Современная электронная библиотека ModernLib.Net

The Discworld Series (№14) - Lords And Ladies

ModernLib.Net / Юмористическая фантастика / Pratchett Terry David John / Lords And Ladies - Чтение (стр. 3)
Автор: Pratchett Terry David John
Жанр: Юмористическая фантастика
Серия: The Discworld Series

 

 


"There's still power there," she said. "Not much, but the ring is holding."

"But who'd be daft enough to come up here and dance around the stones?" said Nanny Ogg, and then, as a treacherous thought drifted across her mind, she added, "Magrat's been away with us the whole time."

"We shall have to find out," said Granny, setting her face in a grim smile. "Now help me up with the poor man."

Nanny Ogg bent to the task.

"Coo, he's heavy. We could've done with young Magrat up here."

"No. Flighty," said Granny Weatherwax. "Head easily turned."

"Nice girl, though."

"But soppy. She thinks you can lead your life as if fairy stories work and folk songs are really true. Not that I don't wish her every happiness."

"Hope she does all right as queen," said Nanny.

"We taught her everything she knows," said Granny Weatherwax.

"Yeah," said Nanny Ogg, as they disappeared into the bracken. "D'you think. . . maybe. . . ?"

"What?"

"D'you think maybe we ought to have taught her everything we know?"

"It'd take too long."

"Yeah, right."


It took a while for letters to get as far as the Archchancellor. The post tended to be picked up from the University gates by anyone who happened to be passing, and then left lying on a shelf somewhere or used as a pipe lighter or a bookmark or, in the case of the Librarian, as bedding.

This one had only taken two days, and was quite intact apart from a couple of cup rings and a bananary fingerprint. It arrived on the table along with the other post while the faculty were at breakfast. The Dean opened it with a spoon.

"Anyone here know where Lancre is?" he said.

"Why?" said Ridcully, looking up sharply.

"Some king's getting married and wants us to come."

"Oh dear, oh dear," said the Lecturer in Recent Runes. "Some tinpot king gets wed and he wants us to come?"

"It's up in the mountains," said the Archchancellor, quietly "Good trout fishin' in those parts, as I recall. My word. Lancre. Good grief. Hadn't thought about the place in years. You know, there's glacier lakes up there where the fish've never seen a rod. Lancre. Yes."

"And it's far too far," said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.

Ridcully wasn't listening. "And there's deer. Thousands of head of deer. And elk. Wolves all over the place. Mountain lions too, I shouldn't wonder. I heard that Ice Eagles have been seen up there again, too."

His eyes gleamed.

"There's only half a dozen of 'em left," he said.

Mustrum Ridcully did a lot for rare species. For one thing, he kept them rare.

"It's the back of beyond," said the Dean. "Right off the edge of the map."

"Used to stay with my uncle up there, in the holidays," said Ridcully, his eyes misty with distance. "Great days I had up there. Great days. The summers up there . . . and the sky's a deeper blue than anywhere else, it's very . . . and the grass. . . and. . ."

He returned abruptly from the landscapes of memory.

"Got to go, then," he said. "Duty calls. Head of state gettin' married. Important occasion. Got to have a few wizards there. Look of the thing. Nobblyess obligay."

"Well, I'm not going," said the Dean. "It's not natural, the countryside. Far too many trees. Never could stand it."

"The Bursar could do with an outing," said Ridcully. "Seems a bit jumpy just lately, can't imagine why." He leaned forward to look along the High Table. "Bursaaar!"

The Bursar dropped his spoon into his oatmeal.

"See what I mean?" said Ridcully. "Bundle o' nerves the whole time. I WAS SAYING YOU COULD DO WITH SOME FRESH AIR, BURSAR." He nudged the Dean heavily. "Hope he's not going off his rocker, poor fella," he said, in what he chose to believe was a whisper. "Spends too much time indoors, if you get my drift."

The Dean, who went outdoors about once a month, shrugged his shoulders.

"I EXPECT YOU'D LIKE A LITTLE TIME AWAY FROM THE UNIVERSITY, EH?" said the Archchancellor, nodding and grimacing madly. "Peace and quiet? Healthy country livin'?"

"I, I, I, I should like that very much, Archchancellor," said the Bursar, hope rising in his face like an autumn mushroom.

"Good man. Good man. You shall come with me," said Ridcully, beaming.

The Bursar's expression froze.

