Maskerade

Terry Pratchett

Summary

The show must go on, as muder, music and mayhem run riot in the night...

The Opera House, Ankh Morpork ... a huge, rambling building, where masked figures and hooded shadows do wicked deeds in the wings ... where dying the death on stage is a little bit more than just a metaphor ... where innocent young sopranos are lured to their destiny by an evil mastermind in a hideously deformed evening dress...

At least, he hopes so. But Granny Weatherwax, Discworld's most famous witch, is in the audience. And she doesn't hold with that sort of thing.

So there's going to be trouble (but nevertheless a good evening's entertainment with murders you can really hum...)

Quotes

DEDICATION: My thanks to the people who showed me that opera was stranger than I could imagine. I can best repay their kindness by not mentioning their names here.

They said weapons couldn't pierce [Black Aliss]. Swords bounced off her skin. ... And she turned people into gingerbread and had a house made of frogs.

They said you could hear her mad laughter a mile off, and of course, while mad laughter was always part of a waitch's stock-in-trade in necessary circumstances, this was insane mad laughter, the worst kind.

Without Magrat, Nanny Ogg and Granny Weatherwax got on one another's nerves. With her, all three had been able to get on the nerves of absolutely everyone else in the whole world, which had been a lot more fun.

Nanny Ogg found herself embarassed even to think about this, and this was unusual because embarassment normally came as naturally to Nanny as altruism comes to a cat.

Young Verence had sent off for a helpful manual. It had pictures in it, and numbered parts. Nanny knew this because she had sneaked into the royal bedroom while visiting one day, and had spent an instructional ten minutes drawing moustaches and spectacles on some of the figures. ...Verence had been seen enquiring of people where he might buy a couple of fake moustaches.

Of course, Granny Weatherwax made a great play of her independence and self-reliance. But the point about that kind of stuff was that you needed someone around to be proudly independent and self-reliant at. People who didn't need people needed people around to know that they were the kind of people who didn't need people.

It was like hermits. There was no point freezing your nadgers off on top of some mountain while communing with the Infinite unless you could rely on a lot of impressionable young women to come along occassionally and say "Gosh."

Goatberger: "You've just read about Banana Soup Surprise?"
Cropper: "Yes!"
Goatberger: "You wait till you get to Spotted Dick."
Cropper: "Well, my old granny used to make Spotted Dick--"
Goatberger: "Not to this recipe."

-- Evaluating Nanny Ogg's cookbook

And he dreamed the dream of all those who publish books, which was to have so much gold in your pockets that you would have to employ two people just to hold your trousers up.

A man was theoretically sweeping [the steps]. What he was in fact doing was moving the dirt around with a broom, to give it a change of scenery and a chance to make new friends.

He had a unique stride: it looked as though his body was being dragged forward and his legs had to flail around underneath it, landing wherever they could find room. It wasn't so much a walk as a collapse, indefinitely postponed.

[Agnes had] even given herself a middle initial - X - which stood for "someone who has a cool and exciting middle initial."

She'd never dared tell anyone that she'd like her full name to be Perdita X Dream. They just wouldn't understand. They'd say things like: if you think that's the right name for you, why have you still got two shelves full of soft toys?

Nanny Ogg went to bed early. After all, she was an old lady. Sometimes she went to bed as early as 6 a.m.

Nanny wandered the summer hayfields regularly, and had a sharp if compassionate eye and damn' good over-the-horizon hearing. Violet Frottidge was walking out with young Deviousness Carter, or at least doing something within ninety degrees of walking out. Bonnie Quarney had been gathering nuts in May with William Simple, and it was only because she'd thought ahead and taken a little advice from Nanny that she wouldn't be bearing Fruit in February.

The people of Lancre thought that marriage was a very serious step that ought to be done properly, so they practiced quite a lot.

You needed at least three witches for a coven. Two witches was just an argument.

She could feel the blush starting somewhere around her knees. It'd take some time to get to her face, because it had a lot of skin to cover, but by then it'd be strawberry pink.

Lancre's only other singer of note was Nanny Ogg, whose attitude to songs was purely ballistic. You just pointed your voice at the end of the verse and went for it.

Voice: "Is ... is that your full [vocal] range, dear?"
Agnes: "No."
Voice: "No?"
Agnes: "If I go any higher people faint. And if I go lower everyone says it makes them feel uncomfortable."

Granny was impressed. It was an outrageously ingenious bit of folk hokum worth remembering for another occassion.

[Granny Weatherwax had] faced wizards, monsters, and elves ... and now she was feeling pleased with herself because she'd fooled Jarge Weaver, a man who'd twice failed to become Village Idiot through being overqualified.

Salzella: "She has a good figure, yes. She certainly has a... sparkle. But she can't sing."
Bucket: "You can train her, can't you? A few years in the chorus..."
Undershaft: "Yes, maybe after a few years, if I persevere, she will be merely very bad."

...it was an education seeing Agnes turn around. She was light enough on her feet but the inertia of outlying parts meant that bits of Agnes were still trying to work out which way to face for some time afterwards.

"My name's Christine!" she said. "Isn't this exciting?!"

And she had the type of voice that can exclaim a question. It seemed to have an excited little squeak permanently screwed to it.

It occurred to Agnes, as she trudged after the girl en route to her new lodgings, that if you spent much time in the same room as Christine you'd need to open a window to stop from drowning in punctuation.

Lancre had always bred strong, capable women. A Lancre farmer needed a wife who'd think nothing of beating a wolf to death with her apron when she went out to get some firewood.

