Thief of Time tds-26

by Terry Pratchett

  The one who had raised the question of the painting drifted towards one of the chairs and said, And what is this?

  “It is a cat. It arrived. It does not appear to wish to depart.”

  The cat, a feral ginger tom, flicked a serrated ear and curled up in a tighter ball. Anything that could survive in Ankh-Morpork's alleys, with their abandoned swamp dragons, dog packs and furriers' agents, was not about to open even one eye for a bunch of floating nightdresses.

  The one who was now getting on Lady LeJean's nerves said: And the reason for its presence?

  “It appears to tolerate the company of hu—of apparent humans, asking nothing in return but food, water, shelter and comfort,” said Lady LeJean. “This interests me. Our purpose is to learn, and thus I have, as you can see, begun.” She hoped it sounded better to them than it did to her.

  One said, When will the clock problems you spoke of be resolved?

  “Oh, soon. Very soon. Yes.”

  The one that was beginning to terrify Lady LeJean said, We wonder: is it possible that you are slowing the work in some way?

  Lady LeJean felt a prickling on her forehead. Why was it doing that?

  “No. Why should I slow the work? There would be no logic to it!”

  One said, Hmm.

  And an Auditor did not say “Hmm” by accident. “Hmm” had a very precise meaning.

  It went on: You are making moisture on your head.

  “Yes. It's a body thing.”

  One said, Yes. And that, too, had a very specific and ominous meaning.

  One said, We wonder if too long in a solid body weakens resolve. Also, we find it hard to see your thoughts.

  “Body again, I am afraid. The brain is a very imprecise instrument.” Lady LeJean got control of her hands at last.

  One said, Yes.

  Another said, When water fills a jug, it takes the shape of the jug. But the water is not the jug, nor is the jug the water.

  “Of course,” said Lady LeJean. And, inside, a thought that she hadn't known she was thinking, a thought that turned up out of the darkness behind the eyes, said: We are surely the most stupid creatures in the universe.

  One said, It is not good to act alone.

  She said, “Of course.” And once again a thought emerged from the darkness: I'm in trouble now.

  One said, And therefore you will have companions. No blame attaches. One should never be alone. Together, resolve is strengthened.

  Motes began to twinkle in the air.

  Lady LeJean's body backed away automatically and, when she saw what was forming, she backed it away further. She had seen humans in all states of life and death, but seeing a body being spun out of raw matter was curiously disquieting when you were currently inhabiting a similar one. It was one of those times when the stomach did the thinking, and thought it wanted to throw up.

  Six figures took shape, blinked, and opened their eyes. Three of the figures were male, three were female. They were dressed in human-sized equivalents of the Auditors' robes.

  The remaining Auditors drew back, but one said: They will accompany you to the clockmaker, and matters will be resolved today. They will not eat or breathe.

  Hah! thought one of the little voices that made up Lady LeJean's thinking.

  One of the figures whimpered.

  “The body will breathe,” said her ladyship. “You will not persuade it that air is not required.”

  She was aware of the choking noises.

  “You are thinking, yes, we can exchange necessary materials with the outside world, and this is true,” she went on. “But the body does not know that. It thinks it is dying. Let it breathe.”

  There was a series of gasps.

  “And you will feel better shortly,” said her ladyship, and was enthralled to hear the inner voice think: These are your jailers, and you are already stronger than them.

  One of the figures felt its face with a clumsy hand and, panting, said, “Whom do you speak to with your mouth?”

  “You,” said Lady LeJean.

  “Us?”

  “This will take some explaining—”

  “No,” said the Auditor. “Danger lies that way. We believe the body imposes a method of thought on the brain. No blame attaches. It is a… malfunction. We will accompany you to the clockmaker. We will do this now.”

  “Not in those clothes,” said Lady LeJean. “You will frighten him. It may lead to irrational actions.”

  There was a moment of silence. The Auditors-made-flesh looked hopelessly at one another.

  “You have to talk with your mouth,” Lady LeJean prompted. “The minds stay inside the head.”

  One said, “What is wrong with these clothes? It is a simple shape found in many human cultures.”

