The Price of Flight – part seven
The Hag of the High Airs
V0.2. As with everything, it has room for revision. Watch this space. Look out for defiant pilots, with a touch of the spitfire, unleashing a tempest and flying through a whirlwind hurricane of puns
The Elves, moving on the ground and looking for things to torment, were stalking a family of foxes. Eventually, they'd take those pretty tails.
They simply paid no attention to what was stalking them.
Three Elves became two. Then two Elves became one. Then the last Elf realised he was on his own. He briefly wondered. And then the knife took him.
A black-clad figure smiled to himself and slipped back into the trees. He had stalked with panache, assessed his clients with professional competence, devised the most stylish approach strategy, and then inhumed them with quiet competent ease. With the courtesy and understanding appropriate to his profession, he ignored the rather gamey odour of the client as he let the body settle quietly.
Roger Forbishly, who had a long time ago been in Mykkims House, a Lancre man who had attended the Guild School in a long-ago boyhood, considered this to be necessary pro-bono work. It was his first wet work in decades. While he was Guild Head in Lancre, that didn't mean much when only one Assassin lived there. And it was a country that really didn't have much call on the Guild's time. He had felt distinctly under-employed, in fact.
Roger grinned. And people thought being sixty-seven meant you were past it. He paid a few moments attention to how he'd phrase the report for Downey. Hmmph. That boy was a cringing little wretch who I remember as being fag to Tony Bullingdon-Myers. And they let him become Guild Master. Amazing. And an Assassin, old enough to remember Lord Downey as a snotty little new insect of eleven, went to rejoin the others. Who were also out on the ground making life difficult for the intruders.
And he hoped the little chaps, the Feegle, had got the message to those maniac women in the sky who were lobbing fireballs like there was no tomorrow. Watch where you're dropping them. We're down here too, and we are fighting on the same side. There had been a quite enormous bang a while back, something fiery dropping out of the sky that had impacted the ground too damn close. It had made quite a mess of a few Elves who Forbishley and his party had been trailing.
Then he nearly tripped over the pistol crossbow on the ground. It looked bashed about, with scratching and chips that looked recent, scars marring the exquisite black enamelling. As if it had been dropped from a great height. And it was Guild make. Roger looked for indications as to ownership. Squinting in the moonlight and holding it up to see what glittered and caught the eye, he made out the gilded initials in the stock.
They read AGB.
Roger almost said it out loud. His training made him merely whisper it.
"Good Gods. She's here?"
He looked further up and saw the woman's body in the branches of the tree. He wondered for a second, and realised her hair was blonde and she wasn't dressed as Guild. And she was very dead. He took off his hat in respect, then marked the spot, and set off to find some of those Feegle chaps. To get the word to somebody. Figure out a way of getting the poor girl down for a decent burial. Somebody must know who she is. Was.
The Assassins' Guild School, shortly before the battle.
The Guild porters, carrying the large iron box with obvious reluctance, appeared eager to put it down on the table in front of the teacher. They stood well back with some relief, well away from the metaphorical blue touchpaper.
Madame la Comptesse de Lapoignard, Emmanuelle les Deux-Epées, looked at them gravely and thanked them for going above and beyond the call of duty. Then she turned to her class, thirty older students, and the guests who were present. The guests were here strictly unofficially. But at least one Very Senior Assassin and Dark Council member had nodded and discreetly made arrangements.
"Attention, mes élèves." Emmanuelle said. "Et aussi, mes amies."
She nodded at the group of women who were older and not in Assassin black.
"I have requested these things to be brought out of secure storage today as demonstration items for our lesson." she said, carefully donning the gauntlets. "You are here for a lesson in the theory and the practice of bladed weapons. As Assassins, you must know, at least by sight, the wide variety of blades you will encounter in the course of a working life. Those that will often be seen in the hands of people who would then diligently attempt to insert them into you, through holes which were not initially there."
She pulled on the left gauntlet.
