Thief of Time

meet belonged to…

…someone like me.

She sat and stared at nothing for a while. Around her, historians climbed library ladders, fumbled books onto their lecterns and generally rebuilt the image of the past to suit the eyesight of today. One of them was in fact looking for his glasses.

Time had a son, she thought, someone who walks in the world.

There was a man who devoted himself to the study of time so wholeheartedly that, for him, time became real. He learned the ways of time and Time noticed him, Death had said. There was something there like love.

And Time had a son.

How? Susan had the kind of mind that would sour a narrative with a question like that. Time and a mortal man. How could they ever…? Well, how could they?

Then she thought: my grandfather is Death. He adopted my mother. My father was his apprentice for a while. That's all that happened. They were both human, and I turned up in the normal way. There is no way I should be able to walk through walls and live outside time and be a little bit immortal, but I am, and so this is not an area where logic and, let's face it, basic biology have any part to play.

In any case, time is constantly creating the future. The future contains things that didn't exist in the past. A small baby should be easy for something… someone who rebuilds the universe once every instant.

Susan sighed. And you had to remember that Time probably wasn't time, in the same way that Death wasn't exactly the same as death and War wasn't exactly the same as war. She'd met War, a big fat man with an inappropriate sense of humour and a habit of losing the thread, and he certainly didn't personally attend every minor fracas. She disliked Pestilence, who gave her funny looks, and Famine was just wasted and weird. None of them ran their… call it their discipline. They personified it.

Given that she'd met the Tooth Fairy, the Soul Cake Duck and Old Man Trouble, it amazed Susan that she had grown up to be mostly human, nearly normal.

As she stared at her notes, her hair unwound itself from its tight bun and took up its ground-state position, which was the hair of someone who had just touched something highly electrical. It spread out around her head like a cloud, with one black streak of nearly normal hair.

Grandfather might be an ultimate destroyer of worlds and the final truth of the universe, but that wasn't to say he didn't take an interest in the little people. Perhaps Time did, too.

She smiled.

Time waited for no man, they said.

Perhaps she'd waited for one, once.

Susan was aware that someone was looking at her, turned and saw the Death of Rats peering through the lens of the glasses belonging to the mildly distracted man searching for them on the other side of the room. Up on a long-disregarded bust of a former historian the raven preened itself.

“Well?” she said.

SQUEAK!

“Oh, he is, is he?”

The doors of the library were nuzzled open and a white horse walked in. There is a terrible habit amongst horsy people to call a white horse “grey”, but even one of that bowlegged fraternity would have had to admit that this horse, at least, was white—not as white as snow, which is a dead white, but at least as white as milk, which is alive. His bridle and reins were black, and so was the saddle, but all of them were in a sense just for show. If the horse of Death was inclined to let you ride him, then you'd stay on, saddle or no. And there was no upper limit to the number of people he could carry. After all, plagues sometimes happened suddenly.

The historians paid him no attention. Horses did not walk into libraries.

Susan mounted. There were plenty of times when she wished she'd been born completely human and wholly normal, but the reality was that she'd give it all up tomorrow—

–apart from Binky.

A moment later, four hoofprints glowed like plasma in the air above the library, and then faded away.

Tick

The crunch-crunch of the yeti's feet over the snow and the eternal wind of the mountains were the only sounds.

Then Lobsang said, “By ‘cut off his head’, you actually mean…?”

“Sever the head from the body,” said Lu-Tze.

“And,” said Lobsang, still in the tones of one carefully exploring every corner of the haunted cave, “he doesn't mind?”

“Waal, it's a nuisance,” said the yeti. “A bit of a paarty trick. But it's okaay, if it helps. The sweeper haas alwaays been a goood friend to us. We owe him faavours.”

“I've tried teaching 'em the Way,” said Lu-Tze proudly.

“Yaas. Ver' usefuul. ‘A washed pot never boils,’” said the yeti.

Curiosity vied with annoyance in Lobsang's head, and won.

“What have I missed here?” he said. “You don't die?”

“I doon't die? Wit my head cut off? For laughing! Ho. Ho,” said the yeti. “Of course I die. But this is not such a sizeaable traansaaction.”

“It took us years to work out what the yetis were up to,” said Lu-Tze. “Their loops played hob with the Mandala until the abbot worked out how to allow for them. They've been extinct three times.”

“Three times, eh?” said Lobsang. “That's a lot of times to go extinct. I mean, most species only manage it once, don't they?”

The yeti was entering taller forest now, of ancient pines.

“This'd be a good place,” said Lu-Tze. “Put us down, sir.”

“And we'll chop your head off,” said Lobsang weakly. “What am I saying? I'm not going to chop anyone's head off!”

“You heard him say it doesn't worry him,” said Lu-Tze, as they were gently lowered to the ground.

“That's not the point!” said Lobsang hotly.

“It's his head,” Lu-Tze pointed out.

“But I mind!”

“Oh, well, in that case,” said Lu-Tze, “is it not written, ‘If you want a thing done properly you've got to do it yourself’?”

“Yaas, it is,” said the yeti.

Lu-Tze took the sword out of Lobsang's hand. He held it carefully, like someone unused to weapons. The yeti obligingly knelt.

“You're up to date?” said Lu-Tze.

“Yaas.”

“I cannot believe you're really doing this!” said Lobsang.

“Interesting,” said Lu-Tze. “Mrs Cosmopilite says, ‘Seeing is believing,’ and, strangely enough, the Great Wen said, ‘I have seen, and I believe’!”

He brought the sword down and cut off the yeti's head.

Tick

There was a sound rather like a cabbage being sliced in half, and then a head rolled into the basket to