Agnes was, Nanny considered, quite good-looking in an expansive kind of way; she was a fine figure of typical Lancre womanhood. This meant she was approximately two womanhoods from anywhere else.

Music and magic had a lot in common. They were only two letters apart, for one thing.

Not liking Christine would be like not liking small fluffy animals. And Christine was just like a small fluffy animal. It was certainly impossible for her to get a whole idea into her head in one go. She had to nibble it into manageable bits.

"...my father is the Emperor of Klatch and my mother is a small tray of raspberry puddings."

"That's interesting!" said Christine, who was looking at the mirror. "Do you think my hair looks right?!"

No one had asked [Agnes], before she was born, whether she'd want a lovely personality or whether she'd prefer, say, a miserabler personality but a body that could take size 9 in dresses. Instead, people would take pains to tell her that beauty was only skin-deep, as if a man ever fell for an attractive pair of kidneys.

Nanny Ogg could see the future in the froth on a beermug. It invariably showed that she was going to enjoy a refreshing drink which she almost certainly was not going to pay for.

"Tea-leaves can't tell the future," said Granny quietly. "Everyone knows that."

"Tea-leaves don't know."

"Well, who'd be so daft as to tell anything to a bunch of dried leaves?"

...the Lancre postal service consisted of taking the mailbag off the nail where the coach left it and delivering it to the outlying homesteads when he had a moment, although many citizens were in the habit of going down to the sack and rummaging until they found some mail they liked.

Christine's forehead wrinkled, as it tended to when she was contemplating a problem more complex than "What is your name?"

"Books've got to have a name on 'em so's everyone knows who's guilty."

Granny Weatherwax was grudgingly literate but keenly numerate. She assumed that anything written down was probably a lie, and that applied to numbers too. Numbers were used only by people who wanted to put one over on you.

"But that's a--" She stopped. The only word she could think of was "fortune" and that wasn't adequate.

Granny Weatherwax: "Gytha, this is me askin' you this. Is there any page in this book, is there any single recipe, which does not in some way relate to ... goings-on?"
Nanny Ogg: "Porridge."
Granny Weatherwax: "Really?"
Nanny Ogg: "Yes. Er. No, I tell a lie, it's got my special honey mixture in it."
Granny Weatherwax: "What about this one? Maids of Honour?"
Nanny Ogg: "Weeelll, they starts out as Maids of Honour, but they ends up Tarts."

Granny looked out at the dull grey sky and the dying leaves and felt, amazingly enough, her sap rising. A day ago the future had looked aching and desolate, and now it looked full of surprises and terror and bad things happening to people...

If she had anything to do with it, anyway.

[The witches] were arguing. It was not a raised-voice argument, but a chronic wrangle that had clearly been going on for some time and was set in for the rest of the decade.

"And I'm telling you it's too draughty on broomsticks this time of year, Esme. The breeze gets into places I wouldn't dream of talking about."

"Really? Can't imagine where those'd be, then."

Nanny Ogg: "Anyway, Greebo don't like it on the broomstick. He's got a delicate stomach."
Granny Weatherwax: "Gytha, I've seen him eat half a skunk, so don't tell me about his delicate stomach."

Nanny Ogg: "[Greebo] pines when I'm gone. He won't take food from anyone else."
Granny Weatherwax: "Only 'cos they try to poison him, and no wonder."

An elderly man advanced across the stage. He wore an ancient opera hat and carried a sack over one shoulder, while his spare hand made the needlessly expansive gestures of someone who has got hold of some direful information and can't wait to freeze all nearby spines.

"Are we talking about some kind of mask here?" said Agnes.

Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, "Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all."

"You mean you just see things that are really there?" he said. "I can see you haven't been with the opera for long, dear."

"Let's see what else we've got ... ah, has anybody got an opener for a bottle of beer?"

A man in the corner indicated that he might have such a thing.

"Fine," said Nanny Ogg. "Anyone got something to drink a bottle of beer out of?"

Another man nodded hopefully.

"Good," said Nanny Ogg. "Now, has anyone got a bottle of beer?"

He was snoring with the regularity of a geyser, and looked as though the only worries he might have in the world were a tendency for small objects to gravitate towards him and the occassional tide.

"I should've gone before we left. Sorry. It's the jolting. Anyone know if there's a privy on this thing?" [Nanny] added brightly.

"Er," said the probable spy, "we generally wait until the next stop, or--" He stopped. He had been about to add "there's always the window", which was a manly option on the bumpier rural stretches, but he stopped himself in the horrible apprehension that this ghastly old woman might seriously consider the possibility.

Seldom Bucket had always enjoyed opera. He didn't understand it and never had, but he didn't understand the ocean either and he enjoyed that, too.

"Handing over thirty thousand dollars concentrates the memory a bit."

"There have been ... accidents."

"What kind of accidents?"

"The kind of accidents you prefer to call ... accidents."

Ahahahahaha! Ahahahaha! Aahahaha!

BEWARE!!!!!

Yrs sincerely
The Opera Ghost

"What sort of person," said Salzella patiently, "sits down and writes a maniacal laugh? And all those exclamation marks, you notice? Five? A sure sign of someone who wears his underpants on his head. Opera can do that to a man."

Bucket smiled the bright, crazed smile of a man who was nearing double exclamation marks himself.

"This isn't cheese. This is opera. If you wanted a quiet retirement, Mr. Bucket, you shouldn't have bought the Opera House. You should have done something peaceful, like alligator dentistry."

The coaching inn was a run-down shack, with only two bedrooms for guests. As helpless old ladies travelling alone, the witches got one, simply because all hell would have been let loose if they hadn't.