  Lady LeJean walked to the window. “See the people down there?” she said. “You must dress in appropriate city fashions.”

  Reluctantly the Auditors did so, and, while they retained the greyness, they did give themselves clothes that would pass unnoticed in the street. Up to a point, anyway.

  “Only those of female appearance should wear dresses,” Lady LeJean pointed out.

  A hovering grey shape said, Warning. Danger. The one calling itself Lady LeJean may give unsafe advice. Warning.

  “Understood,” said one of the incarnate ones. “We know the way. We will lead.”

  It walked into the door.

  The Auditors clustered around the door for a while, and then one of them glared at Lady LeJean, who smiled.

  “Doorknob,” she said.

  The Auditor turned back to the door, stared at the brass knob, and then looked the door up and down. It dissolved into dust.

  “Doorknob was simpler,” said Lady LeJean.

  Tick

  There were big mountains around the Hub. But the ones towering above the temple didn't all have names, because there were simply too many of them. Only gods have enough time to name all the pebbles on a beach, but gods don't have the patience.

  Copperhead was small enough to be big enough to have a name. Lobsang awoke and saw its crooked peak, towering above the lesser local mountains, outlined against the sunrise.

  Sometimes the gods have no taste at all. They allow sunrises and sunsets in ridiculous pink and blue hues that any professional artist would dismiss as the work of some enthusiastic amateur who'd never looked at a real sunset. This was one of those sunrises. It was the kind of sunrise a man looks at and says, “No real sunrise could paint the sky Surgical Appliance Pink.”

  Nevertheless, it was beautiful.15

  Lobsang was half covered in a pile of dry bracken. There was no sign of the yeti.

  It was springtime here. There was still snow, but with the occasional patch of bare soil and a hint of green. He stared around, and saw leaves in bud.

  Lu-Tze was standing some way off, gazing up into a tree. He didn't turn his head as Lobsang approached.

  “Where's the yeti?”

  “He wouldn't go further than this. Can't ask a yeti to leave snow,” whispered Lu-Tze.

  “Oh,” whispered Lobsang. “Er, why are we whispering?”

  “Look at the bird.”

  It was perched on a branch by a fork in the tree, next to what looked like a birdhouse, and nibbling at a piece of roughly round wood it held in one claw.

  “Must be an old nest they're repairing,” said Lu-Tze. “Can't have got that advanced this early in the season.”

  “Looks like some kind of old box to me,” said Lobsang. He squinted to see better. “Is it an old… clock?” he added.

  “Look at what the bird is nibbling,” suggested Lu-Tze.

  “Well, it looks like… a crude gearwheel? But why—”

  “Well spotted. That, lad, is a clock cuckoo. A young one, by the look of it, trying to build a nest that'll attract a mate. Not much chance of that… See? It's got the numerals all wrong and it's stuck the hands on crooked.”

  “A bird that builds clocks? I thought a cuckoo clock was a cl
ock with a mechanical cuckoo that came out when—”

  “And where do you think people got such a strange idea from?”

  “But that's some kind of miracle!”

  “Why?” said Lu-Tze. “They barely go for more than half an hour, they keep lousy time and the poor dumb males go frantic trying to keep them wound.”

  “But even to—”

  “Everything happens somewhere, I suppose,” said Lu-Tze. “Not worth making too much of a fuss. Got any food left?”

  “No. We finished it last night,” said Lobsang. He added, hopefully, “Er… I heard tell that really advanced monks can live on the, er, life force in the actual air itself…”

  “Only on the planet Sausage, I expect,” said Lu-Tze. “No, we'll skirt Copperhead and find something in the valleys on the other side. Let's go, there's not much time.”

  But time enough to watch a bird, thought Lobsang as he let the world around him become blue and fade, and the thought was comforting.

  It was easier going without the snow on the ground, provided he avoided the strange resistance offered by bushes and long grass. Lu-Tze walked on ahead, looking oddly colourful and unreal against the faded landscape.

