Wyrd Sisters

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    Hwel didn’t like the Ramtops, which was odd because it was traditional dwarf country and he was a dwarf. But he’d been banished from his tribe years ago, not only because of his claustrophobia but also because he had a tendency to daydream. It was felt by the local dwarf king that this is not a valuable talent for someone who is supposed to swing a pickaxe without forgetting what he is supposed to hit with it, and so Hwel had been given a very small bag of gold, the tribe’s heartfelt best wishes, and a firm goodbye.
    It had happened that Vitoller’s strolling players had been passing through at the time, and the dwarf had ventured one small copper coin on a performance of The Dragon of the Plains . He had watched it without a muscle moving in his face, gone back to his lodgings, and in the morning had knocked on Vitoller’s latty with the first draft of King Under the Mountain . It wasn’t in fact very good, but Vitoller had been perceptive enough to see that inside the hairy bullet head was an imagination big enough to bestride the world and so, when the strolling players strolled off, one of them was running to keep up.
    Particles of raw inspiration sleet through the universe all the time. Every once in a while one of them hits a receptive mind, which then invents DNA or the flute sonata form or a way of making light bulbs wear out in half the time. But most of them miss. Most people go through their lives without being hit by even one.
    Some people are even more unfortunate. They get them all .
    Such a one was Hwel. Enough inspirations to equip a complete history of the performing arts poured continuously into a small heavy skull designed by evolution to do nothing more spectacular than be remarkably resistant to axe blows.
    He licked his quill and looked bashfully around the camp. No one was watching. He carefully lifted up the Wizard and revealed another stack of paper.
    It was another potboiler. Every page was stained with sweat and the words themselves scrawled across the manuscript in a trellis of blots and crossings-out and tiny scribbled insertions. Hwel stared at it for a moment, alone in a world that consisted of him, the next blank page and the shouting, clamoring voices that haunted his dreams.
    He began to write.
    Free of Hwel’s never-too-stringent attention, Tomjon pushed open the lid of the props hamper and, in the methodical way of the very young, began to unpack the crowns.
    The dwarf stuck out his tongue as he piloted the errant quill across the ink-speckled page. He’d found room for the star-crossed lovers, the comic grave-diggers and the hunchback king. It was the cats and the roller skates that were currently giving him trouble…
    A gurgle made him look up.
    “For goodness sake, lad,” he said. “It hardly fits. Put it back.”

    The Disc rolled into winter.
    Winter in the Ramtops could not honestly be described as a magical frosty wonderland, each twig laced with confections of brittle ice. Winter in the Ramtops didn’t mess about; it was a gateway straight through to the primeval coldness that lived before the creation of the world. Winter in the Ramtops was several yards of snow, the forests a mere collection of shadowy green tunnels under the drifts. Winter meant the coming of the lazy wind, which couldn’t be bothered to blow around people and blew right through them instead. The idea that Winter could actually be enjoyable would never have occurred to Ramtop people, who had eighteen different words for snow. *
    The ghost of King Verence prowled the battlements, bereft and hungry, and stared out across his beloved forests and waited his chance.
    It was a winter of portents. Comets sparkled against the chilled skies at night. Clouds shaped mightily like whales and dragons drifted over the land by day. In the village of Razorback a cat gave birth to a two-headed kitten, but since Greebo, by dint of considerable effort, was every male ancestor for the last thirty generations this probably wasn’t all that portentous.
    However, in Bad Ass a cockerel laid an egg and had to put up with some very embarrassing personal questions. In Lancre town a man swore he’d met a man who had actually seen with his own eyes a tree get up and walk. There was a short sharp shower of shrimps. There were odd lights in the sky. Geese walked backward. Above all of this flared the great curtains of cold fire that were the Aurora Coriolis, the Hublights, whose frosty tints illuminated