'What did you say?' he said.
Koomi's eyes rolled. His mouth opened and shut, but his voice wisely decided not to come out.
Teppicymon pushed his bandaged face close to the priest's pointed nose.
'I remember you,' he growled. 'I've seen you oiling around the place. A bad hat, if ever I saw one. I remember thinking that.'
He glared around at the others.
'You're all priests, aren't you? Come to say sorry, have you? Where's Dios?'
The ancestors pressed forward, muttering. When you've been dead for hundreds of years, you're not inclined to feel generous to those people who assured you that you were going to have a lovely time. There was a scuffle in the middle of the crowd as King Psam-nut-kha, who had spent five thousand years with nothing to look at but the inside of a lid, was restrained by younger colleagues.
Teppicymon switched his attention back to Koomi, who hadn't gone anywhere.
'Foul shades, was it?' he said.
'Er,' said Koomi.
'Put him down.' Dios gently took the staff from Koomi's unresisting fingers and said, 'I am Dios, the high priest. Why are you here?'
It was a perfectly calm and reasonable voice, with overtones of concerned but indubitable authority. It was a tone of voice the pharaohs of Djelibeybi had heard for thousands of years, a voice which had regulated the days, prescribed the rituals, cut the time into carefully-turned segments, interpreted the ways of gods to men. It was the sound of authority, which stirred antique memories among the ancestors and caused them to look embarrassed and shuffle their feet.
One of the younger pharaohs lurched forward.
'You bastard,' he croaked. 'You laid us out and shut us away, one by one, and you went on. People thought the name was passed on but it was always you. How old are you, Dios?'
There was no sound. No-one moved. A breeze stirred the dust a little.
Dios sighed.
'I did not mean to,' he said. 'There was so much to do. There were never enough hours in the day. Truly, I did not realise what was happening. I thought it was refreshing, nothing more, I suspected nothing. I noted the passing of the rituals, not the years.'
'Come from a long-lived family, do you?' said Teppicymon sarcastically.
Dios stared at him, his lips moving. 'Family,' he said at last, his voice softened from its normal bark. 'Family. Yes. I must have had a family, mustn't I. But, you know, I can't remember. Memory is the first thing that goes. The pyramids don't seem to preserve it, strangely.'
'This is Dios, the footnote-keeper of history?' said Teppicymon.
'Ah.' The high priest smiled. 'Memory goes from the head. But it is all around me. Every scroll and book.'
'That's the history of the kingdom, man!'
'Yes. My memory.'
The king relaxed a little. Sheer horrified fascination was unravelling the knot of fury.
'How old are you?' he said.
'I think… seven thousand years. But sometimes it seems much longer.'
'Really seven thousand years?'
'Yes,' said Dios.
'How could any man stand it?' said the king.
Dios shrugged.
'Seven thousand years is just one day at a time,' he said. Slowly, with the occasional wince, he got down on one knee and held up his staff in shaking hands.
'O kings,' he said, 'I have always existed only to serve.'
There was a long, extremely embarrassed pause.
'We will destroy the pyramids,' said Far-re-ptah, pushing forward.
'You will destroy the kingdom,' said Dios. 'I cannot allow it.'
'You cannot allow it?'
'Yes. What will we be without the pyramids?' said Dios.
'Speaking for the dead,' said Far-re-ptah, 'we will be free.'
'But the kingdom will be just another small country,' said Dios, and to their horror the ancestors saw tears in his eyes.
'All that we hold dear, you will cast adrift in time. Uncertain. Without guidance. Changeable.'
'Then it can take its chances,' said Teppicymon. 'Stand aside, Dios.'
Dios held up his staff. The snake around it uncoiled and hissed at the king.
'Be still,' said Dios.
Dark lightning crackled between the ancestors. Dios stared at the staff in astonishment; it had never done this before.
But seven thousand years of his priests had believed, in their hearts, that the staff of Dios could rule this world and the next.
In the sudden silence there was the faint chink, high up, of a knife being wedged between two black marble slabs.
The pyramid pulsed under Teppic, and the marble was as slippery as ice. The inward slope wasn't the help he had expected.
The thing, he told himself, is not to look up or down, but straight ahead, into the marble, parcelling the impossible height into manageable sections. Just like time. That's how we survive infinity — we kill it by breaking it up into small bits.
He was aware of shouts below him, and glanced briefly over his shoulder. He was barely a third of the way up, but he could see the crowds across the river, a grey mass speckled with the pale blobs of upturned faces. Closer to, the pale army of the dead, facing the small grey group of priests, with Dios in front of them. There was some sort of argument going on.
The sun was on the horizon.
He reached up, located the next crack, found a handhold.
Dios spotted Ptaclusp's head peering over the debris, and sent a couple of priests to bring him back. IIb followed, his carefully folded brother under his arm.
'What is the boy doing?' Dios demanded.
'O Dios, he said he was going to flare off the pyramid,' said Ptaclusp.
'How can he do that?'
'O lord, he says he is going to cap it off before the sun sets.'
'Is it possible?' Dios demanded, turning to the architect. IIb hesitated.
'It may be,' he said.
'And what will happen? Will we return to the world outside?'
'Well, it depends on whether the dimensional effect ratchets, as it were, and is stable in each state, or if, on the contrary, the pyramid is acting as a piece of rubber under tension-'
His voice stuttered to a halt under the intensity of Dios's stare.
'I don't know,' he admitted.
'Back to the world outside,' said Dios. 'Not our world. Our world is the Valley. Ours is a world of order. Men need order.'
He raised his staff.
'That's my son!' shouted Teppicymon. 'Don't you dare try anything! That's the king!'
The ranks of ancestors swayed, but couldn't break the spell.
'Er, Dios,' said Koomi.
Dios turned, his eyebrows raised.
'You spoke?' he said.
'Er, if it is the king, er I — that is, we — think perhaps you should let him get on with it. Er, don't you think