"The items in this box are dangerous. They are not kept on open display in the Dark Museum for very good and pressing reasons. They reside in an iron chest in a locked and secure room. They are typical of a foe who is not human. Who share none of the values of humanity, nor indeed of dwarfs, trolls or goblins. I will not dwell on how the Guild came to acquire these. And I will ask you, in all earnestness, to each hold something of iron or steel in your hand while we speak, so as to be able to say the name without hindrance. We will be speaking it a lot in the next hour."
Emmanuelle raised her gloved hands. They were the sort of gloves worn by somebody who expects their hands might be a target for violence, thick sturdy leather, and with metal plates sewn into the backs and palms and down the backs of the fingers.
She placed a hand on the metal of the case.
"The word. Is Elf."
Lancre Castle. Day Two.
Dead beat, Olga Romanoff made herself walk to the crash area set aside for sleeping, without staggering. She had insisted there should be no separate quarters for the officer commanding. She'd live as the girls lived. And sleep as they slept. Where private space was needed, it could be found.
She had stood down half her command – including, after due reflection, herself – so that they could get some sleep. She had asked the duty Teknik to wake them all up in exactly four hours. Then the other half of the squadron could come off watch and snatch some sleep.
Olga noted sleep was indeed happening, if fitfully in some cases. She noted Marina Raskova and Kiiki Pekkisaalen were sleeping together,, under a blanket, arms round each other. She wondered briefly, then shrugged. She'd shared a common blanket or a bed with Irena often enough in their adventures, but that certainly didn't mean they were… none of my business, she reminded herself, firmly. Then she wondered if it was. If two of her command were a married couple, as good as. What if one was killed or wounded? Implications.
I'll deal with that when it happens. No point in adding woes that haven't happened yet.
Olga blinked. There it was, on top of her bed-roll. Her Cossack fur cap. The one she'd thought lost forever, after the scrap with the elf on her broomstick. Olga picked it up and turned it in her hands. No mistake. Her name was on the tape sewn inside. O.A.E. POMAHЯOФ.
Olga turned it over in her hands, wondering. Slightly dirty, the fur was full of plant debris and pine needles, needs brushing… but mine. Mystery.
Aye, weel, we got the Hag O' The High Air her wee furry black bonnet back, Rob Anybody.
Aye, Daft Wullie. We saw the writin', inside. The writin' that didnae follow the rules. The Kelda explained and she said that Squirell-ick writing only belongs to one people and some of them is at the Castle and we are to return it there.
Squirrels can write? They must be awfy clever wee beasties!
Olga smiled slightly. She said, in a low voice
"Show yourselves. Report to me. And do so quietly. There are people sleeping here."
"Aye, Mistress."
Olga counted the Feegle who were emerging. She folded her arms.
"You found my papakha. I thank you"
"Aye, mistress. We wuz watchin' the fight in the high airs. Dodgin' bits of yon scunners droppin' oot the skies. And some of them bits wuz awf'y wee. An' then this bonnet comes floatin' down."
"Aye. An' we thinks. Hags is up there fightin'. Hags wear black bonnets. This belongs tae a Hag."
The spokesfeegle looked up at her.
"'Tis not right for a Hag not tae have her hat." He said. "We con-seedered we wuz under a Geese. Aye. Tae find the Hag, tae return her bonnet."
"T'was not an easy thing." Rob Anybody said. "There wuz writin' in the inside. A name. And my Kelda taught me the knowin' of the letters. Or I thought she had taught me the kennin'. But some of these letters. I asked Jeannie. She said there is" - and the Feegle made a shocked and frightened gasp, confronted with a terror beyond imagining - "more than one alph-a-bettie. This one she named Squirrelic."
Olga suddenly saw the problem. She grinned, then mistressed herself.
"Da. Squirillic." she said, thsi time keeping a straight face. "Different alphabet."
She put the cap on. And squared it.
"Properly called the papakha or the astrakhan peren." she said. "That depends on your Horde or your Host. I belong to the Vulga Horde. Here, it can be called also the ushanka. Not a bonnet."
The Feegle seemed to stand or sit up straighter as Olga straightened her fur cap. She wondered about the coincidence. Cossacks didn't have to wear black. There were traditions, but no hard and fast rules. So long as the Horde heraldry in the crown was correct, the fur could be grey or brown. Even white. But she and Irena had selected black. Without even thinking of the Witch associations.
