Carpe Jugulum

crackling and smoking. As he watched, little flames erupted from the leather again.
    “It knows what they did,” said Granny. “It was hatched knowing. Phoenixes share their minds. And they don’t tolerate evil.”
    The head turned to look at Oats with its white-hot stare and, instinctively, he backed away and tried to cover his eyes.
    “Use the doorknocker,” said Granny, nodding to the big iron ring hanging loosely from one splintered door.
    “What? You want me to knock on the door ? Of a vampire’s castle ?”
    “We’re not going to sneak in, are we? Anyway, you Omnians are good at knocking on doors.”
    “Well, yes ,” said Oats, “but normally just for a shared prayer and to interest people in our pamphlets—” he let the knocker fall a few times, the boom echoing around the valley “—not to have my throat ripped out!”
    “Think of this as a particularly difficult street,” said Granny. “Try again…mebbe they’re hidin’ behind the sofa, eh?”
    “Hah!”
    “You’re a good man, Mister Oats?” said Granny, conversationally, as the echoes died away. “Even without your holy book and holy amulet and holy hat?”
    “Er…I try to be…” he ventured.
    “Well…this is where you find out,” said Granny. “To the fire we come at last, Mister Oats. This is where we both find out.”

Nanny raced up some stairs, a couple of vampires at her heels. They were hampered because they hadn’t got to grips with not being able to fly, but there was something else wrong with them as well.
    “Tea!” one screamed. “I must have… tea !”
    Nanny pushed open the door to the battlements. They followed her, and tripped over Igor’s leg as he stepped out of the shadows.
    He raised two sharpened table legs.
    “How d’you want your thtaketh, boyth?” he shouted excitedly, as he struck. “You thould have thed you liked my thpiderth!”
    Nanny leaned against the wall to get her breath back.
    “Granny’s somewhere here,” she panted. “Don’t ask me how. But those two were craving a cup of tea, and I reckon only Esme could mess up someone’s head like that—”
    The sounds of the doorknocker boomed around the courtyard below. At the same time the door at the other end of the battlements opened. Half a dozen vampires advanced.
    “They’re acting very dumb, aren’t they,” said Nanny. “Give me a couple more stakes.”
    “Run out of thtaketh, Nanny.”
    “Okay, then, pass me a bottle of holy water…hurry up…”
    “None left, Nanny.”
    “We’ve got nothing? ”
    “Got’n orange, Nanny.”
    “What for?”
    “Run out of lemonth.”
    “What good with an orange do if I hit a vampire in the mouth with it?” said Nanny, eyeing the approaching creatures.
    Igor scratched his head. “Well, I thuppothe they won’t catch coldth tho eathily…”
    The knocking reverberated around the castle again. Several vampires were creeping across the courtyard.
    Nanny caught a flicker of light around the edge of the door. Instinct took over. As the vampires began to run, she grabbed Igor and pulled him down.
    The arch exploded, every stone and plank drifting away on an expanding bubble of eyeball-searing flame. It lifted the vampires off their feet and they screamed as the fire carried them up.
    When the brightness had faded a little Nanny peered carefully into the courtyard.
    A bird, house-sized, wings of flame wider than the castle, reared in the broken doorway.

Mightily Oats pushed himself up onto his hands and knees. Hot flames roared around him, thundering like fiercely burning gas. His skin should be blackening already, but against all reason the fire felt no more deadly than a hot desert wind. The air smelled of camphor and spices.
    He looked up. The flames wrapped Granny Weatherwax, but they looked oddly transparent, not entirely real. Here and there little gold and green sparks glittered on her dress, and all the time the fire whipped and tore around her.
    She looked down at him. “You’re in the wings of the phoenix now, Mister Oats,” she shouted, above the noise, “and you ain’t burned!”
    The bird flapping its wings on her wrist was incandescent.
    “How can—”
    “You’re the scholar! But male birds are always ones for the big display, aren’t they?”
    “Males? This is a male phoenix?”
    “Yes!”
    It leapt. What flew…what flew, as far as Oats could see, was a great bird-shape of pale flame, with the little form of the real bird inside like the head of a comet.