"Got to be someone else, too," said Ridcully. "Volunteers, anyone?"

The wizards, townies to a man, bent industriously over their food. They always bent industriously over their food in any case, but this time they were doing it to avoid catching Ridcully's eye.

"What about the Librarian?" said the Lecturer in Recent Runes, throwing a random victim to the wolves.

There was a sudden babble of relieved agreement.

"Good choice," said the Dean. "Just the thing for him. Countryside. Trees. And. . . and. . . trees."

"Mountain air," said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.

"Yes, he's been looking peaky lately," said the Reader in Invisible Writings[7].

"It'd be a real treat for him," said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.

"Home away from home, I expect," said the Dean. "Trees all over the place."

They all looked expectantly at the Archchancellor.

"He doesn't wear clothes," said Ridcully. "And he goes 'ook' all the time."

"He does wear the old green robe thing," said the Dean.

"Only when he's had a bath."

Ridcully rubbed his beard. In fact he quite liked the Librarian, who never argued with him and always kept himself in shape, even if that shape was a pear shape. It was the right shape for an orang-utan.

The thing about the Librarian was that no one noticed he was an orang-utan anymore, unless a visitor to the University happened to point it out. In which case someone would say, "Oh, yes. Some kind of magical accident, wasn't it? Pretty sure it was something like that. One minute human, next minute an ape. Funny thing, really . . . can't remember what he looked like before. I mean, he must have been human, I suppose. Always thought of him as an ape, really. It's more him."

And indeed it had been an accident among the potent and magical books of the University library that had as it were bounced the Librarian's genotype down the evolutionary tree and back up a different branch, with the significant difference that now he could hang on to it upside down with his feet.

"Oh, all right," said the Archchancellor. "But he's got to wear something during the ceremony,' if only for the sake of the poor bride."

There was a whimper from the Bursar.

All the wizards turned toward him.

His spoon landed on the floor with a small thud. It was wooden. The wizards had gently prevented him from having metal cutlery since what was now known as the Unfortunate Incident At Dinner.

"A-a-a-a," gurgled the Bursar, trying to push himself away from the table.

"Dried frog pills," said the Archchancellor. "Someone fish 'em out of his pocket."

Wizards didn't rush this. You could find anything in a wizard's pocket-peas, unreasonable things with legs, small experimental universes, anything. . .

The Reader in Invisible Writings craned to see what had unglued his colleague.

"Here, look at his porridge," he said.

There was a perfect round depression in the oatmeal.

"Oh dear, another crop circle," said the Dean.

The wizards relaxed.

"Damn things turning up everywhere this year," said the Archchancellor. He hadn't taken his hat off to eat the meal. This was because it was holding down a poultice of honey and horse manure and a small mouse-powered electrostatic generator he'd got those clever young fellas in the High Energy Magic research building to knock together for him, clever fellas they were, one day he might even understand half of what they were always gabblin' on about. . .

In the meantime, he'd keep his hat on.

"Particularly strong, too," said the Dean. "The gardener told me yesterday they're playing merry hell with the cabbages."

"I thought them things only turned up out in fields and things," said Ridcully. "Perfectly normal natural phenomenon."

"If there is a suitably high flux level, the inter-continuum pressure can probably overcome quite a high base reality quotient," said the Reader in Invisible Writings.

The conversation stopped. Everyone turned to look at this most wretched and least senior member of the staff.

The Archchancellor glowered.

"I don't even want you to begin to start explainin' that," he said. "You're probably goin' to go on about the universe bein' a rubber sheet with weights on it again, right?"

"Not exactly a-"

"And the word 'quantum' is hurryin' toward your lips again," said Ridcully.

"Well, the-"

"And 'continuinuinuum' too, I expect," said Ridcully.

The Reader in Invisible Writings, a young wizard whose name was Ponder Stibbons, sighed deeply.

"No, Archchancellor, I was merely pointing out-"

"It's not wormholes again, is it?"

Stibbons gave up. Using a metaphor in front of a man as unimaginative as Ridcully was like a red rag to a bu-was like putting something very annoying in front of someone who was annoyed by it.

It was very hard, being a reader in Invisible Writings.

"I reckon you'd better come too," said Ridcully.

"Me, Archchancellor?"

"Can't have you skulking around the place inventing millions of other universes that're too small to see and all the rest of that continuinuinuum stuff," said Ridcully. "Anyway, I shall need someone to carry my rods and crossbo — my stuff," he corrected himself.