"You might think a production like Lohenshaak is full of passion, but it's a sandpit of toddlers compared to what goes on behind the scenes. The singers all loathe the sight of one another, the chorus despises the singers, they both hate the orchestra, and everyone fears the conductor; the staff on one prompt side won't talk to the staff on the opposite prompt side, the dancers are all crazed from hunger in any case, and that's only the start of it..."

-- Secrets of opera revealed

Salzella: "You see, cheese does make money. And opera doesn't. Opera's what you spend money on."
Bucket: "But... what do you get out of it?"
Salzella: "You get opera. You put money in, you see, and opera comes out."
Bucket: "There's no profit?"
Salzella: "Profit... profit. No, I don't believe I've come across the word."

Greebo also had a cat's approach to possessions, which was simply that nothing edible had a right to belong to other people.

At home Granny Weatherwax slept with open windows and an unlocked door, secure in the knowledge that the Ramtops' various creatures of the night would rather eat their own ears than break in.

Nanny Ogg: "I really don't think we need to shove the bed in front of the door, Esme."
Granny Weatherwax: "You can't be too careful. Supposing some man started rattlin' the knob in the middle of the night?"
Nanny Ogg: "Not at our time of life."

"Gytha, is there anything in the whole world you can't make sound grubby?"

"Not found it yet, Esme," said Nanny brightly.

...Greebo's soul had noted there was one extra option for use in a tight corner (in addition to the usual cat assortment of run, fight, crap or all three together)...

COURAGE IS EASY BY CANDLELIGHT. YOUR FAITH, I SUSPECT, IS IN THE FLAME.

Death grinned.

Granny leaned forward and blew out the candle. Then she folded her arms again and stared fiercely ahead of her.

After some length of time a voice said, ALL RIGHT, YOU'VE MADE YOUR POINT.

-- Why Granny Weatherwax is a major badass

Most people in Lancre, as the saying goes, went to bed with the chickens and got up with the cows. [Footnote: Er. That is to say, they went to bed at the same time as the chickens went to bed, and got up at the same time as the cows got up. Loosely worded sayings can really cause misunderstandings.]

They said love always found a way and, of course, so did a number of associated activities.

Agnes's life unrolled in front of her. ... It almost certainly held chocolate rather than sex and, while Agnes was not in a position to make a direct comparison, and regardless of the fact that a bar of chocolate could be made to last all day, it did not seem a very fair exchange.

"--in fact, at La Scalda in Genua last month his singing made ten thousand people shed tears."

"--hah, I can do that, I don't see there's anything special about that--"

"Senor Basilica's fame has spread far and wide," said the manager primly.

"--just like Senior Basilica," muttered Nanny. "On other people's pies, I expect. Oh, yes, too posh for us now, just because he's the only man you could find on an atlas--"

Enrico: "You're interested in music, Mrs. Ogg?"
Nanny Ogg: "I can get a tune out of just about anything if you give me five minutes to study it. And our Jason can play the violin and our Kev can blow the trombone and all my kids can sing and our Shawn can fart any melody you care to name."
Enrico: "A very talented family, indeed."

"But I don't believe in reincarnation!" he protested.

SQUEAK.

And this, Mr. Pounder understood with absolute rodent clarity, meant: Reincarnation believes in you.

"And if you'll excuse me," said Enrico, "I must catch up on my sleep."

"Don't worry, I shouldn't think it's had time to get far away," said Nanny.

Hate is a force of attraction. Hate is just love with its back turned.

Granny now took every opportunity to visit the travelling theatre that came to Lancre, and sat bolt upright in the front row of every performance, staring fiercely. Even honest Punch and Judy men found her sitting among the children, snapping things like "'Tain't so!" and "Is that any way to behave?" As a result, Lancre was becoming known throughout the Sto Plains as a really tough gig.

Bucket: "I don't understand! Is the man mad?"
Salzella: "Well, now. A man who wears evening dress all the time, lurks in the shadows and occassionally kills people. Then he sends little notes, writing maniacal laughter. Five exclamation marks again, I notice. We have to ask ourselves: is this the career of a sane man?"

"My view," said the director of music, "is that we should shut down, get all the able-bodied men together, issue them with torches, go through this place from top to bottom, flush him out, chase him through the city, catch him and beat him to a pulp, and then throw what's left into the river. It's the only way to be sure."

[Substituting singers] was done far more often than the audiences ever realized -- when singers had a sore throat, or had completely dried, or had turned up so drunk they could barely stand, or, in one notorious instance many years previously, had died in the interval and subsequently sung their famous aria by means of a broom-handle stuck up their back and their jaw operated with a piece of string.

Undershaft: "Opera used to be just about voices. You know, I remember the days of the great sopranos. Dame Violetta Gigh, Dame Clarissa Extendo... whatever became of them, I sometimes wonder."
Salzella: "Didn't the climate change?"

The person on the other side was a young woman. Very obviously a young woman. There was no possible way that she could have been mistaken for a young man in any language, especially Braille.

Granny Weatherwax: "Before you criticize someone, Gytha, walk a mile in their shoes."
Nanny Ogg: "In those shoes she was wearin', I'd twist my ankle."

"This isn't real life, this is opera. It doesn't matter what the words mean."

[Christine] dashed across the room and endeavored to pick Agnes up and hug her, settling eventually for just hugging her.

After you'd known Christine for any length of time, you found yourself fighting a desire to look into her ear to see if you could spot daylight coming the other way.

