Thief of Time

who would be considered mad by conventional standards. Insanity depended on your point of view, he always said, and if it was the view through your own underpants then everything looked fine.

But young Master Jeremy was beginning to worry him. He never laughed, and Igor liked a good maniacal laugh. You could trust it. Since giving up the medicine, Jeremy had not, as Igor had expected, begun to gibber and shout things like “Mad! They said I was mad! But I shall show them all! Ahahahaha!” He'd simply become more— focused.

Then there was that smile. Igor was not easily frightened, because otherwise he wouldnl be able to look in a mirror, but he was becoming a little troubled.

“Now, where were we…?” said Jeremy. “Oh, yes, give me a hand here.”

Together they moved the table aside. Under it, dozens of glass jars hissed.

“Not enough power,” said Igor. “Altho, we have not got the mirrorth right yet, thur.”

Jeremy pulled the cloth off the device on the workbench. Glass and crystal glittered, and in some cases glittered very strangely. As Jeremy had remarked yesterday, in the clarity that was returning now that he was carefully pouring one spoonful of his medicine down the sink twice a day, some of the angles looked wrong. One crystal had disappeared when he'd locked it into place, but it was clearly still there because he could see the light reflecting off it.

“And we've thtill got too much metal in it, thur,” Igor grumbled. “It wath the thpring that did for the latht one.”

“We'll find a way,” said Jeremy.

“Home-made lightning ith never ath good ath the real thort,” said Igor.

“Good enough to test the principle,” said Jeremy.

“Tetht the printhiple, tetht the printhiple,” muttered Igor. “Thorry, thur, but Igorth do not ‘tetht the printhiple’. Thtrap it to the bench and put a good thick bolt of lightning through it, thatth our motto. Thatth how you tetht thomething.”

“You seem ill at ease, Igor.”

“Well, I'm thorry, thur,” said Igor. “It'th the climate dithagreeing with me. I'm uthed to regular thunderthtormth.”

“I've heard that some people really seem to come alive in thunderstorms,” said Jeremy, carefully adjusting the angle of a crystal.

“Ah, that wath when I worked for Baron Finklethtein,” said Igor.

Jeremy stood back. This wasn't the clock, of course. There was still a lot more work to do (but he could see it in front of him, if he closed his eyes) before they had a clock. This was just an essay, to see if he was on the right lines.

He was on the right lines. He knew it.

Tick

Susan walked back through the motionless streets, sat down in Madam Frout's office and let herself sink back into the stream of time.

She had never found out how this worked. It just did. Time didn't stop for the rest of the world, and it didn't stop for her—it was just that she entered a kind of loop of time, and everything else stayed exactly as it was until she'd finished what she needed to do.

It was another inherited family trait. It worked best if you didn't think about it, just like tightrope walking. Anyway, now she had other things to think about.

Madam Frout turned her gaze back from the rat-free mantelpiece. “Oh,” she said. “It seems to have gone.”

“It was probably a trick of the light, madam,” said Susan. Mostly human. Someone like me, she thought.

“Yes, er, of course…” Madam Frout managed to get her glasses on, despite the fact that the string was still tangled with the button. It meant that she'd moored herself to her own chest, but she was damned if she was going to do anything about it now.

Susan could unnerve a glacier. All she had to do was sit quietly, looking polite and alert.

“What precisely was it you wanted, madam?” she said. “It's just that I've left the class doing algebra, and they get restless when they've finished.”

“Algebra?” said Madam Frout, perforce staring at her own bosom, which no one else had ever done. “But that's far too difficult for seven-year-olds!”

“Yes, but I didn't tell them that and so far they haven't found out,” said Susan. It was time to move things along. “I expect you wanted to see me about my letter, madam?” she said.

Madam Frout looked blank. “Wh—” she began.

Susan sighed and snapped her fingers.

She walked round and opened a drawer by the motionless Madam Frout, removed a sheet of paper and spent some time carefully writing a letter. She let the ink dry, rustled the paper a bit to make it look slightly second-hand, and then put it just under the top of the pile of paperwork beside Madam Frout, with enough of it peeking out so that it would be easy to see.

She returned to her seat. She snapped her fingers again.

“—at letter?” said Madam Frout. And then she looked down at her desk. “Oh.”

It was a cruel thing to do, Susan knew. But while Madam Frout was not by any means a bad person and was quite kind to children, in a haphazard way, she was silly. And Susan did not have a lot of time for silly.

“Yes, I asked if I might have a few days' leave,” said Susan. “Pressing family matters, I'm afraid. I have prepared some work for the children to get on with, of course.”

Madam Frout hesitated. Susan didn't have time for this, either. She snapped her fingers.

“MY GOODNESS, THAT'D BE A RELIEF,” she said, in a voice whose harmonics went all the way into the subconscious. “IF WE DON'T SLOW HER DOWN WE'LL RUN OUT OF THINGS TO TEACH THEM! SHE HAS BEEN PERFORMING SMALL MIRACLES ON A DAILY BASIS AND DESERVES A RAISE.”

Then she sat back, snapped her fingers again, and watched the words settle into the forefront of Madam Frours mind. The woman's lips actually moved.

“Why, yes, of course,” she murmured at last. “You have been working very hard… and… and,” and since there are things even a voice of eldritch command can't achieve and one of them is to get extra money out of a head teacher, “we shall have to think about a little increment for you one of these days.”

Susan returned to the classroom and spent the rest of the day performing small miracles, which included removing the glue from Richenda's hair, emptying the wee out of Billy's shoes and treating the class to a short visit to the continent of Fourecks.

When their parents came to pick them up they were all waving crayoned pictures of kangaroos, and Susan had to hope that the red dust on their shoes—red mud in the case of Billy's, whose sense of timing had not improved—would pass unnoticed. It probably would. Fidgett's was not the only place where adults didn't see what couldn't possibly be true.

Now she sat back.

There was something pleasant about an empty classroom. Of course, as any teacher would point out, one nice thing was that there were no children in it, and particularly no Jason.

But the tables and shelves around the room showed evidence of a term well spent. Paintings lined the walls, and displayed good use of perspective and colour. The class had built a full-size white horse out of cardboard boxes, during which time they'd learned a lot about horses and Susan learned about Jason's remarkably accurate powers of observation. She'd had to take the cardboard tube away from him and explain that this was a polite horse.

It had been a long day. She raised the lid of her desk and took out Grim Fairy Tales. This dislodged some paperwork, which in turn revealed a small cardboard box decorated in black and gold.