"I thank you for your courtesy." Olga said. "A witch must wear her black hat. Pravda. Truth. Now come with me out of the sleeping area."
Sleep could wait a little longer. She conferred with a duty Teknik. He unlocked a certain stores chest. The Feegle perked up, expectantly. From their point of view, the day was getting better.
"A kindness and a courtesy returned." Olga said, pouring glasses. "That too is right."
Olga considered adding one for herself. Nyet. The commander takes a drink and those she commands cannot? Then she set the bottle aside and took a certain amusement in the Feegles' first exposure to..
"Crivvens! 'Tis strong! Sez here on the bottle, Wee Dangerous Spike, it sez… B – O – D – K – A in gey big letters. BODKA."
"That first letter is a "V". Olga corrected them. "The rest are the same as in the Latatian alphabet used here." She smiled slightly. "Squirrelic. Remember?" (1)
Then she became serious.
"Listen to me. I will tell you how I came to lose my ushanka. How I have lost pilots."
"Aye, Hag o' the' High Airs." Said a larger cheerful-looking Feegle. "Yon puir lassie who the Man In Black found deid hangin' up in the tall tree, and…"
Other Feegle muffled him quickly. Olga glared.
"It is true, Hag O' The High Airs." the one called Rob Anybody said. "We brought her down. With care and with respect, ye ken. We asked counsel o' the Quin, Quin Magrat, that is, and of oor Kelda. The puir deid girl lies now below us, safe in the mor-too-err-y."
Olga relaxed.
I need sleep. Sigrid will get no deader. She will understand if I do not see her now.
"Then again I thank you. I will briefly explain certain things. Where we are weak in the air and where El… they – have got in to hurt us. How they killed Sigrid and how I came to be nearly killed and to lose my cap. I have a favour to ask of you…"
The Assassins' Guild School, shortly before the battle.
Emmanuelle lifted the items in the box. Her expanded class watched attentively.
"Just because a weapon looks crude and is not made of metal does not mean it cannot kill."
She brandished a knife that appeared to be chipped from one long thin flake of flint. The handle was made of what looked like bone tied with a grip made of a wound strip of continuously wound leather. The leather, her class noted, seemed suspiciously pale. The remnants of feathers and coloured cloth hung from the pommel.
Emmanuelle demonstrated with a piece of paper run against the blade that it was still razor-sharp. The paper seemed to hum as it separated into two neatly cut sections.
"This is the standard sort of fighting knife carried by the Elves. For reasons I will discuss later, it is wise not to receive even the slightest scratch from one."
She laid the weapon down with care. She went on to discuss bows – double recurved, made from a laminate of layers of bone and wood, the string – well, it is best to think of it as animal gut for now. Arrows made as you might expect with sharpened flint heads. Their metal working is rudimentary and handicapped by not being able to work iron. But if in forays into the human world they find bronze, or brass, or pewter, or the newly-refined and discovered thing called aluminium, they adapt it.
"It is thought that lead is also inimical to them, but not to the same degree as iron." she said. "This war-club is weighted with lead, but carefully wrapped in cloth. The supposition is that lead is poisonous only on physical contact and a braver Elf than most experimented with a pleasing weight at the killing end of his mace. Unlike iron, it has no distance effect."
A student asked if it wasn't courting trouble to have these things anywhere in the Guild at all, ma'am. Emmanuelle complimented him on his prudent thought.
"It is a common substition(2) that a sword, a weapon in intimate contact with its owner for many years and decades, absorbs something of the personality and psychic outlook of that owner." she said. "Some swords have a reputation for being cursed. In the Dark Museum, we have, for instance, one of the Muramasa swords, a nihonto. While I can fight with the nihonto, I would not care to fight with this one. Nor would my colleague Koukouchou-sama.(3) If your weapons affinity is the sword and you are in tune with them, you can feel the malice from that weapon from some yards away, and you will most assuredly know it could twist in your hand and stab you, its wielder. And I am no magic user."
