Wyrd Sisters

exploding doors, and now these women were defying her in her own dungeons. She couldn’t be sure how she was supposed to react to the supernatural items, but she had very firm ideas about how she should tackle the last one.
    Her mouth opened like the gateway to a red hell. “Guards!” she yelled, and spotted the Fool hovering near the door. “Fool! Fetch the guards!”
    “They’re busy. We were just leaving,” said Granny. “Which one of you is the duke?”
    Felmet stared pink-eyed up at her from his half-crouch in the corner. A thin dribble of saliva escaped from the corner of his mouth, and he giggled.
    Granny looked closer. In the center of those streaming eyes something else looked back at her.
    “I’m going to give you no cause,” she said quietly. “But it would be better for you if you left this country. Abdicate, or whatever.”
    “In favor of whom?” said the duchess icily. “A witch?”
    “I won’t,” said the duke.
    “What did you say?”
    The duke pulled himself upright, brushed some of the dust off his clothes, and looked Granny full in the face. The coldness in the center of his eyes was larger.
    “I said I won’t,” he said. “Do you think a bit of simple conjuring would frighten me? I am the king by right of conquest, and you cannot change it. It is as simple as that, witch.”
    He moved closer.
    Granny stared at him. She hadn’t faced anything like this before. The man was clearly mad, but at the heart of his madness was a dreadful cold sanity, a core of pure interstellar ice in the center of the furnace. She’d thought him weak under a thin shell of strength, but it went a lot further than that. Somewhere deep inside his mind, somewhere beyond the event horizon of rationality, the sheer pressure of insanity had hammered his madness into something harder than diamond.
    “If you defeat me by magic, magic will rule,” said the duke. “And you can’t do it. And any king raised with your help would be under your power. Hag-ridden, I might say. That which magic rules, magic destroys. It would destroy you, too. You know it. Ha. Ha.”
    Granny’s knuckles whitened as he moved closer.
    “You could strike me down,” he said. “And perhaps you could find someone to replace me. But he would have to be a fool indeed, because he would know he was under your evil eye, and if he mispleased you, why, his life would be instantly forfeit. You could protest all you wished, but he’d know he ruled with your permission. And that would make him no king at all. Is this not true?”
    Granny looked away. The other witches hung back, ready to duck.
    “I said , is this not true?”
    “Yes,” said Granny. “It is true…”
    “Yes.”
    “…but there is one who could defeat you,” said Granny slowly.
    “The child? Let him come when he is grown. A young man with a sword, seeking his destiny.” The duke sneered. “Very romantic. But I have many years to prepare. Let him try.”
    Beside him King Verence’s fist smashed through the air and quite failed to connect.
    The duke leaned closer until his nose was an inch from Granny’s face.
    “Get back to your cauldrons, wyrd sisters,” he said softly.

    Granny Weatherwax stalked through the passages of Lancre Castle like a large, angry bat, the duke’s laughter echoing around her head.
    “You could give him boils or something,” said Nanny Ogg. “Hemorrhoids are good. That’s allowed. It won’t stop him ruling, it just means he’ll have to rule standing up. Always good for a laugh, that. Or piles.”
    Granny Weatherwax said nothing. If fury were heat, her hat would have caught fire.
    “Mind you, that’d probably make him worse,” said Nanny, running to keep up. “Same with toothache.” She gave a sideways glance at Granny’s twitching features.
    “You needn’t fret,” she said. “They didn’t do anything much. But thanks, anyway.”
    “I ain’t worried about you, Gytha Ogg,” snapped Granny. “I only come along ’cos Magrat was fretting. What I say is, if a witch can’t look after herself, she’s got no business calling herself a witch.”
    “Magrat done well with the woodwork, I thought.”
    Even in the grip of her sullen fury, Granny Weatherwax spared a nod.
    “She’s coming along,” she said. She looked up and down the corridor, and then leaned closer to Nanny Ogg’s ear.
    “I ain’t going to give him the pleasure of saying it,” she said, “but he’s got us beaten.”
    “Well, I don’t know,” said