Carpe Jugulum - Terry Pratchett [131]
The eagle swooped on into the bowl of Lancre.
The long light glowed on the lake, and on the big V-shaped ripple, made up of many small V-shaped ripples, that arrowed through the water toward the unsuspecting island.
The voices echoed around the mountains.
“See you, otter!”
“Taggit, jins ma greely!”
“Wee free men!”
“Nac mac Feegle!”
The eagle passed overhead, dropping fast and steep now. It drifted silently over the shadowy woods, curved over the trees, and landed suddenly on a branch beside a cottage in a clearing.
Granny Weatherwax awoke.
Her body did not move, but her gaze darted this way and that, sharply, and in the gloom her nose looked more hooked than normal. Then she settled back, and her shoulders lost the hunched, perching look.
After a while she stood up, stretched, and went to the doorway.
The night felt warmer. She could feel greenness in the ground, uncoiling. The year was past the edge, heading away from the dark…Of course, dark would come again, but that was in the nature of the world. Many things were beginning.
When at last she’d shut the door she lit the fire, took the box of candles out of the dresser and lit every single one and put them around the room, in saucers.
On the table, the pool of water that had accumulated in the last two days rippled and rose gently in the middle. Then a drip soared upward and plopped into the damp patch in the ceiling.
Granny wound up the clock, and started the pendulum. She left the room for a moment and came back with a square of cardboard attached to a loop of elderly string. She sat down in the rocking chair and reached down into the hearth for a stick of half-burned wood.
The clock ticked as she wrote. Another drop left the table and plunged toward the ceiling.
Then Granny Weatherwax hung the sign around her neck, and lay back with a smile. The chair rocked for a while, a counterpoint to the dripping of the table and the ticking of the clock, and then slowed.
The sign read:
I still ATE’NT DEAD
The light faded from can to can’t.
After a few minutes an owl woke up in a nearby tree and sailed out over the forests.
About the Author
Terry Pratchett’s novels have sold more than thirty million (give or take a few million) copies worldwide. He lives in England.
www.terrypratchettbooks.com
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
UNANIMOUS Praise for
CARPE JUGULUM
“Pratchett lampoons everything from Christian
superstition to Swiss Army knives here, proving that the fantasy
sire of Discworld ’still ate’nt dead.’”
Publishers Weekly
“Fresh, inventive, and funny…Pratchett has a gift for
the absurd, the comic, the fantastic, and the outrageous. His
world is a combination of slapstick, puns, humorous situations
and outlandish characters. Any new novel by him is
guaranteed…it will make the bestseller list.”
Birmingham Post (U.K.)
“An enduring, endearing presence in comic
literature…Pratchett’s position as a leading
comic novelist now seems as permanently assured
as that of P. G. Wodehouse…. Despite outward
appearances, these cannot really be called fantasy novels, partly because Pratchett is too intent on
undermining all the conventions of the genre and
partly because they mirror so effectively the
current concerns of our own society.”
The Guardian (U.K.)
and
TERRY PRATCHETT
“The funniest parodist working in
the field today, period.”
New York Review of Science Fiction
“If I were making my list of Best Books of the Twentieth Century,
Terry Pratchett’s would be most of them.”
Elizabeth Peters
“Pratchett…should be recognized as one of the more significant
contemporary English-language satirists.”
Publishers Weekly
“Simply the best humorous writer of the
twentieth century.”
Oxford Times (U.K.)
“A brilliant storyteller with a sense of humor…whose infectious
fun completely engulfs you…The Dickens of the twentieth