Discworld 06 - Wyrd Sisters

“Very well. My name is WxrtHltl-jwlpklz,” said the demon smugly.
“Where were you when the vowels were handed out? Behind the door?” said Nanny Ogg.

Gods prefer simple, vicious games, where you Do Not Achieve Transcendence but Go Straight To Oblivion

In the middle of this elemental storm a fire gleamed among the dripping furze bushes like the madness in a weasel’s eye. It illuminated three hunched figures. As the cauldron bubbled an eldritch voice shrieked: ‘When shall we three meet again?’

‘Witches just aren’t like that,’ said Magrat. ‘We live in harmony with the great cycles of Nature, and do no harm to anyone, and it’s wicked of them to say we don’t. We ought to fill their bones with hot lead.’

The other two looked at her with a certain amount of surprised admiration.

Magrat wondered what it was like, spending your whole life doing something you didn’t want to do. Like being dead, she considered, only worse, the reason being, you were alive to suffer it.

‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘we’ve got to find the boy now. That’s the next step.’

‘We shall look for him directly after lunch.’

‘Lunch?’

‘It’s chicken,’ said Nanny. ‘And you’re tired. Besides, making a decent search will take a long time.’

‘He’ll be in Ankh-Morpork,’ said Granny. ‘Mark my words. Everyone ends up there. We’ll start with Ankh-Morpork. You don’t have to search for people when destiny is involved, you just wait for them in Ankh-Morpork.’

Nanny Ogg was also out early. She hadn’t been able to get any sleep anyway, and besides, she was worried about Greebo. Greebo was one of her few blind spots. While intellectually she would concede that he was indeed a fat, cunning, evil-smelling multiple rapist, she nevertheless instinctively pictured him as the small fluffy kitten he had been decades before. The fact that he had once chased a female wolf up a tree and seriously surprised a she-bear who had been innocently digging for roots didn’t stop her worrying that something bad might happen to him. It was generally considered by everyone else in the kingdom that the only thing that might slow Greebo down was a direct meteorite strike.

Grandad was credited with seven official new jokes. He’d won the honorary cap and bells of the Grand Prix des Idiots Blithering at Ankh-Morpork four years in a row, which no-one else had ever done, and presumably they made him the funniest man who ever lived. He had worked hard at it, you had to give him that.

The Fool recalled with a shudder how, at the age of six, he’d timidly approached the old man after supper with a joke he’d made up. It was about a duck.

It had earned him the biggest thrashing of his life, which even then must have presented the old joker with a bit of a challenge.

‘You will learn, my lad—’ he recalled, with every sentence punctuated by jingling cracks —’that there is nothing more serious than jesting. From now on you will never—’ the old man paused to change hands —’never, never, ever utter a joke that has not been approved by the Guild. Who are you to decide what is amusing? Marry, let the untutored giggle at unskilled banter; it is the laughter of the ignorant. Never. Never. Never let me catch you joculating again.’

After that he’d gone back to learning the three hundred and eighty-three Guild-approved jokes, which was bad enough, and the glossary, which was a lot bigger and much worse.

Grandad was credited with seven official new jokes. He’d won the honorary cap and bells of the Grand Prix des Idiots Blithering at Ankh-Morpork four years in a row, which no-one else had ever done, and presumably they made him the funniest man who ever lived. He had worked hard at it, you had to give him that.

The Fool recalled with a shudder how, at the age of six, he’d timidly approached the old man after supper with a joke he’d made up. It was about a duck.

It had earned him the biggest thrashing of his life, which even then must have presented the old joker with a bit of a challenge.

She was out of breath, and wore only a shawl over a nightdress that, if Magrat had anything to reveal, would have been very revealing.