Thief of Time

She wasn't certain how this would work. If she fell… but would she fall? There was no time to fall. She had her own personal time. In theory, if anything so definite as a theory existed in a case like this, that meant she could just drift down to the ground. But the time to test a theory like that was when you had no other choice. A theory was just an idea, but a drainpipe was a fact.

The blue light flickered around her hands.

“Lobsang?” she said quietly. “It is you, isn't it?”

That name is as good as any for us. The voice was as faint as a breath.

“This may seem a stupid question, but where are you?”

We are just a memory. And I am weak.

“Oh.” Susan slid a little further.

But I will grow strong. Get to the clock.

“What's the point? There was nothing we could do!”

Times have changed.

Susan reached the ground. Lady LeJean followed, moving clumsily. Her evening dress had acquired several more tears.

“Can I offer a fashion tip?” said Susan.

“It would be welcomed,” said her ladyship politely.

“Long cerise bloomers with that dress? Not a good idea.”

“No? They are very colourful, and quite warm. What should I have chosen instead?”

“With that cut? Practically nothing.”

“That would have been acceptable?”

“Er…” Susan blanched at unfolding the complex laws of lingerie to someone who wasn't even, she felt, anybody. “To anyone likely to find out, yes,” she finished. “It would take too long to explain.”

Lady LeJean sighed. “All of it does,” she said. “Even clothing. Skin-substitutes to preserve body heat? So simple. So easy to say. But there are so many rules and exceptions, impossible to understand.”

Susan looked along Broad Way. It was thick with silent traffic, but there was no sign of an Auditor.

“We'll run into more of them,” she said aloud.

“Yes. There will be hundreds, at least,” said Lady LeJean.

“Why?”

“Because we have always wondered what life is like.”

“Then let's get up into Zephire Street,” said Susan.

“What is there for us?”

“Wienrich and Boettcher.”

“Who are they?”

“I think the original Herr Wienrich and Frau Boettcher died a long time ago. But the shop still does very good business,” said Susan, darting across the street. “We need ammunition.”

Lady LeJean caught up. “Oh. They make chocolate?” she said.

“Does a bear poo in the woods?” said Susan, and realized her mistake straight away.16

Too late. Lady LeJean looked thoughtful for a moment.

“Yes,” she said at last. “Yes, I believe that most varieties do indeed excrete as you suggest, at least in the temperate zones, but there are several that—”

“I meant to say that, yes, they make chocolate,” said Susan.

Vanity, vanity, thought Lu-Tze, as the milk cart rattled through the silent city. Ronnie would have been like a god, and people of that stripe don't like hiding. Not really hiding. They like to leave a little clue, some emerald tablet somewhere, some code in some tomb under the desert, something to say to the keen researcher: I was here, and I was great.

What else had the first people been afraid of? Night, maybe. Cold. Bears. Winter. Stars. The endless sky. Spiders. Snakes. One another. People had been afraid of so many things.

He reached into his pack for the battered copy of the Way, and opened it at random.

Koan 97: “Do unto otters as you would have them do unto you.” Hmm. No real help there. Besides, he'd occasionally been unsure that he'd written that one down properly, although it certainly had worked. He'd always left aquatic mammals well alone, and they had done the same to him.

He tried again.

Koan 124: “It's amazing what you see if you keep your eyes open.”

“What's the book, monk?” said Ronnie.

“Oh, just… a little book,” said Lu-Tze. He looked around.

The cart was passing a funeral parlour. The owner had invested in a large plate-glass window, even though the professional undertaker does not, in truth, have that much to sell that looks good in a window and they usually make do with dark, sombre drapes and perhaps a tasteful urn.

And the name of the Fifth Horseman.

“Hah!” said Lu-Tze quietly.

“Something funny, monk?”

“Obvious, when you think about it,” said Lu-Tze, as much to himself as to Ronnie. Then he turned in his seat and stuck out his hand. “Pleased to meet you,” he said. “Let me guess your name.”

And said it.

Susan had been unusually inexact. To call Wienrich and Boettcher “chocolate makers” was like calling Leonard of Quirm “a decent painter who also tinkered with things”, or Death “not someone you'd want to meet every day”. It was accurate, but it didn't tell the whole story.

For one thing, they didn't make, they created. There's an important difference.17 And, while their select little shop sold the results, it didn't do anything so crass as to fill the window with them. That would suggest… well, over-eagerness. Generally, W&B had a display of silk and velvet drapes with, on a small stand, perhaps one of their special pralines or no more than three of their renowned frosted caramels. There was no price tag. If you had to ask the price of W&B's chocolates, you couldn't afford them. And if you'd tasted one, and still couldn't afford them, you'd save and scrimp and rob and sell elderly members of your family for just one more of those mouthfuls that fell in love with your tongue and turned your soul to whipped cream.

There was a discreet drain in the pavement in case people standing in front of the window drooled too much.

Wienrich and Boettcher were, naturally, foreigners, and according to Ankh-Morpork's Guild of Confectioners they did not understand the peculiarities of the city's tastebuds.

Ankh-Morpork people, said the Guild, were hearty, no-nonsense folk who did not want chocolate that was stuffed with cocoa liquor, and were certainly not like effete la-di-dah foreigners who wanted cream in everything. In fact they actually preferred chocolate made mostly from milk, sugar, suet, hooves, lips, miscellaneous squeezings, rat droppings, plaster, flies, tallow, bits of tree, hair, lint, spiders and powdered cocoa husks. This meant that according to the food standards of the great chocolate centres in Borogravia and Quirm, Ankh-Morpork chocolate was formally classed as “cheese” and only escaped, through being the wrong colour, being defined as “tile grout”.

Susan allowed herself one of their cheaper boxes per month. And she could easily stop at the first layer if she wanted to.

“You needn't come in,” she said, as she opened the shop door. Rigid customers lined the counter.