Witches Abroad Read Online Free PDF Page A

neither,’ she shouted.
    Nanny Ogg’s reply was inaudible.
    Granny waited a moment, and then crept rapidly over to the big chimney. She reached up and felt cautiously around.
    â€˜Looking for something, Esme?’ said Nanny Ogg behind her.
    â€˜The soot up here is terrible,’ said Granny, standing up quickly. ‘Terrible soot there is.’
    â€˜ It’s not up there, then?’ said Nanny Ogg sweetly.
    â€˜Don’t know what you’re talking about.’
    â€˜You don’t have to pretend. Everyone knows she must have had one,’ said Nanny Ogg. ‘It goes with the job. It practic’ly is the job.’
    â€˜Well . . . maybe I just wanted a look at it,’ Granny admitted. ‘Just hold it a while. Not use it. You wouldn’t catch me using one of those things. I only ever saw it once or twice. There ain’t many of ’em around these days.’
    Nanny Ogg nodded. ‘You can’t get the wood,’ she said.
    â€˜You don’t think she’s been buried with it, do you?’
    â€˜Shouldn’t think so. I wouldn’t want to be buried with it. Thing like that, it’s a bit of a responsibility. Anyway, it wouldn’t stay buried. A thing like that wants to be used. It’d be rattling around your coffin the whole time. You know the trouble they are.’
    She relaxed a bit. ‘I’ll sort out the tea things,’ she said. ‘You light the fire.’
    She wandered back into the scullery.
    Granny Weatherwax reached along the mantelpiece for the matches, and then realized that there wouldn’t be any. Desiderata had always said she was much too busy not to use magic around the house. Even her laundry did itself.
    Granny disapproved of magic for domestic purposes, but she was annoyed. She also wanted her tea.
    She threw a couple of logs into the fireplace and glared at them until they burst into flame out of sheer embarrassment.
    It was then that her eye was caught by the shrouded mirror.
    â€˜Coverin’ it over?’ she murmured. ‘I didn’t know old Desiderata was frightened of thunderstorms.’
    She twitched aside the cloth.
    She stared.
    Very few people in the world had more self-control than Granny Weatherwax. It was as rigid as a bar of cast iron. And about as flexible.
    She smashed the mirror.
    Lilith sat bolt upright in her tower of mirrors.
    Her?
    The face was different, of course. Older. It had been a long time. But eyes don’t change, and witches always look at the eyes.
    Her!
    Magrat Garlick, witch, was also standing in front of a mirror. In her case it was totally unmagical. It was also still in one piece, but there had been one or two close calls.
    She frowned at her reflection, and then consulted the small, cheaply-woodcut leaflet that had arrived the previous day.
    She mouthed a few words under her breath, straightened up, extended her hands in front of her, punched the air vigorously and said: ‘HAAAAiiiiieeeeeeehgh! Um.’
    Magrat would be the first to admit that she had an open mind. It was as open as a field, as open as the sky. No mind could be more open without special surgical implements. And she was always waiting for something to fill it up.
    What it was currently filling up with was the search for inner peace and cosmic harmony and the true essence of Being.
    When people say ‘An idea came to me’ it isn’t just a metaphor. Raw inspirations, tiny particles of self-contained thought, are sleeting through the cosmos all the time. They get drawn to heads like Magrat’s in the same way that water runs into a hole in the desert.
    It was all due to her mother’s lack of attention to spelling, she speculated. A caring parent would have spelled Margaret correctly. And then she could have been a Peggy, or a Maggie – big, robust names, full of reliability. There wasn’t much you could do with a Magrat. It sounded like something that lived in a hole