'Evil black and midnight hags!'

'Are you scheming?'

'Yeah!'

'Are you secret?'

'Yeah!'

Hwel drew himself to his full height, such as it was.

'What-are-you?' he screamed.

'We're scheming evil secret black and midnight hags!'

'Right!' He pointed a vibrating finger towards the stage and lowered his voice and, at that moment, a dramatic inspiration dived through the atmosphere and slammed into his creative node, causing him to say, 'Now I want you to get out there and give 'em hell. Not for me. Not for the goddam captain.' He shifted the butt of an imaginary cigar from one side of his mouth to the other, and pushed back a non-existent tin helmet, and rasped, 'But for Corporal Walkowski and his little dawg.'

They stared at him in disbelief.

On cue, someone shook a sheet of tin and broke the spell.

Hwel rolled his eyes. He'd grown up in the mountains, where thunderstorms stalked from peak to peak on legs of lightning. He remembered thunderstorms that left mountains a different shape and flattened whole forests. Somehow, a sheet of tin wasn't the same, no matter how enthusiastically it was shaken.

Just once, he thought, just once. Let me get it right just once.

He opened his eyes and glared at the witches.

'What are you hanging around here for?' he yelled. 'Get out there and curse them!'

He watched them scamper on to the stage, and then Tomjon tapped him on the head.

'Hwel, there's no crown.'

'Hmm?' said the dwarf, his mind wrestling with ways of building thunder-and-lightning machines.

'There's no crown, Hwel. I've got to wear a crown.'

'Of course there's a crown. The big one with the red glass, very impressive, we used it in that place with the big square—'

'I think we left it there.'

There was another tinny roll of thunder but, even so, the part of Hwel that was living the play heard a faltering voice on stage. He darted to the wings.

'—I have smother'd many a babe—' he hissed, and sprinted back.

'Well, just find another one, then,' he said vaguely. 'In the props box. You're the Evil King, you've got to have a crown. Get on with it, lad, you're on in a few minutes. Improvise.'

Tomjon wandered back to the box. He'd grown up among crowns, big golden crowns made of wood and plaster, studded with finest glass. He'd cut his teeth on the hat-brims of Authority. But most of them had been left in the Dysk now. He pulled out collapsible daggers and skulls and vases, the strata of the years and, right at the bottom, his fingers closed on something thin and crown shaped, which no-one had ever wanted to wear because it looked so uncrownly.

It would be nice to say it tingled under his hand. Perhaps it did.

Granny was sitting as still as a statue, and almost as cold. The horror of realisation was stealing over her.

'That's us,' she said. 'Round that silly cauldron. That's meant to be us, Gytha.'

Nanny Ogg paused with a walnut halfway to her gums. She listened to the words.

'I never shipwrecked anybody!' she said. 'They just said they shipwreck people! I never did!'

Up in the tower Magrat elbowed the Fool in the ribs.

'Green blusher,' she said, staring at the 3rd Witche. 'I don't look like that. I don't, do I?'

'Absolutely not,' said the Fool.

'And that hair!'

The Fool peered through the crenellations like an over-eager gargoyle.

'It looks like straw,' he said. 'Not very clean, either.'

He hesitated, picking at the lichened stonework with his fingers; Before he'd left the city he'd asked Hwel for a few suitable words to say to a young lady, and he had been memorising them on the way home. It was now or never.

'I'd like to know if I could compare you to a summer's day. Because – well, June 12th was quite nice, and . . .Oh. You've gone . . .'

King Verence gripped the edge of his seat; his fingers went through it. Tomjon had strutted on to the stage.

'That's him, isn't it? That's my son?'

The uncracked walnut fell from Nanny Ogg's fingers and rolled on to the floor. She nodded.

Verence turned a haggard, transparent face towards her.

'But what is he doing? What is he saying?'

Nanny shook her head. The king listened with his mouth open as Tomjon, lurching crabwise across the stage, launched into his major speech.

'I think he's meant to be you,' said Nanny, distantly.

'But I never walked like that! Why's he got a hump on his back? What's happened to his leg?' He listened some more, and added, in horrified tones, 'And I certainly never did that! Or that. Why is he saying I did that?'

The look he gave Nanny was full of pleading. She shrugged.

The king reached up, lifted off his spectral crown, and examined it.

'And it's my crown he's wearing! Look, this is it! And he's saying I did all those—' He paused for a minute, to listen to the latest couplet, and added, 'All right. Maybe I did that. So I set fire to a few cottages. But everyone does that. It's good for the building industry, anyway.'

He put the ghostly crown back on his head.

'Why's he saying all this about me?' he pleaded.

'It's art,' said Nanny. 'It wossname, holds a mirror up to life.'

Granny turned slowly in her seat to look at the audience. They were staring at the performance, their faces rapt. The words washed over them in the breathless air. This was real. This was more real even than reality. This was history. It might not be true, but that had nothing to do with it.

Granny had never had much time for words. They were so insubstantial. Now she wished that she had found the time. Words were indeed insubstantial. They were as soft as water, but they were also as powerful as water and now they were rushing over the audience, eroding the levees of veracity, and carrying away the past.

That's us down there, she thought. Everyone knows who we really are, but the things down there are what they'll remember – three gibbering old baggages in pointy hats. All we've ever done, all we've ever been, won't exist any more.

