'Why?' said Teppic, from the shadows. He fumbled in his boot for his blowpipe.
'You will then be thrown to the sacred crocodiles, by order of the king,' said Dios.
'Something to look forward to, eh?' said Teppic, feverishly screwing bits together.
'It would certainly be preferable to many alternatives,' said Dios.
In the darkness Teppic ran his fingers over the little coded knobs on the darts. Most of the really spectacular poisons would have evaporated or dissolved into harmlessness by now, but there were a number of lesser potions designed to give their clients nothing more than a good night's sleep. An assassin might have to work his way to an inhume past a number of alert bodyguards. It was considered impolite to inhume them as well.
'You could let us go,' said Teppic. 'I suspect that's what you want, isn't it? For me to go away and never come back? That suits me fine.'
Dios hesitated.
'You're supposed to say «And let the girl go»,' he said.
'Oh, yes. And that, too,' said Teppic.
'No. I would be failing in my duty to the king,' said Dios.
'For goodness sake, Dios, you know I am the king!'
'No. I have a very clear picture of the king. You are not the king,' said the priest.
Teppic peered over the edge of the camel stall. The camel peered over his shoulder.
And then the world went mad.
All right, madder.
All the pyramids were blazing now, filling the sky with their sooty light as the brothers Ptaclusp struggled to the main working platform.
IIa collapsed on the planking, wheezing like an elderly bellows. A few feet away the sloping side was hot to the touch, and there was no doubt in his mind now that the pyramid was creaking, like a sailing ship in a gale. He had never paid much attention to the actual mechanics as opposed to the cost of pyramid construction, but he was pretty certain that the noise was as wrong as II and II making V.
His brother reached out to touch the stone, but drew his hand back as small sparks flashed around his fingers.
'You can feel the warmth,' he said. 'It's astonishing!'
'Why?'
'Heating up a mass like this. I mean, the sheer tonnage…'
'I don't like it, Two-bee,' IIa quavered. 'Let's just leave the stone here, shall we? I'm sure it'll be all right, and in the morning we can send a gang up here, they'll know exactly what-'
His words were drowned out as another flare crackled across the sky and hit the column of dancing air fifty feet above them. He grabbed part of the scaffolding.
'Sod take this,' he said. 'I'm off.'
'Hang on a minute,' said IIb. 'I mean, what is creaking? Stone can't creak.'
'The whole bloody scaffolding is moving, don't be daft!' He stared goggle-eyed at his brother. 'Tell me it's the scaffolding,' he pleaded.
'No, I'm certain this time. It's coming from inside.' They stared at one another, and then at the rickety ladder leading up to the tip, or to where the tip should be.
'Come on!' said IIb. 'It can't flare off, it's trying to find ways of discharging-'
There was a sound as loud as the groaning of continents.
Teppic felt it. He felt that his skin was several sizes too small. He felt that someone was holding his ears and trying to twist his head off.
He saw the guard captain sag to his knees, fighting to get his helmet off, and he leapt the stall.
Tried to leap the stall. Everything was wrong, and he landed heavily on a floor that seemed undecided about becoming a wall. He managed to get to his feet and was pulled sideways, dancing awkwardly across the stable to keep his balance.
The stables stretched and shrank like a picture in a distorting mirror. He'd gone to see some once in Ankh, the three of them hazarding a half-coin each to visit the transient marvels of Dr Mooner's Travelling Take Your Breath Away Emporium. But you knew then that it was only twisted glass that was giving you a head like a sausage and legs like footballs. Teppic wished he could be so certain that what was happening around him would allow of such a harmless explanation. You'd probably need a wobbly glass mirror to make it look normal.
He ran on taffy legs towards Ptraci and the high priest as the world was expanded and squeezed around him, and was momentarily gratified to see the girl squirm in Dios's grip and fetch him a tidy thump on the ear.
He moved as though in a dream, with the distances changing as though reality was an elastic thing. Another step sent him cannoning into the pair of them. He grabbed Ptraci's arm and staggered back to the camel stall, where the creature was still cudding and watching the scene with the nearest thing a camel will ever get to mild interest, and snatched its halter.
