -- a face, a strange
animal, a sea montser. Somtimes the more
interesting ones would be put on garden walls,
for show.
The old people called these calkins,
which meant "chalk children". They'd always
seemed ... odd to Tiffany, as if they stone
was trying to become alive. Some flints looked
like bits of meat, or bones, or something off
a butcher's slab. In the dark, under the sea,
it looked as though the chalk had been trying
to make the shapes of living creatures.
"Yes!", said a voice, and Tiffany realized
that it was hers again. The anger rose up,
joyfully. "Yes! I'm me! I am careful
and logical and I look up things I don't
understand! When I hear people use the wrong
words, I get edgy! I am good with cheese. I
read books fast! I think! And I always
have a piece of string! THat's the kind of
person I am!
...and then, like someone rising out of the
clouds of a sleep, she felt the ceep, deep
Time below her. She sensed the breath of the
downs and the distand roar of ancient, ancient
seas trapped in millioins of tiny shells. The
tought of Granny Aching, under the turf,
becoming part of the chalk again, part of the
land under wave. She felt as if huge wheels,
of time and stars, were turning slowly around
her.
I'll never be like this again, she thought,
as she saw the terror in the Queen's face.
I'll never again feel as tall as the sky and
as old as the hills and as strong as the sea.
I've been given something for a while, and the
price of it is that I have to give it back.
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Witches Abroad
She threw a couple of logs into the fireplace
and glared at them until they burst into flame
out of sheer embarrassment.
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.
Greebo turned slowly, a faint, lazy smile on
his scarred face. As a human, his nose was
broken and a black patch covered his bad eye.
But the other one glittered like sins of
angels, and his smile was the downfall of
saints.
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