She looked at the ghost of the king. Well, he'd been no worse than any other king. Oh, he might burn down the odd cottage every now and again, in a sort of absent-minded way, but only when he was really angry about something, and he could give it up any time he liked. Where he wounded the world, he left the kind of wounds that healed.

Whoever wrote this Theatre knew about the uses of magic. Even I believe what's happening, and I know there's no truth in it.

This is Art holding a Mirror up to Life. That's why everything is exactly the wrong way round.

We've lost. There is nothing we can do against this without becoming exactly what we aren't.

Nanny Ogg gave her a violent nudge in the ribs.

'Did you hear that?' she said. 'One of 'em said we put babbies in the cauldron! They've done a slander on me! I'm not sitting here and have 'em say we put babbies in a cauldron!'

Granny grabbed her shawl as she tried to stand up.

'Don't do anything!' she hissed. 'It'll make things worse.'

' “Ditch-delivered by adrabe”, they said. That'll be young Millie Hipwood, who didn't dare tell her mum and then went out gathering firewood. I was up all night with that one,' Nanny muttered. 'Fine girl she produced. It's a slander! What's a drabe?' she added.

'Words,' said Granny, half to herself. 'That's all that's left. Words.'

'And now there's a man with a trumpet come on. What's he going to do? Oh. End of Act One,' said Nanny.

The words won't be forgotten, thought Granny. They've got a power to them. They're damn good words, as words go.

There was yet another rattle of thunder, which ended with the kind of crash made, for example, by a sheet of tin escaping from someone's hands and hitting the wall.

In the world outside the stage the heat pressed down like a pillow, squeezing the very life out of the air. Granny saw a footman bend down to the duke's ear. No, he won't stop the play. Of course he won't. He wants it to run its course.

The duke must have felt the heat of her gaze on the back of his neck. He turned, focused on her, and gave her a strange little smile. Then he nudged his wife. They both laughed.

Granny Weatherwax was often angry. She considered it one of her strong points. Genuine anger was one of the world's great creative forces. But you had to learn how to control it. That didn't mean you let it trickle away. It meant you dammed it, carefully, let it develop a working head, let it drown whole valleys of the mind and then, just when the whole structure was about to collapse, opened a tiny pipeline at the base and let the iron-hard stream of wrath power the turbines of revenge.

She felt the land below her, even through several feet of foundations, flagstones, one thickness of leather and two thicknesses of sock. She felt it waiting.

She heard the king say, 'My own flesh and blood? Why has he done this to me? I'm going to confront him!'

She gently took Nanny Ogg's hand.

'Come, Gytha,' she said.

Lord Felmet sat back in his throne and beamed madly at the world, which was looking good right at the moment. Things were working out better than he had dared to hope. He could feel the past melting behind him, like ice in the spring thaw.

On an impulse he called the footman back.

'Call the captain of the guard,' he said, 'and tell him to find the witches and arrest them.'

The duchess snorted.

'Remember what happened last time, foolish man?'

'We left two of them loose,' said the duke. 'This time . . . all three. The tide of public feeling is on our side. That sort of thing affects witches, depend upon it.'

The duchess cracked her knuckles to indicate her view of public opinion.

'You must admit, my treasure, that the experiment seems to be working.'

'It would appear so.'

'Very well. Don't just stand there, man. Before the play ends, tell him. Those witches are to be under lock and key.'

Death adjusted his cardboard skull in front of the mirror, twitched his cowl into a suitable shape, stood back and considered the general effect. It was going to be his first speaking part. He wanted to get it right.

'Cower now, Brief Mortals,' he said. 'For I am Death, 'Gainst Whom No . . . no . . . no . . . Hwel, 'gainst whom no?'

'Oh, good grief, Dafe. “ 'Gainst whom no lock will hold nor fasten'd portal bar”, I really don't see why you have difficulty with . . . not that way up, you idiots!' Hwel strode off through the backstage melee in pursuit of a pair of importunate scene shifters.

'Right,' said Death, to no-one in particular. He turned back to the mirror.

' 'Gainst Whom No . . . Tumpty-Tum . . . nor Tumpty-Tumpty bar,' he said, uncertainly, and flourished his scythe. The end fell off.

'Do you think I'm fearsome enough?' he said, as he tried to fix it on again.

Tomjon, who was sitting on his hump and trying to drink some tea, gave him an encouraging nod.

'No problem, my friend,' he said. 'Compared to a visit from you, even Death himself would hold no fears. But you could try a bit more hollowness.'

'How d'you mean?'

Tomjon put down his cup. Shadows seemed to move across his face; his eyes sank, his lips drew back from his teeth, his skin stretched and paled.

'I HAVE COME TO GET YOU, YOU TERRIBLE ACTOR,' he intoned, each syllable falling into place like a coffin lid. His features sprang back into shape.

'Like that,' he said.

Dafe, who had flattened himself against the wall, relaxed a bit and gave a nervous giggle.

'Gods, I don't know how you do it,' he said. 'Honestly, I'll never be as good as you.'

'There really isn't anything to it. Now run along, Hwel's fit to be tied as it is.'

Dafe gave him a look of gratitude and ran off to help with the scene shifting.