Hogfather

all sorted out,” said the Dean.
    “Household gods,” said Ridcully. “That’s what they are, Chair?” He opened the drawer in his hat and took out his pipe.
    “Yes, Archchancellor. It says here they used to be the…local spirits, I suppose. They saw to it that the bread rose and the butter churned properly.”
    “Did they eat pencils? What was their attitude in the socks department?”
    “This was back in the time of the First Empire,” said the Chair of Indefinite Studies. “Sandals and togas and so on.”
    “Ah. Not noticeably socked?”
    “Not excessively so, no. And it was nine hundred years before Osric Pencillium first discovered, in the graphite-rich sands of the remote island of Sumtri, the small bush which, by dint of careful cultivation, he induced to produce the long—”
    “Yes, we can all see you’ve got the encyclopedia open under the table, Chair,” said Ridcully. “But I daresay things have changed a bit. Moved with the times. Bound to have been a few developments. Once they looked after the bread rising, now we have things that eat pencils and socks and see to it that you can never find a clean towel when you want one—”
    There was a distant tinkling.
    He stopped.
    “I just said that, didn’t I?” he said.
    The wizards nodded glumly.
    “And this is the first time anyone’s mentioned it?”
    The wizards nodded again.
    “Well, dammit, it’s amazing, you can never find a clean towel when—”
    There was a rising wheeee noise. A towel went by at shoulder height. There was a suggestion of many small wings.
    “That was mine,” said the Lecturer in Recent Runes reproachfully. The towel disappeared in the direction of the Great Hall.
    “Towel Wasps,” said the Dean. “Well done, Archchancellor.”
    “Well, I mean, dammit , it’s human nature, isn’t it?” said Ridcully hotly. “Things go wrong, things get lost, it’s natural to invent little creatures that—All right, all right, I’ll be careful. I’m just saying man is naturally a mythopoeic creature.”
    “What’s that mean?” said the Senior Wrangler.
    “Means we make things up as we go along,” said the Dean, not looking up.
    “Um…excuse me, gentlemen,” said Ponder Stibbons, who had been scribbling thoughtfully at the end of the table. “Are we suggesting that things are coming back? Do we think that’s a viable hypothesis?”
    The wizards looked at one another around the table.
    “Definitely viable.”
    “Viable, right enough.”
    “Yes, that’s the stuff to give the troops.”
    “What is? What’s the stuff to give the troops?”
    “Well…tinned rations? Decent weapons, good boots…that sort of thing.”
    “What’s that got to do with anything?”
    “Don’t ask me. He was the one who started talking about giving stuff to the troops.”
    “Will you lot shut up? No one’s giving anything to the troops!”
    “Oh, shouldn’t they have something? It’s Hogswatch, after all.”
    “Look, it was just a figure of speech, all right? I just meant I was fully in agreement. It’s just colorful language. Good grief, you surely can’t think I’m actually suggesting giving stuff to the troops, at Hogswatch or any other time!”
    “You weren’t?”
    “No!”
    “That’s a bit mean, isn’t it?”
    Ponder just let it happen. It’s because their minds are so often involved with deep and problematic matters, he told himself, that their mouths are allowed to wander around making a nuisance of themselves.
    “I don’t hold with using that thinking machine,” said the Dean. “I’ve said this before. It’s meddling with the cult. The oc cult has always been good enough for me, thank you very much.”
    “On the other hand it’s the only person round here who can think straight and it does what it’s told,” said Ridcully.

    The sleigh roared through the snow, leaving rolling trails in the sky.
    “Oh, what fun,” muttered Albert, hanging on tightly.
    The runners hit a roof near the University and the pigs trotted to a halt.
    Death looked at the hourglass again.
    O DD , he said.
    “It’s a scythe job, then?” said Albert. “You won’t be wanting the false beard and the jolly laugh?” He looked around, and puzzlement replaced sarcasm. “Hey…how could anyone be dead up here?”
    Someone was. A corpse lay in the snow.
    It was clear that the man had only just died. Albert squinted up at the sky.
    “There’s nowhere to fall from and there’s no footprints in the snow,” he said,