from Discworld® novels by
Terry Pratchett
concerning the Witches of Lancre

It must be understood that while the majority of Zoon cannot lie they have great respect for any Zoon who can say that the world is other than it is, and the Liar holds a position of considerable eminence. He represents his tribe in all his dealings with the outside world [...]

Other races get very annoyed about all this. They feel that the Zoon ought to have adopted more suitable titles, like “diplomat” or “public relations officer.” They feel they are poking fun at the whole thing.

It is well known that stone can think, because the whole of electronics is based on that fact, but in some universes men spend ages looking for other intelligences in the sky without once looking under their feet. That is because they’ve got the time-span all wrong. From stone’s point of view the universe is hardly created and mountain ranges are bouncing up and down like organ-stops while continents zip backwards and forwards in general high spirits, crashing into each other from the sheer joy of momentum and getting their rocks off. It is going to be quite some time before stone notices its disfiguring little skin disease and starts to scratch, which is just as well.

“Um, women aren’t allowed in,” said Esk.

Granny stopped in the doorway. Her shoulders rose. She turned around very slowly.

“What did you say?” she said. “Did these old ears deceive me, and don’t say they did because they didn’t.”

“Sorry,” said Esk. “Force of habit.”

“I can see you’ve been getting ideas below your station,” said Granny coldly.

Basically, it was p’ch’zarni’chiwkov. This epiglottis-throttling word is seldom used on the Disc except by highly-paid stunt linguists and, of course, the tiny tribe of the K’turni, who invented it. It has no direct synonym, although the Cumhoolie word “squernt” (‘the feeling upon finding that the previous occupant of the privy has used all the paper’) begins to approach it in general depth of feeling. The closest translation is as follows:

the nasty little sound of a sword being unsheathed right behind one at just the point when one thought one had disposed of one’s enemies

“You’re only putting off the inevitable,” it said.

“Suits me.”

“Everything was a different colour in those days.”

“That’s true.”

“It didn’t rain so much in the summer time.”

“The sunsets were redder.”

“There were more old people. The world was full of them,” said the wizard.

“Yes, I know. And now it’s full of young people. Funny, really. I mean, you’d expect it to be the other way round.”

He seized the hem of his robe and wrung it out wretchedly, then he reached for his tobacco pouch.

It was a nice green waterproof one. That meant that all the rain that had got into it couldn’t get out again.

It would be a pretty good bet that the gods of a world like this probably do not play chess and indeed this is the case. In fact no gods anywhere play chess. They haven’t got the imagination. Gods prefer simple, vicious games, where you Do Not Achieve Transcendence but Go Straight To Oblivion; a key to the understanding of all religion is that a god’s idea of amusement is Snakes and Ladders with greased rungs.

“There is a knocking without,” he said.

“Without what?” said the Fool.

“Without the door, idiot.”

The Fool gave him a worried look. “A knocking without a door?” he said suspiciously. “This isn’t some kind of Zen, is it?”

“Who dost knock without?” he growled.

The soldier, drenched and terrified though he was, hesitated.

“Without? Without what?” he said.

“If you’re going to bugger about, you can bloody well stay without all day,” said the porter calmly.

“Oh, obvious,” said Granny. “I’ll grant you it’s obvious. Trouble is, just because things are obvious doesn’t mean they’re true.”

It was a rich and wonderful voice, with every diphthong gliding beautifully into place. It was a golden brown voice. If the Creator of the multiverse had a voice, it was a voice such as this. If it had a drawback, it was that it wasn’t a voice you could use, for example, for ordering coal. Coal ordered by this voice would become diamonds.

Only once, in the entire history of witchery in the Ramtops, had a thief broken into a witch’s cottage. The witch concerned visited the most terrible punishment on him.*

* She did nothing, although sometimes when she saw him in the village she’d smile in a faint, puzzled way. After three weeks of this the suspense was too much for him and he took his own life; in fact he took it all the way across the continent, where he became a reformed character and never went home again.

“Ah,” said Granny Weatherwax distantly. “His droit de seigneur.”

“Needed a lot of exercise,” said Nanny Ogg, staring at the fire.

“But next day he’d send his housekeeper round with a bag of silver and a hamper of stuff for the wedding,” said Granny. “Many a couple got a proper start in life thanks to that.”

“Ah,” agreed Nanny. “One or two individuals, too.”

Winter in the Ramtops could not honestly be described as a magical frosty wonderland, each twig laced with confections of brittle ice. Winter in the Ramtops didn’t mess about it; it was a gateway straight through to the primeval coldness that lived before the creation of the world. Winter in the Ramtops was several yards of snow, the forests a mere collection of shadowy green tunnels under the drifts. Winter meant the coming of the lazy wind, which couldn’t be bothered to blow around people and blew right through them instead. The idea that Winter could actually be enjoyable would never have occurred to Ramtop people, who had eighteen different words for snow.*

* All of them, unfortunately, unprintable.

Totally mad, the Fool thought. Several bricks short of a bundle. So far round the twist you could use him to open wine bottles.

The stone was about the same height as a tall man, and made of a bluish tinted rock. It was considered intensely magical because, although there was only one of it, no-one had ever been able to count it; if it saw anyone looking at it speculatively, it shuffled behind them. It was the most self-effacing monolith ever discovered.

“It’s got to stop. I know my rights.”

“What rights are they?” said Granny.

“Dunnage, cowhage-in-ordinary, badinage, leftovers, scrommidge, clary and spunt,” said the peasant promptly. “And acornage, every other year, and the right to keep two-thirds of a goat on the common.”

“Well, well,” said one, leering. “Come to keep us company, have you, my pretty.”*

* No-one knows why men say things like this. Any minute now he is probably going to say he likes a girl with spirit.

It was probably some wonderful organisation on the part of Nature to protect itself. It saw to it that everyone with any magical talent was about as ready to co-operate as a she-bear with toothache, so all that dangerous power was safely dissipated as random bickering and rivalry. There were differences in style, of course. Wizards assassinated each other in draughty corridors, witches just cut one another dead in the street. And they were all as self-centred as a spinning top. Even when they help other people, she thought, they’re secretly doing it for themselves. Honestly, they’re just like big children.

Except for me, she thought smugly.

It is true that words have power, and one of the things they are able to do is get out of someone’s mouth before the speaker has the chance to stop them.

“But you can’t put the old king back on the throne,” said Magrat. “Ghosts can’t rule. You’d never get the crown to stay on. It’d drop through.”

Hour gongs were being struck all across the city and night-watchmen were proclaiming that it was indeed midnight and also that, in the face of all the evidence, all was well. Many of them got as far as the end of the sentence before being mugged.

The road, Hwel felt, had to go somewhere.

This geographical fiction has been the death of many people. Roads don’t necessarily have to go anywhere, they just have to have somewhere to start.

Magrat didn’t like cats and hated the idea of mousetraps. She’d always felt that it should be possible to come to some sort of arrangement with creatures like mice so that all available food was rationed in the best interest of all parties. This was a very humanitarian outlook, which is to say that it was not a view shared by mice, and therefore her moonlit kitchen was alive.

“We’re bound to be truthful,” she said. “But there’s no call to be honest.”