AND YOU  ARE  EIGHT,  GOING  ON  ...  OH,  ABOUT  FORTY-FIVE, said  the Hogfather.

     'There's forms to fill in when they pay, expect,' said Aaron.

     AND YOU WANT WALNUT'S INOFFENSIVE REPTILES OF THE STO PLAINS, A DISPLAY CABINET, A COLLECTOR'S ALBUM, A KILLING  JAR AND A LIZARD PRESS.  WHAT IS  A LIZARD PRESS?

     'You can't glue  them in  when they're still fat,  or  didn't you  know that? I expect she told you about  them when I was momentarily distracted by the  display of pencils. Look, shall  we end this charade? just give  me  my orange and we'll say no more about it.'

I CAN GIVE FAR MORE THAN ORANGES.

     'Yes, yes, I saw all that. Probably  done in collusion with accomplices to  attract gullible customers. Oh dear, you've  even got a  false beard. By the way, old chap, did you know that your pig...'

YES.

     'All done by mirrors and string and pipes, I expect. It all looked very artificial to me.'

     The Hogfather snapped his fingers.

     'That's  probably a  signal,  I expect,'  said  the boy,  getting down. 'Thank you very much.'

     HAPPY HOGSWATCH, said the Hogfather as the boy walked away.

     Uncle Heavy patted him on the shoulder.

     'Well done, master,' he said. 'Very patient. I'd have given him a clonk athwart the earhole, myself.'

     OH,  I'M SURE HE'LL SEE THE ERROR  OF HIS WAYS.  The red hood turned so that only Albert could see into its depths. RIGHT AROUND THE TIME HE OPENS THOSE BOXES HIS MOTHER WAS CARRYING ... HO. HO. HO.

     'Don't tie it so tight! Don't tie it so tight!'

SQUEAK.

     There  was  a bickering behind Susan as she sought along the shelves in the canyons of Death's huge library, which was so big that clouds would form in it if they dared.

     'Right, right,'  said the voice she was trying to ignore. 'That's about right. I've got to be able to move my wings, right?'

SQUEAK.

     'Ah,' said Susan, under her breath. 'The Hogfather...'

     He had several shelves, not  just one book. The first  volume seemed to be written on a roll of animal skin. The Hogfather was old.

     `OK, OK. How does it look?'

SQUEAK.

     'Miss?' said the raven, seeking a second opinion.

     Susan looked up. The raven bounced past, its breast bright red.

     'Twit, twit,' it said. 'Bobbly bobbly bob. Hop hop hopping along . . .'

     'You're  fooling no  one but  yourself,'  said  Susan. 'I  can  see the string.'

     She unrolled the scroll.

     'Maybe I should sit on  a  snowy log,' mumbled  the  raven behind  her. 'Thats probably the trick, right enough.'

     'I can't read this!' said Susan. 'The letters are all ... odd. . .'

     'Ethereal runes,'  said the raven.  'The  Hogfather  ain't human, after all.'

     Susan ran her hands over the thin leather. The ... shapes flowed around her fingers.

     She couldn't read them but  she  could  feel them. There was the sharp smell of snow, so vivid  that  her breath  condensed in  the air. There were sounds, hooves, the snap of branches in a freezing forest...

     A bright shining ball ...

     Susan jerked awake  and  thrust the scroll aside. She unrolled the next one,  which  looked as though it  was  made  of  strips of  bark. Characters hovered over the surface. Whatever they were,  they had  never been designed to  be  read by  the eye; you could  believe they were  a  Braille  for  the touching mind. Images ribboned across her  senses - wet  fur,  sweat,  pine, soot, iced  air, the  tang of damp  ash, pig ... manure, her  governess mind hastily corrected. There was  blood ... and the taste of ... ..beans? It was all images without words. Almost ... animal.

     'But none of this is right! Everyone knows he's a jolly old fat man who hands out presents to kids!' she said aloud.

     'Is. Is. Not was. You know how it is,' said the raven.

     'Do I?'

     'It's like, you  know,  industrial re-training,' said  the  bird. 'Even gods have to  move  with  the times,  am  I  right?  He  was probably  quite different thousands of years ago. Stands to  reason. No  one wore stockings, for one thing.' He. scratched at his beak.

     'Yersss,'  he continued expansively, 'he  was probably just your  basic winter  demi-urge. You know  ... blood on the snow, making the sun  come up. Starts  off  with  animal sacrifice, y'know, hunt  some  big hairy animal to death, that  kind of stuff. You know there's some people  up on the  Ramtops who  kill  a wren at Hogswatch and  walk around from house to  house singing about it? With a whack-fol-oh- diddle-dildo. Very folkloric, very myffic.'

     'A wren? Why?'

     'I dunno.  Maybe someone  said, hey, how'd you like to  hunt  this evil bastard of an eagle with  his big sharp beak and great ripping talons,  sort of thing, or how about  instead you hunt this wren, which is basically about the  size of a pea and goes "twit"? Go on, you choose. Anyway, then later on it sinks  to the  level of religion and  then they start this business where some  poor bugger  finds a  special bean in his tucker, oho,  everyone says, you're  king, mate,  and  he thinks "This is a bit  of  all right" only they don't say  it wouldn't  be a  good idea to  start any long  books, 'cos next thing  he's legging it  over the snow with a dozen other buggers chasing him with holy sickles so's  the earth'll come to life again and all this snow'll go away. Very,  you  know ...  ethnic. Then some bright spark thought,  hey, looks like that  damn sun comes  up  anyway,  so how come we're giving those druids  all  this  free grub? Next  thing you know, there's  a job  vacancy. That's the thing about gods. They'll always find a way to, you know ... hang on.'

     'The damn sun comes up anyway,' Susan repeated. 'How do you know that?'

     'Oh, observation. It happens every morning. I seen it.'

     'I meant all that stuff about holy sickles and things.'

     The raven contrived to look smug.

     'Very occult bird, your  basic  raven,'  he said. 'Blind Io the Thunder God used  to have these  myffic  ravens  that flew everywhere  and  told him everything that was going on.'

     'Used to?'

     'WeeeW  ... you  know how  he's not got eyes in  his face,  just these, like,  you  know, free-floating eyeballs  that go and zoom around ...' The raven  coughed  in  species embarrassment.  'Bit of  an accident  waiting to happen, really.'

     'Do you ever think of anything except eyeballs?'

     'Well ... there's entrails.'

SQUEAK.

     'He's right, though,' said Susan. 'Gods don't die. Never completely die ...'

     There's always somewhere, she told herself. Inside some stone, perhaps, or the words  of a song, or  riding the  mind of  some animal, or maybe in a whisper on the wind. They  never entirely go, they hang on to  the world by the tip of a fingernail, always  fighting to find a  way back. Once  a  god, always a god. Dead, perhaps, but only like the world in winter

     'All right,' she said. 'Let's see what happened to him ...'

     She reached out for the last book and tried to open it at random ...

     The feeling lashed at her out of the book, like a whip ...

     ... hooves, fear, blood, snow, cold, night . . .

     She dropped the scroll. It slammed shut.

SQUEAK?

     'I'm. . . all right.'

     She looked  down at the book and knew that she'd been given  a friendly warning, such  as a pet  animal might give when it  was crazed with pain but just  still  tame enough not to claw  and bite  the hand that fed it -  this time. Wherever the Hogfather was - dead, alive, somewhere -  he wanted to be left alone ...

     She  eyed  the Death of  Rats. His little  eye sockets flared blue in a disconcertingly familiar way.