Wyrd Sisters

“Stop! I command you!”
    Death shook his head gloomily, and stepped through the next wall. The king hurried after him with as much dignity as he could still muster, and found Death fiddling with the girths of a large white horse standing on the battlements. It was wearing a nosebag.
    “You can’t leave me like this!” he repeated, in the face of the evidence.
    Death turned to him.
    I CAN , he said. Y OU’RE UNDEAD, YOU SEE . G HOSTS INHABIT A WORLD BETWEEN THE LIVING AND THE DEAD . I T’S NOT MY RESPONSIBILITY . He patted the king on the shoulder. D ON’T WORRY , he said, IT WON’T BE FOREVER .
    “Good.”
    I T MAY SEEM LIKE FOREVER .
    “How long will it really be?”
    U NTIL YOU HAVE FULFILLED YOUR DESTINY , I ASSUME .
    “And how will I know what my destiny is?” said the king, desperately.
    C AN’T HELP THERE . I’ M SORRY .
    “Well, how can I find out?”
    T HESE THINGS GENERALLY BECOME APPARENT , I UNDERSTAND , said Death, and swung himself into the saddle.
    “And until then I have to haunt this place.” King Verence stared around at the drafty battlements. “All alone, I suppose. Won’t anyone be able to see me?”
    O H, THE PSYCHICALLY INCLINED . C LOSE RELATIVES . A ND CATS, OF COURSE .
    “I hate cats.”
    Death’s face became a little stiffer, if that were possible. The blue glow in his eye sockets flickered red for an instant.
    I SEE , he said. The tone suggested that death was too good for cat-haters. Y OU LIKE GREAT BIG DOGS , I IMAGINE .
    “As a matter of fact, I do.” The king stared gloomily at the dawn. His dogs. He’d really miss his dogs. And it looked like such a good hunting day.
    He wondered if ghosts hunted. Almost certainly not, he imagined. Or ate, or drank either for that matter, and that was really depressing. He liked a big noisy banquet and had quaffed * many a pint of good ale. And bad ale, come to that. He’d never been able to tell the difference till the following morning, usually.
    He kicked despondently at a stone, and noted gloomily that his foot went right through it. No hunting, drinking, carousing, no wassailing, no hawking…It was dawning on him that the pleasures of the flesh were pretty sparse without the flesh. Suddenly life wasn’t worth living. The fact that he wasn’t living it didn’t cheer him up at all.
    S OME PEOPLE LIKE TO BE GHOSTS , said Death.
    “Hmm?” said Verence, gloomily.
    I T’S NOT SUCH A WRENCH , I ASSUME . T HEY CAN SEE HOW THEIR DESCENDANTS GET ON . S ORRY ? I S SOMETHING THE MATTER ?
    But Verence had vanished into the wall.
    D ON’T MIND ME, WILL YOU , said Death, peevishly. He looked around him with a gaze that could see through time and space and the souls of men, and noted a landslide in distant Klatch, a hurricane in Howandaland, a plague in Hergen.
    B USY, BUSY , he muttered, and spurred his horse into the sky.
    Verence ran through the walls of his own castle. His feet barely touched the ground—in fact, the unevenness of the floor meant that at times they didn’t touch the ground at all.
    As a king he was used to treating servants as if they were not there, and running through them as a ghost was almost the same. The only difference was that they didn’t stand aside.
    Verence reached the nursery, saw the broken door, the trailed sheets…
    Heard the hoofbeats. He reached the window, saw his own horse go full tilt through the open gateway in the shafts of the coach. A few seconds later three horsemen followed it. The sound of hooves echoed for a moment on the cobbles and died away.
    The king thumped the still, his fist going several inches into the stone.
    Then he pushed his way out into the air, disdaining to notice the drop, and half flew, half ran down across the courtyard and into the stables.
    It took him a mere twenty seconds to learn that, to the great many things a ghost cannot do, should be added the mounting of a horse. He did succeed in getting into the saddle, or at least in straddling the air just above it, but when the horse finally bolted, terrified beyond belief by the mysterious things happening behind its ears, Verence was left sitting astride five feet of fresh air.
    He tried to run, and got about as far as the gateway before the air around him thickened to the consistency of tar.
    “You can’t,” said a sad, old voice behind him. “You have to stay where you were killed. That’s what haunting means. Take it from me. I know.”

    Granny Weatherwax paused with a second scone halfway to her