Stibbons stared at his plate. It was no good arguing. What he had really wanted out of life was to spend the next hundred years of it in the University, eating big meals and not moving much in between them. He was a plump young man with a complexion the colour of something that lives under a rock. People were always telling him to make something of his life, and that's what he wanted to do. He wanted to make a bed of it.

"But, Archchancellor," said the Lecturer in Recent Runes, "it's still too damn far."

"Nonsense," said Ridcully. "They've got that new turnpike open all the way to Sto Helit now. Coaches every Wednesday, reg'lar. Bursaaar! Oh, give him a dried frog pill, someone . . . Mr. Stibbons, if you could happen to find yourself in this universe for five minutes, go and arrange some tickets. There. All sorted out, right?"


Magrat woke up.

And knew she wasn't a witch anymore. The feeling just crept over her, as part of the normal stock-taking that any body automatically does in the first seconds of emergence from the pit of dreams: arms: 2, legs: 2, existential dread: 58%, randomised guilt: 94%, witchcraft level: 00.00.

The point was, she couldn't remember ever being anything else. She'd always been a witch. Magrat Garlick, third witch, that was what she was. The soft one.

She knew she'd never been much good at it. Oh, she could do some spells and do them quite well, and she was good at herbs, but she wasn't a witch in the bone like the old ones. They made sure she knew it.

Well, she'd just have to learn queening. At least she was the only one in Lancre. No one'd be looking over her shoulder the whole time, saying things like "You ain't holding that sceptre right'."

Right. . .

Someone had stolen her clothes in the night.

She got up in her nightshirt and hopped over the cold flagstones to the door. She was halfway there when it opened of its own accord.

She recognised the small dark girl that came in, barely visible behind a stack of linen. Most people in Lancre knew everyone else.

"Millie Chillum?"

The linen bobbed a curtsy.

"Yes'm?"

Magrat lifted up part of the stack.

"It's me, Magrat," she said. "Hello."

"Yes'm." Another bob.

"What's up with you, Millie?"

"Yes'm." Bob, bob.

"I said it's me. You don't have to look at me like that."

"Yes'm."

The nervous bobbing continued. Magrat found her own knees beginning to jerk in sympathy but as it were behind the beat, so that as she was bobbing down she overtook the girl bobbing up.

"If you say 'yes'm' again, it will go very hard with you," she managed, as she went past.

"Y-right, your majesty, m'm."

Faint light began to dawn.

"I'm not queen yet, Millie. And you've known me for twenty years," panted Magrat, on the way up.

"Yes'm. But you're going to be queen. So me mam told me I was to be respectful," said Millie, still curtsying nervously

"Oh. Well. All right, then. Where are my clothes?"

"Got 'em here, your pre-majesty."

"They're not mine. And please stop going up and down all the time. I feel a bit sick."

"The king ordered 'em from Sto Helit special, m'm."

"Did he, eh? How long ago?"

"Dunno, m'm."

He knew I was coming home, thought Magrat. How? What's going on here?

There was a good deal more lace than Magrat was used to, but that was, as it were, the icing on the cake. Magrat normally wore a simple dress with not much underneath it except Magrat. Ladies of quality couldn't get away with that kind of thing. Millie had been provided with a sort of technical diagram, but it wasn't much help.

They studied it for some time.

"This is a standard queen outfit, then?"

"Couldn't say, m'm. I think his majesty just sent 'em a lot of money and said to send you everything." They spread out the bits on the floor.

"Is this the pantoffle?"

Outside, on the battlements, the guard changed. In fact he changed into his gardening apron and went off to hoe the beans. Inside, there was considerable sartorial discussion.

"I think you've got it up the wrong way, m'm. Which bit's the farthingale?"

"Says here Insert Tabbe A into Slotte B. Can't find slotte B."

"These're like saddlebags. I'm not wearing these. And this thing?"

"A ruff, m'm. Um. They're all the rage in Sto Helit, my brother says."

"You mean they make people angry? And what's this?"

"Brocade, I think."

"It's like cardboard. Do I have to wear this sort of thing every day?"

"Don't know, I'm sure, m'm."

"But Verence just trots around in leather gaiters and an old jacket!"

"Ah, but you're queen. Queens can't do that sort of thing. Everyone knows that, m'm. It's all right for kings to go wandering around with their arse half out their trous-"

She rammed her hand over her mouth.

