Carpe Jugulum

about it at all,” said the voice behind him.
    It sounded fainter. He felt Granny clutch his arm to steady herself…
    “Are you all right?” he said.
    “I wish this creature would go faster…I ain’t entirely myself.”
    “We could stop for a rest?”
    “No! Not far now! Oh, I’ve been so stupid …”
    The thunder grumbled. He felt her grip lessen, and heard her hit the ground.
    Oats leapt down. Granny Weatherwax was lying awkwardly on the moss, her eyes closed. He took her wrist. There was a pulse there, but it was horribly weak. She felt icy cold.
    When he patted her face she opened her eyes.
    “If you raise the subject of religion at this point,” she wheezed, “I’ll give you such a hidin’…” Her eyes shut again.
    Oats sat down to get his breath back. Icy cold…yes, there was something cold about all of her, as though she always pushed heat away. Any kind of warmth.
    He heard the sound of the horse again, and the faint jingle of a harness. It stopped a little way away.
    “Hello?” said Oats, standing up. He strained to see the rider in the darkness, but there was just a dim shape farther along the track.
    “Are you following us? Hello?”
    He took a few steps and made out the horse, head bowed against the rain. The rider was just a darker shadow in the night.
    Suddenly awash with dread, Oats ran and slithered back to Granny’s silent form. He struggled out of his drenched coat and put it over her, for whatever good that would do, and looked around desperately for anything that could make a fire. Fire , that was the thing. It brought life and drove away the darkness.
    But the trees were tall firs, dripping wet with dank bracken underneath among the black trunks. There was nothing that would burn here.
    He fished hurriedly in his pocket and found a waxed box with his last few matches in it. Even a few dry twigs or a tuft of grass would do, anything that’d dry out another handful of twigs…
    Rain oozed through his shirt. The air was full of water.
    Oats hunched over so that his hat kept the drips off, and pulled out the Book of Om for the comfort that it brought. In times of trouble, Om would surely show the way—
    …I’ve already got a hot water bottle…
    “Damn you,” he said, under his breath.
    He opened the book at random, struck a match and read:
    “…and in that time, in the land of the Cyrinites, there was a multiplication of camels…”
    The match hissed out.
    No help there, no clue. He tried again.
    “…and looked upon Gul-Arah, and the lamentation of the desert, and rode then to…”
    Oats remembered the vampire’s mocking smile. What words could you trust? He struck the third match with shaking hands and flicked the book open again and read, in the weak dancing light:
    “…and Brutha said to Simony, ‘Where there is darkness we will make a great light…’”
    The match died. And there was darkness.
    Granny Weatherwax groaned. At the back of his mind, Oats thought he could hear the sounds of hooves, slowly approaching.
    Oats knelt in the mud and tried a prayer, but there was no answering voice from the sky. There never had been. He’d been told never to expect one. That wasn’t how Om worked anymore. Alone of all the gods, he’d been taught, Om delivered the answers straight into the depths of the head. Since the prophet Brutha, Om was the silent god. That’s what they said.
    If you didn’t have faith, then you weren’t anything. There was just the dark.
    He shuddered in the gloom. Was the god silent, or was there no one to speak?
    He tried praying again, more desperately this time, fragments of childish prayer, losing control of the words and even of their direction, so that they tumbled out and soared away into the universe addressed simply to The Occupier.
    The rain dripped off his hat.
    He knelt and waited in the wet darkness, and listened to his own mind, and remembered, and took out the Book of Om once more.
    And made a great light.

The coach thundered through pine trees by a lake, struck a tree root, lost a wheel and skidded to a halt on its side as the horses bolted.
    Igor picked himself up, lurched to the coach and raised a door.
    “Thorry about that,” he said. “I’m afraid thith alwayth happenth when the marthter ithn’t on board. Everyone all right down there?”
    A hand grabbed him by the throat.
    “You could have warned us!” Nanny growled. “We were thrown all over the place! Where the hell are we? Is this Slake?”
    A match