“And your new plan is…?” said Lacrimosa, stepping across the rubble.
“We’ll kill everyone. Not an original plan, I admit, but tried and tested,” said the Count. This met with general approval, but his daughter looked unsatisfied.
“What, everyone? All at once?”
“Oh, you can save some for later if you must.”
The Countess clutched his arm.
“Oh, this does so remind me of our honeymoon,” she said. “Don’t you remember those wonderful nights in Grjsknvij?”
“Oh, fresh morning of the world indeed,” said the Count, solemnly.
“Such romance…and we met such lovely people, too. Do you remember Mr. and Mrs. Harker?”
“Very fondly. I recall they lasted nearly all week. Now, listen all of you. Holy symbols will
not
hurt us. Holy water is just water—yes, I know, but Cryptopher just wasn’t concentrating. Garlic is just another member of the allium family. Do onions hurt us? Are we frightened of shallots? No. We’ve just got a bit tired, that’s all. Malicia, call up the rest of the clan. We will have a little holiday from reason. And afterward, in the morning, there will be room for a new world order I can’t be having with this at all…”
He rubbed his forehead. The Count prided himself on his mind, and tended it carefully. But right now it felt exposed, as though someone was looking over his shoulder. He wasn’t certain he was thinking right. She couldn’t have got into his head, could she? He’d had hundreds of years of experience. There was no way some village witch could get past his defenses. It stood to reason…
His throat felt parched. At least he could obey the call of his nature. But this time it was an oddly disquieting one.
“Do we have any…tea?” he said.
“What is tea?” said the Countess.
“It…grows on a bush, I think,” said the Count.
“How do you bite it, then?”
“You…er…lower it into boiling water, don’t you?” The Count shook his head, trying to free himself of this demonic urge.
“While it’s still alive?” said Lacrimosa, brightening up.
“…sweet biscuits…” mumbled the Count.
“I think you should try to get a grip, dear,” said the Countess.
“This…tea,” said Lacrimosa. “Is it…brown?”
“…yes…” whispered the Count.
“Because when we were in Escrow I was going to put the bite on one of them and I had this horrible mental picture of a cup full of the wretched stuff,” said his daughter.
The Count shook himself again.
“I don’t know what’s happening to me,” he said. “So let’s stick to what we
do
know, shall we? Obey our blood…”
The second casualty in the battle for the castle was Vargo, a lank young man who actually become a vampire because he thought he’d meet interesting girls, or any girls at all, and had been told he looked good in black. And then he’d found that a vampire’s interests always center, sooner or later, on the next meal, and hitherto he’d never really thought of the neck as the most interesting organ a girl could have.
Right now all he wanted to do was sleep, so as the vampires surged into the castle proper he sauntered gently away in the direction of his cellar and nice comfortable coffin. Of course he was hungry, since all he’d got in Escrow was a foot in the chest, but he had just enough sense of self-preservation to let the others get on with the hunting so that he could turn up later for the feast.
His coffin was in the center of the dim cellar, its lid lying carelessly on the floor beside it. He’d always been messy with the bedclothes, even as a human.
Vargo climbed in, twisted and turned a few times to get comfortable on the pillow, then pulled the lid down and latched it.
As the eye of narrative drew back from the coffin on its stand, two things happened. One happened comparatively slowly, and this was Vargo’s realization that he never recalled the coffin having a pillow before.
The other was Greebo deciding that he was as mad as hell and wasn’t going to take it anymore. He’d been shaken around in the wheely thing and then sat on by Nanny, and he was angry about that because he knew, in a dim animal way, that scratching Nanny might be the single most stupid thing he could do in the whole world, since no one else was prepared to feed him. This hadn’t helped his temper.
Then he’d encountered a dog, which had tried to lick him. He’d scratched and bitten it a few times, but this had no effect apart from encouraging it to try to be more friendly.
He’d finally found a comfy resting place and had curled up into a ball, and
now
someone was using him as a
cushion—
There wasn’t a great deal of noise. The coffin rocked a few times, and then pivoted around.
Greebo sheathed his claws, and went back to sleep.
“—burn, with a clear bright light—”
Splash, suck, splash.
“—and I in mine…Om be praised.”
Squelch, splash.
Oats had worked his way through most of the hymns he knew, even the old ones which you shouldn’t really sing anymore but you nevertheless remembered because the words were so good. He sang them loudly and defiantly, to hold back the night and the doubts. They helped take his mind off the weight of Granny Weatherwax. It was amazing how much she’d apparently gained in the last mile or so, especially whenever he fell over and she landed on top of him.
He lost one of his own boots in a mire. His hat was floating in a pool somewhere. Thorns had ripped his coat to tatters—
He slipped and fell once again as the mud shifted under his feet. Granny rolled off, and landed in a clump of sedge.
