Lords and Ladies

stopped.
    It couldn’t have been done from life. In the days of this queen, the only paint known locally was a sort of blue, and generally used on the body. But a few generations ago King Lully I had been a bit of a historian and a romantic. He’d researched what was known of the early days of Lancre, and where actual evidence had been a bit sparse he had, in the best traditions of the keen ethnic historian, inferred from revealed self-evident wisdom * and extrapolated from associated sources. He’d commissioned the portrait of Queen Ynci the Short-Tempered, one of the founders of the kingdom.
    She had a helmet with wings and a spike on it and a mass of black hair plaited into dreadlocks with blood as a setting lotion. She was heavily made-up in the woad-and-blood-and-spirals school of barbarian cosmetics. She had a 42 D-cup breastplate and shoulder pads with spikes. She had knee pads with spikes on, and spikes on her sandals, and a rather short skirt in the fashionable tartan and blood motif. One hand rested nonchalantly on a double-headed battle axe with a spike on it, the other caressed the hand of a captured enemy warrior. The rest of the captured enemy warrior was hanging from various pine trees in the background. Also in the picture was Spike, her favorite war pony, of the now extinct Lancre hill breed which was the same general shape and disposition as a barrel of gunpowder, and her war chariot, which picked up the popular spiky theme. It had wheels you could shave with.
    Magrat stared.
    They’d never mentioned this.
    They’d told her about tapestries, and embroidery, and farthingales, and how to shake hands with lords. They’d never told her about spikes.
    There was a sound at the end of the gallery, from back the way she’d come. She grabbed her skirts and ran.
    There were footsteps behind her, and laughter.
    Left down the cloisters, then along the dark passage above the kitchens, and past the—
    A shape moved in the shadows. Teeth flashed. Magrat raised the chair leg, and stopped in mid-strike.
    “Greebo?”
    Nanny Ogg’s cat rubbed against her legs. His hair was flat against his body. This unnerved Magrat even more. This was Greebo , undisputed king of Lancre’s cat population and father of most of it, in whose presence wolves trod softly and bears climbed trees. He was frightened.
    “Come here, you bloody idiot!”
    She grabbed him by the scruff of his scarred neck and ran on, while Greebo gratefully sank his claws into her arm to the bone * and scrambled up to her shoulder.
    She must be somewhere near the kitchen now, because that was Greebo’s territory. This was an unknown and shadowy area, terror incognita, where the flesh of carpets and the plaster pillars ran out and the stone bone of the castle showed through.
    She was sure there were footsteps behind her, very fast and light.
    If she hurried around the next corner—
    In her arms, Greebo tensed like a spring. Magrat stopped.
    Around the next corner—
    Without her apparently willing it, the hand holding the broken wood came up, moving slowly back.
    She stepped to the corner and stabbed in one movement. There was a triumphant hiss which turned into a screech as the wood scraped down the side of the waiting elf’s neck. It reeled away. Magrat bolted for the nearest doorway, weeping in panic, and wrenched at the handle. It swung open. She darted through, slammed the door, flailed in the dark for the bars, felt them clonk home, and collapsed on to her knees.
    Something hit the door outside.
    After a while Magrat opened her eyes, and then wondered if she really had opened her eyes, because the darkness was no less dark. There was a feeling of space in front of her. There were all sorts of things in the castle, old hidden rooms, anything…there could be a pit there, there could be anything . She fumbled for the doorframe, guided herself upright, and then groped cautiously in the general direction of the wall.
    There was a shelf. This was a candle. And this was a bundle of matches.
    So, she insisted above her own heartbeat, this was a room that got used recently. Most people in Lancre still used tinderboxes. Only the king could afford matches all the way from Ankh-Morpork. Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg got them too, but they didn’t buy them. They got given them. It was easy to get given things, if you were a witch.
    Magrat lit the stub of candle, and turned to see what kind of room she’d scuttled into.
    Oh, no…

    “Well, well,”