Undershaft: "But he just killed me! Strangled me with his bare hands!"
Death: YES. CHALK IT UP TO EXPERIENCE.
Undershaft: "You mean I can't do anything about it?"
Death: LEAVE IT TO THE LIVING. GENERALLY SPEAKING, THEY GET UNEASY WHEN THE DECEASED TAKE A CONSTRUCTIVE ROLE IN A MURDER INVESTIGATION. THEY TEND TO LOSE CONCENTRATION.

Greebo ambled along behind them. The air was full of new smells, and he was looking forward to seeing if any of them belonged to anything he could eat, fight or ravish.

Distillation of alcohol was illegal in Lancre. On the other hand, King Verence had long ago given up any idea of stopping a witch doing something she wanted to do, so merely required Nanny Ogg to keep her still somewhere it wasn't obvious. She thoroughly approved of the prohibition, since this gave her an unchallenged market for her own product, known wherever men fell backwards into a ditch as "suicider."

Movable type was known in Ankh-Morpork, but if wizards heard about it they moved it where no one could find it. ... [Printers] simply worked around the problem, and engraved everything. This took a long time and meant that Ankh-Morpork was, for example, denied the benefit of newspapers, leaving the population to fool themselves as best they could.

"I'm Mrs. Ogg," said Nanny Ogg.

The man looked her up and down.

"Oh yes? Can you identify yourself?"

"Certainly. I'd know me anywhere."

Nanny Ogg: "I wore my hair longer in those days... And I still weigh the same now as I did then."
Granny Weatherwax: "Except that it's shifted."

Goatberger: "You're telling me this came up with Bananana soup Surprise?"
Nanny Ogg: "Did you try it?"
Goatberger: "Mr. Cropper the head printer did, yes."
Nanny Ogg: "Was he surprised?"
Goatberger: "Not half as surprised as Mrs. Cropper."

"She does," said Granny. "She wants a little bit of money for every book you've sold."

"I don't expect to be treated like royalty," said Nanny.

[Footnote: Strictly speaking, this means being chased by photographers anxious to get a picture of you with your vest off.]

Bucket: "Honestly, Salzella ... what is the difference between opera and madness?"
Salzella: "Is this a trick question?"
Bucket: "No!"
Salzella: "Then I'd say: better scenery."

Bucket: "How's it all going for tonight?"
Salzalla: "I think it will work, if that's what you mean. Perdita seems to have a very good grasp of the part."
Bucket: "And Christine?"
Salzalla: "She has an astonishingly good grasp of wearing a dress. Between them, they make one prima donna."

"Can we have a look around?" said Nanny dutifully, aware that Granny's curiousity was equalled only by her desire not to show it.

Nanny had an unexpected gift for languages: she could be comprehensibly incompetent in a enw one within an hour or two. What she spoke was one step away from gibberish but it was authentic foreign gibberish.

"We got to be careful. People can be very tricky when they're in a grip of a strange occult force. Remember Mr. Scruple over in Slice?"

"That wasn't a strange occult force. That was acid stomach."

"Well, it certainly seemed strangely occult for a while. Especially if the windows were shut."

"Well, basically there are two sorts of opera," said Nanny, who also had the true witch's ability to be confidently expert on the basis of no experience whatsoever. "There's your heavy opera, where basically people sing foreign and it goes like 'Oh oh oh, I am dyin', oh, I am dyin', oh, oh, oh, that's what I'm doin'', and there's your light opera, where they sing in foreign and it basically goes 'Beer! Beer! Beer! Beer! I like to drink lots of beer!', although sometimes they drink champagne instead. That's basically all of opera, reely."

"What? Either dyin' or drinking beer?"

"Basically, yes," said Nanny, contriving to suggest that this was the whole gamut of human experience.

"Er, excuse me," said the man as Nanny Ogg turned away, "but what is that on your shoulders?"

"It's ... a fur collar," said Nanny.

"Excuse me, but I just saw it flick its tail."

"Yes. I happen to believe in beauty without cruelty."

The chorus was filing on to be A Busy Marketplace, in which various jugglers, gypsies, swordswallowers and gaily dressed yokels would be entirely unsurprised at an apparently drunken baritone strolling on to sing an enormous amount of plot at a passing tenor.

"I assure you, madam, your fur is eating my chocolates. It's started on the second layer!"

"Oh, dear. Show him the little map inside the lid, will you? He's only after the truffles, and you can soon rub the dribble off the others."

That was the good thing about black. You could be nearly anything, wearing black. Mother Superior or Madam, it was really just a matter of the style. It just depended on the details.

Nanny's philosophy of life was to do what seemed like a good idea at the time, and do it as hard as possible. It had never let her down.

"Look at Dame Timpani," he said. "There's a nose in a sling if ever I saw one."

Agnes stared at the prima donna.

"She's smiling," she said.

"So does a tiger, dear."

People were running backwards and forwards, shouting. More impressionable people were just standing in one place and screaming. A large lady was sprawled over two chairs having hysterics, while some distracted stage-hands tried to fan her with a script.

Nanny Ogg was not certain whether something important had happened or whether this was just a continuation of opera by other means.

"Let me through. I'm a nosy person."

"...Mr. Bucket has authorized me to say that there will be an additional two dollars' bonus tonight in recognition of your bravely agreeing to continue with the show--"

"Money? After a shock like this? Money? He thinks he can offer us a couple of dollars and we'll agree to stay on this cursed stage?"

"Shame!"

"Heartless!"

"Unthinkable!"

"Should be at least four!"

"Right! Right!"

People didn't take any notice of little old ladies who looked as though they fitted in, and Nanny Ogg could fit in faster than a dead chicken in a maggot factory.

Salzella: "I'd better go and round up the orchestra. They'll all be at the Stab In The Back over the road. The swine can get through half a pint before the applause has died away."
Bucket: "Are they capable of playing?"
Salzella: "They never have been, so I don't see why they should start now."

