She sighed again. ‘Wish I was going to Genua,’^{4} she said. ‘I could do with the warmth. And it’s Fat Tuesday coming up. Always went to Genua for Fat Tuesday in the old days.’

There was an expectant silence.

Then Death said, YOU SURELY ARE NOT ASKING ME TO GRANT A WISH?

‘Hah! No-one grants a fairy godmother’s wishes.’ Desiderata had that inward look again, her voice talking to herself. ‘See? I got to get the three of them to Genua. Got to get ’em there because I’ve seen ’em there. Got to be all three. And that ain’t easy, with people like them. Got to use headology. Got to make ’em send ’emselves. Tell Esme Weatherwax she’s got to go somewhere and she won’t go out of contrariness, so tell her she’s not to go and she’ll run there over broken glass. That’s the thing about the Weatherwaxes, see. They don’t know how to be beaten.’

Something seemed to strike her as funny.

‘But one of ’em’s going to have to learn.’

Death said nothing. From where he sat, Desiderata reflected, losing was something that everyone learned.

She drained her tea. Then she stood up, put on her pointy hat with a certain amount of ceremony, and hobbled out of the back door.

There was a deep trench dug under the trees a little way from the house, down into which someone had thoughtfully put a short ladder. She climbed in and, with some difficulty, heaved the ladder on to the leaves. Then she lay down. She sat up.

‘Mr Chert the troll^{5} down at the sawmill does a very good deal on coffins, if you don’t mind pine.’

I SHALL DEFINITELY BEAR IT IN MIND.

‘I got Hurker the poacher to dig the hole out for me,’ she said conversationally, ‘and he’s goin’ to come along and fill it in on his way home. I believe in being neat. Take it away, maestro.’

WHAT? OH. A FIGURE OF SPEECH.

He raised his scythe.

Desiderata Hollow went to her rest.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘that was easy. What happens now?’

And this is Genua. The magical kingdom. The diamond city. The fortunate country.

In the centre of the city a woman stood between two mirrors, watching herself reflected all the way to infinity.

The mirrors were themselves in the centre of an octagon of mirrors, open to the sky on the highest tower of the palace. There were so many reflections, in fact, that it was only with extreme difficulty that you could tell where the mirrors ended and the real person began.

Her name was Lady Lilith de Tempscire,^{6} although she had answered to many others in the course of a long and eventful life. And that was something you learned to do early on, she’d found. If you wanted to get anywhere in this world — and she’d decided, right at the start, that she wanted to get as far as it was possible to go — you wore names lightly, and you took power anywhere you found it. She had buried three husbands, and at least two of them had been already dead.

And you moved around a lot. Because most people didn’t move around much. Change countries and your name and, if you had the right manner, the world was your mollusc. For example, she’d had to go a mere hundred miles to become a Lady.

She’d go to any lengths now …

The two main mirrors were set almost, but not quite, facing one another, so that Lilith could see over her shoulder and watch her images curve away around the universe inside the mirror.

She could feel herself pouring into herself, multiplying itself via the endless reflections.

When Lilith sighed and strode out from the Space between the mirrors the effect was startling. Images of Lilith hung in the air behind her for a moment, like three-dimensional shadows, before fading.

So … Desiderata was dying. Interfering old baggage. She deserved death. She’d never understood the kind of power she’d had. She was one of those people afraid to do good for fear of doing harm, who took it all so seriously that they’d constipate themselves with moral anguish before granting the wish of a single ant.

Lilith looked down and out over the city. Well, there were no barriers now. The stupid voodoo woman in the swamp was a mere distraction, with no understanding.

Nothing stood in the way of what Lilith liked more than anything else.

A happy ending.

Up on the mountain, the sabbat had settled down a bit.

Artists and writers have always had a rather exaggerated idea about what goes on at a witches’ sabbat. This comes from spending too much time in small rooms with the curtains drawn, instead of getting out in the healthy fresh air.

For example, there’s the dancing around naked. In the average temperate climate there are very few nights when anyone would dance around at midnight with no clothes on, quite apart from the question of stones, thistles, and sudden hedgehogs.

Then there’s all that business with goat-headed gods. Most witches don’t believe in gods. They know that the gods exist, of course. They even deal with them occasionally. But they don’t believe in them. They know them too well. It would be like believing in the postman.

And there’s the food and drink — the bits of reptile and so on. In fact, witches don’t go for that sort of thing. The worst you can say about the eating habits of the older type of witch is that they tend to like ginger biscuits dipped in tea with so much sugar in it that the spoon won’t move and will drink it out of the saucer if they think it’s too hot. And do so with appreciative noises more generally associated with the cheaper type of plumbing system. Legs of toad and so on might be better than this.