She lifted the Elven long knife again.
"Imagine, then, the amount of malice, of hostility to humanity, contained in alien weapons such as these. I am wearing metal on my hands. Even so, I am taking no chances. Before these were accepted for the Dark Museum, we took the advice of the University. Professor Stibbons recommended steeping them in salt water for some weeks. Apparently, this kills any form of residual magic, benign or malicious, in an artefact and you end up merely with the object."
She smiled slightly.
"The explanation was hard to follow, but I understood from the Professor that this is a complex reaction in biothaumic chemistry in which free-floating positively charged octagen ions in salt water neutralise negatively charged particles in the magical artefact."(4)
Emmanuelle looked over at Olga Romanoff. She shrugged. "When you dispense with all the wizard-speak, salt water kills magic." Olga said. "Witches have known this for ages."
"ah, merci!"
Olga reflected that while most people present had refrained from touching the Elven weapons, she, Olga Romanoff, had still suspected that not all the malice in them was dead. Ginny Heartsease had for some reason – possibly curiosity – chosen to pick up the elven battle-mace, the one with the lead weight. A second or two she had gone white and put it down again. Olga had not considered this to be serious, and in any case Ginny had been warned about touching them. She'd just lifted it, shuddered, and hurriedly put it down again. Just as I might.
And in the present, in Lancre, Ginny was concussed and had been patched up as best the other girls could. After having being hit, several times, with an Elven battle-club.
"We really need an Igor." Olga said, shaking her head.
"You called, Mithtreth?"
The voice had come from right behind her. Olga jumped slightly. She'd managed three hours' sleep in the end but it still didn't feel like nearly enough. And she'd heard the Clacks trunk had been severed between Lancre and Sheepridge. A flight had been sent out to make contact and report back. It was possible Irena's unit was in combat. It might even – horrible thought – have been overwhelmed. She needed information.
Olga turned to the Igor, who was looking expectant. She also saw Nanny Ogg and Queen Magrat. Nanny looked a little sad.
"Olga, love, they just brung the other one in. you know, Jennny Gorlock. From Eel Springs. Just bin to talk to her mum and dad. Jenny's bein' looked after. We laid her next to Sigrid, for now."
Olga nodded. She made the witch bow to Queen Magrat. Who looked scary in that armour.
"I'm so sorry. You've been doing a lot of the fighting. And, well. Nanny sent to Hot Dang, where the nearest Igors are." Magrat said.
"I'm the only one they could thpare, for now." Igor said. "There wath heavy fighting at a lumberjack camp. Many dead."
"Can you… see to Ginny? Please?" Olga said. Igor nodded and picked up his bag. Olga picked up her voice.
"Anyone with wounds, bumps, bruises, scratches. See Igor. Thank you."
She turned back to Granny and Magrat.
"I need to send a flight to the Chalk. This is urgent." she said. "Do you wish me to have a flight check Hot Dang? If the elves are nearby who attacked the lumberjacks. We can get them."
Nanny shook her head.
"Heavily forested up there, love." she said. "I'm not sure you'd spot anything moving in the trees. 'Sides, we got people on the ground there. Sort of covert. They nearly got hit by something left over from the fighting in the air. Got the request to ask you to be careful about what you lets fall to earth. They knows you ain't doin' it on purpose and accidents happen, but you needs to know."
Magrat unfurled a map. She and Nanny took turns explaining what was going on at ground level.
"Just here, in the forests around Creel and Slice where we discovered… well, Sigrid. May her Gods receive her. There's a, well, partisan group, they calls themselves, on the ground. In between killin' elves and fighting back, they've appreciated watchin' what you've been doing in the sky. They say if any of your girls crash-land and need gettin' to safety, they'll get to them before the elves do. But please don't bomb them."
"Da. Friendly fire." Olga agreed. "To be avoided."
"Oh." Nanny rummaged. She untangled things with audible twanging noises and eventually brought out a rather battered pistol crossbow. "Nearly forgot. This got retrieved. You ain't got that Alice Band here with you, have you? Roger was askin'."
"Nyet." Olga said. "She can't fly, for one thing. Dead weight."