"It's all right," said Magrat. "I'm sure even kings have . . . tops to their legs just like everyone else. Just go on with what you were saying."

Millie had gone bright red.

"I mean, I mean, I mean, queens has got to be ladylike," she managed. "The king got books about it. Etti-quetty and stuff."

Magrat surveyed herself critically in the mirror.

"It really suits you, your soon-going-to-be-majesty," said Millie.

Magrat turned this way and that.

"My hair's a mess," she said, after a while.

"Please m'm, the king said he's having a hairdresser come all the way from Ankh-Morpork, m'm. For the wedding."

Magrat patted a tress into place. It was beginning to dawn on her that being a queen was a whole new life.

"My word," she said. "And what happens now?"

"Dunno, m'm."

"What's the king doing?"

"Oh, he had breakfast early and buggered off over to Slice to show old Muckloe how to breed his pigs out of a book."

"So what do I do? What's my job?"

Millie looked puzzled although this did not involve much of a change in her general expression.

"Dunno, m'm. Reigning, I suppose. Walking around in the garden. Holding court. Doin' tapestry. That's very popular among queens. And then. . . er. . . later on there's the royal succession. . ."

"At the moment," said Magrat firmly, "we'll have a go at the tapestry."


Ridcully was having difficulty with the Librarian.

"I happen to be your Archchancellor, sir!"

"Oook."

"You'll like it up there! Fresh air! Bags of trees! More woods than you can shake a stick at!"

"Oook!"

"Come down this minute!"

"Oook!"

"The books'll be quite safe here during the holidays. Good grief, it's hard enough to get students to come in here at the best of times-"

"Oook!"

Ridcully glared at the Librarian, who was hanging by his toes from the top shelf of Parazoology Ba to Mn.

'Oh, well," he said, his voice suddenly low and cunning, "it's a great shame, in the circumstances. They've got a pretty good library in Lancre castle, I heard. Well, they call it a library — it's just a lot of old books. Never had a catalogue near 'em, apparently."

"Oook?"

"Thousands of books. Someone told me there's incunibles, too. Shame, really, you not wanting to see them." Ridcully's voice could have greased axles.

"Oook?"

"But I can see your mind is quite made up. So I shall be going. Farewell."

Ridcully paused outside the Library door, counting under his breath. He'd reached "three" when the Librarian knuckled through at high speed, caught by the incunibles.

"So that'll be four tickets, then?" said Ridcully.


Granny Weatherwax set about finding out what had been happening around the stones in her own distinctive way.

People underestimate bees.

Granny Weatherwax didn't. She had half a dozen hives of them and knew, for example, there is no such creature as an individual bee. But there is such a creature as a swarm, whose component cells are just a bit more mobile than those of, say, the common whelk. Swarms see everything and sense a lot more, and they can remember things for years, although their memory tends to be external and built out of wax. A honeycomb is a hive's memory — the placement of egg cells, pollen cells, queen cells, honey cells, different types of honey, are all part of the memory array.

And then there are the big fat drones. People think all they do is hang around the hive all year, waiting for those few brief minutes when the queen even notices their existence, but that doesn't explain why they've got more sense organs than the roof of the CIA building.

Granny didn't really keep bees. She took some old wax every year, for candles, and the occasional pound of honey that the hives felt they could spare, but mainly she had them for someone to talk to.

For the first time since she'd returned home, she went to the hives.

And stared.

Bees were boiling out of the entrances. The thrum of wings filled the normally calm little patch behind the raspberry bushes. Brown bodies zipped through the air like horizontal hail.

She wished she knew why.

Bees were her one failure. There wasn't a mind in Lancre she couldn't Borrow. She could even see the world through the eyes of earthworms[9] But a swarm, a mind made up of thousands of mobile parts, was beyond her. It was the toughest test of all. She'd tried over and over again to ride on one, to see the world through ten thousand pairs of multifaceted eyes all at once, and all she'd ever got was a migraine and an inclination to make love to flowers.

But you could tell a lot from just watching bees. The activity, the direction, the way the guard bees acted. . .

They were acting extremely worried.

So she went for a lie down, as only Granny Weatherwax knew how.


Nanny Ogg tried a different way, which didn't have much to do with witchcraft but did have a lot to do with her general Oggishness.