  They went past the entrance to dwarf mines, but saw no one above ground. Lobsang was glad of that. The statues he had seen in the villages yesterday weren't dead, he knew, but merely frozen at a different speed of time. Lu-Tze had forbidden him to go near anyone, but he needn't have bothered. Walking around the living statues was invasive, somehow. It made it worse when you realized that they were moving, but very, very slowly…

  The sun had barely moved from the horizon when they came down through warmer woods on the Rim side of the mountain. Here the landscape had a more domesticated air. It was woodland rather than forest. The game trail they'd been following crossed a creek at a point where there were cart tracks, old but still not overgrown.

  Lobsang looked behind him after he'd walked across the ford, and watched the water very slowly reclaim the shape of his footprints in the stream.

  He'd been trained in time-slicing on the snowfields above the valley, like the rest of the novices. That was so they couldn't come to any harm, the monks had said, although no one actually explained what harm they might come to. Outside the monastery, this was the first time Lobsang had sliced in a living landscape.

  It was marvellous! Birds hung in the sky. Early morning bumblebees hovered over the opening flowers. The world was a crystal made of living things.

  Lobsang slowed near a group of deer cropping the grass, and watched as the nearer eye of one of them swivelled, with geological slowness, to watch him. He saw the skin move as the muscles underneath started to bunch for flight…

  “Time for a smoko,” said Lu-Tze.

  The world around Lobsang speeded up. The deer fled, along with the magic of the moment.

  “What's a smoko?” said Lobsang. He was annoyed. The quiet slow world had been fun.

  “You ever been to Fourecks?”

  “No. There's a barman at the Bunch of Grapes from there, though.”

  Lu-Tze lit one of his skinny cigarettes.

  “Don't mean much,” he said. “The barman everywhere is from there. Strange country. Big time source right in the middle, very useful. Time and space all tangled up. Probably all that beer. Nice place, though. Now, you see that country down there?”

  On one side of the clearing the ground fell away steeply, showing treetops and, beyond, a small patchwork of fields tucked into a fold in the mountains. In the distance was a gorge, and Lobsang thought he could make out a bridge across it.

  “Doesn't look much like a country,” he said. “Looks more like a shelf.”

  “That's witch country,” said Lu-Tze. “And we're going to borrow a broomstick. Quickest way to Ankh-Morpork. Only way to travel.”

  “Isn't that, er, interfering with history? I mean, I was told that sort of thing is all right up in the valleys, but down here in the world…”

  “No, it's absolutely forbidden,” said Lu-Tze. “'cos it's Interfering With History. Got to be careful of your witch, of course. Some of them are pretty canny.” He caught Lobsang's expression. “Look, that's why there's rules, understand? So that you think before you break 'em.”

  “But—”

  Lu-Tze sighed, and pinched out the end of his cigarette. “We're being watched,” he said.

  Lobsang spun round. There were only trees, and insects buzzing in the early-morning air.

  “Up there,” said Lu-Tze.

  There was a raven perched on the broken crown of a pine tree, shattered in some winter storm. It looked at them looking at it.

  “Caw?” it said.

  “It's just a raven,” said Lobsang. “There's lots of them in the valley.”

  “It was watching us when we stopped.”

  “There's ravens all over the mountains, Sweeper.”

  “And when we met the yeti,” Lu-Tze persisted.

  “That settles it, then. It's coincidence. One raven couldn't move that fast.”

  “Maybe it's a special raven,” said Lu-Tze. “Anyway, it's not one of our mountain ravens. It's a lowland raven. Mountain ravens croak. They don't caw. Why's it so interested in us?”

  “It's a bit… weird, thinking you're being followed by a bird,” said Lobsang.

  “When you get to my age you notice things in the sky,” said Lu-Tze. He shrugged and gave a grin. “You start worrying they might be vultures.”

  They faded into time, and vanished.

  The raven ruffled its feathers.

  “Croak?” it said. “Damn.”

  Tick

  Lobsang felt around under the thatched eaves of the cottage, and his hand closed on the bristles of a broomstick that had been thrust among the reeds.

  “This is rather like stealing,” he said, as Lu-Tze helped him down.