"We don't carry passengers, Nanny, Mum." Nottie Garlick said. Olga smiled slightly. She heard a commotion. It was growing louder.
"Now that's where you're wrong…"
And over the Chalk, Irena Politek's small command was still fighting. Incredibly, she hadn't lost a pilot yet. But a new wave of Elves had burst from the Stones. Six pilots, heavily outnumbered, were again doing all they could to blunt the elven onslaught. And Irena now had everything in the air, including the two new fledglings, who were learning all the time. Provided they stayed alive.
She reflected that she had to consider a fighting retreat to Lancre if support didn't arrive in time. Then she decided this would be shaming. They were here to help defend the Chalk. Whose people were fighting on the ground below them and didn't have the option of retreat.
The enemy is at the gates. We fight them at the gates.
Her sabre swung at an Elf who had got too close. Irena noted how they froze at the approach of a length of steel. Which was, after all, 96% iron.
Rust was right. Just showing them cold steel does work on some enemies.
"Ruskiya'rat!" she screamed, as the elf fell away.
One of the old slogans from Komsomelets days echoed in her head.
"Do you want to die on your feet? Or on your knees?"
The words echoed around the sky.
"On your feet! Or on your knees!" (5)
Then she had her first taste of the tactic the elves had been using to down pilots over Lancre. It was young Matilda Glossop's broom they chose to flame. Irena watched as the young recruit pilot belatedly realised she was flying a burning broomstick, and determinedly put the nose down in a power-dive, steep and dangerous, which might put the flames out. Irena whistled. Nobody had taught the girl that. She'd worked it out all for herself.
Darleen and Hanna fell in behind her, driving off Elves who were flocking to an easy-seeming kill. Irena sighed. Three pilots left. She had to be prudent. She mustered Sally and Bethany, and pointed her sword down towards Home Farm.
"Regroup!" she called. "Back to base!"
And six pilots withdrew from a combat with three or four times their number.
From Lancre, another flight set off for the Chalk. Olga needed to find out what was happening down there. With the Clacks link gone, direct contact was vital. She also suspected Irena needed reinforcement. The last clacks before the tower had been damaged had reported contact with the enemy. Olga needed to see for herself. She had also decided to reinforce the Chalk with what could be spared. The three magic carpets had been loaded with essential stores and had set off, apparently unescorted and an easy target.
Olga smiled to herself and took a flight, mounted on a mix of the standard ME-109 all-purpose Watch broom and the faster, purpose-built, ME-262. The 109's had been proven in combat. It was now the turn of the 262's. These had been designed as combat interceptors. The nose was bulbous and fatter than the usual broom. What looked like a long stabilising fin stood out on either side. If you looked really closely, you would see what looked like nostrils depressed into the front of the bulges. Four of them.
These were the recessed barrels of the multiple repeating crossbows built into the bulging snout. It was a revolutionary mechanism. Not very accurate over fifty yards and tended to lose propulsive power beyond that. But close to. It fired smaller, but hard, fast and lethal, bolts very fast indeed.
Would they work? Olga shrugged. It had tested promisingly. You could always revert to the proven ways of fighting if it didn't. And this was a fast broom… Her eight chosen pilots quickly got a few thousand feet above the carpets and waited for something to take the bait. The bait flew on quickly, in the deceptively slow-seeming plodding manner of Klatchian carpets. But ones her Tekniks had worked up and augmented.
Matilda Glossop sensed she was in trouble. It had made desperate sense: push the nose down and dive. Massive airstream back over the broom. Blow out the fire in the bristles. Simple.
But the ground was coming up nearer and nearer. A glance behind her had told her the flame was holding on in there. But there was Home Farm, on the sky just above her head… the tricky thing would be getting there. Matilda pulled back hard on the stick. Slowly, painfully slowly, fighting her all the way, inch by inch, the nose lifted.
Observers from underneath might have seen a young Witch in a near-vertical crash dive on a burning broom that was trailing smoke, and they might have intended to look away or close their eyes when… but just as the crash and the explosion was abount to happen, when the observer might have said "now I pull my eyes away" but somehow didn't… she pulled into level flight again at an insanely low altitude, still on a burning stick but one that was at least bleeding off the speed.
