Maskerade

They turned and looked at Agnes, who was standing in the centre of the stage and glowering at nothing.

“Feeling a bit angry?” said Nanny. “Only to be expected.”

“Yes!”

“Feeling that everything's happened for other people and not for you?”

“Yes!”

“But,” said Granny Weatherwax, “look at it like this: what's Christine got to look forward to? She'll just become a singer. Stuck in a little world. Oh, maybe she'll be good enough to get a little fame, but one day the voice'll crack and that's the end of her life. You have got a choice. You can either be on the stage, just a performer, just going through the lines… or you can be outside it, and know how the script works, where the scenery hangs, and where the trapdoors are. Isn't that better?”

“No!”

The infuriating thing about Nanny Ogg and Granny Weatherwax, Agnes thought later, was the way they sometimes acted in tandem, without exchanging a word. Of course, there were plenty of other things — the way they never thought that meddling was meddling if they did it; the way they automatically assumed that everyone else's business was their own; the way they went through life in a straight line; the way, in fact, that they arrived in any situation and immediately started to change it. Compared to that, acting on unspoken agreement was a mere minor annoyance, but it was here and up close.

They walked towards her, and each laid a hand on her shoulder.

“Feeling angry?” said Granny.

“Yes!”

“I should let it out then, if I was you,” said Nanny.

Agnes shut her eyes, clenched her fists, opened her mouth and screamed.

It started low. Plaster dust drifted down from the ceiling. The prisms on the chandelier chimed gently as they shook.

It rose, passing quickly through the mysterious pitch at fourteen cycles per second where the human spirit begins to feel distinctly uncomfortable about the universe and the place in it of the bowels. Small items around the Opera House vibrated off shelves and smashed on the floor.

The note climbed, rang like a bell, climbed again. In the Pit, all the violin strings snapped, one by one.

As the tone rose, the crystal prisms shook in the chandelier. In the bar, champagne corks fired a salvo. Ice jingled and shattered in its bucket. A line of wine?glasses joined in the chorus, blurred around the rims, and then exploded like hazardous thistledown with attitude.

There were harmonics and echoes that caused strange effects. In the dressing?rooms the No. 3 greasepaint melted. Mirrors cracked, filling the ballet school with a million fractured images.

Dust rose, insects fell. In the stones of the Opera House tiny particles of quartz danced briefly…

Then there was silence, broken by the occasional thud and tinkle.

Nanny grinned.

“Ah,” she said, “now the opera's over.”

Salzella opened his eyes.

The stage was empty, and dark, and nevertheless brilliantly lit. That is, a huge shadowless light was streaming from some unseen source and yet, apart from Salzella himself, there was nothing for it to illuminate.

Footsteps sounded in the distance. Their owner took some time to arrive, but when he stepped into the liquid air around Salzella he seemed to burst into flame.

He wore red: a red suit with red lace, a red cloak, red shoes with ruby buckles, and a broad?brimmed red hat with a huge red feather. He even walked with a long red stick, bedecked with red ribbons. But for someone who had taken such meticulous trouble with his costume, he'd been remiss in the matter of his mask. It was a crude one of a skull, such as might be bought in any theatrical shop — Salzella could even see the string.

“Where did everyone go?” Salzella demanded. Unpleasant recent memories were beginning to bubble up in his mind. He couldn't quite recall them clearly at the moment, but the taste of them was bad.

The figure said nothing.

“Where's the orchestra? What happened to the audience?”

There was a barely perceptible shrug from the tall red figure.

Salzella began to notice other details. What he had thought was the stage seemed slightly gritty underfoot. The ceiling above him was a long way away, perhaps as far away as anything could be, and was filled with cold, hard points of light.

“I asked you a question!”

THREE QUESTIONS, IN FACT.

The words turned up on the inside of Salzella's ears with no suggestion that they had had to travel like normal sound.

“You didn't answer me!”

SOME THINGS YOU HAVE TO WORK OUT FOR YOURSELF, AND THIS IS ONE OF THEM, BELIEVE ME.

“Who are you? You're not a member of the cast, I know that! Take off that mask!”

AS YOU WISH. I DO LIKE TO GET INTO THE SPIRIT OF THE THING.

The figure removed its mask.

“And now take off that other mask!” said Salzella, as the frozen fingers of dread rose through him.

Death touched a secret spring on the stick. A blade shot out, so thin that it was transparent, its edge glittering blue as air molecules were sliced into their component atoms.

AH, he said, raising the scythe. THERE I THINK YOU HAVE ME.

It was dark in the cellars, but Nanny Ogg had walked alone in the strange caverns under Lancre and through the night?time forests with Granny Weatherwax. Darkness held no fears for an Ogg.

She struck a match.

“Greebo?”

People had been tramping to and fro for hours. The darkness wasn't private any more. It had taken quite a lot of people to carry all the money, for a start. Up until the end of the opera, there had been something mysterious about these cellars. Now they were just… well… damp underground rooms. Something that had lived here had moved on.

Her foot rattled a piece of pottery.

She grunted as she went down on one knee. Spilt mud and shards of broken pot littered the floor. Here and there, unrooted and snapped, were some unheeded pieces of dead twig.

Only some kind of fool would have stuck bits of wood in pots of mud far underground and expected anything to happen.

Nanny picked one up and sniffed it tentatively. It smelled of mud. And nothing else.

She'd have liked to have?known how it had been done. Just professional interest, of course. And she knew she never would, now. Walter was a busy man now, up in the light. And, for something to begin, other things had to end.

“We all wears a mask of one sort or another,” she said to the damp air. “No sense in upsetting things now, eh…”

The coach didn't leave until seven o'clock in the morning. By Lancre standards that was practically midday. The witches got there early.

“I was hoping to shop for a few souvenirs,” said Nanny, stamping her feet on the cobbles to keep warm. “For the kiddies.”