Maskerade - Terry Pratchett [3]
His erratic footsteps led toward a door in the side wall. Agnes followed them in.
Just inside was a sort of shed, with one open wall and a counter positioned so that someone standing there could watch the door. The person behind it must have been a human being because walruses don’t wear coats. The strange man had disappeared somewhere in the gloom beyond.
Agnes looked around desperately.
“Yes, miss?” said the walrus man. It really was an impressive mustache, which had sapped all the growth from the rest of its owner.
“Er…I’m here for the…the auditions,” said Agnes. “I saw a notice that said you were auditioning—”
She gave a helpless little smile. The doorkeeper’s face proclaimed that it had seen and been unimpressed by more desperate smiles than even Agnes could have eaten hot dinners. He produced a clipboard and a stub of pencil.
“You got to sign here,” he said.
“Who was that…person who came in with me?”
The mustache moved, suggesting a smile was buried somewhere below. “Everyone knows our Walter Plinge.”
This seemed to be all the information that was likely to be imparted.
Agnes gripped the pencil.
The most important question was: what should she call herself? Her name had many sterling qualities, no doubt, but it didn’t exactly roll off the tongue. It snapped off the palate and clicked between the teeth, but it didn’t roll off the tongue.
The trouble was, she couldn’t think of one with great rotational capabilities.
Catherine, possibly.
Or…Perdita. She could go back to trying Perdita. She’d been embarrassed out of using that name in Lancre. It was a mysterious name, hinting of darkness and intrigue and, incidentally, of someone who was quite thin. She’d even given herself a middle initial—X—which stood for “someone who has a cool and exciting middle initial.”
It hadn’t worked. Lancre people were depressingly resistant to cool. She had just been known as “that Agnes who calls herself Perditax.”
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?
Well, here she could start afresh. She was good. She knew she was good.
Probably no hope for the Dream, though.
She was probably stuck with the Nitt.
Nanny Ogg usually went to bed early. After all, she was an old lady. Sometimes she went to bed as early as six A.M.
Her breath puffed in the air as she walked through the woods. Her boots crunched on the leaves. The wind had died away, leaving the sky wide and clear and open for the first frost of the season, a petal-nipping, fruit-withering little scorcher that showed you why they called Nature a mother…
A third witch, she thought.
Three witches could sort of…spread the load.
Maiden, mother and…crone. There.
The trouble was that Granny Weatherwax combined all three in one. She was a maiden, as far as Nanny knew, and she was at least in the right age-bracket for a crone; and, as for the third, well…cross Granny Weatherwax on a bad day and you’d be like a blossom in the frost.
There was bound to be a candidate for the vacancy, though. There were several young girls in Lancre who were just about the right age.
Trouble was, the young men of Lancre knew it too. 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. And pretty soon now young Mildred Tinker’s mother would