“Taggit, jins ma greely!”
“Wee free men!”
“Nac mac Feegle!”
The eagle passed overhead, dropping fast and steep now. It drifted silently over the shadowy woods, curved over the trees, and landed suddenly on a branch beside a cottage in a clearing.
Granny Weatherwax awoke.
Her body did not move, but her gaze darted this way and that, sharply, and in the gloom her nose looked more hooked than normal. Then she settled back, and her shoulders lost the hunched, perching look.
After a while she stood up, stretched, and went to the doorway.
The night felt warmer. She could feel greenness in the ground, uncoiling. The year was past the edge, heading away from the dark…Of course, dark would come again, but that was in the nature of the world. Many things were beginning.
When at last she’d shut the door she lit the fire, took the box of candles out of the dresser and lit every single one and put them around the room, in saucers.
On the table, the pool of water that had accumulated in the last two days rippled and rose gently in the middle. Then a drip soared upward and plopped into the damp patch in the ceiling.
Granny wound up the clock, and started the pendulum. She left the room for a moment and came back with a square of cardboard attached to a loop of elderly string. She sat down in the rocking chair and reached down into the hearth for a stick of half-burned wood.
The clock ticked as she wrote. Another drop left the table and plunged toward the ceiling.
Then Granny Weatherwax hung the sign around her neck, and lay back with a smile. The chair rocked for a while, a counterpoint to the dripping of the table and the ticking of the clock, and then slowed.
The sign read:
I still ATE’NT DEAD
The light faded from can to can’t.
After a few minutes an owl woke up in a nearby tree and sailed out over the forests.
About the Author
Terry Pratchett’s novels have sold more than thirty million (give or take a few million) copies worldwide. He lives in England.
www.terrypratchettbooks.com
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UNANIMOUS Praise for
CARPE JUGULUM
“Pratchett lampoons everything from Christian
superstition to Swiss Army knives here, proving that the fantasy
sire of Discworld ’still ate’nt dead.’”
Publishers Weekly
“Fresh, inventive, and funny…Pratchett has a gift for
the absurd, the comic, the fantastic, and the outrageous. His
world is a combination of slapstick, puns, humorous situations
and outlandish characters. Any new novel by him is
guaranteed…it will make the bestseller list.”
Birmingham Post (U.K.)
“An enduring, endearing presence in comic
literature…Pratchett’s position as a leading
comic novelist now seems as permanently assured
as that of P. G. Wodehouse…. Despite outward
appearances, these cannot really be called fantasy novels, partly because Pratchett is too intent on
undermining all the conventions of the genre and
partly because they mirror so effectively the
current concerns of our own society.”
The Guardian (U.K.)
and
TERRY PRATCHETT
“The funniest parodist working in
the field today, period.”
New York Review of Science Fiction
“If I were making my list of Best Books of the Twentieth Century,
Terry Pratchett’s would be most of them.”
Elizabeth Peters
“Pratchett…should be recognized as one of the more significant
Publishers Weekly
“Simply the best humorous writer of the
twentieth century.”
Oxford Times (U.K.)
“A brilliant storyteller with a sense of humor…whose infectious
fun completely engulfs you…The Dickens of the twentieth century.”
Mail on Sunday (U.K.)
“If you are unfamiliar with Pratchett’s unique blend of philosophical
badinage interspersed with slapstick, you are on the
threshold of a mind-expanding opportunity.”
Financial Times (U.K.)
“Pratchett demonstrates just how great the distance is between
one-or two-joke writers and the comic masters whose work
will be read into the next century.”
Locus
“As always he is head and shoulders above the best of the rest. He
is screamingly funny. He is wise. He has style.”
Daily Telegraph (U.K.)
“Pratchett is a comic genius.”
The Express (U.K.)
“Pratchett is as funny as Wodehouse
and as witty as Waugh.”
The Independent (U.K.)
“Terry Pratchett does for fantasy what Douglas
Adams did for science fiction.”
Today (U.K.)
“What makes Terry Pratchett’s fantasies so entertaining is that
their humor depends on the characters first, on the plot second,
rather than the other way around. The story isn’t there simply
to lead from one slapstick pratfall to another pun.
Its humour is genuine and unforced.”
Ottawa Citizen
“Terry Pratchett ought to be locked in a padded cell. And
forced to write a book a month.”
Barbara Michaels
“Terry Pratchett is more than a magician. He is the kindest,
most fascinating teacher you ever had.”
Harlan Ellison
“It is his unexpected insights into human morality that make
the Discworld series stand out.”
Times Literary Supplement (U.K.)
“Quite probably the funniest living author, bar nobody.”
Good Book Guide (England)
“Delightful…Logically illogical as only
Terry Pratchett can write.”