She sat for a while in her spotless kitchen, drinking rum and smoking her foul pipe and staring at the paintings on the wall. They had been done by her youngest grandchildren in a dozen shades of mud, most of them of blobby stick figures with the word GRAN blobbily blobbed in underneath in muddy blobby letters.

In front of her the cat Greebo, glad to be home again, lay on his back with all four paws in the air, doing his celebrated something-found-in-the-gutter impersonation.

Finally Nanny got up and ambled thoughtfully down to Jason Ogg's smithy.

A smithy always occupied an important position in the villages, doing the duty of town hall, meeting room, and general clearing house for gossip. Several men were lounging around in it now, filling in time between the normal Lancre occupations of poaching and watching the women do the work.

"Jason Ogg, I wants a word with you."

The smithy emptied like magic. It was probably something in Nanny Ogg's tone of voice. But Nanny reached out and grabbed one man by the arm as he tried to go past at a sort of stumbling crouch.

"I'm glad I've run into you, Mr. Quarney," she said. "Don't rush off. Store doing all right, is it?"

Lancre's only storekeeper gave her the look a threelegged mouse gives an athletic cat. Nevertheless, he tried.

"Oh, terrible bad, terrible bad business is right now, Mrs. Ogg."

"Same as normal, eh?"

Mr. Quarney's expression was pleading. He knew he wasn't going to get out without something, he just wanted to know what it was.

"Well, now," said Nanny, "you know the widow Scrope, lives over in Slice?"

Quarney's mouth opened.

"She's not a widow," he said. "She-"

"Bet you half a dollar?" said Nanny.

Quarney's mouth stayed open, and around it the rest of his face recomposed itself in an expression of fascinated horror.

"So she's to be allowed credit, right, until she gets the farm on its feet," said Nanny, in the silence. Quarney nodded mutely.

"That goes for the rest of you men listening outside the door," said Nanny, raising her voice. "Dropping a cut of meat on her doorstep once a week wouldn't come amiss, eh? And she'll probably want extra help come harvest. I knows I can depend on you all. Now, off you go. . ."

They ran for it, leaving Nanny Ogg standing triumphantly in the doorway.

Jason Ogg looked at her hopelessly, a fifteen-stone man reduced to a four-year-old boy.

"Jason?"

"I got to do this bit of brazing for old-"

"So," said Nanny, ignoring him, "what's been happening in these parts while we've been away, my lad?"

Jason poked at the fire distractedly with an iron bar.

"Oh, well, us had a big whirlwind on Hogswatchnight and one of Mother Peason's hens laid the same egg three times, and old Poorchick's cow gave birth to a seven-headed snake, and there was a rain of frogs over in Slice-"

"Been pretty normal, then," said Nanny Ogg. She refilled her pipe in a casual but meaningful way.

"All very quiet, really," said Jason. He pulled the bar out of the fire, laid it on the anvil, and raised his hammer.

"I'll find out sooner or later, you know," said Nanny Ogg.

Jason didn't turn his head, but his hammer stopped in mid-air.

"I always does, you know," said Nanny Ogg.

The iron cooled from the colour of fresh straw to bright red.

"You knows you always feels better for telling your old mum," said Nanny Ogg.

The iron cooled from red to spitting black. But Jason, ' used all day to the searing heat of a forge, seemed to be uncomfortably warm.

"I should beat it up before it gets cold," said Nanny Ogg.

"Weren't my fault. Mum! How could I stop 'em?"

Nanny sat back in the chair, smiling happily

"What them would these be, my son?"

"That young Diamanda and that Perdita and that girl with the red hair from over in Bad Ass and them others. I says to old Peason, I says you'd have something to say, I tole'em Mistress Weatherwax'd get her knic — would definitely be sarcastic when she found out," said Jason. "But they just laughs. They said they could teach 'emselves witching."

Nanny nodded. Actually, they were quite right. You could teach yourself witchcraft. But both the teacher and the pupil had to be the right kind of person.

"Diamanda?" she said. "Don't recall the name."

"Really she's Lucy Tockley," said Jason. "She says Diamanda is more. . . more witchy."

"Ah. The one that wears the big floppy felt hat?"

"Yes, Mum."

"She's the one that paints her nails black, too?"

"Yes, Mum."

"Old Tockley sent her off to school, didn't he?"

"Yes, Mum. She came back while you was gone."

"Ah."

