Thief of Time

There was a fight going on in the square. In the strange colours involved in the time-slicing state known as Zimmerman's Valley, it was picked out in shades of light blue.

By the look of it, a couple of watchmen were trying to take on a gang. One man was airborne, and hung there without support. Another had fired a crossbow directly at one of the watchmen; the arrow was nailed unmoving in the air.

Lobsang examined it curiously.

“You're going to touch it, aren't you?” said a voice behind Lobsang. “You're just going to reach out and touch it, despite everything I've told you. Pay attention to the damn sky!”

Lu-Tze was smoking nervously. When it got a few inches away from his body, the smoke went rigid in the air.

“Are you sure you can't feel where it is?” he snapped.

“It's all round us, Sweeper. We're so close, it… it's like trying to see the wood when you're standing under the trees!”

“Well, this is the Street of Cunning Artificers and that's the Guild of Clockmakers over there,” said Lu-Tze. “I don't dare go inside if it's this close, not until we're certain.”

“What about the University?”

“Wizards aren't mad enough to try it!”

“You're going to try and race the lightning?”

“It's doable, if we start from here in the Valley. Lightning ain't as quick as people think.”

“Are we waiting to see a little pointy bit of lightning coming out of a cloud?”

“Hah! Kids today, where do they get their education? The first stroke is from the ground to the air, lad. That makes a nice hole in the air for the main lightning to come down. Look for the glow. We've got to be giving the road plenty of sandal by the time it reaches the clouds. You holding up okay?”

“I could go on like this all day,” said Lobsang.

“Don't try it.” Lu-Tze scanned the sky again. “Maybe I was wrong. Maybe it's just a storm. Sooner or later you get—”

He stopped. One look at Lobsang's face was enough.

“O-kay,” said the sweeper slowly. “Just give me a direction. Point if you can't speak.”

Lobsang dropped to his knees, hands rising to his head. “I don't know… don't know…”

Silvery light rose over the city, a few streets away. Lu-Tze grabbed the boy's elbow.

“Come on, lad. On your feet. Faster than lightning, eh? Okay?”

“Yeah… yeah, okay…”

“You can do it, right?”

Lobsang blinked. He could see the glass house again, stretching away as a pale outline overlaid the city.

“Clock,” he said thickly.

“Run, boy, run!” shouted Lu-Tze. “And don't stop for anything.”

Lobsang plunged forward, and found it hard. Time moved aside for him, sluggishly at first, as his legs pumped. With every step he pushed himself faster and faster, the landscape changing colours again as the world slowed even further.

There was another stitch in time, the sweeper had said. Another valley, even closer to the null point. Insofar as he could think at all, Lobsang hoped he would reach it soon. His body felt as though it would fly apart; he could feel his bones creaking.

The glow ahead was halfway to the iron-heavy clouds now, but he'd reached a crossroads and he could see it was rising from a house halfway down the street.

He turned to look for the sweeper, and saw the man yards behind him, mouth open, a statue falling forward.

Lobsang turned, concentrated, let time speed up.

He reached Lu-Tze and caught him before he hit the ground. There was blood coming from the old man's ears.

“I can't do it, lad,” the sweeper mumbled. “Get on! Get on!”

“I can do it! It's like running downhill!”

“Not for me it ain't!”

“I can't just leave you here like this!”

“Save us from heroes! Get that bloody clock!”

Lobsang hesitated. The downstroke was already emerging from the clouds, a drifting, glowing spike.

He ran. The lightning was falling towards a shop, a few buildings away. He could see a big clock hanging over its window.

He pushed against the flow of time ever further, and it yielded. But the lightning had reached the iron pole atop the building.

The window was closer than the door. He lowered his head and jumped through it, the glass shattering around him and then freezing in mid-air, clocks pinwheeling off the display and stopping as if caught in invisible amber.

There was another door ahead of him. He grabbed the knob and pulled, feeling the terrible resistance of a slab of wood urged to move at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light.

It was barely open a few inches when he saw, beyond, the slow ooze of lightning run down the rod and into the heart of the big clock.

The clock struck one.

Time stopped.

Ti—

Mr Soak the dairyman was washing bottles at the sink when the air dimmed and the water solidified.

He stared at it for a moment and then, with the manner of a man trying an experiment, held the bottle over the stone floor and let it go.

It remained hanging in the air.

“Dammit,” he said. “Another idiot with a clock, eh?”

What he did then was not usual dairy practice. He walked into the centre of the room and made a few passes in the air with his hands.

The air brightened. The water splashed. The bottle smashed although, when Ronnie turned round and waved a hand at it, the glass slivers ran together again.

Then Ronnie Soak sighed and went into the cream-settling room. Large wide bowls stretched away into the distance and, if Ronnie had ever allowed another to notice this, the distance contained far more distance than is ever found in a normal building.

“Show me,” he said.

The surface of the nearest bowl of milk became a mirror, and then began to show pictures…

Ronnie went back into the dairy, took his peaked cap off its hook by the door, and crossed the courtyard to the stable. The sky overhead was a sullen, unmoving grey as he emerged, leading his horse. The horse was black, glistening with condition, and there was this about it that was odd: it shone as though it was illuminated by a red light. Redness spangled off its shoulders and flanks, even under the greyness.

And even when it was harnessed to the cart it didn't look like any kind of horse that should be hitched to any kind of wagon, but people never noticed this and, again, Ronnie took care to make sure that they didn't.

The cart gleamed with white paint, picked out here and there with a fresh green.

The wording on the side declared, proudly: