Lords and Ladies Read Online Free PDF Page B

that, and then tie the neck with string.
    On the way up to the palace she crossed the bridge over Lancre Gorge and tossed the sack into the river.
    It bobbed for a moment in the strong current, and then sank.
    She’d secretly hoped for a string of multicolored bubbles, or even a hiss. But it just sank. Just as if it wasn’t anything very important.
     
    Another world, another castle…
    The elf galloped over the frozen moat, steam billowing from its black horse and from the thing it carried over its neck.
    It rode up the steps and into the hall itself, where the Queen sat amidst her dreams…
    “My lord Lankin?”
    “A stag!”
    It was still alive. Elves were skilled at leaving things alive, often for weeks.
    “From out of the circle?”
    “ Yes, lady!”
    “It’s weakening. Did I not tell you?”
    “How long ? How long ?”
    “Soon. Soon. What went through the other way?”
    The elf tried to avoid her face.
    “Your…pet, lady.”
    “No doubt it won’t go far.” The Queen laughed. “No doubt it will have an amusing time…”
     
    It rained briefly at dawn.
    There’s nothing nastier to walk through than shoulder-high wet bracken. Well, there is. There are an uncountable number of things nastier to walk through, especially if they’re shoulder-high. But here and now, thought Nanny Ogg, it was hard to think of more than one or two.
    They hadn’t landed inside the Dancers, of course. Even birds detoured rather than cross that airspace. Migrating spiders on gossamer threads floating half a mile up curved around it. Clouds split in two and flowed around it.
    Mist hung around the stones. Sticky, damp mist.
    Nanny hacked vaguely at the clinging bracken with her sickle.
    “You there, Esme?” she muttered.
    Granny Weatherwax’s head rose from a clump of bracken a few feet away.
    “There’s been things going on,” she said, in a cold and deliberate tone.
    “Like what?”
    “All the bracken and weeds is trampled around the stones. I reckon someone’s been dancing. ”
    Nanny Ogg gave this the same consideration as would a nuclear physicist who’d just been told that someone was banging two bits of sub-critical uranium together to keep warm.
    “They never, ” she said.
    “They have. And another thing…”
    It was hard to imagine what other thing there could be, but Nanny Ogg said “Yes?” anyway.
    “Someone got killed up here.”
    “Oh, no,” moaned Nanny Ogg. “Not inside the circle too.”
    “Nope. Don’t be daft. It was outside. A tall man. He had one leg longer’n the other. And a beard. He was probably a hunter.”
    “How’d you know all that?”
    “I just trod on ’im.”
    The sun rose through the mists.
     
    The morning rays were already caressing the ancient stones of Unseen University, premier college of wizardry, five hundred miles away.
    Not that many wizards were aware of this.
    For most of the wizards of Unseen University their lunch was the first meal of the day. They were not, by and large, breakfast people. The Archchancellor and the Librarian were the only two who knew what the dawn looked like from the front, and they tended to have the entire campus to themselves for several hours.
    The Librarian was always up early because he was an orang-utan, and they are naturally early risers, although in his case he didn’t bellow a few times to keep other males off his territory. He just unlocked the Library and fed the books.
    And Mustrum Ridcully, the current Archchancellor, liked to wander around the sleepy buildings, nodding to the servants and leaving little notes for his subordinates, usually designed for no other purpose than to make it absolutely clear that he was up and attending to the business of the day while they were still fast asleep. *
    Today, however, he had something else on his mind. More or less literally.
    It was round. There was healthy growth all around it. He could swear it hadn’t been there yesterday.
    He turned his head this way and that, squinting at the