Carpe Jugulum - Terry Pratchett [97]
“Hello?” said Oats, standing up. He strained to see the rider in the darkness, but there was just a dim shape farther along the track.
“Are you following us? Hello?”
He took a few steps and made out the horse, head bowed against the rain. The rider was just a darker shadow in the night.
Suddenly awash with dread, Oats ran and slithered back to Granny’s silent form. He struggled out of his drenched coat and put it over her, for whatever good that would do, and looked around desperately for anything that could make a fire. Fire, that was the thing. It brought life and drove away the darkness.
But the trees were tall firs, dripping wet with dank bracken underneath among the black trunks. There was nothing that would burn here.
He fished hurriedly in his pocket and found a waxed box with his last few matches in it. Even a few dry twigs or a tuft of grass would do, anything that’d dry out another handful of twigs…
Rain oozed through his shirt. The air was full of water.
Oats hunched over so that his hat kept the drips off, and pulled out the Book of Om for the comfort that it brought. In times of trouble, Om would surely show the way—
…I’ve already got a hot water bottle…
“Damn you,” he said, under his breath.
He opened the book at random, struck a match and read:
“…and in that time, in the land of the Cyrinites, there was a multiplication of camels…”
The match hissed out.
No help there, no clue. He tried again.
“…and looked upon Gul-Arah, and the lamentation of the desert, and rode then to…”
Oats remembered the vampire’s mocking smile. What words could you trust? He struck the third match with shaking hands and flicked the book open again and read, in the weak dancing light:
“…and Brutha said to Simony, ‘Where there is darkness we will make a great light…’”
The match died. And there was darkness.
Granny Weatherwax groaned. At the back of his mind, Oats thought he could hear the sounds of hooves, slowly approaching.
Oats knelt in the mud and tried a prayer, but there was no answering voice from the sky. There never had been. He’d been told never to expect one. That wasn’t how Om worked anymore. Alone of all the gods, he’d been taught, Om delivered the answers straight into the depths of the head. Since the prophet Brutha, Om was the silent god. That’s what they said.
If you didn’t have faith, then you weren’t anything. There was just the dark.
He shuddered in the gloom. Was the god silent, or was there no one to speak?
He tried praying again, more desperately this time, fragments of childish prayer, losing control of the words and even of their direction, so that they tumbled out and soared away into the universe addressed simply to The Occupier.
The rain dripped off his hat.
He knelt and waited in the wet darkness, and listened to his own mind, and remembered, and took out the Book of Om once more.
And made a great light.
The coach thundered through pine trees by a lake, struck a tree root, lost a wheel and skidded to a halt on its side as the horses bolted.
Igor picked himself up, lurched to the coach and raised a door.
“Thorry about that,” he said. “I’m afraid thith alwayth happenth when the marthter ithn’t on board. Everyone all right down there?”
A hand grabbed him by the throat.
“You could have warned us!” Nanny growled. “We were thrown all over the place! Where the hell are we? Is this Slake?”
A match flared and Igor lit a torch.
“We’re near the cathle,” he said.
“Whose?”
“The Magpyrth.”
“We’re near the vampires’ castle?”
“Yeth. I think the old marthter did thomething to the road here. The wheelth alwayth come off, ath thure ath eggth ith eggth. Bringth in the vithitorth, he thed.”
“It didn’t occur to you to mention it?” said Nanny, climbing out and giving Magrat a hand.
“Thorry. It’th been a buthy day…”
Nanny took the torch. The flames illuminated a crude sign nailed to a tree.
“‘Don’t go near the Castle!!’” Nanny read. “Nice of them to put an arrow pointing the way to it, too.”
“Oh, the marthter did that,” said