Wyrd Sisters

chain mail.
    “There’s a good cat,” said the Fool, and lowered him to the ground. “Go on, find your way home. Any home will do.”
    Greebo’s grin gradually faded, until there was nothing left but the cat. This was nearly as spooky as the opposite way around.
    He stretched and yawned to hide his embarrassment. Being called a good cat in the middle of one of his favorite stalking grounds wasn’t going to do anything for his prowl-credibility. He disappeared into the undergrowth.
    The Fool peered into the gloom. It dawned on him that while he liked forests, he liked them at one remove, as it were; it was nice to know that they were there, but the forests of the mind were not quite the same as real forests that, for example, you got lost in. They had more mighty oaks and fewer brambles. They also tended to be viewed in daylight, and the trees didn’t have malevolent faces and long scratchy branches. The trees of the imagination were proud giants of the forest. Most of the trees here appeared to be vegetable gnomes, mere trellises for fungi and ivy.
    The Fool was vaguely aware that you could tell which direction the Hub lay by seeing which side of the trees the moss grew on. A quick inspection of the nearby trunks indicated that, in defiance of all normal geography, the Hub lay everywhere.
    Greebo had vanished.
    The Fool sighed, removed his chain mail protection, and tinkled gently through the night in search of high ground. High ground seemed a good idea. The ground he was on at the moment appeared to be trembling. He was sure it shouldn’t do that.

    Magrat hovered on her broomstick several hundred feet above the Turnwise borders of Lancre, looking down on a sea of mist through which the occasional treetop poked like a seaweed-covered rock at high tide. A bulging moon floated above her, probably gibbous again. Even a decent thin crescent would have been better, she felt. More appropriate.
    She shivered, and wondered where Granny Weatherwax was at this moment.
    The old witch’s broomstick was known and feared throughout the skies of Lancre. Granny had been introduced to flying quite late in life, and after some initial suspicion had taken to it like a bluebottle to an ancient fish head. A problem, however, was that Granny saw every flight simply as a straight line from A to B and was unable to get alongside the idea that other users of the air might have any rights whatsoever; the flight migration patterns of an entire continent had been changed because of that simple fact. High-speed evolution among local birds had developed a generation that flew on their backs, so that they could keep a watchful eye on the skies.
    Granny’s implicit belief that everything should get out of her way extended to other witches, very tall trees and, on occasion, mountains.
    Granny had also browbeaten the dwarfs who lived under the mountains and in fear of their lives into speeding the thing up. Many an egg had been laid in midair by unsuspecting fowls who had suddenly glimpsed Granny bearing down on them, scowling over the top of the broomstick.
    “Oh dear,” thought Magrat. “I hope she hasn’t happened to someone.”
    A midnight breeze turned her gently around in the air, like an unsupported weathercock. She shivered and squinted at the moonlit mountains, the high Ramtops, whose freezing crags and ice-green chasms acknowledged no king or cartographer. Only on the Rimward side was Lancre open to the world; the rest of its borders looked as jagged as a wolf’s mouth and far more impassable. From up here it was possible to see the whole kingdom…
    There was a ripping noise in the sky above her, a blast of wind that spun her around again, and a Doppler-distorted cry of, “Stop dreaming, girl!”
    She gripped the bristles with her knees and urged the stick upward.
    It took several minutes to catch up with Granny, who was lying almost full length along her broomstick to reduce wind resistance. Dark treetops roared far below them as Magrat came alongside. Granny turned to her, holding her hat on with one hand.
    “Not before time,” she snapped. “I don’t reckon this one’s got more’n a few minutes flight left. Come on, get a move on.”
    She reached out a hand. So did Magrat. Unsteadily, the broomsticks bucking and dipping in one another’s slipstream, they touched fingertips.
    Magrat’s arm tingled as the power flowed up it. * Granny’s broomstick jerked forward.
    “Leave me a bit,” shouted Magrat. “I’ve