Then there’s the mystic ointments. By sheer luck, the artists and writers are on firmer ground here. Most witches are elderly, which is when ointments start to have an attraction, and at least two of those present tonight were wearing Granny Weatherwax’s famous goose-grease-and-sage chest liniment.^{7} This didn’t make you fly and see visions, but it did prevent colds, if only because the distressing smell that developed around about the second week kept everyone else so far away you couldn’t catch anything from them.

And finally there’s sabbats themselves. Your average witch is not, by nature, a social animal as far as other witches are concerned. There’s a conflict of dominant personalities. There’s a group of ringleaders without a ring. There’s the basic unwritten rule of witchcraft, which is ‘Don’t do what you will, do what I say.’ The natural size of a coven is one. Witches only get together when they can’t avoid it.

Like now.

The conversation, given Desiderata’s absence, had naturally turned to the increasing shortage of witches.^[6]

‘What, no-one?’ said Granny Weatherwax.

‘No-one,’ said Gammer Brevis.

‘I call that terrible,’ said Granny. ‘That’s disgustin’.’

‘Eh?’ said Old Mother Dismass.

‘She calls it disgusting!’ shouted Gammer Brevis.

‘Eh?’

‘There’s no girl to put forward! To take Desiderata’s place!’

‘Oh.’

The implications of this sank in.

‘If anyone doesn’t want their crusts I’ll ’ave ’em,’ said Nanny Ogg.

‘We never had this sort of thing in my young days,’ said Granny. ‘There was a dozen witches this side of the mountain alone. Of course, that was before all this’ — she made a face — ‘making your own entertainment. There’s far too much of this making your own entertainment these days. We never made our own entertainment when I was a girl. We never had time.’

‘Tempers fuggit,’ said Nanny Ogg.

‘What?’

‘Tempers fuggit. Means that was then and this is now,’^{8} said Nanny.

‘I don’t need no-one to tell me that, Gytha Ogg. I know when now is.’

‘You got to move with the times.’

‘I don’t see why. Don’t see why we—’

‘So I reckon we got to shift the boundaries again,’ said Gammer Brevis.

‘Can’t do that,’ said Granny Weatherwax promptly. ‘I’m doing four villages already. The broomstick hardly has time to cool down.’

‘Well, with Mother Hollow passing on, we’re definitely short handed,’ said Gammer Brevis. ‘I know she didn’t do a lot, what with her other work, but she was there. That’s what it’s all about. Being there. There’s got to be a local witch.’

The four witches stared gloomily at the fire. Well, three of them did. Nanny Ogg, who tended to look on the cheerful side, made toast.

‘They’ve got a wizard in, down in Creel Springs,’ said Gammer Brevis. ‘There wasn’t anyone to take over when old Granny Hopliss passed on, so they sent off to Ankh-Morpork for a wizard. An actual wizard. With a staff. He’s got a shop there and everything, with a brass sign on the door. It says “Wizard”.’

The witches sighed.

‘Mrs Singe passed on,’ said Gammer Brevis. ‘And Gammer Peavey passed on.’

‘Did she? Old Mabel Peavey?’ said Nanny Ogg, through a shower of crumbs. ‘How old was she?’

‘One hundred and nineteen,’ said Gammer Brevis. ‘I said to her, “You don’t want to go climbing mountains at your age” but she wouldn’t listen.’

‘Some people are like that,’ said Granny. ‘Stubborn as mules. Tell them they mustn’t do something and they won’t stop till they’ve tried it.’

‘I actually heard her very last words,’ said Gammer.

‘What did she say?’ said Granny.

‘As I recall, “oh bugger”,’ said Gammer.

‘It’s the way she would have wanted to go,’ said Nanny Ogg. The other witches nodded.

‘You know … we could be looking at the end of witchcraft in these parts,’ said Gammer Brevis.

They stared at the fire again.

‘I don’t ’spect anyone’s brought any marshmallows?’ said Nanny Ogg, hopefully.

Granny Weatherwax looked at her sister witches. Gammer Brevis she couldn’t stand; the old woman taught school on the other side of the mountain, and had a nasty habit of being reasonable when provoked. And Old Mother Dismass was possibly the most useless sibyl in the history of oracular revelation. And Granny really couldn’t be having at all with Nanny Ogg, who was her best friend.

‘What about young Magrat?’ said Old Mother Dismass innocently. ‘Her patch runs right alongside Desiderata’s. Maybe she could take on a bit extra?’

Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg exchanged glances.

‘She’s gone funny in the head,’ said Granny.