  “No, it's not,” said the sweeper, taking the broomstick and holding it up so he could look along its length. “And I'll tell you why. If we sort things out, we'll drop it off on our way back and she'll never know it's gone… and if we don't sort things out, well, she'll still never know it's gone. Honestly, they don't take much care of their sticks, witches. Look at the bristles on this one. I wouldn't use it to clean a pond! Oh, well… back into clock time, lad. I'd hate to fly one of these things while I was slicing.”

  He straddled the stick and gripped the handle. It rose a little way.

  “Good suspension, at least,” he said. “You can have the comfy seat on the back. Hold tight to my own broom and make sure you wrap your robe around you. These things are pretty breezy.”

  Lobsang pulled himself aboard and the stick rose. As it drew level with the lower branches around the clearing, it brought Lu-Tze to eye level with a raven.

  It shifted uneasily and turned its head this way and that, trying to fix both eyes on him.

  “Are you going to caw or croak, I wonder,” said Lu-Tze, apparently to himself.

  “Croak,” said the raven.

  “So you're not the raven we saw on the other side of the mountain, then.”

  “Me? Gosh, no,” said the raven. “That's croaking territory over there.”

  “Just checking.”

  The broom rose higher, and set off above the trees in a Hubwards direction.

  The raven ruffled its feathers and blinked.

  “Damn!” it said. It shuffled around the tree to where the Death of Rats was sitting.

  SQUEAK?

  “Look, if you want me to do this undercover work you've got to get me a book on ornithology, okay?” said Quoth. “Let's go, or I'll never keep up.”

  Tick

  Death found Famine in a new restaurant in Genua. He had a booth all to himself and was eating Duck and Dirty Rice.

  “Oh,” said Famine. “It's you.”

  YES. WE MUST RIDE. YOU MUST HAVE GOT MY MESSAGE.

  “Pull up a chair,” Famine hissed. “They do a very good alligator sausage here.”

 
I SAID, WE MUST RIDE.

  “Why?”

  Death sat down and explained. Famine listened., although he never stopped eating.

  “I see,” he said at last. “Thank you, but I think I shall sit this one out.”

  SIT IT OUT? YOU'RE A HORSEMAN!

  “Yes, of course. But what is my role here?”

  I BEG YOUR PARDON?

  “No famine appears to be involved, does it? A shortage of food per se? As such?”

  WELL, NO. NOT AS SUCH, OBVIOUSLY, BUT—

  “So I would, as it were, be turning up just to wave. No, thank you.”

  YOU USED TO RIDE OUT EVERY TIME, said Death accusingly.

  Famine waved a bone airily. “We had proper apocalypses in those days,” he said, and sucked at the bone. “You could sink your teeth into them.”

  NEVERTHELESS, THIS IS THE END OF THE WORLD.

  Famine pushed his plate aside and opened the menu. “There are other worlds,” he said. “You're too sentimental, Death. I've always said so.”

  Death drew himself up. Humans had created Famine, too. Oh, there had always been droughts and locusts, but for a really good famine, for fertile land to be turned into a dustbowl by stupidity and avarice, you needed humans. Famine was arrogant.

  I AM SORRY, he said, TO HAVE TRESPASSED ON YOUR TIME.

  He went outside, into the crowded street, all alone.

  Tick

  The stick swooped down towards the plains, and levelled off a few hundred feet above the ground.

  “We're on our way now!” shouted Lu-Tze, pointing ahead. Lobsang looked down at a slim wooden tower hung with complicated boxes. There was another one in the far distance, a toothpick in the morning mist.

  “Semaphore towers!” Lu-Tze shouted. “Ever seen them?”

  “Only in the city!” Lobsang shouted above the slipstream.

  “It's the Grand Trunk!” the sweeper shouted back. “Runs like an arrow all the way to the city! All we have to do is follow it!”

  Lobsang clung on. There was no snow beneath them and it looked as though spring was well advanced. And therefore it was unfair that here, that much nearer the sun, the air was frigid and was being driven into his flesh by the wind of their travel.