Carpe Jugulum

always find a way of coming back. Everyone knows that, who knows anything about vampires. If they’re not too hard to kill and it’s all a bit of an adventure for people, well, like as not they’ll just stake him or chuck him in the river and go home. Then he has a nice restful decade or so, bein’ dead, and comes back from the grave and away he goes again. That way he never gets totally wiped out and the lads of the village get some healthy exercise.”
    “The Magpyrs will come after us,” said Magrat, clutching the baby to her. “They’ll see we’re not in Lancre and they’ll know we couldn’t have gone down to the plains. They’ll find the smashed coach, too. They’ll find us, Nanny.”
    Nanny looked at the array of jars and bottles, and the stakes neatly arranged in order of size.
    “It’ll take them a little while,” she said. “We’ve got time to get…prepared.”
    She turned around with a bottle of blessed water in one hand, a crossbow loaded with a wooden bolt, and a bag of musty lemons in her mouth.
    “Eg oo it I ay,” she said.
    “Pardon?” said Magrat.
    Nanny spat out the lemons.
    “Now we’ll try things my way,” she said. “I’m not good at thinkin’ like Granny but I’m bloody good at actin’ like me. Head-ology’s for them as can handle it. Let’s kick some bat.”

The wind soughed across the moors on the edge of Lancre, and hissed through the heather.
    Around some old mounds, half buried in brambles, it shook the wet branches of a single thorn tree, and shredded the curling smoke that drifted up through the roots.
    There was a single scream.
    Down below, the Nac mac Feegle were doing their best, but strength is not the same as weight and mass and even with pixies hanging on to every limb and Big Aggie herself sitting on Verence’s chest he was still hard to control.
    “I think mebbe the drink was a wee bitty too trackle?” said Big Aggie’s man, looking down at Verence’s bloodshot eyes and foaming mouth. “I’m sayin’, mebbe it was wrong jus’ giving him fifty times more than we tak’. He’s not used to it…”
    Big Aggie shrugged.
    In the far corner of the barrow half a dozen pixies backed out of the hole they’d hacked into the next chamber, dragging a sword. For bronze, it was quite well preserved—the old chieftains of Lancre reckoned to be buried with their weapons in order to fight their enemies in the next world, and since you didn’t become a chieftain of ancient Lancre without sending a great many enemies to the next world, they liked to take weapons that could be relied upon to last.
    Under the direction of the old pixie, they maneuvered it within reached of Verence’s flailing hand.
    “Are ye scrat?” said Big Aggie’s man. “Yin! Tan! Tetra!”
    The Feegle leapt away in every direction. Verence rose almost vertically, bounced off the roof, grabbed the sword, hacked madly until he’d cut a hole through to the outside world, and escaped into the night.
    The pixies clustered around the walls of the barrow turned their eyes to their Kelda.
    Big Aggie nodded.
    “Big Aggie says ye’d best see him come to nae harm,” said the old pixie.
    A thousand small but very sharp weapons waved in the smoky air.
    “Hoons!”
    “Kill ’em a’!”
    “Nac mac Feegle!”
    A few seconds later the chamber was empty.

Nanny hurried across the castle’s main hall, burdened with stakes, and stopped dead.
    “What the hell’s that thing?” she said. “Takes up a whole wall!”
    “Oh, that wath the old Count’th pride and joy,” said Igor. “He wathn’t very modern, he alwayth thaid, but the Thentury of the Fruitbat had it’th compenthathionth. Thometimeth he’d play with it for hourth on end…”
    It was an organ, or possibly what an organ hoped to be when it grew up, because it dominated the huge room. A music lover to the core, Nanny couldn’t help trotting over to inspect it. It was black, its pipes framed and enclosed in intricate ebony fretwork, with the stops and keyboard made of dead elephant.
    “How does it work?” she said.
    “Water power,” said Igor proudly. “There’th an underground river. The marthter had thith made thpethially to hith own de-thign…”
    Nanny ran her fingers over a brass plate screwed above the keyboard.
    It read: HLISTEN TO ZER CHILTREN OFF DER NIGHT…VOT VONDERFUL MHUSICK DEY MAKE. MNFTRD. BY BERGHOLT STUTTLEY JOHNSON, ANKH-MORPORK .
    “It’s a Johnson,” she breathed. “I haven’t got my hands