Wyrd Sisters

away like a couple of ninnies. Granny stopped her hand in the process of patting her own iron-hard bun, and cleared her throat meaningfully.
    “We’d like to talk to you, Mr. Vitoller.” She indicated the actors, who were dismantling the set and staying well out of her way, and added in a conspiratorial whisper, “Somewhere private.”
    “Dear lady, but of a certain,” he said. “Currently I have lodgings in yonder esteemed watering hole.”
    The witches looked around. Eventually Magrat risked, “You mean in the pub?”

    It was cold and drafty in the Great Hall of Lancre Castle, and the new chamberlain’s bladder wasn’t getting any younger. He stood and squirmed under the gaze of Lady Felmet.
    “Oh, yes,” he said. “We’ve got them all right. Lots.”
    “And people don’t do anything about them?” said the duchess.
    The chamberlain blinked. “I’m sorry?” he said.
    “People tolerate them?”
    “Oh, indeed,” said the chamberlain happily. “It’s considered good luck to have a witch living in your village. My word, yes.”
    “Why?”
    The chamberlain hesitated. The last time he had resorted to a witch it had been because certain rectal problems had turned the privy into a daily torture chamber, and the jar of ointment she had prepared had turned the world into a nicer place.
    “They smooth out life’s little humps and bumps,” he said.
    “Where I come from, we don’t allow witches,” said the duchess sternly. “And we don’t propose to allow them here. You will furnish us with their addresses.”
    “Addresses, ladyship?”
    “Where they live. I trust your tax gatherers know where to find them?”
    “Ah,” said the chamberlain, miserably.
    The duke leaned forward on his throne.
    “I trust,” he said, “that they do pay taxes?”
    “Not, exactly pay taxes, my lord,” said the chamberlain.
    There was silence. Finally the duke prompted, “Go on, man.”
    “Well, it’s more that they don’t pay, you see. We never felt, that is, the old king didn’t think…Well, they just don’t.”
    The duke laid a hand on his wife’s arm.
    “I see,” he said coldly. “Very well. You may go.”
    The chamberlain gave him a brief nod of relief and scuttled crabwise from the hall.
    “Well!” said the duchess.
    “Indeed.”
    “That was how your family used to run a kingdom, was it? You had a positive duty to kill your cousin. It was clearly in the interests of the species,” said the duchess. “The weak don’t deserve to survive.”
    The duke shivered. She would keep on reminding him. He didn’t, on the whole, object to killing people, or at least ordering them to be killed and then watching it happen. But killing a kinsman rather stuck in the throat or—he recalled—the liver.
    “Quite so,” he managed. “Of course, there would appear to be many witches, and it might be difficult to find the three that were on the moor.”
    “That doesn’t matter.”
    “Of course not.”
    “Put matters in hand.”
    “Yes, my love.”
    Matters in hand. He’d put matters in hand all right. If he closed his eyes he could see the body tumbling down the steps. Had there been a hiss of shocked breath, down in the darkness of the hall? He’d been certain they were alone. Matters in hand! He’d tried to wash the blood off his hand. If he could wash the blood off, he told himself, it wouldn’t have happened. He’d scrubbed and scrubbed. Scrubbed still he screamed.

    Granny wasn’t at home in public houses. She sat stiffly to attention behind her port-and-lemon, as if it were a shield against the lures of the world.
    Nanny Ogg, on the other hand, was enthusiastically downing her third drink and, Granny thought sourly, was well along that path which would probably end up with her usual dancing on the table, showing her petticoats and singing “The Hedgehog Can Never be Buggered at All.”
    The table was covered with copper coins. Vitoller and his wife sat at either end, counting. It was something of a race.
    Granny considered Mrs. Vitoller as she snatched farthings from under her husband’s fingers. She was an intelligent-looking woman, who appeared to treat her husband much as a sheepdog treats a favorite lamb. The complexities of the marital relationship were known to Granny only from a distance, in the same way that an astronomer can view the surface of a remote and alien world, but it had already occurred to her that a wife to Vitoller would have to be a very special woman with