They would have seen the broom, feet above the ground, crash through a hedgerow. One that pulled the witch out of the pilot's seat and left her hanging there, winded and gasping, whilst the now pilotless stick, the blaze and fire in the bristles leaping into life again, went charging off on its own.
Right into a group of Elves who were approaching the farmstead, who had stopped to watch the crashing Witch, to see if it hurt and if she screamed.
The stick exploded in a fireball of abused and unchanneled exothaumic energy.
The Air Watch powers its brooms with a lot more than the usual amount of "oomph" needed to make a stick go. Its tekniks are good at adding supercharge and turbo, even to the everyday Yak of a working witch. As the pilots well know, this is very finely calculated and can go wrong. Or, in this case, right.
This was not the last of the woes for the raiding Elf party. Its survivors contemplated the dead and near-dead fellows scattered in and around a sudden crater, ignored them, jeered at them for being stupid and slow, and pressed on to Home Farm. Destroying the base of the Air Witches was a part of it. Getting some of them on the ground would be better. And it had animals, like chickens and baby sheep, to play with.
It also had Joe Aching and his son Wentworth, who were defending their home. It also had Ground Teknik Anton van Fokker, who had grasped part of his new employment contract to Sergeant Irena, who had played fair, was that he was called upon to fight like Hell for her and for them other girls. He was a Dwarf. He had an axe. And Dwarfs hated, really hated, Elves. He ran to get the girl out of the hedge. A Teknik serves his pilots. They fight for him; he fights for them. The contract. A couple of elves who got in his way very briefly wished they hadn't.
The elves soon realised they were in a fight.
The remaining airborne pilots swooped in and joined the combat. Home Farm was safe. four pursued. One flew down to check on Matilda, who had shakily extricated from the hedge.
Meanwhile in the air, the bait had been taken. Elves in flight appeared to be learning only slowly. Those three magic carpets fascinated them. They seemed to be guarded lightly. They were stacked with crates and boxes. Plunder.
They did not look above them.
The first elf dropped onto a carpet, singing softly. His yarrow stalk hovered obediently nearby. Another Elf joined him.
"Well, hello, boys!" a small voice roared.
A Dwarf emerged from a gap between boxes. He grinned. Indicated his steel armour. And hefted his mattock. At the same time, Feegle started to pop up. A short fight ensued. At the front of the carpet, an Elf who tried for the pilot discovered the finer cultural points, and the sharp cultural edge, of a Klatchian tulwar sword. The pilot spat, watching the Elf's body tumbling through the sky.
"Djinni." he said, contemptuously. Klatch knew Elves, too.
And the new brooms, with the bulbous shark-like noses, tipped into a bank and tumbled from the sky.
Olga Romanoff flew the ME-262 with her Watch badge number, 588, (6) stencilled on the nose. An elf danced across her field of vision. She chose her moment and briefly thumbed the trigger, feeling her two-six-two shudder in the air.
Reminding herself there was only so much ammo, and she could use it all up before she knew it. She sped past, getting the briefest glimpse of a cloud of scattering debris, and shouted a war-cry.
Every sense twanged and she rejoiced, briefly, in the glory of pure flight, flipping the two-six-two up into a looping turn. She half-heard a voice.
You are good, Olga Romanoff, and you know it. I'm minded to think you're the greatest air witch we've got. But be mindful, girl. There is a price of flight and you'll be called upon to pay it. That's all I'm sayin'.
She heard a little voice behind her say "Crivvens!" and recalled she wasn't alone up here…
Elsewhere in the sky, an Elf with a blazing torch steered almost to within lighting distance of an air witch. He drew near and was extending his arm…
"See me, Tinkerbelle! Ye likes playin' with fire, diz ye? Well, play wi' this!"
Each witch now carried a Feegle, at least one Feegle, who was tasked to watch her back for moments like this and provide close-in defence. The incidence of brooms brought down by fire would drop to zero.
