I Shall Wear Midnight

Tiffany looked down at the Nac Mac Feegle, who were silent, as if in shock. Of course, when about thirty deadly fighters found themselves being beaten into submission by one tiny man, it takes a while to come up with a face-saving excuse.

Rob Anybody looked up at her with a very rare expression of shame. ‘Sorry, miss. Sorry, miss,’ he said. ‘We just had considerably too much of the booze. And ye ken, the more ye have of the booze, you ken ye want to have even more of the booze, until ye falls over, which is when ye know ye’ve had enough of the booze. By the way, what the heel is crème-de-menthe? A nice green colour, ye ken, I must have drunk a bucket of that stuff! I suppose there is no point in saying we are verrae sorry? But ye ken, we did find the useless streak of rubbish for ye.’

Tiffany looked up at what remained of the King’s Head. Flickering in the torchlight it looked like some kind of skeleton of a building. Even as she watched, a large beam began to creak and dropped apologetically onto a pile of broken furniture.

‘I told you to find him; I didn’t tell you you were supposed to pull the doors off,’ she said. She folded her arms, and the little men huddled even closer together; the next stage of female anger would be the tapping o’ the feets, which generally led them to burst into tears and walk into trees. Now, though, they formed up neatly behind her and Mrs Proust and Captain Angua.

The captain nodded at Mrs Proust and said, ‘I’m sure we can all agree that handcuffs won’t be necessary – yes, ladies?’

‘Oh, you know me, Captain,’ said Mrs Proust.

Captain Angua’s eyes narrowed. ‘Yes, but I don’t know anything about your little friend. I would like you to carry the broomstick, Mrs Proust.’

Tiffany could see there was no point in arguing, and handed the stick over without complaining. They walked on in silence apart from the muted mumbling of the Nac Mac Feegles.

After a while the captain said, ‘Not a good time to be wearing pointy black hats, Mrs Proust. There’s been another case, out on the plains. Some dead and alive hole you would never go to. They beat up an old lady for having a book of spells.’

‘No!’

They turned to look at Tiffany, and the Feegles walked into her ankles.

Captain Angua shook her head. ‘Sorry, miss, but it’s true. Turned out to be a book of Klatchian poetry, you know. All that wiggly writing! I suppose it looks like a spell book for those inclined to think that way. She died.’

‘I blame The Times,’ said Mrs Proust. ‘When they put that sort of thing in the paper, it gives people ideas.’

Angua shrugged. ‘From what I hear the people who did it weren’t much for reading.’

‘You’ve got to stop it!’ said Tiffany.

‘How, miss? We are the City Watch. We don’t have any real jurisdiction outside the walls. There are places out there in the woods that we probably haven’t even heard of. I don’t know where this stuff comes from. It’s like some mad idea dropping out of the air.’ The captain rubbed her hands together. ‘Of course, we don’t have any witches in the city,’ she said, ‘although there are quite a lot of hen nights, eh, Mrs Proust?’ And the captain winked. She really winked, Tiffany was certain of it, in the same way she had been certain that Captain Carrot really did not like the Duchess very much.

‘Well, I think real witches would soon stop it,’ Tiffany said. ‘They certainly would in the mountains, Mrs Proust.’

‘Oh, but we don’t have real witches in the city. You heard the captain.’ Mrs Proust glared at Tiffany and then hissed, ‘We do not argue around the normal people. It makes them jittery.’

They stopped outside a large building with blue lamps on either side of the doors. ‘Welcome to the Watch House, ladies,’ said Captain Angua. ‘Now, Miss Aching, I shall have to lock you in a cell, but it will be a clean one – no mice, hardly at all – and if Mrs Proust will keep you company, then, shall we say, I might be a bit forgetful and leave the key in the lock, do you understand? Please do not leave the building, because you will be hunted.’ She looked directly at Tiffany and added, ‘And no one should be hunted. It is a terrible thing, being hunted.’

She led them through the building and down to a row of surprisingly cosy-looking cells, gesturing for them to go inside one of them. The door of the cell clanged behind her and they heard the sound of her boots as she went back down the stone corridor.

Mrs Proust walked over to the door and reached through the bars. There was a tinkle of metal and her hand came back in with the key in it. She put it in the keyhole on this side, and turned it. ‘There,’ she said. ‘Now we are doubly safe.’

‘Och, crivens!’ said Rob Anybody. ‘Will ye no’ look at us? Slammed up in the banger!’

‘Again!’ said Daft Wullie. ‘I dinnae ken if I will ever look m’self in the face.’

Mrs Proust sat back down and stared at Tiffany. ‘All right, my girl, what was that we saw? No eyes, I noticed. No windows into the soul. No soul, perhaps?’