No-one seemed to be interested in stopping them as they helped each other through the doorway and out into the mad night.
'It helps if you shut your eyes,' said Ptraci.
Teppic tried it. It worked. A stretch of courtyard that his eyes told him was a quivering rectangle whose sides twanged like bowstrings became, well, just a courtyard under his feet.
'Gosh, that was clever,' he said. 'How did you think of that?'
'I always shut my eyes when I'm frightened,' said Ptraci.
'Good plan.'
'What's happening?'
'I don't know. I don't want to find out. I think going away from here could be an amazingly sensible idea. How do you make a camel kneel, did you say? I've got any amount of sharp things.'
The camel, who had a very adequate grasp of human language as it applied to threats, knelt down graciously. They scrambled aboard and the landscape lurched again as the beast jacked itself back on to its feet.
The camel knew perfectly well what was happening. Three stomachs and a digestive system like an industrial distillation plant gave you a lot of time for sitting and thinking.
It's not for nothing that advanced mathematics tends to be invented in hot countries. It's because of the morphic resonance of all the camels, who have that disdainful expression and famous curled lip as a natural result of an ability to do quadratic equations.
It's not generally realised that camels have a natural aptitude for advanced mathematics, particularly where they involve ballistics. This evolved as a survival trait, in the same way as a human's hand and eye co-ordination, a chameleon's camouflage and a dolphin's renowned ability to save drowning swimmers if there's any chance that biting them in half might be observed and commented upon adversely by other humans.
The fact is that camels are far more intelligent than dolphins19.
They are so much brighter that they soon realised that the most prudent thing any intelligent animal can do, if it would prefer its descendants not to spend a lot of time on a slab with electrodes clamped to their brains or sticking mines on the bottom of ships or being patronised rigid by zoologists, is to make bloody certain humans don't find out about it. So they long ago plumped for a lifestyle that, in return for a certain amount of porterage and being prodded with sticks, allowed them adequate food and grooming and the chance to spit in a human's eye and get away with it.
And this particular camel, the result of millions of years of selective evolution to produce a creature that could count the grains of sand it was walking over, and close its nostrils at will, and survive under the broiling sun for many days without water, was called You Bastard.
And he was, in fact, the greatest mathematician in the world.
You Bastard was thinking: there seems to be some growing dimensional instability here, swinging from zero to nearly forty— five degrees by the look of it. How interesting. I wonder what's causing it? Let V equal 3. Let Tau equal Chi/4. cudcudcud Let Kappa/y be an Evil-Smelling-Bugger20 differential tensor domain with four imaginary spin co-efficients…
Ptraci hit him across the head with her sandal. 'Come on, get a move on!' she yelled. You Bastard thought: Therefore H to the enabling power equals V/s. cudcudcud Thus in hypersyllogic notation . . .
Teppic looked behind him. The strange disto
rtions in the landscape seemed to be settling down, and Dios was . . .
Dios was striding out of the palace, and had actually managed to find several guards whose fear of disobedience overcame the terror of the mysteriously distorted world.
You Bastard stood stoically chewing. . . cudcudcud which gives us an interesting shortening oscillation. What would be the period of this? Let period = x. cudcudcud Let t = time. Let initial period . . .
Ptraci bounced up and down on his neck and kicked hard with her heels, an action which would have caused any anthropoid male to howl and bang his head against the wall.
'It won't move! Can't you hit it?'
Teppic brought his hand down as hard as he could on You Bastard's hide, raising a cloud of dust and deadening every nerve in his fingers. It was like hitting a large sack full of coathangers.
'Come on,' he muttered.
Dios raised a hand.
'Halt, in the name of the king!' he shouted.
An arrow thudded into You Bastard's hump.
. . . equals 6.3 recurring. Reduce. That gives us ouch . . . 314 seconds . . .