However, as Olga discovered, while the ME-262 might be a magnificent fighting platform, it was still an experimental design. The Tekniks hadn't yet got all the bugs out of it. It was, they apologetically said, still a bit temperamental, ma'am…
As the exothaumic power spluttered, flipped in and out and then died, Olga remembered the little flaws. She sighed.
Going to glide down, Wee Crazy Derek." she said to her Feegle. "Should be able to make an emergency landing okay. Stand by."
"Right y'are, Mistress." her Feegle replied. He was riding with the Hag Of The High Airs herself. She'd land safely.
"You never know. It might even switch on again." (7)
To be continued – I have ideas about how, in-universe, Olga becomes "Syren". Watch this space.
Notes Dump: think of it as a sort of dispersal area for recovered ideas which can be cannibalised for spare parts so as to get new ideas up into the air again.
(1) There was a monk, who had become a Saint of the Orthodox Potato Church. St Cyril of St PeterProcknicksburg. Monks write things. It's a big part of the job specification. Brother Cyril heard the Rus language used all around him. He had never questioned the fact that some of it had to be written down for posterity, or at least the bits worth keeping had to be written down. But the fact remained that neither the old Glugolic runes handed down since time immoral, nor the Latatian alphabet borrowed from neighbours towards the Turnwise, were doing the job. They did not fit the sounds of Rus. Cyril, and an assistant monk called Klimenti, set about listening to their own language. They identified the sounds. Where a Latatian letter fitted a phoneme, they kept it. For some sounds, Ephebian letters did the job better. But for a lot of sounds, they had to begin from scratch and invent their own. They did this so well that even today, a chant of praise in the Orthodox Potato Church used in Plainsong every Octeday, honouring the man who gave the Rus people a distinctive orthography all of their own and is therefore a Hero, goesНице оне, Църил, нице оне, сон! нице оне Църил, ит дон'т неед анотхер оне!
(2) We have superstitions, irrational magical associations to certain objects and dates, such as a deeply held conviction that things coming in groups of thirteens (like Olga's Night Witches) are unlucky. The Discworld has substitions. Where you can still make an irrational association of doom between an object and a consequent event based on seemingly illogical, unconnected and irrational presumptions. And you would be dead right because it will happen. Every time.
(3) Miss Pretty Butterfly taught Agatean Studies at the Guild School. She had, for instance, a memorable way of dealing with pupils who thought every Agatean sword was a katana, and pointing out to them that they were dead wrong. The emphasis being the point. Which might be of a katana. But could be a nihonto, or an odachi, or perhaps a wakizashi or a kodachi.
(4) Chemists out there – just spotted this one. A positively charged ion. I think these exist and aren't an antimatter thing. But should it be a cation or something? I'd really love Ponder's pig-Chemistry to be as right as the pig-Latin…
(5) Incidentally, the title of a magnificently raw live LP by the Blue Öyster Cult. With a cracking encore of ME-262.
(6) There had been no order or purpose to Watch badge allocation. Sam Vimes had retrieved a crate full of them from the Palace and handed them out more-or-less at random, in a "lucky dip" sort of way, to new Watchmen. If a badge number had a History, it was recorded somewhere. He had been surprised that Irena and Olga, once passed out from training, had received consecutive numbers, 587 and 588 (6.1). Vimes had remarked that there had to be a first time for everything, and what were the chances of that?. (For the bewildered, look up "Night Bomber Regiment 588" to see what the link is). Later on, after this war, Olga had asked if 500-series numbers could be separated out for Air Watch use. Vimes had agreed. (And yes, this means ret-conning "Strandpiel" to make Rebecka Smith-Rhodes' badge number into 523 – the fighting in Lancre takes place nine or ten years before an older Bekki joins the Air Watch, don't forget)
(6.1) People asked Olga whether she thought having a badge with a double-7a in it was, you know, unlucky? She considered this.
"Da." Olga replied. "But who is to say the bad luck is mine? Ask the people I deal with. After I have dealt with them. Then ask where the bad fortune goes."
As they say, a Witch makes her own luck.
(7) Unreliable components and engine failure were a bugbear of the ME-262 on our world too.