Thief of Time

as fog. It merged into the general gloom and disappeared.

She'd turned into an alleyway, and then she'd turned into… something else.

Igor felt his hands twitch.

Individual Igors might have their particular specialities, but they were all expert surgeons and had an inbuilt desire not to see anybody wasted. Up in the mountains, where most of the employment was for woodchoppers and miners, having an Igor living locally was considered very fortunate. There was always the risk of an axe bouncing or a sawblade running wild, and then a man was glad to have an Igor around who could lend a hand—or even an entire arm, if you were lucky.

And while they practised their skills freely and generously in the community, the Igors were even more careful to use them amongst themselves. Magnificent eyesight, a stout pair of lungs, a powerful digestive system… It was terrible to think of such wonderful workmanship going to the worms. So they made sure it didn't. They kept it in the family.

Igor really did have his grandfather's hands. And now they were bunching into fists, all by themselves.

Tick

A very small kettle burned on a fire of wood shavings and dried yak dung.

“It was… a long time ago,” said Lu-Tze. “Exactly when doesn't matter, 'cos of what happened. In fact asking exactly ‘when’ doesn't make any sense any more. It depends where you are. In some places it was hundreds of years ago. Some other places… well, maybe it hasn't happened yet. There was this man in Uberwald. Invented a clock. An amazing clock. It measured the tick of the universe. Know what that is?”

“No.”

“Me neither. The abbot's your man for that kind of stuff. Lemme see… okay… think of the smallest amount of time that you can. Really small. So tiny that a second would be like a billion years. Got that? Well, the cosmic quantum tick—that's what the abbot calls it—the cosmic quantum tick is much smaller than that. It's the time it takes to go from now to then. The time it takes an atom to think of wobbling. It's—”

“It's the time it takes for the smallest thing that's possible to happen to happen?” said Lobsang.

“Exactly. Well done,” said Lu-Tze. He took a deep breath. “It's also the time it takes for the whole universe to be destroyed in the past and rebuilt in the future. Don't look at me like that—that's what the abbot said.”

“Has it been happening while we've been talking?” said Lobsang.

“Millions of times. An oodleplex of times, probably.”

“How many's that?”

“It's one of the abbot's words. It means more numbers than you can imagine in a yonk.”

“What's a yonk?”

“A very long time.”

“And we don't feel it? The universe is destroyed and we don't feel it?”

“They say not. The first time it was explained to me I got a bit jumpy, but it's far too quick for us to notice.”

Lobsang stared at the snow for a while. Then he said, “All right. Go on.”

“Someone in Uberwald built this clock out of glass. Powered by lightning, as I recall. It somehow got down to a level where it could tick with the universe.”

“Why did he want to do that?”

“Listen, he lived in a big old castle on a crag in Uberwald. People like that don't need a reason apart from ‘because I can’. They have a nightmare and try to make it happen.”

“But, look, you can't make a clock like that, because it's inside the universe, so it'll… get rebuilt when the universe does, right?”

Lu-Tze looked impressed, and said so. “I'm impressed,” he said.

“It'd be like opening a box with the crowbar that's inside.”

“The abbot believes that part of the clock was outside, though.”

“You can't have something outside the—”

“Tell that to a man who has been working on the problem for nine lifetimes,” said Lu-Tze. “You want to hear the rest of the story?”

“Yes, Sweeper.”

“So… we were spread pretty thin in those days, but there was this young sweeper—”

“You,” said Lobsang. “This is going to be you, right?”

“Yes, yes,” said Lu-Tze testily. “I was sent to Uberwald. History hadn't diverged much in those days, and we knew something big was going to happen around Bad Schuschein. I must have spent weeks looking. You know how many remote castles there are along the gorges? You can't move for remote castles!”

“That's why you didn't find the right one in time,” said Lobsang. “I remember what you told the abbot.”

“I was just down in the valley when the lightning struck the tower,” said Lu-Tze. “You know it is written, ‘Big events always cast their shadows.’ But I couldn't detect where it was happening until too late. A half-mile sprint uphill faster than a lightning bolt… No one could do that. Nearly made it, though—I was actually through the door when it all went to hell!”

“No point in blaming yourself, then.”

“Yes, but you know how it is—you keep thinking ‘If only I'd got up earlier, or had gone a different way…’” said Lu-Tze.

“And the clock struck,” said Lobsang.

“No. It stuck. I told you part of it was outside the universe. It wouldn't go with the flow. It was trying to count the tick, not move with it.”

“But the universe is huge! It can't be stopped by a piece of clock work!”

Lu-Tze flicked the end of his cigarette into the fire.

“The abbot says the size wouldn't make any difference at all,” he said. “Look, it's taken him nine lifetimes to know what he knows, so it's not our fault if we can't understand it, is it? History shattered. It was the only thing that could give. Very strange event. There were cracks left all over the place. The… oh, I can't remember the words… the fastenings that tell bits of the past which bits of the present they belong to, they were flapping allover the place. Some got lost for ever.” Lu-Tze stared into the dying flames. “We stitched it up as best we could,” he added. “Up and down history. Filling up holes with bits of time taken from somewhere else. It's a patchwork, really.”

“Didn't people notice?”

“Why should they? Once we'd done it, it had always been like that. You'd be amazed at what we got away with. F'r instance—”

“I'm sure they spot it somehow.”

Lu-Tze gave Lobsang one of his sidelong glances. “Funny you should say that. I've always wondered about it. People say things like ‘Where did the time go?’ and ‘It seems like only yesterday.’ We had to do it, anyway. And it's healed up very nicely.”

“But people would look in the history books and see—”

“Words, lad. That's all. Anyway, people have been messing around with time ever since there were people. Wasting it, killing it, sparing it, making it up. And they do it. People's heads were made to play with time. Just like we do, except we're better trained and have a few extra skills. And we've spent centuries working to bring it all back in line. You