If Brother Melchio could only see him now…
The wowhawk swooped past and landed on the branch of a dead tree, a few yards away. Oats hated the thing. It appeared demonic. It flew even though it surely couldn’t see through the hood. Worse, whenever he thought about it, as now, the hooded head turned to fix him with an invisible stare. He took off his other useless shoe, its shiny leather all stained and cracked, and flung it inexpertly.
“Go away, you wicked creature!”
The bird didn’t stir. The shoe flew past it.
Then, as he tried to get to his feet, he smelled burning leather.
Two wisps of smoke were curling up from either side of the hood.
Oats reached to his neck for the security of the turtle, and it wasn’t there. It has cost him five
obols
in the Citadel, and it was too late now to reflect that perhaps he shouldn’t have hung it from a chain worth a tenth of an
obol.
It was probably lying in some pool, or buried in some muddy, squelching marsh…
Now the leather burned away, and the yellow glow from the holes was so bright he could barely see the outline of the bird. It turned the dank landscape into lines and shadows, put a golden edge on every tuft of grass and stricken tree—and winked out so quickly that it left Oats’s eyes full of purple explosions.
When he’d recovered his breath and his balance, the bird was swooping away down the moor.
He picked up Granny Weatherwax’s unconscious body and ran after it.
The track did lead downhill, at least. Mud and bracken slipped under his feet. Streams were running from every hole and gully. Half the time it seemed to him that he wasn’t walking, merely controlling a slide, bouncing off rocks, slithering through puddles of mud and leaves.
And then there was the castle, seen through a gap in the trees, lit by a flash of lightning. Oats staggered through a clump of thorn bushes, managed to keep upright down a slope of loose boulders, and collapsed on the road with Granny Weatherwax on top of him.
She stirred.
“…holiday from reason…kill them all…can’t be havin’ with this…” she murmured.
The wind blew a branchful of raindrops on her face, and she opened her eyes. For a moment they seemed to Oats to have red pupils, and then the icy blue gaze focused on him.
“Are we here, then?”
“Yes.”
“What happened to your holy hat?”
“It got lost,” said Oats abruptly. Granny peered closer.
“Your magic amulet’s gone too,” she said. “The one with the turtle and the little man on it.”
“It’s
not
a magic amulet, Mistress Weatherwax! Please! A magic amulet is a symbol of primitive and mechanistic superstition, whereas the Turtle of Om is…is…is…well, it’s not, do you understand?”
“Oh, right. Thank you for explaining,” said Granny. “Help me up, will you?”
Oats was having some difficulty with his temper. He’d carried the old bit—biddy for miles, he was frozen to the bone, and now they were here she acted as if she’d somehow done him a favor.
“What’s the magic word?” he snarled.
“Oh, I don’t think a holy man like you should be having with
magic
words,” said Granny. “But the
holy
words are: do what I tell you or get smitten. They should do the trick.”
He helped her to her feet, alive with badly digested rage, and supported her as she swayed.
There was a scream from the castle, suddenly cut off.
“Not female,” said Granny. “I reckon the girls have started. Let’s give ’em a hand, shall we?”
Her arm shook as she raised it. The wowhawk fluttered down and settled on her wrist.
“Now help get me to the gate.”
“Don’t mention it, glad to be of service,” Oats mumbled. He looked at the bird, whose hood swiveled to face him.
“That’s the…other phoenix, isn’t it,” he said.
“Yes,” said Granny, watching the door. “
A
phoenix. You can’t have just one of anything.”
“But it looks like a little hawk.”
“It was born among hawks, so it looks like a hawk. If it was hatched in a hen roost it’d be a chicken. Stands to reason. And a hawk it’ll remain, until it needs to be a phoenix. They’re shy birds. You could say a phoenix is what it may
become
…”
“Too much eggshell…”
“Yes, Mister Oats. And when does the phoenix sometimes lay two eggs? When it needs to. Hodgesaargh was right. A phoenix is of the nature of birds. Bird first, myth second.”
The doors were hanging loose, their iron reinforcements twisted out of shape and their timbers smoldering, but some effort had been made to pull them shut. Over what remained of the arch, a bat carved in stone told visitors everything they needed to know about this place.
On Granny’s wrist the hood of the hawk was crackling and smoking. As he watched, little flames erupted from the leather again.
“It knows what they did,” said Granny. “It was
hatched
knowing. Phoenixes share their minds. And they don’t tolerate evil.”
The head turned to look at Oats with its white-hot stare and, instinctively, he backed away and tried to cover his eyes.
“Use the doorknocker,” said Granny, nodding to the big iron ring hanging loosely from one splintered door.