"They're musicians, Bucket. The only way a dead body would upset them is if it fell in their beer, and even then they'd play if you offered them Dead Body Money."

"Are you all right? You had a nasty shock! Do you think you could go on for the sake of your art and people not asking for their money back?"

"What's been happening?"

"Well... the Duke's sung a long song to say that he must be going, and the Count has sung a song saying how nice it is in the springtime, and a dead body's fallen out of the ceiling."

"That goes on a lot in opera, does it?"

"I mean, I can't imagine who'd want to murder opera people..." Nanny thought of the expression on Dame Timpani's face. "Except p'raps other opera people. And p'raps the musicians. And some of the audience, p'raps."

Greebo rubbed against [Walter's] legs. Cats have an instinct for anyone daft enough to give them food, and Walter certainly was well qualified.

Granny Weatherwax: "I know about fear."
Nanny Ogg: "That's true. Most of the people you meet are full of fear."

Agnes arranged the flowers Lancre fashion, which was to hold the pot with one hand and the bouquet in the other and forcibly bring the two into conjunction.

"This is Granny Weatherwax, you know."

The troll gave her a disbelieving grin, and then its brow corrugated again, and then it looked at Granny.

She nodded.

"The one you boys call Aaoograha hoa, you know?" said Nanny. "'She Who Must Be Avoided'?"

The troll looked at its club as if seriously considering the possibility of beating itself to death.

-- Granny's reputation precedes her

Granny Weatherwax: "How about the dwarfs? Have they got a name for me, too?"
Nanny Ogg: "Let's go and see Mr. Goatberger, shall we?"
Granny Weatherwax: "Gytha!"
Nanny Ogg: "Er ... well ... I think it's K'ez'rek d'b'duz."
Granny Weatherwax: "What does that mean?"
Nanny Ogg: "Er ... 'Go Around the Other Side of the Mountain.'"

-- Granny's reputation really precedes her

Nanny Ogg: "How much was that again?"
Granny Weatherwax: "Three thousand, two hundred and seventy dollars and eighty-seven pence."
Nanny Ogg: "I've never had seventy dollars before."
Granny Weatherwax: "I didn't say just seventy dollars, I said--"
Nanny Ogg: "Yes, I know. But I'm working my way up to it gradual."

A lady appeared from behind a curtain and observed the visitors, quite possibly with her nose.

"Perhaps you could show us some things," said Lady Esmerelda, sitting down. "It's for the opera."

"Oh, you patronize the opera?"

"Lady Esmerelda patronizes everything," said Nanny Ogg stoutly.

Madame Dawning had a manner peculiar to her class and upbringing... If civilization were to collapse totally and the survivors were reduced to eating cockroaches, Madame Dawning would still use a napkin and look down on people who ate their cockroaches the wrong way round.

[Madame Dawning] knew about old money, which was somehow hallowed by the fact that people had hung on to it for years, and she knew about new money, which seemed to be being made by all these upstarts that were flooding into the city these days. But under her powdered bosom she was an Ankh-Morpork shopkeeper, and knew that the best kind of money was the sort that was in her hand and not someone else's. The best kind of money was mine, not yours.

In the same way that the really rich can never be mad (they're eccentric), so they can also never be rude (they're outspoken and forthright).

Granny Weatherwax: "Anyway, you said you were at your wits' end with thinking what you'd do with the money."
Nanny Ogg: "Yes, but I'd have quite liked to have been at my wits' end on a big comfy chase longyou somewhere with lots of big strong men buyin' me chocolates and pressin' their favours on me."
Granny Weatherwax: "Money don't buy happiness, Gytha."
Nanny Ogg: "I only wanted to rent it for a few weeks."

Andre: "The Watch have been here, talking to everyone and asking lots of questions and writing things down very slowly."
Agnes: "What sort of questions?"
Andre: "Well, knowing the Watch, probably 'Was it you what did it, then?'"

There was a crash from the direction of the kitchen, although it was really more of a crashendo -- the long-drawn-out clatter that begins when a pile of plates begins to slip, continues when someone tries to grab at them, develops a desperate counter-theme when the person realizes they don't have three hands and ends with the roinroinroin of the one miraculously intact plate spinning round and round the floor.

"[Opera's] not meant to be real," said Andre. "It's not like theater. No one's saying 'you've got to pretend this is a big battlefield and that guy in the cardboard crown is really a king.' The plot's only there to fill in time before the next song."

"Shall I do madam's feet?" said the manicurist. She stared at Granny's boots and wondered if it might be necessary to use a hammer.

"Madam has marvellous hair," said the hairdresser. "What is the secret?"

"You've got to make sure there's no newts in the water," said Granny.

Nanny Ogg stared. She'd seen many strange things in her life, some of them twice. She'd seen elves and walking stones and the shoeing of a unicorn. She'd had a farmhouse dropped on her head. But she'd never seen Granny Weatherwax in rouge.

"Gytha Ogg, you wouldn't be a witch if you couldn't jump to conclusions, right?"

Nanny nodded. "Oh, yes." There was no shame in it. Sometimes there wasn't time to do anything else but take a flying leap. Sometimes you had to trust to experience and intuition and general awareness and take a running jump. Nanny herself could clear quite a tall conclusion from a standing start.

Mr. Bucket's mental compass once again swung around to point due Money.

"I'm sure Senor Basilica recalls the many happy times we've had in other opera houses can't quite remember at the moment."