Nanny Ogg lit her pipe from the forge. Floppy hat and black nails and education. Oh, dear.

"How many of these gels are there, then?" she said.

"Bout half a dozen. But they'm good at it. Mum."

"Yeah?"

"And it ain't as if they've been doing anything bad."

Nanny Ogg stared reflectively at the glow in the forge.

There was a bottomless quality to Nanny Ogg's silences. And also a certain directional component. Jason was quite clear that the silence was being aimed at him.

He always fell for it. He tried to fill it up.

"And that Diamanda's been properly educated," he said. "She knows some lovely words."

Silence.

"And I knows you've always said there weren't enough young girls interested in learnin' witching these days," said Jason. He removed the iron bar and hit it a few times, for the look of the thing.

More silence flowed in Jason's direction.

"They goes and dances up in the mountains every full moon."

Nanny Ogg removed her pipe and inspected the bowl carefully.

"People do say," said Jason, lowering his voice, "that they dances in the altogether."

"Altogether what?" said Nanny Ogg.

"You know. Mum. In the nudd."

"Cor. There's a thing. Anyone see where they go?"

"Nah. Weaver the thatcher says they always gives him the slip."

"Jason?"

"Yes, Mum?"

"They bin dancin' around the stones."

Jason hit his thumb.


There were a number of gods in the mountains and forests of Lancre. One of them was known as Heme the Hunted. He was a god of the chase and the hunt. More or less.

Most gods are created and sustained by belief and hope. Hunters danced in animal skins and created gods of the chase, who tended to be hearty and boisterous with the tact of a tidal wave. But they are not the only gods of hunting. The prey has an occult voice too, as the blood pounds and the hounds bay. Heme was the god of the chased and the hunted and all small animals whose ultimate destiny is to be an abrupt damp squeak.

He was about three feet high with rabbit ears and very small horns. But he did have an extremely good turn of speed, and was using it to the full as he tore madly through the woods.

"They're coming! They're coming! They're all coming back!"


"Who are?" said Jason Ogg. He was holding his thumb in the water trough.

Nanny Ogg sighed.

"Them." she said. "You know. Them. We ain't certain, but. . ."

"Who's Them?"

Nanny hesitated. There were some things you didn't tell ordinary people. On the other hand, Jason was a blacksmith, which meant he wasn't ordinary. Blacksmiths had to keep secrets. And he was family; Nanny Ogg had had an adventurous youth and wasn't very good at counting, but she was pretty certain he was her son.

"You see," she said, waving her hands vaguely, "them stones. . . the Dancers . . . see, in the old days . . . see, once upon a time. . ."

She stopped, and tried again to explain the essentially fractal nature of reality.

"Like . . . there's some places that're thinner than others, where the old doorways used to be, well, not doorways, never exactly understood it myself, not doorways as such, more places where the world is thinner . . . Anyway, the thing is, the Dancers . . . are a kind of fence . . . we, well, when I say we I mean thousands of years ago . . . I mean, but they're not just stones, they're some kind of thunderbolt iron but . . . there's things like tides, only not with water, it's when worlds get closer together'n you can nearly step between 'em . . . anyway, if people've been hangin' around the stones, playin' around . . . then They'll be back, if we're not careful."

"What They?"

"That's the whole trouble," said Nanny, miserably. "If I tells you, you'll get it all wrong. They lives on the other side of the Dancers."

Her son stared at her. Then a faint grin of realisation wandered across his face.

"Ah," he said. "I knows. I heard them wizards down in Ankh is always accidentally rippin' holes in this fabric o' reality they got down there, and you get them horrible things coming out o' the Dungeon Dimensions. Huge buggers with dozens o' eyeballs and more legs'n a Morris team." He gripped his No. 5 hammer. "Don't you worry. Mum. If they starts poppin' out here, we'll soon-"

"No, it ain't like that," said Nanny "Those live outside. But Them lives. . . over there."

Jason looked completely lost.

Nanny shrugged. She'd have to tell someone, sooner or later.

"The Lords and Ladies," she said.

"Who're they?"

Nanny looked around. But, after all, this was a forge. There had been a forge here long before there was a castle, long before there was even a kingdom. There were horseshoes everywhere. Iron had entered the very walls. It wasn't just a place of iron, it was a place where iron died and was reborn. If you couldn't speak the words here, you couldn't speak 'em anywhere.


  • Страницы:
    1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18