Wyrd Sisters

stage backed away from the sheer force of her exultation.
    “Well, I’ve looked underneath,” said the duchess. “I know what drives people. It’s fear. Sheer, deep-down fear. There’s not one of you who doesn’t fear me, I can make you widdle your drawers out of terror, and now I’m going to take—”
    At this point Nanny Ogg hit her on the back of the head with the cauldron.
    “She does go on, doesn’t she?” she said conversationally, as the duchess collapsed. “She was a bit eccentric, if you ask me.”
    There was a long, embarrassed silence.
    Granny Weatherwax coughed. Then she treated the soldiers holding her to a bright, friendly smile, and pointed to the mound that was now the duchess.
    “Take her away and put her in a cell somewhere,” she commanded. The men snapped to attention, grabbed the duchess by her arms, and pulled her upright with considerable difficulty.
    “Gently, mind,” said Granny.
    She rubbed her hands together and turned to Tomjon, who was watching her with his mouth open.
    “Depend on it,” she hissed. “Here and now, my lad, you don’t have a choice. You’re the King of Lancre.”
    “But I don’t know how to be a king!”
    “We all seed you! You had it down just right, including the shouting.”
    “That’s just acting!”
    “Act, then. Being a king is, is—” Granny hesitated, and snapped her fingers at Magrat. “What do you call them things, there’s always a hundred of them in anything?”
    Magrat looked bewildered. “Do you mean percents?” she said.
    “Them,” agreed Granny. “Most of the percents in being a king is acting, if you ask me. You ought to be good at it.”
    Tomjon looked for help into the wings, where Hwel should have been. The dwarf was in fact there, but he wasn’t paying much attention. He had the script in front of him, and was rewriting furiously.

    B UT I ASSURE YOU, YOU ARE NOT DEAD . T AKE IT FROM ME .
    The duke giggled. He had found a sheet from somewhere and had draped it over himself, and was sidling along some of the castle’s more deserted corridors. Sometimes he would go “whoo-oo” in a low voice.
    This worried Death. He was used to people claiming that they were not dead, because death always came as a shock, and a lot of people had some trouble getting over it. But people claiming that they were dead with every breath in their body was a new and unsettling experience.
    “I shall jump out on people,” said the duke dreamily. “I shall rattle my bones all night, I shall perch on the roof and foretell a death in the house—”
    T HAT’S BANSHEES .
    “I shall if I want,” said the duke, with a trace of earlier determination. “And I shall float through walls, and knock on tables, and drip ectoplasm on anyone I don’t like. Ha. Ha.”
    I T WON’T WORK . L IVING PEOPLE AREN’T ALLOWED TO BE GHOSTS . I’ M SORRY .
    The duke made an unsuccessful attempt to float through a wall, gave up, and opened a door out onto a crumbling section of the battlements. The storm had died away a bit, and a thin rind of moon lurked behind the clouds like a ticket tout for eternity.
    Death stalked through the wall behind him.
    “Well then,” said the duke, “if I’m not dead, why are you here?”
    He jumped up onto the wall and flapped his sheet.
    W AITING .
    “Wait forever, bone face!” said the duke triumphantly. “I shall hover in the twilight world, I shall find some chains to shake, I shall—”
    He stepped backward, lost his balance, landed heavily on the wall and slid. For a moment the remnant of his right hand scrabbled ineffectually at the stonework, and then it vanished.
    Death is obviously potentially everywhere at the same time, and in one sense it is no more true to say that he was on the battlements, picking vaguely at non-existent particles of glowing metal on the edge of his scythe blade, than that he was waist-deep in the foaming, rock-toothed waters in the depths of Lancre gorge, his calcareous gaze sweeping downward and stopping abruptly at a point where the torrent ran a few treacherous inches over a bed of angular pebbles.
    After a while the duke sat up, transparent in the phosphorescent waves.
    “I shall haunt their corridors,” he said, “and whisper under the doors on still nights.” His voice grew fainter, almost lost in the ceaseless roar of the river. “I shall make basket chairs creak most alarmingly, just you wait and see.”
    Death grinned at him.
    N OW YOU’RE TALKING .
    It started to