You Bastard turned his long neck around. His great hairy eyebrows made accusing curves as his yellow eyes narrowed and took a fix on the high priest, and he put aside the interesting problem for a moment and dredged up the familiar ancient maths that his race had perfected long ago:
Let range equal forty-one feet. Let windspeed equal 2. Vector one-eight. cud Let glutinosity equal 7 .
Teppic drew a throwing knife.
Dios took a deep breath. He's going to order them to fire on us, Teppic thought. In my own name, in my own kingdom, I'm going to be shot.
Angle two-five, cud Fire.
It was a magnificent volley. The gob of cud had commendable lift and spin and hit with a sound like, a sound like half a pound of semi-digested grass hitting someone in the face. There was nothing else it could sound like.
The silence that followed was by way of being a standing ovation.
The landscape began to distort again. This was clearly not a place to linger. You Bastard looked down at his front legs.
Let legs equal four .
He lumbered into a run. Camels apparently have more knees than any other creature and You Bastard ran like a steam engine, with lots of extraneous movement at right angles to the direction of motion accompanied by a thunderous barrage of digestive noises.
'Bloody stupid animal,' muttered Ptraci, as they jolted away from the palace, 'but it looks like it finally got the idea.'
. . . gauge-invariant repetition rate of 3.5/z. What's she talking about, Bloody Stupid lives over in Tsort . . .
Though they swung through the air as though jointed with bad elastic You Bastard's legs covered a lot of ground, and already they were bouncing through the sleeping packed-earth streets of the city.
'It's starting again, isn't it?' said Ptraci. 'I'm going to shut my eyes.'
Teppic nodded. The firebrick-hot houses around them were doing their slow motion mirror dance again, and the road was rising and falling in a way that solid land had no right to adopt.
'It's like the sea,' he said.
'I can't see anything,' said Ptraci firmly.
'I mean the sea. The ocean. You know. Waves.'
'I've heard about it. Is anyone chasing us?'
Teppic turned in the saddle. 'Not that I can make out,' he said. 'It looks as-'
From here he could see past the long, low bulk of the palace and across the river to the Great Pyramid itself. It was almost hidden in dark clouds, but what he could see of it was definitely wrong. He knew it had four sides, and he could see all eight of them.
It seemed to be moving in and out of focus, which he felt instinctively was a dangerous thing for several million tons of rock to do. He felt a pressing urge to be a long way away from it. Even a dumb creature like the camel seemed to have the same idea.
You Bastard was thinking: . . Delta squared. Thus, dimensional pressure k will result in a ninety-degree transformation in Chi(16/x/pu)t for a K-bundle of any three invariables. Or four minutes, plus or minus ten seconds The camel looked down at the great pads of his feet.
Let speed equal gallop.
'How did you make it do that?' said Teppic.
'I didn't! It's doing it by itself! Hang on!'
This wasn't easy. Teppic had saddled the camel but neglected the harness. Ptraci had handfuls of camel hair to hang on to. All he had was handfuls of Ptraci. No matter where he tried to put his hands, they encountered warm, yielding flesh. Nothing in his long education had prepared him for this, whereas everything in Ptraci's obviously had. Her long hair whipped his face and smelled beguilingly of rare perfume21. 'Are you all right?' he shouted above the wind.
'I'm hanging on with my knees!'
'That must be very hard!'
'You get special training!'
Camels gallop by throwing their feet as far away from them as possible and then running to keep up. Knee joints clicking like chilly castanets, You Bastard thrashed up the sloping road out of the valley and windmilled along the narrow gorge that led, under towering limestone cliffs, to the high desert beyond.
And behind them, tormented beyond measure by the inexorable tide of geometry, unable to discharge its burden of Time, the Great Pyramid screamed, lifted itself off its base and, its bulk swishing through the air as unstoppably as something completely unstoppable, ground around precisely ninety degrees and did something perverted to the fabric of time and space.
You Bastard sped along the gorge, his neck stretched out to its full extent, his mighty nostrils flaring like jet intakes.
'It's terrified!' Ptraci yelled. 'Animals always know about this sort of thing!'
