Maskerade

on.

    A hatch flew open. The Ghost clambered out, looked down, and slammed the hatch shut. There was a yowl from below.
    Then he danced across the leads until he reached the gargoyle-encrusted parapet, black and silver in the moonlight. The wind caught at his cloak as he ran along the very edge of the roof and dropped down again near another door.
    And a gargoyle was suddenly no longer a gargoyle, but a figure that reached down suddenly and twitched off his mask.
    It was like cutting strings.
    “Good evening, Walter,” said Granny, as he sagged to his knees.
    “Hello Missus Weatherwax!”
    “Mistress,” Granny corrected him. “Now stand up.”
    There was a growl farther along the roof, and then a thump. Bits of trapdoor rose for a moment against the moonlight.
    “It’s nice up here, ain’t it?” said Granny. “There’s fresh air and stars. I thought: up or down? But there’s only rats down below.”
    In another swift movement she grabbed Walter’s chin and tilted it, just as Greebo pulled himself onto the roof with prolonged murder in his heart.
    “How does your mind work, Walter Plinge? If your house was on fire, what’s the first thing you’d try to take out?”
    Greebo stalked along the rooftop, growling. He liked rooftops in general, and some of his fondest memories involved them, but a trapdoor had just been slammed on his head and he was looking for anything he could disembowel.
    Then he recognized the shape of Walter Plinge as someone who had given him food. And, standing right next to him, the much more unwelcome shape of Granny Weatherwax, who had once caught him digging in her garden and had kicked him in the cucumbers.
    Walter said something. Greebo didn’t take much notice of it.
    Granny Weatherwax said: “Well done. A good answer. Greebo!”
    Greebo nudged Walter heavily in the back.
    “Want milluk right noaow! Purr, purr!”
    Granny thrust the mask at the cat. In the distance people were running up stairs and shouting.
    “You put this on! And you stay down real low, Walter Plinge. One man in a mask is pretty much like another, after all. And when they chase you, Greebo…give them a run for their money. Do it right and there could be—”
    “Yurr, I knoaow,” said Greebo despondently, taking the mask. It was turning out to be a long and busy evening for a kipper.
    Someone poked their head out of the stricken trapdoor. The light glinted off Greebo’s mask…and it had to be said, even by Granny, that he made a good Ghost. For one thing, his morphogenic field was trying to reassert itself. His claws could no longer even remotely be thought of as fingernails.
    He spat at the pursuit as they poured up the steps, arched his back dramatically on the very edge of the roof, and stepped off.
    One story down he thrust out an arm, caught a windowsill, and landed on the head of a gargoyle, which said “Oh, fank oo ver’ mush” in a reproachful voice.
    The pursuers looked down at him. Some of them had managed to get hold of flaming torches, because sometimes convention is too strong to be lightly denied.
    Greebo snarled defiance and dropped again, springing from sill to drain pipe to balcony and pausing every now and again for another dramatic pose and another snarl at the pursuers.
    “We’d better get after him, Corporal de Nobbs,” said one of them, who was staggering along behind.
    “We’d better get after him by carefully going back down the stairs, you mean. ’Cos somethin’ I drank don’t want to stay drunk. Much more runnin’ and I’ll be droppin’ a custard, I’m tellin’ you.”
    The other members of the posse also seemed to be reaching the conclusion that there was no extended future in chasing a man down the sheer wall of a building. As one mob they turned and, shouting and waving their torches in the air, headed back to the stairs.
    The parting crowd revealed Nanny Ogg, holding a pitchfork in one hand and a torch in the other and thrusting them both in the air while muttering, “Rhubarb, rhubarb.”
    Granny walked over and tapped her on the shoulder. “They’ve gone, Gytha.”
    “Rhuba—Oh, hello, Esme,” said Nanny, lowering the implements of righteous retribution. “I was just tagging along to see it didn’t get out of hand. Was that Greebo I saw just then?”
    “Yes.”
    “Awww, bless him,” said Nanny. “He looked a bit bothered, though. I hope he doesn’t happen to anybody.”
    “Where’s your broomstick?” said Granny.
    “It’s in the