Carpe Jugulum

floundered. “Like…maybe…rip off all your clothes and run naked in the rain?” she hazarded.
    “Oh yes . Right,” said Nanny.
    “Well…I suppose Perdita is that part of me.”
    “Really? I’ve always been that part of me,” said Nanny. “The important thing is to remember where you left your clothes.”
    Agnes remembered too late that Nanny Ogg was in many ways a very uncomplicated personality.
    “Mind you, I think I know what you mean,” Nanny went on in a more thoughtful voice. “There’s times when I’ve wanted to do things and stopped meself…” She shook her head. “But…vampires…Verence wouldn’t be so stupid as to send an invitation to vampires, would he?” She paused for thought. “Yes, he would. Prob’ly think of it as offering the hand of friendship.”
    She stood up. “Right, they won’t have left yet. Let’s get straight to the jelly. You get extra garlic and a few stakes, I’ll round up Shawn and Jason and the lads.”
    “It won’t work, Nanny. Perdita saw what they can do. The moment you get near them, you’ll forget all about it. They do something to your mind, Nanny.”
    Nanny hesitated.
    “Can’t say I know that much about vampires,” she said.
    “Perdita thinks they can tell what you’re thinking too.”
    “Then this is Esme’s type of stuff,” said Nanny. “Messing with minds and so on. It’s meat and drink to her.”
    “Nanny, they were talking about staying ! We have to do something!”
    “Well, where is she?” Nanny almost wailed. “Esme ought to be sortin’ this out!”
    “Maybe they’ve got to her first?”
    “You don’t think so, do you?” said Nanny, now looking quite panicky. “I can’t think about a vampire getting his teeth into Esme.”
    “Don’t worry, dog doesn’t eat dog.” It was Perdita who blurted it out, but it was Agnes who got the blow. It wasn’t a ladylike slap of disapproval. Nanny Ogg had reared some strapping sons; the Ogg forearm was a power in its own right.
    When Agnes looked up from the hearthrug Nanny was rubbing some life back into her hand. She gave Agnes a solemn look.
    “We’ll say no more about that, shall we?” she commanded. “I ain’t gen’rally given to physicality of that nature but it saves a lot of arguing. Now, we’re goin’ back to the castle. We’re going to sort this out right now .”

Hodgesaargh shut the book and looked at the flame. It was true, then. There’d even been a picture of one just like it in the book, painstakingly drawn by another royal falconer two hundred years before. He wrote that he’d found the thing up on the high meadows, one spring. It’d burned for three years, and then he’d lost it somewhere.
    If you looked at it closely, you could even see the detail. It was not exactly a flame. It was more like a bright feather…
    Well, Lancre was on one of the main migration routes, for birds of all sorts. It was only a matter of time.
    So…the new hatchling was around. They needed time to grow, it said in the book. Odd that it should lay an egg here, because it said in the book that it was always hatched in the burning deserts of Klatch.
    He went and looked at the birds in the mews. They were still very alert.
    Yes, it all made sense. It had flown in here, among the comfort of other birds, and laid its egg, just like it said it did in the book, and then it had burned itself up to hatch the new bird.
    If Hodgesaargh had a fault, it lay in his rather utilitarian view of the bird world. There were birds that you hunted, and there were birds you hunted with . Oh, there were other sorts, tweeting away in the bushes, but they didn’t really count. It occurred to him that if ever there was a bird you could hunt with, it’d be the phoenix.
    Oh yes. It’d be weak, and young, and it wouldn’t have gone far.
    Hmm…birds tended to think the same way, after all.
    It would have helped if there was one picture in the book. In fact, there were several, all carefully drawn by ancient falconers who claimed it was a firebird they’d seen.
    Apart from the fact that they all had wings and a beak, no two were remotely alike. One looked very much like a heron. Another looked like a goose. One, and he scratched his head about this, appeared to be a sparrow. Bit of a puzzle, he decided, and left it at that and selected a drawing that looked at least slightly foreign.
    He glanced at the bird gloves hanging on their hooks. He was good at rearing young birds. He could get them eating