Carpe Jugulum

them tattoos…yeah, this here’s one of the Nac mac Feegle. The little bastards comes down and raids my still about once a year.”
    “Yings, yow graley yin! Suz ae rikt dheu,” said the blue man, taking the thimble.
    “What is he?” said Magrat.
    “They’re gnomes,” said Nanny.
    The man lowered the thimble. “Pictsies!”
    “Pixies, if you insist,” said Nanny. “They live up on the high moors over toward Uberwald—”
    “Ach! Bae, yon snae rikt speel, y’ol behennit! Feggers! Yon ken sweal boggin bludsuckers owl dhu tae—”
    Nanny nodded while she listened. Halfway through the little man’s rant she topped up his thimble.
    “Ah, right,” she said, when he seemed to have finished. “Well, he says the Nac mac Feegle have been forced out by the vampires, see? They’ve been driving all the…” her lips moved as she tried out various translations, “…old people…”
    “That’s very cruel!” said Magrat.
    “No…I mean…old races. The people that live in…the corners. You know, the ones you don’t see around a lot…centaurs, bogeys, gnomes—”
    “Pictsies!”
    “Yeah, right…driving ’em out of the country.”
    “Why should they do that?”
    “Probably not fashionable anymore,” said Nanny.
    Agnes looked hard at the pixie. On a scale of ethereal from one to ten he looked as if he was on some other scale, probably one buried in deep ocean sludge. The blueness of his skin, she could see now, was made up of tattoos and paint. His red hair stuck out at all angles. His sole concession to the temperature was a leather loincloth. He saw her looking at him.
    “Yist, awa’ fra’ yeeks, ye stawking gowt that’ya! Bigjobs!”
    “Er, sorry,” said Agnes.
    “Good language, ain’t it?” said Nanny. “A hint o’ heather and midden. But when you’ve got the Nac mac Feegle on your side, you’re doing okay.”
    The pixie waved the empty thimble at Nanny.
    “Ghail o’ bludy ‘lemonade,’ callyake!”
    “Ah, no foolin’ you, you want the real stuff,” said Nanny. She pulled back a chair cushion, and produced a black glass bottle with its cork held on by wire.
    “You’re not giving him that , are you?” said Magrat. “That’s your medicinal whisky!”
    “And you always tell people it’s strictly for external use only,” said Agnes.
    “Ah, the Nac mac Feegle are a hardheaded race,” said Nanny, handing it down to the tiny man. To Agnes’s amazement, he grasped a bottle bigger than himself with insolent ease. “There you go, man. Share it with your mates, ’cos I know they’re around here somewhere.”
    There was a clink from the dresser. The witches looked up. Hundreds of pixies had simply appeared among the ornaments. Most of them wore pointed hats that curved so that the point was practically pointing down, and they all carried swords.
    “Amazin’ how they can just fade into the foreground like that,” said Nanny. “That’s what’s kept ’em so safe all these years. That and killin’ most people who saw ’em, of course.”
    Greebo, very quietly, went and sat under her chair.
    “So…you gentlemen have been turned out by the vampires, have ye?” said Nanny, as the bottle bobbed through the throng. A roar went up.
    “Blaznet!”
    “Ach, yon weezit fash’ deveel!”
    “Arnoch, a hard tickut!”
    “Bigjobs!”
    “I daresay you can stop in Lancre,” said Nanny, above the din.
    “Just a moment, Nanny—” Magrat began.
    Nanny waved a hand at her hurriedly. “There’s that island up on the lake,” she went on, raising her voice. “It’s where the herons nest. Just the place, eh? Lots of fish, lots of hunting up the valley.”
    The blue pixies went into a huddle. Then one of them looked up.
    “Priznae? Yowl’s nae brennit, moy ghail!”
    “Oh, you’d be left to yourself,” said Nanny. “But no stealing cattle, eh?”
    “ These steal cattle ?” said Agnes. “Full-size cattle? How many of them does it take?”
    “Four.”
    “Four?”
    “One under each foot. Seen ’em do it. You see a cow in a field, mindin’ its own business, next minute the grass is rustlin’, some little bugger shouts ‘hup, hup, hup’ and the poor beast goes past voom! without its legs movin’,” said Nanny. “They’re stronger’n cockroaches. You step on a pixie, you’d better be wearing good thick soles.”
    “Nanny, you can’t give them the island! It doesn’t belong to you!” said Magrat.
    “It doesn’t belong to anyone,” said Nanny.
    “It