Granny Weatherwax: "And what's the first thing you'd take out of a burning house, Mr. Salzella?"
Salzella: "What would you like me to take, madam?"

Yes, thought Nanny, that would be fun.

If people wanted to go around teaching people lessons, other people should remember that those people knew a thing or two about people.

The pre-luncheon drinks were going quite well, Mr. Bucket thought. Everyone was making polite conversation and absolutely no one had been killed up to the present moment.

[Mr. Bucket] was finding it a little difficult to converse with her. As a conversational gambit, "Hello, I understand you have a lot of money, can I have some please?" lacked, he felt, a certain subtlety.

It was an education watching Enrico Basilica eat. It wasn't as though he gobbled his food, but he did eat continuously, like a man who intends to go on doing it all day on industrial lines...

Enrico Basilica ate like a man freed at last from the tyranny of tomatoes with everything.

Nanny Ogg: "Yes, but two thousand dollars!"
Granny Weatherwax: "It's only money."
Nanny Ogg: "Yes, but it's only my money, not only your money."

"Why, Gytha Ogg," said Granny, "I thought you despised riches!"

"Right, so I'd like to get the chance to despise them up close."

Nanny Ogg: "Say what you like, young Walter's all right by me if Greebo likes him."
Granny Weatherwax: "Gytha, Greebo would like Norris the Eyeball-Eating Maniac of Quirm if he knew how to put food in a bowl."

She had seen the [ballet] dancers' dressing-room, where thirty girls washed and changed in a space rather smaller than Bucket's office. It bore the same relationship to ballet as compost did to roses.

Salzella: "Good heavens, man, she's got a face like a hatchet!"
Bucket: "They say that Queen Ezeriel of Klatch had a squint, but that didn't stop her having fourteen husbands, and that was only the official score. Besides, she's knocking on a bit..."
Salzella: "I thought she'd been dead for two hundred years!"
Bucket: "I'm talking about Lady Esmerelda."
Salzella: "So am I."

"Do you think I might just have a few hours without something awful happening?"

"In an opera house?"

Bergholt Stuttley ("Bloody Stupid") Johnson was Ankh-Morpork's most famous, or rather most notorious, inventor. He was reknowned for never letting his number-blindness, his lack of any skill whatsoever or his complete failure to grasp the essence of a problem stand in the way of his cheerful progress as the first Counter-Renaissance man.

"Well ... I suppose it's natural, because sometimes barrel-organ men came to our village and they often had a dear little mon--"

There was a crashing chord. The orangutan raised its other hand and waved a finger politely in front of Agnes' face.

"He doesn't like being called a monkey," said Andre. "And he likes you."

"How can you tell?"

"He doesn't usually go in for warnings."

Nanny Ogg sighed. She felt she was becoming familiar with one of the most fundamental laws of physics. Time equalled money. Therefore, money equalled time.

Nanny Got On with people. Nanny could get a statue to cry on her shoulder and say what it really thought about pigeons.

"What's a swarray?" said Granny suspiciously.

"It's a sort of posh party before the opera."

"What do I have to do?"

"Drink sherry and make polite conversation," said Nanny. "Or conversation, anyway."

"Fish eggs?" said Granny, coldly.

"I borrowed them from the stuff they've done for the swarray," said Nanny.

"Borrowed?" said Granny.

"That's right. Come along, Greebo, who's a good boy then?"

"Borrowed. You mean ... when the cat's finished with them, you're going to give them back?"

Where am I? That didn't sound like the sort of thing someone said when they woke up from a faint; it sounded more like the sort of thing they said because they'd heard it was the sort of thing people said.

"Seems daft to me, havin' to wear a special suit just to listen to music."

"It enhances the experience," said young Henry, who had read this somewhere.

"I mean, how does the music know?" said his mother.

It is probably a full description of Henry Lawsy's mind that if you had given him a book called How To Improve Your Mind In Five Minutes, he would have read it with a stopwatch.

He'd bought a book about the opera and read it carefully, because he'd heard that it was absolutely unheard-of to go to an opera without knowing what it was about, and the chance of finding out while you were actually watching it was remote.

"Mother, they don't sell peanuts at the opera."

"No peanuts? What're you supposed to do if you don't like the songs?"

Greebo fully clothed still managed to communicate the nakedness beneath. The insouciant moustache, the long sideburns and the tousled black hair combined with the well-developed muscles to give the impression of the more louche kind of buccaneer or a romantic poet who'd given up on the opium and tried red meat instead.

Greebo could, in fact, commit sexual harrassment simply by sitting very quietly in the next room.

"What're we going to call him?" said Granny. "He can't just be Greebo, which I've always said was a damn silly name for a cat."

"Well, he looks aristocratic--" Nanny began.

"He looks like a beautiful brainless bully," Granny corrected her.

"Aristocratic," repeated Nanny.

"Same thing."

Walter Plinge ambled by, his black suit making him look like a very good class of scarecrow.

Bucket: "I thought I told you to keep Senor Basilica away from the canapes!"
Salzella: "I'm sorry, I couldn't find a big enough crowbar."

There was, indeed, a very short man in a suit intended for a rather larger man; this was especially the case with the opera cloak, which actually trailed on the floor behind him to give the overall impression of a superhero who had spent too much time around the Kryptonite.

"Officers? Us?" said the Count de Nobbs. "What makes you think we're Watchmen?"

"He's got a helmet on," Nanny pointed out. "Also, he's got his badge pinned to his coat."

"Oh, yes, thank you very much, Count de Tritus," said Nobby bitterly. "Oh, yes, very undercover, that is! Why don't you just wave your truncheon around where everyone can see it?"

"Well, if you t'ink it'd help--"

"Put it away!"

