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“That means there's only the river.” He patted her hand. “Don't worry,” he added. “It's quite used to it.”
Granny stood on the wharf, her boot tap-tap-tapping on the wood. The little man who was the nearest thing Ohulan had to a dockmaster was being treated to the full force of one of her stares, and was visibly wilting. Her expression wasn't perhaps as vicious as thumbscrews, but it did seem to suggest that thumbscrews were a real possibility.
“They left before dawn, you say,” she said.
“Yes-ss,” he said. “Er. I didn't know they weren't supposed to.”
“Did you see a little girl on board?” Tap-tap went her boot.
“Um. No. I'm sorry.” He brightened. “They were Zoons,” he said; “If the child was with them she won't come to harm. You can always trust a Zoon, they say. Very keen on family life.”
Granny turned to Hilta, who was fluttering like a bewildered butterfly, and raised her eyebrows.
“Oh, yes,” Hilta trilled. “The Zoons have a very good name.”
“Mmph,” said Granny. She turned on her heel and stumped back towards the centre of the town. The dockmaster sagged as though a coathanger had just been removed from his shirt.
Hilta's lodgings were over a herbalist's and behind a tannery, and offered splendid views of the rooftops of Ohulan. She liked it because it offered privacy, always appreciated by, as she put it, “my more discerning clients who prefer to make their very special purchases in an atmosphere of calm where discretion is forever the watchword”.
Granny Weatherwax looked around the sitting room with barelyconcealed scorn. There were altogether too many tassels, bead curtains, astrological charts and black cats in the place. Granny couldn't abide cats. She sniffed.
“Is that the tannery?” she said accusingly.
“Incense,” said Hilta. She rallied bravely in the face of Granny's scorn. “The customers appreciate it,” she said. “It puts them in the right frame of mind. You know how it is.”
“I would have thought one could carry out a perfectly respectable business, Hilta, without resorting to parlour tricks,” said Granny, sitting down and beginning the long and tricky business of removing her hatpins.
“It's different in towns,” said Hilta. “One has to move with the times.”
“I'm sure I don't know why. Is the kettle on?” Granny reached across the table and took the velvet cover off Hilta's crystal ball, a sphere of quartz as big as her head.
“Never could get the hang of this damn silicon stuff,” she said. “A bowl of water with a drop of ink in it was good enough when I was a girl. Let's see, now . . . .”
She peered into the dancing heart of the ball, trying to use it to focus her mind on the whereabouts of Esk. A crystal was a tricky thing to use at the best of times, and usually staring into it meant that the one thing the future could be guaranteed to hold was a severe migraine. Granny distrusted them, considering them to smack of wizardry; for two pins, it always seemed to her, the wretched thing would suck your mind out like a whelk from a shell.
“Damn thing's all sparkly,” she said, huffing on it and wiping it with her sleeve. Hilta peered over her shoulder.
“That's not sparkle, that means something,” she said slowly.
“What?”
“I'm not sure. Can I try? It's used to me.” Hilta pushed a cat off the other chair and leaned forward to peer into the glass depths.
“Mnph. Feel free,” said Granny, “but you won't find -”
“Wait. Something's coming through.”
“Looks all sparkly from here,” Granny insisted. “Little silver lights all floating around, like in them little snowstorm-in-abottle toys. Quite pretty, really.”
“Yes, but look beyond the flakes . . . .”
Granny looked.
This was what she saw.
The viewpoint was very high up and a wide swathe of country lay below her, blue with distance, through which a broad river wriggled like a drunken snake. There were silver lights floating in the foreground but they were, in a manner of speaking, just a few flakes in the great storm of lights that turned in a great lazy spiral, like a geriatric tornado with a bad attack of snow, and funnelled down, down to the hazy landscape. By screwing up her eyes Granny could just make out some dots on the river.
Occasionally some sort of lighting would sparkle briefly inside the gently turning funnel of motes.