Anne McCaffrey
BOOKS BY TERRY PRATCHETT
The Carpet People
The Dark Side of the Sun
Strata
Diggers
Wings
Only You Can Save Mankind
Johnny and the Dead
Johnny and the Bomb
The Unadulterated Cat (with Gray Jollife)
Good Omens (with Neil Gaiman)
THE DISCWORLD SERIES
The Color of Magic*
The Light Fantastic*
Equal Rites*
Mort
Sourcery
Wyrd Sisters
Pyramids
Guards! Guards!
Eric (with Josh Kirby)
Moving Pictures
Reaper Man
Witches Abroad
Small Gods*
Lords and Ladies*
Men at Arms*
Soul Music*
Feet of Clay*
Interesting Times*
Maskerade*
Hogfather*
Jingo*
The Last Continent*
Carpe Jugulum*
Mort: A Discworld Big Comic
(with Graham Higgins)
The Streets of Ankh-Morpork (with Stephen Briggs)
The Discworld Companion (with Stephen Briggs)
The Discworld Mapp (with Stephen Briggs)
AND IN HARDCOVER
The Fifth Elephant*
*Published by HarperCollins
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to
be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
CARPE JUGULUM. Copyright © 1998 by Terry Pratchett. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © AUGUST 2007 ISBN: 9780061807862
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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* Which presumably mean that some are virulent and deadly, and others just make you walk in a funny way and avoid fruit.
* Sometimes, of course, to say, “please stop doing it.”
* It struck people as odd that, while Lancre people refused pointblank to have any truck with democracy, on the basis that governing was what the king ought to do and they’d be sure to tell him if he went wrong, they didn’t make very good servants. Oh, they could cook and dig and wash and footle and buttle and did it very well but could never quite get the hang of the serving mentality. King Verence was quite understanding about this, and put up with Shawn ushering guests into the dining room with a cry of “Lovely grub, get it while it’s hot!”
*Apart from the ones containing small postal orders attached to letters which, generally, said pretty much the same thing: Dear Mum and Dad, I am doing pretty well in Ankh-Morpork and this week I earned a whole seven dollars…
* When there was nothing much else to occupy her time Granny Weatherwax sent her mind Borrowing, letting it piggyback inside the heads of other creatures. She was widely accepted as the most skilled exponent of the art that the Ramtops had seen for centuries, being practically able to get inside the minds of things that didn’t even have minds. The practice meant, among other things, that Lancre people were less inclined toward the casual cruelty to animals that is a general feature of the rural idyll, on the basis that the rat you throw a brick at today might turn out to be the witch you need some toothache medicine from tomorrow.
It also meant that people calling on her unexpectedly would find her stretched out apparently cold and lifeless, heart and pulse barely beating. The sign had saved a lot of embarrassment.
* It was obvious to King Verence that even if every adult were put under arms the kingdom of Lancre would still have a very small and insignificant army, and he’d therefore looked for other ways to put it on the military map. Shawn had come up with the idea of the Lancrastrian Army Knife, containing a few essential tools and utensils for the soldier in the field, and research and development work had been going on for some months now. One reason for the slow progress was that the king himself was taking an active interest in the country’s only defense project, and Shawn was receiving little notes up to three times every day with further suggestions for improvement. Generally they were on the lines of: “A device, possibly quite small, for finding things that are lost,” or “A curiously shaped hook-like thing of many uses.” Shawn diplomatically added some of them but lost as many notes as he dared, lest he design the only pocket knife on wheels.
* The leitmotif of the Guild of Barber-Surgeons
* On the rare maps on the Ramtops that existed, it was spelled Überwald. But Lancre people had never got the hang of accents and certainly didn’t agree with trying to balance two dots on another letter, where they’d only roll off and cause unnecessary punctuation.
* Lancre people considered that anything religious that wasn’t said in some ancient and incomprehensible speech probably wasn’t the genuine article.
* This was because Lancre people had a fresh if somewhat sideways approach to names, generally just picking a sound they liked. Sometimes there was a logic to it, but only by accident. There’d be a Chlamydia Weaver toddling around today if her mother hadn’t suddenly decided that Sally was easier to spell.
* King Verence was very keen that someone should compose a national anthem for Lancre, possibly referring to its very nice trees, and had offered a small reward. Nanny Ogg reasoned that it would be easy money because national anthems only ever have one verse or, rather, all have the same second verse, which goes “nur…hnur…mur…nur nur, hnur…nur…nur, hnur” at some length until everyone remembers the last line of the first verse and sings it as loudly as they can.
* In a society that had progressed beyond the privy and the earth closet she would have said “pulling my chain.”
* The role of the lower intestine in the efforts to built a better nation is one that is often neglected by historians.
* Igor had two thumbs on his right hand. If something was useful, he always said, you may as well add another.
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Contents
Begin Reading
About the Author
Praise
Other Books by Terry Pratchett
Copyright
About the Publisher