The Count de Tritus's eyebrows met with the effort of thought. "Dat was irony, den, was it? To a superior officer?"

"Can't be a superior officer, can you, 'cos we ain't Watchmen. Look, Commander Vimes explained it three times..."

Nanny Ogg tactfully moved away. It was bad enough watching them blow their cover without sucking at it as well.

Nanny Ogg was basically a law-abiding person when she had no reason to break the law, and therefore had that kind of person's attitude to law-enforcement officers, which was one of deep and permanent distrust.

"I'm sure people wouldn't come into the Opera House if there was any chance of a chandelier dropping on their ads, mother."

-- Take that, Andrew Lloyd Webber

[The Librarian's] lunchtime recitals in the Great Hall of Unseen University were extremely popular, especially since the University's organ had every single sound-effect that Bloody Stupid Johnson's inverted genius had been able to contrive. No one would have believed, before a pair of simian hand worked on the project, that something like Doinov's romantic Prelude in G could be rescored for Whoopee Cushion and Squashed Rabbits.

The human mind was a deep and abiding mystery and the Librarian was glad he didn't have one any more.

It was central to Nanny Ogg's soul that she never considered herself an old woman, while of course availing herself of every advantage that other people's perception of her as such would bring.

Granny Weatherwax could be nasty, but then nastiness was always in the window: you were aware that it might turn up on the menu. Sharpness from Nanny Ogg, though, was like being bitten by a big, friendly dog. It was all the worse for being unexpected.

The old woman's hand came up holding a bottle of champagne and then came down hard in an effort to launch the SS Gytha Ogg on to the seas of unconsciousness.

Agnes waited with the others for the curtain to go up. She was one of the crowd of fifty or so townspeople who would hear Enrico Basilica sing of his success as a master of disguise, it being a vital part of the entire process that, while the chorus would listen to expositions of the plot, and even sing along, they would suffer an instant lapse of memory afterwards so that later unmaskings would come as a surprise.

It is the fate of all banisters worth sliding down that there is something nasty waiting at the far end.

"And don't go thinking I'm nice. I'm only nice compared to Esme, but so is practic'ly everyone..."

"A secret panel that ain't there is the best kind there is, the reason bein', no bugger can find it."

"They'll put him in prison!"

"If he done them murders, Esme won't let that happen," said Nanny.

Something sank into Mrs Plinge's not very alert mind. "What do you mean, she won't let that happen?" she said.

"I mean," said Nanny, "that if you throw yourself on Esme's mercy, you better be damn' sure you deserve to bounce."

The hairs all over [the Librarian's] body began to prickle. Senses designed to protect his species in the depths of the rainforest had adjusted nicely to the conditions of a big city, which was merely drier and had more carnivoires.

He looked evil in an interesting kind of way, like a pirate who really understood the words "Jolly Roger."

Nanny sprang into a crouch, both thumbs on the cork of the badly shaken champagne bottle she held cradled under one arm.

"This is a magnum," she said, "and I'm not afraid to drink it!"

The stage-hand ran on in a trail of sparks, leaving the yeast of rumour to ferment in the ready dough that was the chorus.

...[Greebo] recognized the shape of Walter Plinge as someone who had given him food. And, standing right next to him, the much more unwelcome shape of Granny Weatherwax, who had once caught him digging in her garden and had kicked him in the cucumbers.

Greebo pounded along Broadway. He was suddenly not feeling very well. Muscles were twitching in odd places. A tingling at the base of his spine indicated that his tail wanted to grow, and his ears definitely wanted to creep up the sides of his head, which is always embarassing when it happens in company.

"There's only one of him and there's lots of us, right? We could easily overpower him."

"Good idea. On the count of three, we'll all rush him, right? One... two... three..." Pause. "You didn't run."

"Well, nor did you."

"Yeah, but I was the one saying 'one, two, three'."

The kicking and punching stopped only when it became apparent that all the mob was attacking was itself. And, since the IQ of a mob is the IQ of its most stupid member divided by the number of mobsters, it was never very clear to anyone what had happened.

"Well, I think," said Nobby, "that when you have ruled out the impossible, what is left, however improbable, ain't worth hanging around on a cold night wondering about when you could be getting on the outside of a big drink."

"An opera about cats?" she said. "Never heard of an opera about cats..."

There were a couple of large pedals under the harmonium. You pedalled these and that worked the bellows and these spongy keys produced something which was to organ music what "poot" was to cursing.

"What about the show? We can't just stop! You never stop the show, not even if someone dies!"

"Oh, we have stopped when people died..."

"Yes, but only as long as it took to get the body off-stage!"

"Walter might not know his right from his left, but he does know his right from his wrong."

"It's Nanny Ogg who thinks we ought to have a third witch. I reckon life's difficult enough without some girl cluttering up the place just because she thinks she looks good in a pointy hat."

"It's wrong to tell lies," said Walter.

"Probably," said Nanny, who'd never let it worry her up to now.

Walter's face was an agony of indecision but, erratic though his thinking might have been, it was no match for Nanny Ogg's meretricious duplicity. He was up against a mind that regarded truth as a reference point but certainly not as a shackle. Nanny Ogg could think her way through a corkscrew in a tornado without touching the sides.

In the flickering candlelight all that she could see were sparkles of light as the cascade poured out, but there was no mistaking the gentle metallic scraping of lots of money. Lots and lots of money. Enough money to suggest very clearly that it belonged to either a thief or a publisher, and there didn't seem to be any books around.

"I thought you didn't like books," said Agnes.

"I don't," said Granny, turning a page. "They can look you right in the face and still lie."

