Hogfather

     Sideney opened his mouth to say, 'But  I'm very bad  at magical locks,' and then thought much better of it. He had already fathomed that if  Teatime wanted you to do something, and you weren't very good at  it, then your best plan, in fact quite possibly  your only plan, was  to learn to be good at it very quickly.  Sideney was not a fool. He'd  seen the way the others reacted around Teatime, and they were men who did things he'd only dreamed of.[11]

     At which point he was relieved to see Medium Dave walk down the stairs, and  it said  a lot for the effect of Teatime's  stare that  anyone could be relieved to have it punctuated by someone like Medium Dave.

     'We've found  another guard, sir.  Up on the  sixth  floor.  He's  been hiding.'

     Teatime stood  up.  'Oh dear,'  he said. 'Not  trying to be heroic, was he?'

     'He's just scared. Shall we let him go?'

     'Let him go?'  said  Teatime.  'Far too messy. I'll go up  there.  Come along, Mr Wizard.'

     Sideney followed him reluctantly up the stairs.

     The tower - if  that's what it was, he thought; he was used  to the odd architecture at Unseen University and this  made UU look normal was a hollow tube.  No  fewer   than  four  spiral   staircases  climbed  the   inside, criss-crossing  on landings and occasionally passing through  one another in defiance of generally accepted  physics. But that was practically normal for an alumnus of Unseen University, although technically  Sideney had  not alumed. What  threw the eye was the  absence of  shadows.  You didn't notice shadows,  how they delineated things, how  they gave texture to  the  world, until they weren't there. The white marble, if that's what it was  seemed to glow from the inside. Even when the impossible sun shone through a window it barely caused faint  grey  smudges where honest shadows should be. The tower seemed to avoid darkness.

     That was even more frightening than the times when, after a complicated landing, you found yourself  walking up by  stepping down the underside of a stair and the  distant floor now hung overhead like a  ceiling. He'd noticed that even the other men shut their eyes when that happened. Teatime, though, took those stairs three at a time, laughing like a kid with a new toy.

     They reached an upper landing and followed a corridor.  The others were gathered by a closed door.

     'He's barricaded himself in,' said Chickenwire.

     Teatime tapped on  it. 'You in  there,' he said. 'Come on out. You have my word you won't be harmed.'

     'No!'

     Teatime stood back. 'Banjo, knock it down,' he said.

     Banjo  lumbered  forward. The door withstood a couple  of massive kicks and then burst open.

     The guard was cowering behind an overturned cabinet. He cringed back as Teatime  stepped over it. 'What're you doing here?'  he  shouted. 'Who are you?'

     'Ah,  I'm  glad  you asked.  I'm your worst  nightmare!'  said  Teatime cheerfully.

     The man shuddered.

     'You  mean ... the one with the giant cabbage and  the sort of whirring knife thing?'

     'Sorry?' Teatime looked momentarily nonplussed.

     'Then you're the one about  where I'm falling,  only instead  of ground underneath it's all...'

     'No, in fact I'm...'

     The  guard sagged. 'Awww, not the  one where there's all this kind  of, you know, mud and then everything goes blue...'

     'No, I'm...'

     'Oh, shit,  then you're the one where there's this door only there's no floor beyond it and then there's these claws...'

     'No,'  said  Teatime. 'Not  that  one.' He withdrew  a  dagger from his sleeve. 'I'm the one where this man comes out of nowhere and kills you stone dead.'

     The guard grinned with relief. 'Oh, that one,' he said. 'But that one's not very...'

     He  crumpled around  Teatime's  suddenly outthrust fist. And then, just like the others had done, he faded.

     'Rather  a charitable  act  there, I feel,'  Teatime said  as  the  man vanished. 'But it is nearly Hogswatch, after all.'

     Death,  pillow slipping gently under his red robe, stood in  the middle of the nursery carpet ...

     It was an old one. Things ended up in the  nursery when they had seen a complete tour of duty in the rest  of the house. Long ago, someone had  made it by carefully knotting long bits  of brightly coloured rag into a sacking base,  giving it the look of a deflated Rastafarian hedgehog. Things lived among the rags. There were old rusks, bits of toy, buckets of dust.  It had seen life. It may even have evolved some.

     Now the occasional lump of grubby melting snow dropped onto it.

     Susan was crimson with anger.

     'I  mean,  why?'  she  demanded, walking  around the figure.  'This  is Hogswatch! It's supposed  to be jolly, with mistletoe  and holly, and -  and other things ending in olly! It's a time when people want to feel good about things  and  eat until they explode!  It's a  time when they want to see all their relatives...'

     She stopped that sentence.