Hogfather

HAS SPREAD SO FAST AND BACK IN TIME, TOO.
    “Never say die, master. That’s our motto, eh?” said the sacks, apparently with their mouth full.
    I CAN’T SAY IT’S EVER REALLY BEEN MINE.
    “I meant we’re not going to be intimidated by the certain prospect of complete and utter failure, master.”
    AREN’T WE? OH, GOOD. WELL, I SUPPOSE WE’D BETTER BE GOING. The figure picked up the reins. UP, GOUGER! UP, ROOTER! UP, TUSKER! UP, SNOUTER! GIDDYUP!
    The four large boars harnessed to the sleigh did not move.
    WHY DOESN’T THAT WORK? said the figure in a puzzled, heavy voice.
    “Beats me, master,” said the sacks.
    IT WORKS ON HORSES.
    “You could try ‘Pig-hooey!’”
    PIG-HOOEY. They waited. NO…DOESN’T SEEM TO REACH THEM.
    There was some whispering.
    REALLY? YOU THINK THAT WOULD WORK?
    “It’d bloody well work on me if I was a pig, master.”
    VERY WELL, THEN.
    The figure gathered up the reins again.
    APPLE! SAUCE!
    The pigs’ legs blurred. Silver light flicked across them, and exploded outward. They dwindled to a dot, and vanished.
    SQUEAK?
    The Death of Rats skipped across the snow, slid down a drain pipe and landed on the roof of a shed.
    There was a raven perched there. It was staring disconsolately at something.
    SQUEAK!
    “Look at that, willya?” said the raven rhetorically. It waved a claw at a bird feeder in the garden below. “They hangs up half a bloody coconut, a lump of bacon rind, a handful of peanuts in a bit of wire and they think they’re the gods’ gift to the nat’ral world. Huh. Do I see eyeballs? Do I see entrails? I think not. Most intelligent bird in the temperate latitudes an’ I gets the cold shoulder just because I can’t hang upside down and go twit, twit. Look at robins, now. Stroppy little evil buggers, fight like demons, but all they got to do is go bob-bob-bobbing along and they can’t move for bread crumbs. Whereas me myself can recite poems and repeat many hum’rous phrases—”
    SQUEAK!
    “Yes? What?”
    The Death of Rats pointed at the roof and then the sky and jumped up and down excitedly. The raven swiveled one eye upward.
    “Oh, yes. Him,” he said. “Turns up at this time of year. Tends to be associated distantly with robins, which—”
    SQUEAK! SQUEE IK IK IK! The Death of Rats pantomimed a figure landing in a grate and walking around a room. SQUEAK EEK IK IK, SQUEAK “HEEK HEEK HEEK!” IK IK SQUEAK!
    “Been overdoing the Hogswatch cheer, have you? Been rooting around in the brandy butter?”
    SQUEAK?
    The raven’s eyes revolved.
    “Look, Death’s Death. It’s a full-time job right? It’s not as though you can run, like, a window cleaning round on the side or nip round after work cutting people’s lawns.”
    SQUEAK!
    “Oh, please yourself.”
    The raven crouched a little to allow the tiny figure to hop on to its back, and then lumbered into the air.
    “Of course, they can go mental, your occult types,” it said, as it swooped over the moonlit garden. “Look at Old Man Trouble, for one—”
    SQUEAK.
    “Oh, I’m not suggesting—”

    Susan didn’t like Biers but she went there anyway, when the pressure of being normal got too much. Biers, despite the smell and the drink and the company, had one important virtue. In Biers no one took any notice. Of anything. Hogswatch was traditionally supposed to be a time for families but the people who drank in Biers probably didn’t have families; some of them looked as though they might have had litters, or clutches. Some of them looked as though they’d probably eaten their relatives, or at least someone’s relatives.
    Biers was where the undead drank. And when Igor the barman was asked for a Bloody Mary, he didn’t mix a metaphor.
    The regular customers didn’t ask questions, and not only because some of them found anything above a growl hard to articulate. None of them was in the answers business. Everyone in Biers drank alone, even when they were in groups. Or packs.
    Despite the decorations put up inexpertly by Igor the barman to show willing, * Biers was not a family place.
    Family was a subject Susan liked to avoid.
    Currently she was being aided in this by a gin and tonic. In Biers, unless you weren’t choosy, it paid to order a drink that was transparent because Igor also had undirected ideas about what you could stick on the end of a cocktail stick. If you saw something spherical and green, you just had to hope that it was an olive.
    She felt hot breath on her ear. A bogeyman