"I ... hang around in dark places looking for trouble," he said.

"Really? There's a nasty name for people like that," snapped Granny.

"Yes," said Andre. "It's 'policeman.'"

The show must go on.

Yes, [Nanny] thought, it has to go on. It's like the build-up to a thunderstorm... no... it's more like making love. Yes. That was a far more Oggish metaphor. You put everything you've got into it, so sooner or later there's a point where it's got to go on, because you can't imagine stopping.

"Incidentally, Corporal Nobbs has got some papers to prove he's a human being."

"Forged?"

"I don't think so."

"Think? Think?" said Granny. "Someone thinking around here at last? How'd you recognize the Ghost, Mister Policeman?"

"Well ... he's got a mask on..."

"Really? Now say it again, and listen to what you say! Good grief! You can recognize him because he's got a mask on? You recognize him because you don't know who he is? Life isn't neat! Whoever said there's only one Ghost?"

Anyway, it would all be explained in the last act, which was the Masked Ball at the Duke's Palace. It would almost certainly turn out that the woman one of the men had been rather daringly courting would be his own wife, but so cunningly disguised by a very small mask that her husband wouldn't have spotted that she wore the same clothes and had the same hairstyle. Someone's serving man would turn out to be someone else's daughter in disguise; someone would die of something that didn't prevent them from singing about it for several minutes; and the plot would be resolved by some coincidences which, in real life, would be as likely as a cardboard hammer.

While the other dancers whirled like snowflakes, the little fat one spun like a top and moved across the floor like one too, bits of her anatomy trying to achieve local orbit.

People who would not believe a High Priest if he said the sky was blue, and was able to produce signed affidavits to this effect from his white-haired old mother and three Vestal virgins, would trust just about anything whispered darkly behind their hand by a complete stranger in a pub.

Christine was walking towards him quite unconcerned. Christine would walk into a dragon's mouth if it had a sign on it saying "Totally harmless, I promise you"... at least, if it was printed in large, easy-to-understand letters.

Granny Weatherwax had never heard of psychiatry and would have had no truck with it even if she had. There are some arts too black even for a witch.

A psychiatrist, dealing with a man who fears he is being followed by a large and terrible monster, will endeavour to convince him that monsters don't exist. Granny Weatherwax would simply give him a chair to stand on and a very heavy stick.

"The trouble is, you see, that if you do know Right from Wrong you can't choose Wrong. You just can't do it and live. So... if I was a bad witch I could make Mister Salzella's muscles turn against his bones and break them where he stood... if I was bad. I could do things inside his head, change the shape he thinks he is, and he'd be down on what'd been his knees and begging to be turned into a frog... if I was bad. I could leave him with a mind like a scrambled egg, listening to colours and hearing smells... if I was bad. Oh, yes." There was another sigh, deeper and more heartfelt. "But I can't do none of that stuff: That wouldn't be Right."

"I don't know what you are when you're behind the mask," said Granny, "but 'ghost' is just another word for 'spirit' and 'spirit' is just another word for 'soul'."

"Oh, yes! A ghost of a Ghost! Totally unbelievable and an offence against common sense, in the best operatic tradition!"

"Well, well," he said. "Lady Esmerelda, eh?"

"I'm stoppin' bein' a lady, Mr Salzella."

"So you are a witch instead?"

"Yes, indeed."

"A bad witch, no doubt?"

"Worse."

"Masks conceal one face, but they reveal another. The one that only comes out in darkness. I bet you could do just what you liked, behind a mask...?"

"Perdita's sensible, and she knows an invisible mask when she sees one."

"Look, the sword isn't even sticking in him! It's just tucked between his body and his arm, for heaven's sake!"

"Yes," said Nanny. "I s'pose, really, it's a shame he dint notice that."

Bucket: "Come on, out with it, tell me what you've done with my money!!! I don't hear you!!!! He's not saying anything!!!"
Granny Weatherwax: "That's on account of being dead. Not talkative, the deceased. As a rule."
Bucket: "Well, you're a witch!!! Can't you do that thing with the cards and the glasses?"
Nanny Ogg: "Well, yes ... we could have a poker game. Good idea."

"Mr. Bucket, you do know this isn't opera? There's music and... yes... dancing and singing all right, but it's not opera. Not opera at all. A long way from opera."

"How far? You don't mean..." Bucket hesitated, savouring the idea, "you don't mean that it's just possible that you put music in and you get money out?"

Agnes: "Did you do something to everyone's heads?"
Nanny Ogg: "No, but I felt like smacking a few."

Granny Weatherwax: "You grab a sharp sword by the blade, you get hurt. World'd be a terrible place if people forgot that."
Nanny Ogg: "You weren't hurt."
Granny Weatherwax: "Not my fault. I didn't have time."

"We are desirous of travelling to Lancre but unfortunately we find ourselves a bit embarassed in the knicker department. ... But we are witches and could prob'ly pay for our travel by, e.g., curing any embarassing little ailments you may have."

The coachman frowned. "I din't carrying you for nothing, old crone. And I haven't got any embarassing little ailments!"

Granny stepped forward.

"How many would you like?" she said.

"Never pick yourself a name you can't scrub the floor in."

"This is just me askin', you understand, in a kind neighbourly way, takin' an interest sort of thing, wouldn't be human if I didn't--"

Agnes sighed. "Yes?"

"...you got much to do with your evenin's these days?"

There was just enough rebellion left in Agnes to put a sarcastic edge on her voice. "Oh? Are you offering to teach me something?"

"Teach? No," said Granny. "Ain't got the patience for teaching. But I might let you learn."