I Shall Wear Midnight

and let herself fade into the foreground and listen to Rob Anybody command the troops, who would listen to him when there was nothing better to do.

‘All right,’ he said, ‘which one of you scunners decided to paint a real neck on the sign? I’m sure it’s no’ normally done like that.’

‘That was Wullie,’ said Big Yan. ‘He reckoned people would think it had always been like that. He is daft, ye ken.’

‘Sometimes daft works,’ said Tiffany. She looked around … And there he was, the man with no eyes, walking through the crowd, walking through the crowd, as if they were ghosts, but she could see that they felt his presence in some way; one man brushed his hand across his face, as if feeling the footsteps of a fly; another one slapped at his own ear. But afterwards they were … changed. When their eyes saw Tiffany they narrowed, and the ghostly man headed towards her and the whole of the crowd became one huge frown. And here came the stench, trailing behind him and turning the daylight grey. It was like the bottom of a pond, where things had died and rotted for centuries.

Tiffany looked around desperately. The turning of the King’s Head had filled the street with the curious and the thirsty. People were trying to go about their business, but were being hemmed in by the crowd in front and the crowd behind them and, of course, by the people with trays and little carts who swarmed through the city and would try to sell something to anyone who stood still for more than two seconds. She could feel the menace in the air, but in fact it was more than a menace — it was hatred, growing like a plant after rain, and still the man in black came nearer. It scared her. Of course, she had the Feegles with her, but generally speaking the Feegles got you out of trouble by getting you into a different kind of trouble.

The ground moved quite suddenly underneath her. There was a metallic scraping noise, and the bottom dropped out of her world, but only by about six feet. As she staggered in the gloom under the pavement, someone pushed past her with a cheerful ‘Excuse me.’ There were more inexplicable metal noises and the round hole now above her head vanished in darkness.

‘Real piece of luck there,’ said the polite voice. ‘The only one we’re going to get today, I fancy. Please try not to panic until I have lit the safety lantern. If you want to panic thereafter, that is entirely up to you. Stay close to me and when I say, “Walk as fast as possible while holding your breath,” do so, for the sake of your sanity, your throat, and possibly your life. I don’t care if you understand or not — just do it, because we may not have much time.’

A match flared. There was a small popping noise and a green-blue glow in the air just in front of Tiffany. ‘Only a bit of marsh gas,’ said the invisible informant. ‘Not too bad, nothing to worry about yet, but stay close, mind you!’

The green-blue glow began to move very fast, and Tiffany had to walk quickly to keep up, which was no mean feat, because the ground beneath her boots was, by turns, like gravel, mud or occasionally a liquid of some sort but probably not a sort that you would want to know about. Here and there, in the distance, there were tiny little glows of other mysterious lights, like will-o’-the-wisps you sometimes got over marshy ground.

‘Do keep up!’ said the voice ahead of her.

Soon Tiffany lost all sense of direction and, for that matter, time.

Then there was a click and the figure was outlined against what looked like a perfectly ordinary doorway, except that it was in an arch, and so the door itself came to a point at the top.

‘Please be so good as to wipe your feet very thoroughly on the mat just inside; it pays to take precautions down here.’

Behind the still shadowy figure, candles were lighting themselves, and now they illuminated someone in heavy, stiff clothing, big boots and a steel helmet on her head — although, as Tiffany watched, the figure carefully lifted the helmet off. She shook out her ponytail, which suggested that she was young, but her hair was white, suggesting that she was old. She was, Tiffany thought, one of those people who picks for themselves a look that suits them and doesn’t get in the way, and never changes it until they die. There were wrinkles too, and Tiffany’s guide had the preoccupied air of somebody who is trying to think of several things at once; and by the look on her face she was trying to think of everything. There was a small table in the room, set with a teapot, cups and a pile of small cupcakes.

‘Do come on in,’ said the woman. ‘Welcome. But where are my manners? My name is Miss … Smith, for the moment. I believe Mrs Proust may have mentioned me? And you are in the Unreal Estate, quite possibly the most unstable place in the world. Would you like some tea?’

Things tend to look better when the world has stopped spinning and you have a warm drink in front of you, even if it’s standing on an old packing case.

‘I’m sorry it’s not a palace,’ said Miss Smith. ‘I never stay here for more than a few days at a time, but I do need to be close to the University, and to have absolute privacy. This was a little cottage outside the University walls, you see, and the wizards just used to chuck all their waste over: after a while, all the different bits of magical rubbish started to react with one another in what I can only call unpredictable ways. Well, what with talking rats, and people’s eyebrows growing up to six feet long, and shoes walking around by themselves, the people that lived nearby ran away, and so did their shoes. And since there was no one complaining any more, the University simply chucked even more stuff over the wall. Wizards are like cats going to the toilet in that respect; once you’ve walked away from it, it isn’t there any more.

‘Of course, it then became a free-for-all, with just about anybody throwing over just about anything and running away very quickly, often pursued by shoes, but not always successfully. Would you like a cupcake? And don’t worry, I bought them off quite a reliable baker tomorrow, so I know they’re fresh, and I pretty much tamed the magic around here a year ago. It wasn’t too hard; magic is largely a matter of balance, but of course you’d know that. Anyway, the upshot is that there is such a magical fog over this place that I doubt if even a god could see into it.’ Miss Smith delicately ate half a cup-cake, and balanced the other half on her saucer. She leaned closer to Tiffany. ‘How did it feel, Miss Tiffany Aching, when you kissed the winter?’

Tiffany stared at her for a moment. ‘Look, it was just a peck, OK? Certainly no tongues!’ Then she said, ‘You are the person that Mrs Proust said was going to find me, aren’t you?’

‘Yes,’ said Miss Smith. ‘I would hope that is obvious. I could give you a long, complicated lecture,’ she continued brusquely, ‘but I think it would be better if I told you a story. I know you have been taught by Granny Weatherwax, and she will tell you that the world is made up of stories. I had better admit that this one is one of the nasty ones.’

‘I am a witch, you know,’ said Tiffany. ‘I have seen nasty things.’

‘So you may think,’ said Miss Smith. ‘But for now I want you to picture a scene, more than a thousand years ago, and imagine a man, still quite young, and he is a witchfinder and a book-burner and a torturer, because people older than him who are far more vile than him have told him that this is what the Great God Om wants him to be. And on this day he has found a woman who is a witch, and she is beautiful, astonishingly beautiful, which is rather unusual among witches, at least in those days—’

‘He falls in love with her, doesn’t he?’ Tiffany interrupted.

‘Of course,’ said Miss Smith. ‘Boy meets girl, one of the greatest engines of narrative causality in the multiverse, or as some people might put it, “It had to happen.” I would like to continue this discourse without interruptions, if you don’t mind?’

‘But he is going to have to kill her, isn’t he?’

Miss Smith sighed. ‘Since you ask, not necessarily. He thinks that if he rescues her and they can get to the river, then they might have a chance. He is bewildered and confused. He has never had feelings like this before. For the first time in his life, he is really having to think for himself. There are horses not far away. There are a few guards, and some other prisoners, and the air is full of smoke because there is a pile of burning books, which is making people’s eyes water.’

Tiffany leaned forward in her seat, listening to the clues, trying to work out the ending in advance.

‘There are some apprentices that he is training, and also some very senior members of the Omnian church who have come to watch and bless the proceedings. And finally there are a number of people from the nearby village who are cheering very loudly because it is not them who are going to be killed and generally they don’t get much entertainment. In fact, it’s pretty much another day at the office, except that the girl being tied to the stake by the apprentices has caught his eye and is now watching him very carefully, not saying a word, not even screaming a word, not yet.’