'It's a family trait, you know. Your grandad had to have Left and Right painted on his sandals, it was that bad. It's lucky for you that you take after your mother in that respect.'
It was strange. She didn't talk, she chattered. She didn't seem to be able to hold a simple thought in her head for more than about ten seconds. Her brain appeared to be wired directly to her mouth, so that as soon as a thought entered her head she spoke it out loud. Compared to the ladies he had met at soirees in Ankh, who delighted in entertaining young assassins and fed them expensive delicacies and talked to them of high and delicate matters while their eyes sparkled like carborundum drills and their lips began to glisten compared to them, she was as empty as a, as a, well, as an empty thing. Nevertheless, he found he desperately wanted to find her. The sheer undemandingness of her was like a drug. The memory of her bosom was quite beside the point.
'I'm glad you've come back for her,' said the king vaguely.
'She's your sister, you know. Half sister, that is. Sometimes I wish I'd married her mother, but you see she wasn't royal. Very bright woman, her mother.'
Teppic listened hard. There it was again: a faint breathing noise, only heard at all because of the deep silence of the night. He worked his way to the back of the room, listened again, and lifted the lid of a case.
Ptraci was curled up on the bottom, fast asleep with her head on her arm.
He leaned the lid carefully against the wall and touched her hair. She muttered something in her sleep, and settled into a more comfortable position.
'Er, I think you'd better wake up,' he whispered.
She changed position again and muttered something like: 'Wstflgl.'
Teppic hesitated. Neither his tutors nor Dios had prepared him for this. He knew at least seventy different ways of killing a sleeping person, but none to wake them up first.
He prodded her in what looked like the least embarrassing area of her skin. She opened her eyes.
'Oh,' she said. 'It's you.' And she yawned.
'I've come to take you away,' said Teppic. 'You've been asleep all day.'
'I heard someone talking,' she said, stretching in a fashion that made Teppic look away hurriedly. 'It was that priest, the one with the face like a bald eagle. He's really horrible.'
'He is, isn't he?' agreed Teppic, intensely relieved to hear it said.
'So I just kept quiet. And there was the king. The new king.'
'Oh. He was down here, was he?' said Teppic weakly. The bitterness in her voice was like a Number Four stabbing knife in his heart.
'All the girls say he's really weird,' she added, as he helped her out of the case. 'You can touch me, you know. I'm not made of china.'
He steadied her arm, feeling in sore need of a cold bath and a quick run around the rooftops.
'You're an assassin, aren't you,' she went on. 'I remembered that after you'd gone. An assassin from foreign parts. All that black. Have you come to kill the king?'
'I wish I could,' said Teppic. 'He's really beginning to get on my nerves. Look, could you take your bangles off?'
'Why?'
'They make such a noise when you walk.' Even Ptraci's earrings appeared to chime the hours when she moved her head.
'I don't want to,' she said. 'I'd feel naked without them.'
'You're nearly naked with them,' hissed Teppic. 'Please!'
'She can play the dulcimer,' said the ghost of Teppicymon XXVII, apropos of nothing much. 'Not very well, mind you. She's up to page five of «Little Pieces for Tiny Fingers».'
Teppic crept to the passage leading out of the embalming room and listened hard. Silence ruled in the palace, broken only by heavy breathing and the occasional clink behind him as Ptraci stripped herself of her jewellery. He crept back.
'Please hurry up,' he said, 'we haven't got a lot of-'
Ptraci was crying.
'Er,' said Teppic. 'Er.'
'Some of these were presents from my granny,' sniffed Ptraci. 'The old king gave me some, too. These earrings have been in my family for ever such a long time. How would you like it if you had to do it?'
'You see, jewellery isn't just something she wears,' said the ghost of Teppicymon XXVII. 'It's part of who she is.' My word, he added to himself, that's probably an Insight. Why is it so much easier to think when you're dead?
'I don't wear any,' said Teppic.
'You've got all those daggers and things.'
'Well, I need them to do my job.'
'Well then.'
'Look, you don't have to leave them here, you can put them in my pouch,' he said. 'But we must be going. Please!'
'Goodbye,' said the ghost sadly, watching them sneak out to the courtyard. He floated back to his corpse, who wasn't the best of company.
The breeze was stronger when they reached the roof. It was hotter, too, and dry.
Across the river one or two of the older pyramids were already sending up their flares, but they were weak and looked wrong.
'I feel itchy,' said Ptraci. 'What's wrong?'
'It feels like we're in for a thunderstorm,' said Teppic, staring across the river at the Great Pyramid. Its blackness had intensified, so that it was a triangle of deeper darkness in the night. Figures were running around its base like lunatics watching their asylum burn.
'What's a thunderstorm?'
'Very hard to describe,' he said, in a preoccupied voice. 'Can you see what they're doing over there?'
Ptraci squinted across the river.
'They're very busy,' she said.
'Looks more like panic to me.'
A few more pyramids flared, but instead of roaring straight up the flames flickered and lashed backwards and forwards, driven by intangible winds.
Teppic shook himself. 'Come on,' he said. 'Let's get you away from here.'
'I said we should have capped it this evening,' shouted Ptaclusp IIb above the screaming of the pyramid. 'I can't float it up now, the turbulence up there must be terrific!'
The ice of day was boiling off the black marble, which was already warm to the touch. He stared distractedly at the capstone on its cradle and then at his brother, who was still in his nightshirt.
'Where's father?' he said.
'I sent one of us to go and wake him up,' said IIa.
'Who?'
'One of you, actually.'
'Oh.' IIb stared again at the capstone. 'It's not that heavy,' he said. 'Two of us could manhandle it up there.' He gave his brother an enquiring look.
'You must be mad. Send some of the men to do it.'
'They've all run away-'
Down river another pyramid tried to flare, spluttered, and then ejected a screaming, ragged flame that arched across the sky and grounded near the top of the Great Pyramid itself.
'It's interfering with the others now!' shouted IIb. 'Come on. We've got to flare it off, it's the only way!'
About a third of the way up the pyramid's flanks a crackling blue zigzag arced out and struck itself on a stone sphinx. The air above it boiled.
The two brothers slung the stone between them and staggered to the scaffolding, while the dust around them whirled into strange shapes.
'Can you hear something?' said IIb, as they stumbled on to the first platform.