'What sort of thing!'
'Forest fires and things!'
'We haven't got any trees!'
'Well, floods and — and things! They've got some strange natural instinct!'
. . . Phi* 1700 u/v. Lateral e/v. Equals a tranche of seven to twelve . . .
The sound hit them. It was as silent as a dandelion clock striking midnight, but it had pressure. It rolled over them, suffocating as velvet, nauseating as a battered saveloy.
And was gone.
You Bastard slowed to a walk, a complicated procedure that involved precise instructions to each leg in turn.
There was a feeling of release, a sense of stress withdrawn. You Bastard stopped. In the pre-dawn glow he'd spotted a clump of thorned syphacia bushes growing in the rocks by the track.
. . angle left. x equals 37. y equals 19. z equals 43. Bite . . .
Peace descended. There was no sound except for the eructations of the camel's digestive tract and the distant warbling of a desert owl.
Ptraci slid off her perch and landed awkwardly.
'My bottom,' she announced, to the desert in general, 'is one huge blister.'
Teppic jumped down and half-ran, half-staggered up the scree by the roadside, then jogged across the cracked limestone plateau until he could get a good look at the valley.
It wasn't there any more.
It was still dark when Dil the master embalmer woke up, his body twanging with the sensation that something was wrong. He slipped out of bed, dressed hurriedly, and pulled aside the curtain that did duty as a door.
The night was soft and velvety. Behind the chirrup of the insects there was another sound, a frying noise, a faint sizzling on the edge of hearing.
Perhaps that was what had woken him up.
The air was warm and damp. Curls of mist rose from the river, and— The pyramids weren't flaring.
He'd grown up in this house: it had been in the family of the master embalmers for thousands of years, and he'd seen the pyramids flare so often that he didn't notice them, any more than he noticed his own breathing. But now they were dark and silent, and the silence cried out and the darkness glared.
But that wasn't the worst part. As his horrified eyes stared up at the empty sky over the necropolis they saw the stars, an
d what the stars were stuck to.
Dil was terrified. And then, when he had time to think about it, he was ashamed of himself. After all, he thought, it's what I've always been told is there. It stands to reason. I'm just seeing it properly for the first time.
There. Does that make me feel any better?
No.
He turned and ran down the street, sandals flapping, until he reached the house that held Gern and his numerous family. He dragged the protesting apprentice from the communal sleeping mat and pulled him into the street, turned his face to the sky and hissed. 'Tell me what you can see!'
Gern squinted.
'I can see the stars, master,' he said.
'What are they on, boy?'
Gern relaxed slightly. 'That's easy, master. Everyone knows the stars are on the body of the goddess Nept who arches herself from . . . oh, bloody hell.'
'You can see her, too?'
'Oh, mummy,' whispered Gern, and slid to his knees.
Dil nodded. He was a religious man. It was a great comfort knowing that the gods were there. It was knowing they were here that was the terrible part.
Because the body of a woman arched over the heavens, faintly blue, faintly shadowy in the light of the watery stars.
She was enormous, her statistics interstellar. The shadow between her galactic breasts was a dark nebula, the curve of her stomach a vast wash of glowing gas, her navel the seething, dark incandescence in which new stars were being born. She wasn't supporting the sky. She was the sky.
Her huge sad face, upside down on the turnwise horizon, stared directly at Dil. And Dil was realising that there are few things that so shake belief as seeing, clearly and precisely, the object of that belief. Seeing, contrary to popular wisdom, isn't believing. It's where belief stops, because it isn't needed any more.
'Oh, Sod,' moaned Gern.
Dil struck him across the arm.
'Stop that,' he said. 'And come with me.'
'Oh, master, whatever shall we do?'
Dil looked around at the sleeping city. He hadn't the faintest idea.
'We'll go to the palace,' he said firmly. 'It's probably a trick of the, of the, of the dark. Anyway, the sun will be up presently.'
He strode off, wishing he could change places with Gern and show just a hint of gibbering terror. The apprentice followed him at a sort of galloping creep.
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