“What? You want me to
knock
on the
door
? Of a vampire’s
castle
?”
“We’re not going to sneak in, are we? Anyway, you Omnians are good at knocking on doors.”
“Well,
yes
,” said Oats, “but normally just for a shared prayer and to interest people in our pamphlets—” he let the knocker fall a few times, the boom echoing around the valley “—not to have my throat ripped out!”
“Think of this as a particularly difficult street,” said Granny. “Try again…mebbe they’re hidin’ behind the sofa, eh?”
“Hah!”
“You’re a good man, Mister Oats?” said Granny, conversationally, as the echoes died away. “Even without your holy book and holy amulet and holy hat?”
“Er…I try to be…” he ventured.
“Well…this is where you find out,” said Granny. “To the fire we come at last, Mister Oats. This is where we
both
find out.”
Nanny raced up some stairs, a couple of vampires at her heels. They were hampered because they hadn’t got to grips with not being able to fly, but there was something else wrong with them as well.
“Tea!” one screamed. “I must have…
tea
!”
Nanny pushed open the door to the battlements. They followed her, and tripped over Igor’s leg as he stepped out of the shadows.
He raised two sharpened table legs.
“How d’you want your thtaketh, boyth?” he shouted excitedly, as he struck. “You thould have thed you
liked
my thpiderth!”
Nanny leaned against the wall to get her breath back.
“Granny’s somewhere here,” she panted. “Don’t ask me how. But those two were craving a cup of tea, and I reckon only Esme could mess up someone’s head like that—”
The sounds of the doorknocker boomed around the courtyard below. At the same time the door at the other end of the battlements opened. Half a dozen vampires advanced.
“They’re acting very dumb, aren’t they,” said Nanny. “Give me a couple more stakes.”
“Run out of thtaketh, Nanny.”
“Okay, then, pass me a bottle of holy water…hurry up…”
“None left, Nanny.”
“We’ve got
nothing?
”
“Got’n orange, Nanny.”
“What for?”
“Run out of lemonth.”
“What good with an orange do if I hit a vampire in the mouth with it?” said Nanny, eyeing the approaching creatures.
Igor scratched his head. “Well, I thuppothe they won’t catch coldth tho eathily…”
The knocking reverberated around the castle again. Several vampires were creeping across the courtyard.
Nanny caught a flicker of light around the edge of the door. Instinct took over. As the vampires began to run, she grabbed Igor and pulled him down.
The arch exploded, every stone and plank drifting away on an expanding bubble of eyeball-searing flame. It lifted the vampires off their feet and they screamed as the fire carried them up.
When the brightness had faded a little Nanny peered carefully into the courtyard.
A bird, house-sized, wings of flame wider than the castle, reared in the broken doorway.
Mightily Oats pushed himself up onto his hands and knees. Hot flames roared around him, thundering like fiercely burning gas. His skin should be blackening already, but against all reason the fire felt no more deadly than a hot desert wind. The air smelled of camphor and spices.
He looked up. The flames wrapped Granny Weatherwax, but they looked oddly transparent, not
entirely
real. Here and there little gold and green sparks glittered on her dress, and all the time the fire whipped and tore around her.
She looked down at him. “You’re in the wings of the phoenix now, Mister Oats,” she shouted, above the noise, “and you ain’t burned!”
The bird flapping its wings on her wrist was incandescent.
“How can—”
“You’re the scholar! But male birds are always ones for the big display, aren’t they?”
“Males? This is a
male
phoenix?”
“Yes!”
It leapt. What flew…what flew, as far as Oats could see, was a great bird-shape of pale flame, with the little form of the real bird inside like the head of a comet. He added to himself: if that is indeed the real bird…
It swooped up into the tower. A yell, cut off quickly, indicated that a vampire hadn’t been fast enough.
“It doesn’t burn itself?” Oats said, weakly.
“Shouldn’t think so,” said Granny, stepping over the wreckage. “Wouldn’t be much point.”
“Then it must be magical fire…”
“They say that whether it burns you or not is up to you,” said Granny. “I used to watch them as a kid. My granny told me about ’em. Some cold nights you see them dancin’ in the sky over the Hub, burnin’ green and gold…”
“Oh, you mean the aurora coriolis,” said Oats, trying to make his voice sound matter-of-fact. “But actually that’s caused by magic particles hitting the—”
“Dunno what it’s
caused
by,” said Granny sharply, “but what it
is
, is the phoenix dancin’.” She reached out. “I ought to hold your arm.”
“In case I fall over?” said Oats, still watching the burning bird.
“That’s right.”
As he took her weight the phoenix above them flung back its head and screamed at the sky.
“And to think I thought it was an allegorical creature,” said the priest.
“Well? Even allegories have to live,” said Granny Weatherwax.