‘Now, come on, Esme,’ said Nanny Ogg.

‘Well, I call it funny,’ said Granny. ‘You can’t tell me that saying all that stuff about relatives isn’t going funny in the head.’

‘She didn’t say that,’ said Nanny. ‘She said she wanted to relate to herself.’

‘That’s what I said,’ said Granny Weatherwax. ‘I told her: Simplicity Garlick was your mother, Araminta Garlick was your granny. Yolande Garlick is your aunt and you’re your … you’re your me.’

She sat back with the satisfied look of someone who has solved everything anyone could ever want to know about a personal identity crisis.

‘She wouldn’t listen,’ she added.

Gammer Brevis wrinkled her forehead.

‘Magrat?’ she said. She tried to get a mental picture of the Ramtops’ youngest witch and recalled — well, not a face, just a slightly watery-eyed expression of hopeless goodwill wedged between a body like a maypole and hair like a haystack after a gale. A relentless doer of good works. A worrier. The kind of person who rescued small lost baby birds and cried when they died, which is the function kind old Mother Nature usually reserves for small lost baby birds.

‘Doesn’t sound like her,’ she said.

‘And she said she wanted to be more self-assertive,’ said Granny.

‘Nothing wrong with being self-assertive,’ said Nanny. ‘Self-asserting’s what witching’s all about.’

‘I never said there was anything wrong with it,’ said Granny. ‘I told her there was nothing wrong with it. You can be as self-assertive as you like, I said, just so long as you do what you’re told.’

‘Rub this on and it’ll clear up in a week or two,’ said Old Mother Dismass.

The other three witches watched her expectantly, in case there was going to be anything else. It became clear that there wasn’t.

‘And she’s running — what’s that she’s running, Gytha?’ said Granny.

‘Self-defence classes,’ said Nanny.

‘But she’s a witch,’ Gammer Brevis pointed out.

‘I told her that,’ said Granny Weatherwax, who had walked nightly without fear in the bandit-haunted forests of the mountains all her life in the certain knowledge that the darkness held nothing more terrible than she was. ‘She said that wasn’t the point. Wasn’t the point. That’s what she said.’

‘No-one goes to them, anyway,’ said Nanny Ogg.

‘I thought she was going to get married to the king,’ said Gammer Brevis.

‘Everyone did,’ said Nanny. ‘But you know Magrat. She tends to be open to Ideas. Now she says she refuses to be a sex object.’

They all thought about this. Finally Gammer Brevis said, slowly, in the manner of one surfacing from the depths of fascinated cogitation, ‘But she’s never been a sex object.’

‘I’m pleased to say I don’t even know what a sex object is,’ said Granny Weatherwax firmly.

‘I do,’ said Nanny Ogg.

They looked at her.

‘Our Shane brought one home from foreign parts once.’

They carried on looking at her.

‘It was brown and fat and had beads on and a face and two holes for the string.’

This didn’t seem to avert their gaze.

‘Well, that’s what he said it was,’ said Nanny.

‘I think you’re talking about a fertility idol,’ said Gammer Brevis helpfully.

Granny shook her head.

‘Doesn’t sound much like Magrat to me —’ she began.

‘You can’t tell me that’s worth tuppence,’ said Old Mother Dismass, from whatever moment of time she was currently occupying.

No-one was ever quite sure which it was.

It was an occupational hazard for those gifted with second sight. The human mind isn’t really designed to be sent rocketing backwards and forwards along the great freeway of time and can become, as it were, detached from its anchorage, seeing randomly into the past and the future and only occasionally into the present. Old Mother Dismass was temporally unfocused. This meant that if you spoke to her in August she was probably listening to you in March. It was best just to say something now and hope she’d pick it up next time her mind was passing through.

Granny waved her hands experimentally in front of Old Mother Dismass’s unseeing eyes.

‘She’s gone again,’ she said.

‘Well, if Magrat can’t take it on there’s Millie Hopgood from over Slice way,’ said Gammer Brevis. ‘She’s a hardworking girl. Mind you, she’s got a worse squint than Magrat.’

‘Nothing wrong with that. A squint looks good on a witch,’ said Granny Weatherwax.

‘But you have to know how to use it,’ said Nanny Ogg. ‘Old Gertie Simmons used to have a squint and she was always putting the evil influence on the end of her own nose. We can’t have people thinkin’ that if you upsets a witch she curses and mutters and then her own nose drops off.’

They all stared at the fire again.

‘I suppose Desiderata wouldn’t have chosen her own successor?’ said Gammer Brevis.

‘Can’t go doin’ that,’ said Granny Weatherwax. ‘That’s not how we do things in these parts.’