Carpe Jugulum

worse down below, where there’s really bad run-off,” said Nanny. “The plains have been cut off all winter before now…”
    She looked at the other way. The road wound farther into the mountains, awash but apparently sound.
    “Where’s the nearest village that way?” she said. “One with a good stone building in it? Slake, isn’t it? There’s a coaching inn up there.”
    “That’th right. Thlake.”
    “Well, we ain’t going anywhere on foot in this weather,” said Nanny. “Slake it’s got to be, then.”
    She got back into the coach and felt it turn around.
    “Is there a problem?” said Magrat. “Why are we going uphill?”
    “Road’s washed out,” said Nanny.
    “We’re heading into Uberwald?”
    “Yes.”
    “But there’s werewolves and vampires and—”
    “Yes, but not everywhere . We should be safe on the main road. Anyway, there’s not much of a choice.”
    “I suppose you’re right,” said Magrat reluctantly.
    “And it could be worse,” said Nanny.
    “How?”
    “Well…there could be snakes in here with us.”

Agnes saw the rocks rush past, looked down and saw the foam of the swollen river.
    The world spun around her when Vlad stopped in mid-air. Water washed over her toes.
    “Let there be…lightness,” he said. “You’d like to be as light as the air, wouldn’t you, Agnes?”
    “We—we’ve got broomsticks…” Agnes panted. Her life had just flashed past her eyes and wasn’t it dull ? Perdita added.
    “Useless cumbersome stupid things,” he said. “And they can’t do this— ”
    The walls of the gorge went past in a blur. The castle dropped away. Clouds drenched her. Then they unrolled as a silver-white fleece, under the silent cold light of the moon.
    Vlad wasn’t beside her. Agnes slowed in her rise, flung out her arms to grip what wasn’t there, and began to fall back—
    He appeared, laughing, and grabbed her around the waist.
    “—can they?” he said.
    Agnes couldn’t speak. Her life passing in front of her eyes one way had met it passing in front of her eyes going in the opposite direction, and words would fail her now until she could decide when now was.
    “And you haven’t seen anything yet,” said Vlad. Wisps of cloud coiled behind them as he raced forward.
    The clouds vanished under Agnes. They might have been as thin as smoke but their presence, their imitation of groundness , had been a comfort. Now they were a departing edge, and far below were the moonlit plains.
    “Ghjgh,” gurgled Agnes, too tense and terrified even to scream. Wheee! crowed Perdita, inside.
    “See that?” said Vlad, pointing. “See the light all around the Rim?”
    Agnes stared, because anything now was better than looking down.
    The sun was under the Disc. Around the dark Rim, though, it found its way up through the endless waterfall, creating a glowing band between the nighttime ocean and the stars. It was, indeed, beautiful, but Agnes felt that beauty was even more likely to be in the eye of the beholder if the feet of the beholder were on something solid. At ten thousand feet up, the eye of the beholder tends to water.
    Perdita thought it was beautiful. Agnes wondered if, should Agnes end up as a circle of pink splash marks on the rocks, Perdita would still be there.
    “Everything you want,” whispered Vlad. “Forever.”
    “I want to get down,” said Agnes.
    He let go.
    There was this about Agnes’s shape. It was a good one for falling. She turned automatically belly down, hair streaming behind her, and floated in the rushing wind.
    Oddly enough, the terror had gone. That had been fear of a situation out of her control. Now, arms outspread, skirts whipping her legs, eyes streaming in the freezing air, she could at least see what the future held even if it was not big enough to hold very much.
    Perhaps she could hit a snowbank, or deep water—
    It might have been worth a try, said Perdita. He doesn’t seem entirely bad.
    “Shut up.”
    It’d just be nice if you could stop looking as though you were wearing saddlebags under your skirt…
    “Shut up.”
    And it’d be nice if you didn’t hit the rocks like a balloon full of water…
    “Shut up. Anyway, I can see a lake. I think I can sort of angle across toward it.”
    At this speed it will be like hitting the ground.
    “How do you know that? I don’t know that. So how do you know?”
    Everyone knows that.
    Vlad appeared alongside Agnes, lounging on the air as though it were a